The moderate years

During its first several decades, the party passed fairly moderate reform resolutions, though many of its members were becoming radicalized by the increased poverty that accompanied Britishimperialism. The party’s initial goal was to achieveconstitutional changes within the colonial framework, and it relied on meetings, petitions, and press campaigns to make its demands. Gradually, these political methods were seen as inadequate and led to a rising disenchantment with the moderates, as the early group of Congress Party leaders came to be known.

Despite the perceived passivity of their political activities, the moderates were extraordinarily successful in constructing a damaging economiccritique of colonialism based on the socioeconomic conditions of 19th-century India. Exploitative British policies combined withfamines andepidemics impoverished India, which had been reduced to a supplier of raw materials to England and a consumer of the imported finished goods. The “drain of wealth” through ruinous taxation, depletion of domestic resources, and the transfer of income to England were detailed in the writings of Naoroji, Romesh Chunder Dutt, and Dinshaw Wacha.

The extremist faction emerges

In the early 20th century the party began to transform into a nationwide movement in response to thepartition of Bengal (1905–11). An “extremist” faction emerged within the Congress Party, consisting of the “Lal Bal Pal” trio (Lala Lajpat Rai,Bal Gangadhar Tilak, andBipin Chandra Pal) andAnnie Besant. This faction began toendorse a policy ofswadeshi (“of our own country”), which called on Indians toboycott imported British goods and promoted Indian-made goods. TheSwadeshi Movement, launched in 1905, was based on this principle of economic self-sufficiency and became the first organized masscollective action in the struggle for independence.

The Surat split

Disagreements between the extremists and the moderates, led byGopal Krishna Gokhale, intensified over the next several years and culminated in anacrimonious session atSurat (now inGujarat state) in 1907. In addition to the Lal Bal Pal trio’s insistence on resolutions favoring the principles ofswadeshi and boycott, the extremists wanted Tilak to speak before the moderate president-elect, Rash Behari Ghose, did.Chaos ensued when the demand was rejected, with shoes and chairs being thrown. The session was suspended before there could be a formal schism. The two factionsreconciled at the 1915 session in Bombay. By 1917 the extremists had begun to exert significant influence by appealing to India’sdiverse social classes, and Besant (who had started theHome Rule League in 1916) became the party’s first woman president.

Access for the whole family!

Bundle Britannica Premium and Kids for the ultimate resource destination.

Subscribe

Gandhi’s civil disobedience

In the 1920s and ’30s the Congress Party, led byMahatma Gandhi, began advocating nonviolentnoncooperation. The change in tactics was precipitated by the protest over the perceived feebleness of the constitutional reforms enacted in early 1919 (Rowlatt Act) and Britain’s manner of carrying them out, as well as by the widespread outrage among Indians in response to themassacre of civilians who had gathered atJallianwala Bagh inAmritsar,Punjab, that April. Many of the acts ofcivil disobedience that followed wereimplemented through the All India Congress Committee, formed in 1929, which advocated avoiding paying taxes as a protest against British rule. Notable among those acts was theSalt March in 1930 led by Gandhi.

The demand for Purna Swaraj

Another wing of the Congress Party, which believed in working within the existing system, contested general elections in 1923 and 1937 as theSwaraj (Home Rule) Party. Led byMotilal Nehru andChittaranjan Das, the Swaraj Party had particular success in the elections of 1937, winning 7 out of 11 provinces. As the independence movement progressed, the Congress Party revised its initial goal of constitutional reform to dominion status. The Nehru Report (named for Motilal Nehru, who presided over the commission that produced the report), released in 1928, firstarticulated the demand for dominion status. This was revised again to press forPurna Swaraj (“Complete Self-Rule”) at the Congress session atLahore in 1929; the party made this resolution public on January 26, 1930.

Independence for India

WhenWorld War II began in 1939, Britain made India abelligerent without consulting Indian elected councils. That action angered Indian officials and prompted the Congress Party to declare that India would not support the war effort until it had been granted complete independence. In 1942 the organization sponsored mass civil disobedience, called theQuit India Movement, to support the demand that the British leave India. British authorities responded by imprisoning the entire Congress Party leadership, including Gandhi, and many remained in jail until 1945. After the war the new British government of theClement Attlee-ledLabour Party resolved to withdraw from India. The BritishParliament passed an independence bill in July 1947, and independence was achieved the following month.The Indian subcontinent would be partitioned into two states, a Hindu-majority India and aMuslim-majorityPakistan. In January 1950 India’s status as an independent state took effect as theConstitution of India came into force.