The Indian National Congress: Founding and the Moderate-Extremist Phase

In December 1885, seventy-two men met in a Bombay college hall to talk politics. None of them wanted a revolution. They wanted a bigger Indian voice inside British rule. Twenty-two years later, that same organisation split apart in public, mid-session, over how far patience should stretch.

Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee, the Calcutta barrister who presided over the Congress’s first session in Bombay, 1885. Photograph from Amvika Charan Mazumdar’s “Indian National Evolution” (1917); public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

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ModHist0061 · Modern Indian History

Congress: From Petition to Split

Founded in Bombay in 1885, divided at Surat in 1907, reunited at Lucknow in 1916

28–31 Dec 1885

Congress holds its first session

Seventy-two delegates meet in Bombay. Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee presides as the first president.

1901

Naoroji publishes his Drain of Wealth theory

“Poverty and Un-British Rule in India” argues that colonial rule is draining India’s wealth to Britain.

1905

Bengal is partitioned

The partition triggers the Swadeshi movement, and sharpens the Moderate-Extremist divide inside Congress.

Dec 1907

Congress splits at Surat

A dispute over the president’s post, between Tilak and Rash Behari Ghosh, ends the session in disorder.

Dec 1916

Moderates and Extremists reunite at Lucknow

The same session produces the Lucknow Pact, a rare Congress–Muslim League agreement.

Two Methods, One Goal

Moderates trusted petitions and dialogue within British rule. Extremists trusted boycott and mass defiance instead. Both aimed at the same end: a real Indian voice in India’s own governance.

📑 Contents

1Timeline
2The Founding of the Congress, 1885
3Hume’s Role and the Safety Valve Debate
4The Moderate Phase: Naoroji, Gokhale, and Mehta
5The Rise of the Extremists: Lal-Bal-Pal
6Test Yourself
7The 1907 Surat Split
8Reunification at Lucknow, 1916
9Legacy: Two Strands of One Struggle
10Previous Year Questions

🕰️ Timeline

The Congress, 1885 to 1916

28–31 December 1885: The Indian National Congress holds its first session in Bombay, with seventy-two delegates.
1901: Dadabhai Naoroji publishes his fullest statement of the Drain of Wealth theory, in “Poverty and Un-British Rule in India.”
1905: The British partition Bengal, triggering the Swadeshi movement and sharpening the Congress’s internal divide.
December 1907: The Congress splits at its Surat session, dividing Moderates and Extremists into rival camps.
December 1916: The two factions reunite at the Lucknow session, alongside a landmark Congress-Muslim League pact.

✊ Must Know

The Founding of the Congress, 1885

The Indian National Congress held its first session in Bombay, from 28 to 31 December 1885.
The session was first planned for Poona, but moved to Bombay after a cholera outbreak there.
It met in the hall of Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College, in Bombay.
Seventy-two delegates attended, mostly English-educated lawyers, journalists, and other professionals.
Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee, a Calcutta barrister, presided over this first session as the Congress’s first president.
Retired British civil servant Allan Octavian Hume played a real, active role in organising the founding session.
In 1883, Hume issued an open letter urging Calcutta University graduates to form a national political body.
Early Congress sessions asked for wider Indian representation in government, and redress of administrative grievances.
The Congress did not demand independence at this early stage. It asked for a larger Indian voice within British rule.

📘 Good to Know

Hume’s Role and the Safety Valve Debate

Historians have long debated why a British official helped start an Indian political body.
One theory, drawn from William Wedderburn’s 1913 biography of Hume, is called the Safety Valve Theory.
It holds that Hume acted with Viceroy Lord Dufferin’s quiet encouragement.
The goal, in this account, was to channel rising discontent into peaceful, controlled debate, and prevent a second uprising like 1857.
Later research into Dufferin’s private papers found no evidence he took Hume’s warnings seriously.
No document confirming Hume’s claimed secret intelligence reports has ever surfaced in Indian or British archives.
Most historians now treat Hume as a facilitator, not the Congress’s sole architect.
Naoroji, Bonnerjee, and Gokhale were educated, committed nationalists in their own right, not British instruments.

