There Was Nothing Indian About the Indian National Congress

It began with cartridges and ended as something the British Empire would spend ninety years trying to forget the true shape of.

Prologue — 1857, the war they called a mutiny

In the summer of 1857 the sepoys of the Bengal Army rose at Meerut, marched on Delhi, and proclaimed the aged Mughal, Bahadur Shah Zafar, sovereign of Hindustan. Within weeks the revolt ran across the Gangetic plain — Kanpur, Lucknow, Jhansi, Bareilly — drawing in not only soldiers but princes, peasants, talukdars, artisans, and clergy of both faiths. It was the first time the subcontinent’s many grievances against the East India Company fused into a single, armed, continental challenge to foreign rule.

The British named it the Sepoy Mutiny — a word chosen with care. A mutiny is an act of indiscipline by soldiers; it can be put down and forgotten. To call 1857 a mutiny was to deny that a nation had risen. Indian writers from V.D. Savarkar onward insisted on the truer name: the First War of Independence. Historians still argue the balance — how much was reactionary, how much proto-national, how coordinated it truly was. What is not in doubt is the fear it left behind in the rulers.

For 1857 taught the Crown two lessons it never unlearned. First, that direct Company rule had to end — and in 1858 it did, India passing to the Crown. Second, and more lasting: that the most dangerous thing in India was not an army but a fused discontent — religion and grievance and leadership flowing into one channel at once. From that day the imperial project was to ensure such a fusion never recurred — to keep Indian discontent divided, channelled, and supervised.

It is against that backdrop — a state that had stared into the abyss of 1857 and resolved never to see it again — that a retired British civil servant helped convene, in 1885, a body where educated Indians might bring their complaints in the rulers’ own constitutional language. To understand the Indian National Congress, you must first understand what the Empire was trying to prevent.

Part One — Inception (1885–1920)

1 · A body organised by a British insider

The Indian National Congress was founded in December 1885 at Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College, Bombay, with seventy-two delegates. Its prime organiser was Allan Octavian Hume, a retired Scottish officer of the Indian Civil Service; Womesh Chandra Banerjee presided over the first session, and Hume served for years as its general secretary.

The early Congress was, by its own constitution and conduct, moderate, loyalist, and gradualist. It sought administrative reform and a larger Indian voice within the British Empire — through petitions, resolutions, and appeals to liberal opinion in London — not the end of British rule. The Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, received its first delegates cordially, which is the sort of welcome an empire reserves for an opposition it has helped to furnish. Whatever else it later became, the Congress was not born as a freedom movement. It was born as a forum in which educated, English-speaking Indians could petition their rulers — politely, in English, by appointment.

2 · The “safety valve” — the strongest version, and its honest limits

The most damaging reading of this origin is the “safety valve” theory: that Hume, with at least the tacit awareness of the colonial establishment, helped create a constitutional outlet for educated discontent precisely so it would vent harmlessly rather than detonate into another 1857. On this view the Congress’s very purpose was the containment of the national impulse, not its advance.

The case for taking it seriously: Hume was a former intelligence-connected official, not an outsider to the colonial state; the organisation’s loyalism is exactly what such a design predicts; and the theory was endorsed early by nationalists themselves — Lala Lajpat Rai chief among them — who used it to attack the moderate leadership from within. The case against overstating it is just as real. The strong form rests heavily on William Wedderburn’s 1916 biography of Hume; there is no surviving document proving a Dufferin–Hume conspiracy. Bipan Chandra argues the reverse — that Indian leaders used Hume as a “lightning conductor,” a respectable British front to shield a fragile new body from instant suppression. And Dufferin himself turned hostile within three years, reportedly writing in 1888 that the government could not allow the Congress to exist.

3 · Surat, 1907 — the organisation breaks its own militants

At the Surat session of 1907 the Congress split openly between the Moderates (Gokhale, Pherozeshah Mehta, Surendranath Banerjea) and the Extremists (Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, Bipin Chandra Pal, with Aurobindo Ghosh among them). Fearing Tilak’s elevation, the Moderates moved the venue from Nagpur to Surat and backed Rash Behari Ghosh for president; Tilak was denied the floor and the session collapsed into open confrontation.

The aftermath gutted the assertive wing: Tilak was later sentenced to six years in Mandalay; Aurobindo withdrew to Pondicherry; Lajpat Rai went abroad; Pal retired from active politics. The Congress that remained recommitted itself to self-government within the Empire, by constitutional means only — which is to say, it removed the men who frightened the British and reassured the British that it had done so. The pattern that would define the organisation appears here in its first full form: forced to choose between the petition and the confrontation, it chose the petition and broke the fighters. The British, understanding the gift, moved at once to crush the now-isolated Extremists.

Part Two — The Gandhian Era (1920–1947)

4 · Khilafat and Malabar — a foreign cause, a Hindu catastrophe

From 1919–20 Gandhi committed the Congress wholeheartedly to the Khilafat movement — an agitation to restore the authority of the Ottoman Caliph after the First World War, a pan-Islamic religious cause with no organic link to Indian self-rule. At the Nagpur session of 1920 he fused Khilafat with Non-Cooperation, putting Congress organisation, funds, and workers behind it, explicitly to secure mass Muslim participation. To sell the bargain to Hindu followers he went so far as to tie it to cow protection. It was, even by sympathetic accounts, one of the strangest misjudgements of his career: a Hindu-majority national movement yoked to the cause of a foreign Islamic monarchy.

In August 1921 the Moplah (Mappila) uprising erupted in Malabar, inflamed by Khilafat agitation. It produced large-scale violence against Hindus: killings, forced conversions, looting, desecration of temples, the proclamation of “Khilafat kingdoms,” and atrocities such as the Thuvoor well massacre. And Gandhi’s response, when it came, was not the unqualified condemnation the moment demanded. He urged Hindus not to let the violence “put a strain on Hindu–Muslim unity,” spoke of the rebels as “brave God-fearing Moplahs… fighting for what they consider as religion,” and asked the victimised to absorb the blow for the sake of the larger alliance. To the survivors of Malabar, the leader of the national movement had asked them to be martyrs to a unity that had just been used as a knife against them.

The deepest indictment here comes not from later partisans but from contemporaries inside the movement. Dr B.R. Ambedkar read the Khilafat alliance as a transactional bid for Muslim numbers that compromised principle, and condemned both the violence and Gandhi’s soft response to it. Sir C. Sankaran Nair — a former president of the Congress itself — wrote a book-length indictment, Gandhi and Anarchy (1922), faulting Gandhi’s role in fomenting the agitation that fed the rebellion. When a former Congress president and the architect of the Constitution both fault the leadership’s judgement, the criticism cannot be waved away.

5 · The disasters it did not avert

A movement claiming to speak for the nation presided over, or failed to prevent, a chain of catastrophes. Fairness requires naming who actually held power in each. Jallianwala Bagh (1919): General Dyer’s troops fired on an unarmed crowd at Amritsar, killing hundreds — a British crime, but the event that radicalised a generation the Congress would then spend years trying to restrain. The Bengal famine (1943): an estimated two to three million dead (scholarly range roughly 0.8–3.8 million; about 2.1 million the consensus mid-point). Amartya Sen, an eyewitness, showed it was not a food-supply shortfall but an entitlement failure driven by wartime inflation, hoarding, continued exports, and an administration that never declared famine — primarily a British crime. Direct Action Day and Noakhali (1946): communal slaughter on the road to Partition. Partition itself (1947): perhaps a million dead and the largest forced migration in modern history.

The famine and Jallianwala Bagh are first of all British crimes, and the Congress in this period was an opposition without state power. The honest charge is therefore narrower but still grave: the body claiming to embody the nation was, again and again, unable to protect it — and several of its own choices fed outcomes it claimed to oppose.

6 · Subhas Chandra Bose — the elected president the party destroyed

This is the best-documented internal betrayal in Congress history. Subhas Chandra Bose was elected Congress President at Haripura in 1938. He stood again at Tripuri in 1939 and won re-election, defeating Pattabhi Sitaramayya — the candidate Gandhi had openly backed. Gandhi publicly called Sitaramayya’s defeat his own.

What followed was not acceptance of a democratic verdict. The party that would one day lecture the nation on democracy could not tolerate the outcome of its own election. The Pant Resolution at Tripuri effectively bound the president to Gandhi’s wishes; every member of the Working Committee except Bose’s brother Sarat resigned, making it impossible for the elected president to function. Bose resigned in April 1939 and formed the Forward Bloc; he would go on to raise the Indian National Army. It was Gandhi and the Congress Right — Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Govind Ballabh Pant — who engineered the squeeze; Nehru’s role was ambivalent rather than central. But the verdict stands: confronted with a militant leader it could not control, the establishment chose to break him rather than follow him. Tilak in 1907, Bose in 1939 — the same reflex, three decades apart.

