A retired British civil servant helped found the Indian National Congress; within twenty years its own children had split it, and the boycott of British goods had become a national weapon.
§1The Congress and the Moderates
The Indian National Congress met first at Bombay in December 1885 — seventy-two delegates, presided over by W.C. Bonnerjee, convened by A.O. Hume. The 'safety-valve theory' — that Hume meant the Congress to let Indian discontent escape harmlessly — was long believed, but the deeper truth is that educated Indians seized the platform and made it their own.
The early Congress — the Moderates — were constitutionalists: Dadabhai Naoroji, Gokhale, Surendranath Banerjea and Pherozeshah Mehta prayed and petitioned, but their real achievement was the economic critique of the Raj — the drain theory — which proved to Indians that their poverty was not fate but policy.
§2Partition and the Swadeshi Turn
In 1905 Curzon partitioned Bengal — officially for administration, really, he admitted, to split the Bengali-speaking nationalist class. The answer was the Swadeshi and Boycott movement: bonfires of foreign cloth, national schools, and a tide of new politics — the first mass movement of Indian nationalism, which hummed with the songs of Rabindranath Tagore. Its refrain, Bande Mataram from Bankimchandra's novel Anandamath, became the anthem of revolution.
Out of the movement rose the Extremists — Lal (Lala Lajpat Rai), Bal (Bal Gangadhar Tilak) and Pal (Bipin Chandra Pal) — who demanded not reform but swaraj, self-rule, as a birthright, and new methods: passive resistance and boycott. Tilak declared 'Swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it.' At Surat in 1907 the Congress split; the Moderates kept the organisation, but the future belonged to the new men.
§3Parallel Currents
The Muslim League was founded at Dacca in 1906 — encouraged by Lord Minto — to organise Muslim politics; the Morley-Minto Reforms (1909) conceded separate electorates for Muslims — the constitutional seed of the two-nation theory. The partition of Bengal itself was annulled in 1911, when the capital shifted from Calcutta to Delhi.
During the Great War, nationalism regrouped: Tilak and Annie Besant launched Home Rule Leagues (1916) modelled on the Irish demand, and 1916 also saw the Lucknow Pact — Congress and League agreeing on joint demands, with the Congress accepting separate electorates — the high-water mark of Hindu-Muslim unity before the Khilafat.
End of Chapter 23 · Volume III