Establishment of the Indian National Congress and the work of Moderates (1885–1905)

A retired British civil servant helped start the organisation that would eventually end British rule in India. That is not a contradiction once you understand what the Indian National Congress was in 1885 — a polite, English-speaking debating society asking for more seats at a table the British already controlled, not yet the mass movement it became twenty years later.

In two minutes

The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, spent its first two decades under Moderate leadership pursuing constitutional methods — petitions, resolutions and reasoned argument — for greater Indian participation in government, before a new, more impatient generation of Extremists took over after 1905.

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