7 · Savarkar and the revolutionaries — outsiders by design

V.D. Savarkar’s revolutionary nationalism and later Hindutva politics placed him wholly outside the Congress; the organisation neither claimed nor supported him. The broader armed tradition — Bhagat Singh, the Ghadarites, the Bengal revolutionaries — operated outside, and often in tension with, the Congress mainstream. Whatever one’s view of Savarkar in particular, the structural point holds: across its history the assertive, self-reliant nationalist was an outsider to the Congress rather than its standard-bearer.

8 · Partition — a line drawn by a stranger across a sacred land

Consider who held the pen. The man entrusted to divide the indivisible was Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British barrister who had never once set foot in India, knew nothing of its sacred geography, its rivers, its pilgrim routes, or the living fabric of its villages — a qualification the British counted as an advantage. He was given roughly five weeks. He worked from outdated maps and census returns his own contemporaries called almost certainly incorrect. He later admitted he had almost handed Lahore to India and back again. From that ignorance he drew a 553-kilometre gash through Punjab and a 4,096-kilometre gash through Bengal — lines that ran through the middle of villages, fields, and irrigation channels, cleaving a civilisation that had been one for millennia. The result: between twelve and twenty million people uprooted, up to two million dead, the Sikh heartland sliced in two, and wounds across Punjab and Bengal that bleed to this day. A foreigner who understood nothing of this land carved it like meat, and a generation paid in blood.

And where was the conscience of the national movement at this hour? The Congress did not want Partition — but decades of coalition-management, most vividly the Khilafat bargain of 1920, had left it without a strategy when the demand for Pakistan turned concrete. A leadership exhausted and outmanoeuvred accepted the vivisection of the motherland as the price of the transfer of power. Gandhi, who had fasted unto near-death over a separate electorate for the depressed classes and over communal stipends, mounted no comparable final stand to stop the division of the country itself; he lent his moral assent to the settlement and turned his fasts instead to securing payments to Pakistan and to quelling the violence the division had unleashed. The man who could halt a nation with a fast did not spend that weapon to keep the nation whole. Partition was the logical terminus of a politics that treated the unity of a sacred and indivisible land as something to be bargained rather than defended.

Part Three — The Congress in Power (1947–2014)

The thesis now shifts from ineffective opposition to governing instinct: that in office, the Congress repeatedly placed the management of its own dominance above the national interest.

9 · Nehru’s Kashmir, 1947–48

Maharaja Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession on 26 October 1947 as Pakistan-backed raiders advanced on Srinagar; India airlifted troops the next day. What should have stayed a bilateral matter — an act of aggression by Pakistan against territory that had legally acceded to India — Nehru instead carried, in January 1948, to the United Nations Security Council. With the army still winning ground, he handed the world a seat at India’s table: the dispute was internationalised, Pakistan was elevated from aggressor to recognised party, a plebiscite was dangled, and a ceasefire froze roughly a third of the state — today’s Pakistan-occupied Kashmir — beyond Indian reach. Article 370 then wrote a separate constitutional status for the rest into the Union itself. A clean question of territorial integrity was converted into a permanent international wound that has burned for three generations.

Defenders answer, with force, that the accession itself was secured under Nehru, that the army was allowed to fight on until Ladakh and the Poonch–Rajouri sector were secured before the ceasefire, and that the cabinet — including Ambedkar — backed the approach. Reasonable people differ on the counterfactual. What is fair to say is that the unresolved status of Kashmir, the referral to the UN, and Article 370 became permanent strategic liabilities — and every one of those decisions was a Congress decision, taken by Nehru.

10 · Nehru’s Himalayan blunder — the China war of 1962

Nehru’s China policy was a study in wishful thinking dressed as statesmanship. So deep was his faith in non-violence as a substitute for strength that, by accounts from within the early army leadership, he is said to have waved away the very idea of a defence plan — that the police would suffice and the army could be scrapped, since India faced no threats. Whatever the exact words, the conduct is not in dispute: India’s armed forces were run down from their wartime strength to a fraction of it even as danger gathered, tens of thousands demobilised on principle. He recognised Communist China early, championed it for a UN seat, signed away India’s inherited special position in Tibet in the 1954 Panchsheel agreement, and answered every warning with the slogan “Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai.”

