Foundation Of The Myth Congress :The Myth

 Indian National Congress was founded in December 1885 by seventy-two political workers. It was the first organized  expression of Indian nationalism on an all-India scale. A.O. Hume, a retired English ICS officer, played an important role in its formation. But why was it founded by these seventy- two mena nd why at that time?

A powerful and long-lasting myth, the myth of ‘the safety valve,’ has arisen around this question. Generations of students and political activists have been fed on this myth. But despite widespread popular belief, this myth has little basis in historical fact. The myth is that the Indian National Congress was started by A.O. Hume and others under the official direction, guidance and advice of no less a person than Lord Dufferin, the Viceroy, to provide a safe, mild, peaceful, and constitutional outlet or safety valve for the rising discontent among the masses, which was nevitably leading towards a popular and violent revolution.Consequently, the revolutionary potential was nipped in the bud.The core of the myth, that a violent revolution was on the card sat the time and was avoided only by the foundations of the Congress, is accepted by most writers; the liberaIs welcome it,the radicals use it to prove that the Congress has always beencompromising if not loyalist vis-a-vis imperialism, the extreme. right use it to show that the Congress has been anti-national from the beginning. All of them agree that the manner of its birth affected the basic character and future work of the Congress in a crucial manner.

In his Young India published in 1916, the Extremist leader Lala Lajpat Rai used the safety-valve theory to attack the

Moderates in the Congress. Having discussed the theory at length

and suggested that the Congress ‘was a product of Lord

Dufferin’s brain,’ he argued that ‘the Congress was started more

with the object of saving the British Empire from danger than

with that of winning political liberty for India. The interests of the

British Empire were primary and those of India only secondary.’  And he added: ‘No one can say that the Congress has not been

true to that ideal.’ His conclusion was: ‘So this is the genesis of

the Congress, and this is sufficient to condemn it in the eyes of

the advanced Nationalists.”

More than a quarter century later, R. Palme Dutt’s

authoritative work India Today made the myth of the safety-valve

a staple of left-wing opinion. Emphasizing the myth, Dutt wrote

that the Congress was brought into existence through direct

Governmental initiative and guidance and through ‘a plan

secretly pre-arranged with the Viceroy’ so that it (the

Government) could use it ‘as an intended weapon for

safeguarding British rule against the rising forces of popular

unrest and anti-British feeling.’ It was ‘an attempt to defeat, or

rather forestall, an impending revolution.’ The Congress did, of

course, in time become a nationalist body; ‘the national character

began to overshadow the loyalist character.’ It also became the

vehicle of mass movements. But the ‘original sin’ of the manner

of its birth left a permanent mark on its politics. Its ‘two-fold

character’ as an institution which was created by the

Government and yet became the organizer of the anti-imperialist

movement ‘ran right through its history.’ It both fought and

collaborated with imperialism. It led the mass movements and

when the masses moved towards the revolutionary path, it

betrayed the movement to imperialism. The Congress, thus, had

two strands: ‘On the one hand, the strand of cooperation with

imperialism against the “menace” of the mass movement; on the

other hand, the strand of leadership of the masses in the national

struggle.’ This duality of the Congress leadership from Gokhale to

Gandhi, said Dutt, in fact reflected the two-fold and vacillating

character of the Indian bourgeoisie itself; ‘at once in conflict with

the British bourgeoisie and desiring to lead the Indian people, yet

feeling that “too rapid” advance may end in destroying its

privileges along with those of the imperialists.’ The Congress had,

thus, become an organ of opposition to real revolution, that is, a

violent revolution. But this role did not date from Gandhiji; ‘this

principle was implanted in it by imperialism at the outset as its

intended official role.’ The culmination of this dual role was its

‘final capitulation with the Mountbatten Settlement.’

