Indian National Congress

• 1. Introduction

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  The Indian National Congress held its very first session in Bombay in December 1885, with just 72 delegates in attendance. Most of them were lawyers. Among those present were luminaries like Dadabhai Naoroji, Badruddin Tyabji, and Pherozeshah Mehta. Conspicuously absent were any women at all. What emerged from that modest gathering, convened partly because a cholera outbreak had forced a last-minute venue change from Poona, was an organisation that would go on to lead one of the largest independence movements in history, govern the world's most populous democracy for stretches totaling more than 54 years, and reshape the political destinies of more than a billion people. How did a platform for elite Indian ambitions transform into a mass movement that ended British rule? What internal fractures split it, healed it, and split it again? And why, after towering over Indian politics for half a century after independence, did it stumble so badly in the 21st century that it once won only 44 seats in a parliament of 543?

• 2. A Borrowed Idea, A British Organiser

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  Allan Octavian Hume, a retired British civil servant known for his pro-Indian sympathies, laid out his vision in 1883 in an open letter to graduates of the University of Calcutta. His stated aim was to obtain a greater share in government for educated Indians and to create a forum for dialogue between them and the British Raj. Hume organised the inaugural meeting in Bombay with the explicit approval of Viceroy Lord Dufferin, and he took on the role of General Secretary himself. Umesh Chandra Banerjee was appointed as the first president. The gathering drew representatives from every province of India, though the majority were lawyers, and its proceedings were dominated by legal and administrative demands: abolishing the India Council in London, creating new legislative councils for the North-West Frontier Province, Sindh, and Awadh, and calling for a commission to examine the entire Indian administration from 1858 onward. The founding members were, by and large, educated in or shaped by Britain. That background gave Congress its early character: less a people's party than a stage for elite Indian ambitions. Dadabhai Naoroji, elected president in 1886, took that stage internationally. He became the first Indian member of the British House of Commons, serving from 1892 to 1895, and he spent a significant portion of his own resources campaigning for India's cause abroad. By 1889, a British branch of the Indian National Congress had been established in London, reflecting the organisation's early orientation toward working within the empire rather than dismantling it.

• 3. Moderates, Extremists, and the Surat Split

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  By 1905, the Congress had fractured into two recognisable camps. On one side stood the Moderates, led by figures like Dadabhai Naoroji, Romesh Chunder Dutt, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and Dinshaw Wacha. They favoured petitions, resolutions, and constitutional dialogue. On the other stood the Extremists, or assertive nationalists, led by Lala Lajpat Rai, Bipin Chandra Pal, and Bal Gangadhar Tilak. The Moderates, for all their caution, had mounted a serious intellectual challenge to British rule. They and their colleagues introduced the Drain Theory, arguing that British colonialism was the primary cause of India's poverty. This was not abstract grievance; it was a structured economic critique that shaped public opinion across the subcontinent. The Extremist trio, known colloquially as "Lal, Bal, Pal", came to prominence largely in response to the partition of Bengal in 1905. Tilak in particular pursued a distinctive strategy: he organised the annual Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav and Shiv Jayanti festivals in western India to mobilise Hindu Indians, while also co-founding the New English School in Pune in 1876 and establishing the Deccan Education Society to cultivate national consciousness among the young. From 1881, he ran two weekly publications, the Maratha in English and Kesari in Marathi, to raise public awareness about India's condition. The ideological incompatibility between the two camps finally broke into the open at the Congress session held in Surat in December 1907. The formal split, known as the Surat Split, separated the factions into distinct organisations, though they were eventually reunited in 1915 at the annual session in Lucknow under the presidency of Ambica Charan Mazumdar. Shortly after that reunion, both Tilak and Annie Besant, a British social reformer who had moved to India in 1893, established separate Home Rule leagues in 1916 to demand self-governance on the model of the Irish Home Rule movement.

• 4. Gandhi and the Mass Movement

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  Mahatma Gandhi returned from South Africa in 1915 and joined Congress. His reputation preceded him, known not only among the educated classes but widely among ordinary people. Between 1917 and 1918, he led three distinct campaigns: the Champaran Satyagraha, the Ahmedabad Mill Strike, and the Kheda Satyagraha. After World War I, his influence over the party became so dominant that he served as its unofficial spiritual leader even when others held formal office. He formally became Congress president in 1924, with the support of the moderate group led by Gokhale. Gandhi's approach drew in a broad coalition: Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Chakravarti Rajgopalachari, and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad all rallied to his cause. At the Congress session held in Lahore in 1929, under Jawaharlal Nehru's presidency, the party formally declared Purna Swaraj, or complete independence, as its goal. The 26th of January 1930 was declared Purna Swaraj Diwas. Gandhi's most dramatic act of mass mobilisation came later, when he called from Bombay on the 8th of August 1942 for Indians to "Do or Die", endorsing the Quit India Movement at Gowalia Tank Maidan. The colonial government responded with mass arrests, detaining Gandhi and Congress leaders and killing over a thousand participants in the movement. The crackdown did not extinguish the movement; it hardened resistance and weakened British control over the region. When the Second World War neared its end in 1945 and the Labour Party won British elections on a promise of Indian independence, the political prisoners of the Quit India movement were released.