When the People’s Liberation Army attacked in October 1962, the bill came due. An army starved of equipment and flung onto a “forward policy” it had no means to sustain was routed in weeks. Brotherhood, it turned out, was not a defence doctrine. India lost Aksai Chin — a Switzerland-sized expanse of the high Himalaya that China holds to this day — along with its prestige and its illusions; the humiliation is widely held to have broken Nehru, who died eighteen months later. And the internal Henderson Brooks–Bhagat report that dissected the catastrophe remains substantially classified more than sixty years on — the state still protecting its citizens from the knowledge of how thoroughly it had failed them.

11 · Indira’s Emergency, 1975–77 — the hardest fact of all

This is the single least deniable item in the entire indictment. After the Allahabad High Court found her guilty of electoral malpractice and unseated her, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi faced a choice between her chair and the Constitution, and chose the chair: a state of Emergency was declared on 25 June 1975. Over the next twenty-one months civil liberties were suspended and elections postponed; the press was placed under pre-censorship, with electricity to Delhi’s newspaper offices cut on the first night; tens of thousands were jailed without trial under MISA, including virtually the entire opposition leadership; and constitutional amendments — the 38th, 39th, and 42nd — were rammed through to bar judicial review of the Emergency and to place the Prime Minister’s own election beyond the reach of any court. The remedy for losing an election case, it turned out, was to abolish the conditions under which one could lose.

The cruellest instrument was the forced-sterilisation campaign, driven by her son Sanjay Gandhi, who held no constitutional office and answered to no one but his mother. Poor men were rounded up and sterilised against their will to meet quotas; the Shah Commission later documented on the order of 1.07 crore — over ten million — sterilisations during the Emergency, with hundreds of deaths from botched procedures, alongside the brutal slum demolitions at Turkman Gate where police fired on residents resisting eviction. A family had bent the apparatus of the Indian state to its private will.

The Shah Commission, headed by a former Chief Justice of India, concluded afterward that there had been no economic or law-and-order crisis to justify the Emergency, and that the decision had been taken by Indira Gandhi essentially alone, without cabinet consultation. No interpretation is required. An elected Congress government, to preserve one leader’s grip on power, suspended Indian democracy, jailed its opposition, gagged its press, and sterilised its poor.

12 · Indira’s squandered victory — 1971 and the Shimla surrender

It is the cruellest irony of the whole record, because here the Congress began with everything. In December 1971 India won perhaps the most complete military victory in its modern history: the Pakistan army surrendered in Dhaka, a new nation, Bangladesh, was born, and India held some 93,000 Pakistani prisoners of war and large tracts of captured territory — a hand of cards no Indian government before or since has held over Pakistan.

And it gave it all away. At Shimla in July 1972, Indira Gandhi returned the 93,000 prisoners and the captured land, and accepted in exchange a vague verbal understanding that Bhutto would, in time, convert the Line of Control into a settled border — a post-dated cheque from a man who had sworn a thousand-year war, drawn on a bank that would never open. The chance to settle Kashmir permanently, on India’s terms, with the strongest hand any Indian leader would ever hold, was simply handed back across the table. Even the Jan Sangh opposition warned at the time that a ceasefire line was being left unconverted into a border. The most complete victory in modern Indian history was negotiated, with some care, into a draw — and Kashmir was left to burn for another half-century. To win a war so totally and lose its peace so comprehensively is an achievement of a kind; it simply is not the kind a nation celebrates.

13 · 1984 — the anti-Sikh pogrom

Following Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards on 31 October 1984, organised mobs slaughtered Sikhs across Delhi and other cities. The Delhi High Court, in 2018, recorded that 2,733 Sikhs were murdered in Delhi alone between 1 and 4 November — thousands more elsewhere — called the killings crimes against humanity, and found that a majority of the perpetrators enjoyed political patronage and were aided by an indifferent police. In that judgement the court convicted Congress leader Sajjan Kumar and sentenced him to life imprisonment, noting long efforts to suppress the cases; he has since been convicted in a further case.

14 · Bhopal, 1984 — and the chairman the Congress let fly home

On the night of 2–3 December 1984, methyl isocyanate gas leaked from the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal. The state put the immediate dead at 3,787; unofficial estimates ran to 8,000–10,000 in the first days and some 15,000 over the years, with more than half a million injured or maimed — the worst industrial disaster in history. It happened on a Congress watch, in a Congress-governed state, under a Congress government at the Centre.

