History of the Indian National Congress

From its foundation on 28 December 1885 by 65 individuals with the active help by A.O Hume, a retired British officer, until the time of independence of India on 15 August 1947, the Indian National Congress was considered to be the largest and most prominent Indian public organization, and central and defining influence of the Indian Independence Movement.

After independence of India in 1947, Mahatma Gandhi asked the leaders to dissolve Indian National Congress and form new organisation to govern the nation.

Founded upon the authority of British civil servant Allan Octavian Hume, the Congress was created to form a platform for civic and political dialogue of educated Indians with the British Raj. After the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the transfer of India from the East India Company to the British Empire (the Raj), it was the goal of the Raj to support and justify its governance of India with the aid of English-educated Indians, who would be familiar and friendly to British culture and political thinking. Ironically, a few of the reasons the Congress grew and survived in the era of undisputed British hegemony, was through the patronage of British authorities, Anglo-Indians, and a rising Indian, English language educated, class.

Hume embarked on an endeavor to get an organization started by reaching-out to selected alumni of the University of Calcutta, writing in his 1883 letter that, "Every nation secures precisely as good a Government as it merits. If you the picked men, the most highly educated of the nation, cannot, scorning personal ease and selfish objects, make a resolute struggle to secure greater freedom for yourselves and your country, a more impartial administration, a larger share in the management of your own affairs, then we, your friends, are wrong and our adversaries right, then are Lord Ripon's noble aspirations for your good fruitless and visionary, then, at present at any rate all hopes of progress are at an end and India truly neither desires nor deserves any better Government than she enjoys."

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