Founding of the Indian National Congress
Symbolic image — a map or later illustration, not a photograph of the event. Image via Wikimedia Commons — Indian National Congress.
The Story
In December 1885, seventy-two Indians from across the country — lawyers, teachers, journalists and businessmen — travelled to Bombay for a very special meeting. They wanted to discuss the future of India and ask the British government to listen to Indian voices.
From that small gathering was born the Indian National Congress, a group that would grow and grow, and one day lead the whole country's fight for freedom.
The Indian National Congress was founded on 28 December 1885 at Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College in Bombay. Its first session was organised by Allan Octavian Hume, a retired British civil servant, along with Indian leaders like Dadabhai Naoroji and Dinshaw Wacha.
The lawyer Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee was elected its first president. Seventy-two delegates from different parts of India attended.
In its early years the Congress was mostly moderate — it asked, through petitions and speeches, for more Indian representation in government and better economic policies. Over the next few decades it changed dramatically.
Under leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and later Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and Bose, it became a mass movement that reached villages, factories and universities. From 1885 to Independence in 1947, the Congress was the main political vehicle of India's freedom struggle, and after Independence it went on to shape the new republic.
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