What the state did next is the indictment. Warren Anderson, chairman of Union Carbide, flew into Bhopal on 7 December and was arrested. Within hours he was released on a token bail bond of ₹25,000, on the orders of Madhya Pradesh’s Congress Chief Minister Arjun Singh, escorted to the airport, and flown out of the country on a state aircraft — a degree of governmental efficiency that the dying of Bhopal never enjoyed. He never returned. India later declared him an absconder and sought his extradition for the rest of his life, in vain; only low-level Indian employees were ever convicted. The man most answerable for the death of thousands of Indians was helped out of the country by the government those Indians had elected. Arjun Singh’s own memoir later pointed the responsibility upward, toward the Union government in Delhi.

15 · Shah Bano, 1986 — and Rajiv’s Bofors

After the Supreme Court in 1985 granted maintenance to a divorced Muslim woman, Shah Bano, the Rajiv Gandhi government used its enormous parliamentary majority to pass the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986, effectively overturning the judgement to placate conservative clerical opinion. It remains the defining instance of vote-bank management — a settled question of individual rights and the authority of the Supreme Court itself, surrendered to an organised religious bloc.

The same government was consumed by the Bofors affair: allegations that kickbacks of some ₹64 crore were paid to Indian decision-makers — names reaching toward Rajiv Gandhi and his circle — to win the contract for the Swedish company’s 155mm howitzers. The scandal helped end his government in 1989 and became shorthand for defence-deal corruption. Honesty requires the qualifier: decades of investigation never produced a conviction of the Gandhi family, and Indian courts eventually quashed much of the case. It stands as a grave allegation that the Congress never cleanly answered, not as a proven theft.

16 · The UPA decade — scandal at scale

The Congress-led UPA’s second term (2009–2014) was defined by a cascade of corruption allegations. The national auditor estimated a “presumptive loss” of ₹1.76 lakh crore in the 2G spectrum allocation and around ₹1.86 lakh crore in coal-block allocation (“Coalgate”), with the Commonwealth Games adding a third byword for graft. The electorate punished it decisively in 2014. Discipline requires the counter-fact, and here it cuts both ways: the headline 2G figure was disputed even by the government’s own economists, far exceeded the CBI’s chargesheet of about ₹30,984 crore, and in 2017 a special court acquitted all the accused for want of proof. The political verdict was crushing; the proof of theft of any specific sum, in several flagship cases, was not. It is a curious distinction to have earned — to be thrown out of office for scandals the courts could not, in the end, quite convict anyone of.

Conclusion — the unbroken thread

Lay the record end to end and a single thread runs its full length. The Empire that survived 1857 resolved that Indian discontent must never again fuse into one armed channel — it must be divided, channelled, supervised. The Congress was conceived as exactly such a channel: a constitutional pressure-valve, organised by a British insider, to manage discontent rather than break colonial rule.

In its freedom-struggle phase it broke its own boldest leaders — Tilak at Surat, Bose at Tripuri — kept the revolutionaries at arm’s length, yoked a Hindu-majority movement to a foreign Islamic cause and reaped Malabar, and finally accepted the partition of the land it claimed to speak for. In power it bequeathed the unresolved wound of Kashmir, walked open-eyed into the humiliation of 1962, suspended Indian democracy itself in 1975 to preserve one family’s grip, presided over a 1984 pogrom for which its own MP now serves a life sentence, flew the Bhopal chairman to safety over the bodies of his victims, and ended its long dominance amid a cascade of scandal.

One need not accept every charge in its harshest form to feel the weight of the pattern. The case is stronger when the inflated numbers are dropped and the contested points are flagged, because what remains is hard to answer: an organisation whose defining instinct, from 1885 to the present, was the management of power and grievance rather than the assertion of the nation’s will. In that precise sense the title earns its provocation. In its founding design, its enduring temperament, and much of its record, there was remarkably little that was Indian — little that was nationally self-asserting — about the Indian National Congress.

Sources to anchor in footnotes: S.N. Sen, Eighteen Fifty-Seven; Savarkar, The Indian War of Independence 1857. Wedderburn, Allan Octavian Hume (1913); Bipan Chandra et al., India’s Struggle for Independence. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India. Ambedkar, Pakistan or the Partition of India (Khilafat chapter); C. Sankaran Nair, Gandhi and Anarchy (1922). Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines (1981); Famine Inquiry Commission (1945). Sugata Bose, His Majesty’s Opponent. Shah Commission of Inquiry reports (1978); Granville Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution. Delhi High Court, State v. Sajjan Kumar (2018); Nanavati Commission. On Bhopal: state mortality figures and contemporary reporting on Anderson’s bail and departure. On corruption: the CAG reports (2010–12) read together with the 2017 special-court 2G acquittal.