Earlier, in 1939, M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS chief, had also

found the safety-valve theory handy in attacking the Congress for  its secularism and, therefore, anti-nationalism. In his pamphlet

We Golwalkar complained that Hindu national consciousness

had been destroyed by those claiming to be ‘nationalists’ who had

pushed the ‘notions of democracy’ and the perverse notion that

‘our old invaders and foes’, the Muslims, had something in

common with Hindus. Consequently, ‘we have allowed our foes to

be our friends and with our hands are undermining true

nationality.’ In fact, the tight in India was not between Indians

and the British only. It was ‘a triangular fight.’ Hindus were at

war with Muslims on the one hand and with the British on the

other. What had led Hindus to enter the path of

‘denationalization,’ said Golwalkar, were the aims and policy laid

down by flume, Cotton, and Wedderburn in 1885; ‘the Congress

they founded as a “safety valve” to “seething nationalism,” as a

toy which would lull the awakening giant into slumber, an

instrument to destroy National consciousness, has been, as far

as they are concerned, a success.’

The liberal C.F. Andrews and Girija Mukherji fully accepted

the safety-valve theory in their work, The Rise and Growth of the

Congress in India published in 1938. They were happy with it

because it had helped avoid ‘useless bloodshed.’ Before as well as

after 1947, tens of scholars and hundreds of popular writers have

repeated some version of these points of view.

*

Historical proof of the safety-valve theory was provided by

the seven volumes of secret reports which flume claimed to have

read at Simla in the summer of 1878 and which convinced him of

the existence of ‘seething discontent’ and a vast conspiracy

among the lower classes to violently overthrow British rule.

Before we unravel the mystery of the seven volumes, let us

briefly trace the history of its rise and growth. It was first

mentioned in William Wedderburn’s biography of A.O. flume

published in 1913. Wedderburn (ICS) found an undated

memorandum in Hume’s papers which dealt with the foundation

of the Congress. He quoted at length from this document. To keep

the mystery alive so that the reader may go along with the writer

step by step towards its solution, I will withhold an account of

Wedderburn’s writing, initially giving only those paragraphs  which were quoted by the subsequent writers. According to

Lajpat Rai, despite the fact that Hume was ‘a lover of liberty and

wanted political liberty for India under the aegis of the British

crown,’ he was above all ‘an English patriot.’ Once he saw that

British rule was threatened with ‘an impending calamity’ he

decided to create a safety valve for the discontent.

As decisive proof of this Lajpat Rai provided a long quotation

from Hume’s memorandum that Wedderburn had mentioned

along with his own comments in his book. Since this passage is

quoted or cited by all subsequent authors, it is necessary to

reproduce it here at length.

“I was shown,” wrote Hume, “several large volumes

containing a vast number of entries; English abstracts or

translations longer or shorter — of vernacular reports or

communications of one kind or another, all arranged according to

districts (not identical with ours) The number of these entries was

enormous; there were said, at the time to be communications

from over 30,000 different reporters.” He (Hume) mentions that

he had the volumes in his possession only for a week... Many of

the entries reported conversations between men of the lowest

classes, “all going to show that these poor men were pervaded

with a sense of the hopelessness of the existing state of affairs;

that they were convinced that they would starve and die, and that

they wanted to do something, and stand by each other, and that

something meant violence. a certain small number of the educated

classes, at the time desperately, perhaps unreasonably, biller

against the Government, would join the movement assume here

and there the lead, give the outbreak cohesion, and direct it as a

national revolt.”’

Very soon, the seven volumes, whose character, origin, etc.,

were left undefined in Lajpat Rai’s quotation, started undergoing

a metamorphosis. In 1933, in Gurmukh Nihal Singh’s hands,

they became ‘government reports.’ Andrews and Mukherji

transformed them into ‘several volumes of secret reports from the

CID’ which came into Hume’s possession ‘in his official capacity.’

The classical and most influential statement came from R. Palme

Dutt. After quoting the passage quoted by Lajpat Rai from

Wedderburn, Dutt wrote: ‘Hume in his official capacity had

received possession of the voluminous secret police reports.”  Numerous other historians of the national movement including

recent ones such as R.C. Majumdar and Tara Chand, were to

accept this product of the creative imagination of these writers as

historical fact.

So deeply rooted had become the belief in Hume’s volumes

as official documents that in the 1950s a large number of

historians and would-be historians, including the present writer,

devoted a great deal of time and energy searching for them in the

National Archives. And when their search proved futile, they

consoled themselves with the thought that the British had

destroyed them before their departure in 1947. Yet only if the

historians had applied a minimum of their historiographic sense

to the question and looked at the professed evidence a bit more

carefully, they would not have been taken for a ride. Three levels

of historical evidence and logic were available to them even before

the private papers of Ripon and Dufferin became available.

