The Congress and the Moderates, 1885-1905

The Indian National Congress was founded in December 1885 at Bombay, at a meeting of seventy-two delegates, with the retired British official Allan Octavian Hume playing a part in its organisation. Its early leaders, known as Moderates, included Dadabhai Naoroji, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and Pherozeshah Mehta. They were lawyers, journalists, and teachers who believed that India should win self-government gradually, by constitutional means, and that the British could be persuaded by reason and evidence.

The Moderates' methods were petitions, resolutions, and speeches. They demanded Indian representation in the legislative councils, lower taxes, separation of the judiciary from the executive, and Indianisation of the civil service. Naoroji's drain theory, set out in his book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, published in 1901, argued that Britain was draining India's wealth, and it became a central economic argument of the national movement. The Moderates also used the Congress session, held each December in a different city, to build a network of educated Indians across provinces.

Their achievements were limited but real. The Indian Councils Act of 1892 increased the number of Indian members in the councils and gave them the right to discuss the budget, though not to vote on it. The Moderates also created a public language of nationalism, in English and in Indian languages, and trained a generation of political workers. Their limits were equally clear: they spoke mainly for the educated middle classes, their methods depended on British goodwill, and they had little connection with peasants or workers.

The Moderates are often dismissed as too timid, but that judgement is too simple. They built the first all-India political organisation, they put economic criticism of colonial rule on a scientific footing, and they kept the Congress alive through its first twenty years. The younger generation that followed, the Extremists, would reject their methods but inherit their organisation, and the tension between constitutional and mass methods would run through the whole freedom movement.