• 5. Nehru's Republic and the Congress System

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  Jawaharlal Nehru served as the party's paramount leader from 1951 until his death in 1964. Congress won landslide victories in the general elections of 1951-52, 1957, and 1962. The first of these saw the party claim 364 seats, representing 76 per cent of the 479 contested seats, and a 45 per cent share of all votes cast. Nehru's economic vision centred on import substitution industrialisation: directing government investment into steel, iron, coal, and power, building heavy industries from the ground up using subsidies and protectionist policies. His foreign policy of non-alignment during the Cold War was politically deft; it allowed India to receive financial and technical support from both the Eastern and Western Blocs simultaneously. During his time in office, there were four known assassination attempts on Nehru. The first occurred during the 1947 partition, while he was visiting the North-West Frontier Province. The second involved a knife-wielding rickshaw-puller in Maharashtra in 1955. A third followed in Bombay in 1956, and a fourth was a bombing attempt on railway tracks in Maharashtra in 1961. Nehru's disdain for security protocols was well known; he actively disliked excess personnel around him and resented any disruption to traffic caused by his movements. When Nehru died of an aortic dissection in 1964, K. Kamaraj, then president of the All India Congress Committee, played a decisive role in selecting the succession. Kamaraj, who had previously served nine years as chief minister of Madras state, was widely credited as the kingmaker in engineering Lal Bahadur Shastri's victory over Morarji Desai in the leadership contest. On the 11th of January 1966, a day after signing the Tashkent Declaration, Shastri died in Tashkent; the circumstances of his death remain disputed.

• 6. Indira Gandhi's Dominance and Its Costs

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  Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru's daughter, had served as Minister of Information and Broadcasting under Shastri. After his death, Congress elected her as party leader over Morarji Desai, again with K. Kamaraj's backing. Her tenure was defined by bold and often controversial moves. In July 1969, she nationalised fourteen of India's largest private banks by ordinance, a move that had been proposed earlier by senior party member Subhadra Joshi. Later she nationalised coal, steel, copper, refining, cotton textiles, and insurance industries. These decisions set her on a collision course with senior party figures. In November 1969, Congress president S. Nijalingappa expelled her from the party for indiscipline. She immediately launched her own faction, Congress (R), taking with her 446 of the 705 members of the All India Congress Committee. The Congress (R) was given a new party symbol by the Election Commission: a cow with a suckling calf. Her faction won the 1971 general election in a landslide on the platform of eliminating poverty, capturing the slogan Garibi Hatao. On the 12th of June 1975, however, the High Court of Allahabad declared her election to the Lok Sabha void on grounds of electoral malpractice. Rather than resign, she recommended that President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed declare a State of Emergency. The emergency, implemented on the 25th of June 1975 and lasting until the 21st of March 1977, involved widespread oppression and abuse of power, particularly by her younger son Sanjay Gandhi and his associates. When elections were finally held in March 1977, the Janata alliance won 295 seats against Congress's 153. Gandhi herself lost her seat to Raj Narain. She returned to power in January 1980 following a new landslide, but her final years were overshadowed by the Punjab crisis. In June 1984, she ordered the Indian Army to enter the Golden Temple in Amritsar to remove Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his armed followers, an operation known as Operation Blue Star. On the 31st of October 1984, two of her bodyguards, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh, shot her in the garden of the prime ministerial residence. She had been scheduled that day to be interviewed by British actor Peter Ustinov, who was filming a documentary for Irish television. The assassination triggered anti-Sikh riots in which between 3,000 and 17,000 people were killed.

• 7. Reform, Decline, and Fragile Revival

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  After Indira Gandhi's death, her son Rajiv Gandhi led Congress to its largest ever parliamentary majority in the 1984 general elections, securing 415 seats out of 533, with a vote share of 49.1 per cent. His administration began the first tentative steps toward economic liberalisation: reducing import duties, introducing export incentives, and allowing the import of fully assembled motherboards, which brought down computer prices substantially. He was also instrumental in the Mizoram Peace Accord of 1986, personally supporting negotiations with Mizo National Front leader Laldenga. On the 21st of May 1991, Gandhi was killed by a bomb hidden in a basket of flowers carried by a woman linked to the Tamil Tigers; he had been campaigning in Tamil Nadu. An Indian court convicted 26 people in the conspiracy in 1998. P. V. Narasimha Rao succeeded him and became the first prime minister from South India. Rao, working with his finance minister Manmohan Singh, launched the economic reforms of 1991 that dismantled the Licence Raj and opened India to foreign investment. These reforms were implemented against a backdrop of a balance of payments crisis, high inflation, and depleted foreign reserves. Rao is widely called the "Father of Indian economic reforms". The party's subsequent difficulties were profound. In the 1996 elections, Congress was reduced to 140 seats, its lowest Lok Sabha count to that point. In the 1999 elections, under Sonia Gandhi's early leadership, the tally fell further to 114 seats. A recovery came in 2004, when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance won 222 seats; Sonia Gandhi declined the prime ministership and appointed Manmohan Singh instead. Under the UPA's first term, landmark legislation was passed: an employment guarantee bill, the Right to Information Act, and a right to education act. Singh then became, in 2009, the first prime minister since Indira Gandhi in 1971 to be re-elected after completing a full five-year term. The collapse that followed was swift. By 2014, amidst corruption scandals including the 2G spectrum case and the coal allocation scam, the party won only 44 seats in a 543-member parliament. Its vote share fell below 20 per cent for the first time. In the 2022 party presidential election, Mallikarjun Kharge defeated Shashi Tharoor, winning 7,897 votes against Tharoor's 1,072. Kharge led the party into the 2024 elections, where Congress secured 99 seats, its best result since 2014, and Rahul Gandhi assumed the role of Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha.