Safety valve theory of congress -Myth or Truth

The formation of Indian National Congress was the first organised expression of the indian nationalism on all India scale. Founded in 1885 by A.O.Hume, a retired English ICS officer .
The protests and the revolts of 1857 and after failed mainly due to the unorganized nature confining to the local population, which the british easily suppressed. There was less unity between different regions and people from other region cared less and concentrated more on their problems. All the revolts were locally confined, devoid of any central organisation.
But Hume’s involvement gave rise to a lot of conspiracies relating to origin of Congress. Controversy was created by W. C. Banerjee statement that Hume was acting under Lord Dufferin. R. P. Dutt analysed that the Congress was formed under a British viceroy to act as a safety valve against popular discontent. This theory originated from William Wedderburn ‘s biography of Hume published in 1913. He wrote that in 1878 Hume came across seven volumes of secret reports showing discontent among the lower classes and conspiracy to overthrow British rule. He met Lord Dufferin and they decided to form an organisation with educated Indians serving as a safety valve by opening up a communication between rulers and the ruled preventing mass revolution.
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.’
But 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.

Neither Dufferin and his fellow-liberal Governors of Bombay
and Madras 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.....
So we can say the foundation of the Congress was the natural culmination of the political work of the previous years: By 1885, a stage had been reached in the political development of India when certain basic tasks or objectives had to be laid down and struggled for. Moreover these objectives were correlated and could only be fulfilled by the coming together of political workers in a single organization formed on an all- India basis. The men who met in Bombay on 28 December 1885 were inspired by these objectives and hoped to initiate the process of achieving them. The success or failure and the future character of the Congress would be determined not by who founded it but by the extent to which these objectives were achieved in the initial years.

By: Ankush Sharma