The Congress had at times been, as history will show, even reluctant to demand full independence for India
Why is the Congress-led UPA Government destroying India socially, culturally, economically and politically, undermining the country's democratic and Constitutional institutions, and weakening the Indian stateIJ This is the question that most people are asking. The answer is simple: Congress was not founded by Indians for achieving freedom from the British who had been exploiting Indian resources through East India Company since 1600 AD.
What happened in India between 1600 and 1857 and then between 1858 and 1885 is well known to students of Indian history and, hence, there is no need to recapitulate. Suffice to say that the British devised and implemented policies to consolidate and expand their rule in India; divide Indian society on caste and communal lines; loot and plunder Indian resources; drain Indian wealth to enrich the British economy; destroy indigenous Indian industry; push the outposts of the Empire further and further at the cost of the Indian exchequer; prove that British culture was superior, scientific and humane; convey the feeling that Hindu culture and religion were responsible for the ills faced by Indian society and create a sense of inferiority complex among Indians.
The British were successful. They ruled India and persecuted Indians with the help of loyalists. This made Indians seethe with anger. By 1885, it had become clear to the British that the situation would go out of control any time. It was imperative to set up an organisation, such as the Congress, with the help of English-educated Indians that could avert the impending disaster. The first initiative was taken by a retired British civil servant, Allan Octavian Hume. According to Sir William Wedderburn, Hume's colleague and biographer, and lala lajpat Rai of Punjab, the reason that prompted Hume to establish an organisation was his ‘anxiety to save India from disruption'.
Between 1885 and 1947, the Congress served as a ‘safety-valve' for Indian discontent. It was no more than an ‘annual forum' whose deliberations were given, what certain leading historians call, “exaggerated significance”. There were some Congress leaders genuinely committed to the cause of the country but they were odd faces in the party whose views were rarely considered. Take, for example, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Aurobindo Ghose, Bipin Chandra Pal, lala lajpat Rai and Subhas Chandra Bose who represented ‘new spirit'. Those who controlled the Congress resisted the efforts of these great leaders to influence party policy, which new leaders rightly termed as ‘policy of political mendicancy'. In December 1905, when tempers were running high in the country, following the partition of Bengal, Benaras Congress president Gopal Krishna Gokhale had said in his presidential address: “For better, for worse, our destinies are now linked with those of England and the Congress freely recognises that whatever advance we seek must be within the Empire itself”. The Congress split at Surat in 1907 was an immediate fall-out of a conflict between British-guided Congress leaders and radical nationalists.
The rift in the Congress were also visible in December 1928. In Calcutta, the Mahatma and his loyalists had opposed Netaji’s the amendment of Motilal Nehru report's Dominion Status goal so as to call for “immediate reiteration of the complete independence objective”. Eventually, Bose too left the Congress and found his own party, Forward Bloc, so that he could fight for India’s independence in his own way. Before his exit in 1939, Bose had defeated the Mahatma’s candidate Pattabhi Sitaramayya in that year’s party presidential election. He had won the election for the second time in a row. In response, the Mahatma had said: “Sitaramayya's defeat was my personal defeat”.
Between 1928 and 1929, the Mahatma had opposed those calling for another round of all-India mass struggle aimed explicitly at complete political emancipation. He had rejected outright the snap independence resolution which had been passed in his absence at the Madras Session of the Congress in December 1927, and also in Calcutta in December 1928. Instead, he pushed through a ‘compromise formula’ that accepted the Dominion Status objective, provided london granted it by the end of 1929, failing which the Congress would be within its right to start a civil disobedience movement for attaining ‘Poorna Swaraj’.
The fact of the matter is that the civil disobedience movement did not achieve anything significant for India. It only resulted in the Government of India Act, 1935, which even a liberal like CY Chintamani described as an “anti-India Act”. As for the Quit India movement, which was started in August, the less said the better. The common people did make a splendid contribution to the movement, ignoring the threat to their life and limb, but the initiative led India nowhere. The British defeated the half-hearted movement in just five months without much difficulty and london did not face any real political challenge from the Congress. When the British quit India in 1947, it was not because the party had done anything great but because of three other factors — popular pressure in India, international developments, and the internal situation in England.
(The writer is former Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Jammu)