The first level pertains to the system under which the

Government of India functioned in the 1870s. In 1878, Flume

was Secretary to the Department of Revenue, Agriculture and

Commerce. How could the Secretary of these departments get

access to Home Department files or CID reports? Also he was

then in Simla while Home Department files were kept in Delhi;

they were not sent to Simla. And from where would 30,000

reporters come? The intelligence departments could not have

employed more than a few hundred persons at the time! And, as

Lajpat Rai noted, if Congress was founded out of the fear of an

outbreak, why did Flume and British officialdom wait for seven

long years?

If these volumes were not government documents, what

were they? The clue was there in Wedderburn’s book and it was

easily available if a writer would go to the book itself and not rely

on extracts from it reproduced by previous authors as nearly all

the later writers seem to have done. This brings us to the second

level of historical evidence already available in Wedderburn.

The passages quoted by Lajpat Rai, R. Palme Dutt and

others are on pages 80-81 of Wedderburn’s book. Two pages

earlier, pages 78-80, and one page later, 82-83, Wedderburn tells

the reader what these volumes were and who provided them to

Hume. The heading of the section where the quoted passages   occur is ‘Indian religious leaders.’ In the very beginning of the

section, Wedderburn writes that a warning of the threatened

danger came to Flume ‘from a very special source that is, from

the leaders among those devoted, in all parts of India, to a

religious life.’ Hume referred in his memorandum to the legions of

secret quasi-religious orders, with literally their millions of

members, which form so important a factor in the Indian

problem.” These religious sects and orders were headed by Gurus,

“men of the highest quality who . . have purged themselves from

earthly desires, and fixed their desires on the highest good.” And

“these religious leaders, through their Chelas or disciples, are

hilly informed of all that goes on under the surface, and their

influence is great in forming public opinion.” It was with these

Gurus, writes Wedderburn, ‘that Mr. Hume came in touch,

towards the end of Lord Lytton’s Viceroyalty.’ These Gurus

approached Hume because Hume was a keen student of Eastern

religions, but also because they “feared that the ominous ‘unrest’

throughout the country… would lead to terrible outbreak” and it

was only men like Hume who had access to the Government who

could help ‘avert a catastrophe.’ “This,” wrote Hume, “is how the

case was put to me.” With this background the passages on

pages 80-81 become clearer.

In other words, the evidence of the seven volumes was

shown to Hume by the Gurus who had been sent reports by

thousands of Chelas. But why should Hume believe that these

reports ‘must necessarily be true?’ Because Chelas were persons

of a special breed who did not belong to any particular sect or

religion or rather belonged to all religions. Moreover they were

‘bound by vows and conditions, over and above those of ordinary

initiates of low grade.’ They were ‘all initiates in some of the many

branches of the secret knowledge’ and were ‘all bound by vows,

they cannot practically break, to some farther advanced seeker

than themselves.’ The leaders were of ‘no sect and no religion, but

of all sects and all religions.’ But why did hardly anyone in India

know of the existence of these myriads of Gurus and Chelas?

Because, explained Hume, absolute secrecy was an essential

feature in their lives. They had communicated with Hume only

because they were anxious to avert calamity.

And, finally, we come to the third level of historiography, the

level of profound belief and absolute fantasy. The full character of the Gurus and Chelas was still not revealed by Wedderburn, for

he was sheltering the reputation of his old friend, as friendly

biographers usually do. The impression given by him was that

these Gurus and Chelas were ordinary mortal men. This was,

however, not the case. Reconstructing the facts on the basis of

some books of Theosophy and Madame Blavatsky and the private

papers of the Viceroys Ripon and Dufferin, we discover that these

Gurus were persons who, because of their practice of ‘peculiar

Eastern religious thought,’ were supposed to possess

supernatural occult powers; they could communicate and direct

from thousands of mites, enter any place go anywhere, sit

anywhere unseen, and direct men’s thoughts and opinions

without their being aware of it.

*

In 1881, Hume came under the spell of Madame Blavatsky

who claimed be in touch with these Gurus who were described by

her as mahatmas. These mahatmas lived as part of a secret

brotherhood in Tibet, but they could contact or ‘correspond’ with

persons anywhere in the world because of their occult powers.

