INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS FORMATION AND SPLIT

1. The fusion into one national whole of all the different elements that constitute the population of India
2. The gradual regeneration along all lines, spiritual, moral, social, and political, of the nation thus evolved
3. The consolidation, often, the union between England and India

• For a few years party's work continued, to shift towards colonial administrators' attitudes and policies on the rights and powers allowed to Indians
• Hume and the party were also criticised, by the British for attempting to change the existing systems that favoured them and by some Indians for not achieving significant results, initially. Hume left India around the end of the 19th Century.
• The party largely consisted of educated, upper-class people who were likely to have studied abroad.
• But with time, this grouping became more diverse, as the organisation began setting up provincial organisations.
• At its Eleventh Session in 1895, there was an increase in the number of delegates from 1,163 the previous year to 1,584
•  President Surendranath Banerjea congratulated the Congress for bringing together “the scattered element of a vast and diversified population.”
• The members frequently protested issues of British colonialism, such as the Bengal famine and the drain of wealth from India.
• However, these protests were at this point usually limited to prayers and petitions, including writing letters to the authorities. As the British rule continued, there grew differences in what the party’s functioning should be like.

• One of the biggest strengths of the party, which helped it appeal to a broad section of Indian society, was having members who held different ideological positions
• In Surat in 1906, the divisions between the ‘moderates’ led by Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Surendranath Banerjea, and the ‘extremists’ led by Bal Gangadhar Tilak came to the fore and there was a split.
• While Tilak and Lala Lajpat Rai wanted the Congress to boycott the visit of the Prince of Wales in protest against the Bengal Partition a year prior, the moderates opposed any such move.
• But by 1915, the Bombay session saw these two groups coming together again as one.
• The pattern of splits and eventual cohesion continued well after Indian independence, even after the party came to completely dominate successive general elections under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
• In the late 1960s, under PM Indira Gandhi, there was a power struggle. There was disagreement over the economic policies that were to be followed by the government, with Gandhi leaning strongly towards socialism, unlike senior leader Morarji Desai
• The Presidential elections to be held around this time became a kind of proxy war, with both factions pushing for their candidates, culminating with Gandhi’s candidate VV Giri winning
• Congress President S Nijalingappa expelled the Prime Minister from the Congress, and the party officially split into Congress (R) led by Indira and Congress (O), which later merged with the Janta Party.