✊ Must Know

The Moderate Phase: Naoroji, Gokhale, and Mehta

The Moderates led the Congress through its first two decades, roughly from 1885 to 1905.
Dadabhai Naoroji was their most influential thinker, and the first Indian elected to Britain’s House of Commons.
Naoroji first raised his Drain of Wealth theory in the 1860s, and set it out fully in his 1901 book, “Poverty and Un-British Rule in India.”
The book argued that British rule was draining India’s wealth away, through unequal trade and high taxation.
It also pointed to the salaries British officials sent home, instead of spending in India.
Gopal Krishna Gokhale, another leading Moderate, founded the Servants of India Society to train public workers.
Gokhale called for “reasoned and restrained” political action, and later mentored a young Mahatma Gandhi.
Pherozeshah Mehta, a Bombay lawyer, co-founded the Bombay Presidency Association in January 1885, months before the Congress itself.
Mehta became Congress president in 1890, and worked to stop the Extremist faction from dominating the party.
Moderate methods relied on petitions, formal resolutions, and dialogue with British officials, not mass protest.

✊ Must Know

The Rise of the Extremists: Lal-Bal-Pal

By the early 1900s, a younger group grew impatient with the Moderates’ slow, petition-based approach.
This group became known as the Extremists, led by a trio nicknamed “Lal-Bal-Pal.”
The name combined Lala Lajpat Rai of Punjab, Bal Gangadhar Tilak of Maharashtra, and Bipin Chandra Pal of Bengal.
Together, the three gave the Extremist message reach across three major regions of India.
Tilak’s most famous line, “Swaraj is my birthright, and I shall have it,” captured their assertive tone.
The Extremists favoured direct action: boycotting British goods, promoting Swadeshi (home-made goods), and national education.
The 1905 partition of Bengal, and the Swadeshi movement it triggered, sharpened this divide inside Congress.
Extremists argued that petitions alone had won India very little, after two decades of Moderate leadership.

Test Yourself

🌟 Great to Know

The 1907 Surat Split

Tensions between the two factions came to a head at the Surat session, in December 1907.
Moderates backed Rash Behari Ghosh for Congress president that year. Extremists backed Tilak instead.
When the session resumed, Tilak was denied the chance to speak from the stage.
The disagreement turned into a physical scuffle on the dais, and the session was adjourned without resolution.
The Moderates then held a separate meeting of their own, formalising the split.
The Extremists were effectively left outside the official Congress organisation after Surat.
The split weakened the Congress as a single, unified political voice, for roughly a decade.

📘 Good to Know

Reunification at Lucknow, 1916

The two factions stayed apart for nine years, running largely separate political campaigns.
They reunited at the Congress session in Lucknow, in December 1916.
The same session also produced the Lucknow Pact, a rare agreement between Congress and the Muslim League.
Reunification let the Congress present a broader, more unified front, heading into the 1920s.
Tilak returned to active Congress politics at Lucknow, after earlier being imprisoned for sedition.

🌟 Great to Know

Legacy: Two Strands of One Struggle

The Moderate-Extremist split reflects a pattern seen in many independence movements.
One strand works to reform existing institutions. The other strand confronts those institutions directly.
Neither approach was simply right or wrong. Each pushed the movement forward in its own way.
Moderate leaders built the institutional habits, and the international profile, that later movements relied on.
Extremist leaders showed that mass mobilisation and public defiance could shift British policy faster than petitions alone.
Early Congress leadership was drawn mostly from English-educated professionals, a narrow social base.
This base broadened sharply after 1915, once Mahatma Gandhi returned from South Africa and reshaped Congress strategy.

📝 Previous Year Questions

UPSC Mains 2021, GS Paper I, Q11: Did the Moderates Prepare a Base?

Mains PYQ Asked to what extent the Moderates prepared a base for the wider freedom movement.
View this Mains question →

UPSC Mains 2017, GS Paper I, Q3: Why the Moderates Failed to Carry Conviction

Mains PYQ Asked why the Moderates failed to carry conviction with the nation by the end of the 19th century.
View this Mains question →

Two PYQs on the Same 1907 Split

2015: Which movement caused it The Swadeshi Movement contributed to the split between moderates and extremists — the 1905 Partition of Bengal and its Swadeshi/Boycott response sharpened the divide that broke out at Surat in 1907.
2016: The main reason The Extremists’ lack of faith in the Moderates’ capacity to negotiate effectively with the British Government was the main reason for the 1907 Surat split.
Not communalism or Muslim League Communalism introduced by Lord Minto and the founding of the Muslim League were both real events of the period, but neither directly caused the Congress’s own internal Surat split.
View the 2015 question on the full paper →
View the 2016 question on the full paper →