Blavatsky enabled Hume to get in touch with one of these

mahatmas named ‘Koot Hoomi Lal Singh.’ It is this invisible

brotherhood that gathered secret information on Indian affairs

through their Chelas. In a book published in 1880, A.P. Sinnet,

editor of the Pioneer and another follower of Blavatsky, had

quoted a letter from Koot Hoomi that these mahatmas had used

their power in 1857 to control the Indian masses and saved the

British Empire and that they would do the same in future.

Hume believed all this. He was keen to acquire these occult

powers by which the Chelas could know all about the present

and the future. He started a ‘correspondence’ with the mahatmas

in Tibet. By 1883 Hume had quarreled with Blavatsky, but his

faith in the Gurus or mahatmas continued unabated. He also

began to use his connection with the mahatmas to promote

political objectives dear to his heart — attempting to reform

Indian administration and make it more responsive to Indian

opinion.

In December 1883, he wrote to Ripon: ‘I am associated with

men, who though never seen by the masses . . . are yet reverenced by them as Gods . . . and who feel every pulse of

public feeling.’ He claimed a Superior knowledge ‘of the native

mind’ because ‘a body of men, mostly of Asiatic origin . . . who

possess facilities which no other man or body of men living do,

for gauging the feelings of the natives. . . have seen fit. . . to give

me their confidence to a certain limited extent.’ In January 1884,

he informed Ripon that even earlier, in 1848, he had been in

contact with the brotherhood or association of his mystical

advisers and that it was their intervention which had defeated

the revolutions of 1848 in Europe and the ‘mutiny’ of 1857. From

distant Tibet they were now acting through him and others like

him to help Ripon introduce reforms and avoid ‘the possibility of

such a cataclysm recurring.’ This association of mahatmas was

also helping him, he told Ripon, to persuade the Queen to give a

second term as Viceroy to Ripon and to ‘tranquilize the native

press.

Hume tried to play a similar role with Dufferin, but more

hesitatingly, not sharing with him the information that his

advisers were astral, occult figures so that even many historians

have assumed that these advisers were his fellow Congress

leaders! Only once did he lift the veil before Dufferin when the

latter during 1887 angrily pressed him to reveal the source

through which he claimed to have gained access to the Viceroy’s

secret letter to the Secretary of State. Pressed to the wall, Hume

told him copies of the letter had been obtained by his friends

through occult methods or ‘through the medium of supernatural

photography.’ And when Dufferin showed him the original letter,

proving that the copy was false, Hume had no answer.’

Once earlier, too, Hume had indirectly tried to tell Dufferin

that his advisers were not ordinary political leaders but

‘advanced initiates’ and mahatmas; but he had done so in a

guarded fashion. In a letter to Dufferin in November 1886, he

said that he had been trying to persuade those who had shown

him the volumes in Simla to also show them to Dufferin so that

the Viceroy could get their veracity checked by his own sources.

But, at present they say that this is impossible.’ Nor would they

agree to communicate with the Viceroy directly. ‘Most of them, I

believe, could not. You have not done, and would not do, what is

required to enable them to communicate with you directly after

their fashion.’ But there was hope. ‘My own special friend’ who spent more than a month with Hume in Simla (in 1878), and who

was often in India might agree to see the Viceroy. Hume

suggested: ‘if ever a native gentleman comes to the Private

Secretary and says that Mr. Hume said the Viceroy would like to

see him, see him at once. You will not talk to him ten minutes

without finding out that he is no ordinary man. You may never

get the chance — goodness knows — they move in a mysterious

way their wonders to

But Hume was worried that he could offer no visible or

direct proof of his knowledge or connections. He told the Viceroy

that he was ‘getting gradually very angry and disgusted’ because

he was not able to get ‘this vouching for directly.’ None of the

‘advanced initiates’ under whose advice and guidance’ he was

working would ‘publicly stand by me,’ so that most Europeans in

India ‘look upon me either as a lunatic or a liar.’ And hence, he

informed the Viceroy, while he had decided to continue the

political work, he had decided to ‘drop all references to my

friends.”

Thus, it turns out that the seven volumes which Hume saw

were prepared by mahatmas and Gurus, and his friends and

advisers were these occult figures and not Congressmen!

*

Further proof offered for the safety-valve theory was based

on W.C. Bannerjee’s statement in 1898 in Indian Politics that the

Congress, ‘as it was originally started and as it has since been

carried on, is in reality the work of the Marquis of Dufferin and

Ava.’ He stated that Flume had, in 1884, thought of bringing

together leading political Indians once a year “to discuss social

matters” and did not “desire that politics should form part of

their discussion.” But Dufferin asked flume to do the opposite

and start a body to discuss politics so that the Government could

keep itself informed of Indian opinion. Such a body could also

perform ‘the functions which Her Majesty’s Opposition did in

England.”

Clearly, either W.C. Bannerjee’s memory was failing or he

was trying to protect the National Congress from the wrath of the

late 19th century imperialist reaction, for contemporary evidence clearly indicated the opposite. All the discussions Hume had with

Indian leaders regarding the holding of an annual conference

referred to a political gathering. Almost the entire work of earlier

associations like the Bombay Presidency Association, Poona

Sarvajanik Sabha, Madras Mahajan Sabha and Indian

Association was political. Since his retirement from the Indian

Civil Service in 1882, Hume had been publicly urging Indians to

take to politics. He had also been asking his Indian friends not to

get divided on social questions.

When, in January 1885, his friend B.M. Malabari wrote

some editorials in the Indian Spectator urging educated Indians to

inaugurate a movement for social reform, Hume wrote a letter to

the Indian Spectator criticizing Malabari’s proposals, warning

against the dangerous potential of such a move, and arguing that

political reforms should take precedence over social reform.’

Dufferin, on his part, in his St. Andrews’ Day dinner speech in

1888, publicly criticized the Congress for pursuing politics to

serve narrow interests rather than take to social reform which

would benefit millions.’5 Earlier he had expressed the same

sentiment in a private letter to the Secretary of State.

A perusal of Dufferin’s private papers, thrown open to

scholars in the late 1950s, should have put an end to the myth of

Dufferin’s sponsor of or support to the Congress. It was only after

Hume had sent him a Copy of the letter to the Indian Spectator

with a covering note deprecating Malabari’s views on social

reform that Dufferin expressed agreement with Hume and asked

him to meet him. Definite confirmation of the fact that Hume

never proposed a social gathering but rather a political one comes

in Dufferin’s letter to Lord Reay, Governor of Bombay, after his f

meeting with Hume in May 1885: “At his last interview he told me

that he and his friends were going to assemble a political

convention of delegates, as far as I understood, on the lines

adopted by O’Connell previous to Catholic emancipation.”

Neither Dufferin and his fellow-liberal Governors of Bombay

and Madras nor his conservative officials like Alfred and J.B.

Lyall, D.M Wallace, A. Colvin and S.C. Bayley were sympathetic

to the Congress. It was not only in 1888 that Dufferin attacked

the Congress in a vicious manner by writing that he would

consider ‘in what way the happy despatch may be best applied to  the Congress,’ for ‘we cannot allow the Congress to continue to

exist.” In May 1885 itself, he had written to Reay asking him to

be careful about Hume’s Congress, telling him that it would be

unwise to identify with either the reformers or the reactionaries.

Reay in turn, in a letter in June 1885, referred with apprehension

to the new political activists as ‘the National Party of India’ and

warned against Indian delegates, like Irish delegates, making

their appearance on the British political scene. Earlier, in May,

Reay had cautioned Dufferin that Hume was ‘the head-centre of

an organization . . . (which) has for its object to bring native

opinion into a focus.’

In fact, from the end of May 1885, Dufferin had grown cool

to Hume and began to keep him at an arm’s length. From 1886

onwards he also began to attack the ‘Bengali Baboos and

Mahratta Brahmins’ for being ‘inspired by questionable motives’

and for wanting to start Irish-type revolutionary agitations in

India.20 And, during May-June 1886. he was describing Hume

as ‘cleverish, a little cracked, excessively vain, and absolutely

indifferent to truth,’ his main fault being that he was ‘one of the

chief stimulants of the Indian Home Rule movement. To

conclude, it is high time that the safety-valve theory of the

genesis of the Congress was confined to the care of the mahatmas

from whom perhaps it originated