Indian National Congress

Founding and Early Years (1885-1905)

The Indian National Congress held its first session in Bombay on 28-31 December 1885, convened by the retired British civil servant Allan Octavian Hume together with Indian public figures including Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee, who presided as the first president, and Dadabhai Naoroji. Seventy-two delegates attended. The early Congress, dominated by lawyers, journalists, and landowners educated in the English system, functioned as a forum for airing grievances and petitioning for reform rather than as a body demanding independence; its moderate leadership, including Naoroji, later the first Indian elected to the British Parliament, in 1892, and author of the influential "drain of wealth" critique of colonial economic policy, and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who founded the Servants of India Society in 1905 and mentored a young Mohandas Gandhi, favored constitutional agitation over confrontation.

Split and Reunification (1905-1919)

Viceroy Lord Curzon's partition of Bengal in 1905, widely read as an attempt to weaken nationalist organizing along religious lines, provoked the Swadeshi movement calling for the boycott of British goods and radicalized a new wing of leaders, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, and Lala Lajpat Rai, together known as Lal-Bal-Pal, who pushed for self-rule (swaraj) rather than gradual reform. Tension between this more radical faction and the moderates split the Congress at its 1907 session in Surat. The Morley-Minto reforms of 1909 introduced separate electorates for Muslims, a step that shaped communal politics for decades. The factions reunited in 1916, the same year the Congress and the Muslim League, then led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, signed the Lucknow Pact, briefly coordinating demands for constitutional reform. In the same period, Annie Besant and Tilak separately launched Home Rule Leagues in 1916, agitating for self-government within the empire along the lines of Ireland or the settler dominions; Besant, an English-born theosophist based in Madras, was elected Congress president in 1917, one of the few non-Indians to hold the post. Throughout this early period the Congress functioned through annual sessions held in a different city each year, presided over by an elected president serving a single term, a rotating structure that gave the party a genuinely national, rather than regional, character from its earliest years.

The Gandhian Era (1919-1947)

Gandhi, who returned to India from South Africa in 1915, rose to leadership of the Congress after the Rowlatt Act of 1919 and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre radicalized Indian opinion. Under his direction the party shifted from a body of petitioners to a mass movement, launching the Non-Cooperation Movement (1920-22), the Civil Disobedience Movement (1930-34), inaugurated by the Salt March, and the Quit India Movement (1942). Between these campaigns, figures including C.R. Das and Motilal Nehru formed the Swaraj Party in 1923 to contest legislative councils; the Congress boycotted the all-British Simon Commission in 1928; its 1929 Lahore session, presided over by Jawaharlal Nehru, adopted the demand for complete independence, Purna Swaraj, and set 26 January 1930 as an annual Independence Day; and negotiations following the Round Table Conferences produced the Poona Pact of 1932 between Gandhi and B.R. Ambedkar over the representation of the "depressed classes." After the 1937 provincial elections, held under the Government of India Act, 1935, the Congress won outright majorities in most provinces, while the Muslim League performed comparatively poorly even in Muslim-majority regions; the Congress's refusal to form coalition ministries with the League in the United Provinces, where the League had hoped for a share of power despite its weaker showing, is cited by many historians as a turning point that pushed Jinnah toward the separate-state demand he articulated in following years. Congress ministries governed for two years before resigning in 1939 to protest India's inclusion in the Second World War without consultation. The Quit India Movement of August 1942 led to the mass arrest of the party's leadership, including Gandhi, Nehru, and Vallabhbhai Patel, for the war's duration. In the final negotiations of 1946-47, Congress leaders Nehru, Patel, and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad dealt with the British and the Muslim League over the terms of transfer of power, accepting the partition of India as the price of a swift transition; independence and partition followed on 15 August 1947.

In Power: Nehru to Shastri (1947-1966)

A separate socialist current had organized within the Congress itself in 1934 as the Congress Socialist Party, formed by figures including Jayaprakash Narayan, Acharya Narendra Dev, and Ram Manohar Lohia, who pushed the parent organization toward more explicitly redistributive economic positions before several of its leaders eventually left to form independent socialist parties after independence. Rajendra Prasad, a senior Congress leader and former party president, became independent India's first President in 1950, a largely ceremonial head of state role distinct from Nehru's executive premiership. The tension between the party presidency and the prime ministership surfaced early: Purushottam Das Tandon, elected Congress president in 1950 against Nehru's preferred candidate, resigned within a year under pressure from Nehru over policy differences, after which Nehru himself took the party presidency alongside the premiership, an early instance of prime ministerial dominance over the party organization that recurred throughout the Congress's history.

As the ruling party of independent India, the Congress under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru pursued parliamentary democracy, a secular constitution, a state-directed mixed economy built around Five Year Plans beginning in 1951, and a foreign policy of non-alignment between the Cold War blocs. Nehru's government reorganized India's states along linguistic lines in 1956, oversaw the integration of the last princely holdouts, and championed non-alignment on the world stage, articulating the Panchsheel principles of peaceful coexistence with China in 1954 and co-founding the Non-Aligned Movement with Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, formalized at the Belgrade conference of 1961 after the groundwork laid at the 1955 Bandung Conference of Asian and African states. This foreign-policy record was shadowed by the 1962 border war with China, a significant military and political setback that exposed gaps in India's defense preparedness. After Nehru's death in May 1964, Lal Bahadur Shastri led the party and the country through the 1965 war with Pakistan before dying in Tashkent in January 1966 shortly after signing a peace agreement.

Indira Gandhi and Party Transformation (1966-1984)

Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister in 1966. Clashes with the party's senior leadership over her nationalization of major banks in 1969 and other policies split the Congress into rival factions, with Gandhi's Congress(R) prevailing over the old guard's Congress(O); it is her branch that has continued as the modern Indian National Congress. Campaigning on the slogan "Garibi Hatao" (Remove Poverty), she led the party to a landslide victory in 1971, the same year India intervened in the Bangladesh Liberation War. Her government conducted India's first nuclear test, code-named Smiling Buddha, at Pokhran in May 1974, and formally merged the Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim into the Indian Union as its twenty-second state in 1975. Facing a court ruling that invalidated her own election and mounting political unrest, Gandhi declared a state of Emergency from June 1975 to March 1977, suspending civil liberties and press freedom; the Congress lost power for the first time at the national level in the elections that followed the Emergency's end. Gandhi returned to office in 1980, and her 1984 order for Operation Blue Star, a military assault on militants who had fortified themselves inside the Golden Temple in Amritsar, led to her assassination by two of her Sikh bodyguards on 31 October 1984, followed by anti-Sikh violence in Delhi and elsewhere.

Rajiv Gandhi and Its Aftermath (1984-1991)

Indira Gandhi's son Rajiv Gandhi succeeded her and led the Congress to a landslide victory in the sympathy-driven 1984 election. His government pursued technological modernization and early steps toward economic liberalization but became entangled in communal controversy when it legislated to overturn a Supreme Court maintenance ruling in the 1985 Shah Bano case through the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986, seen by critics as a concession to conservative Muslim opinion, and, in the same year, allowed the locks on the disputed Babri Masjid site in Ayodhya to be opened for Hindu worship, a decision that inflamed the dispute over the site rather than settling it. His government was further damaged by the 1987 Bofors arms-deal corruption allegations and by the deployment of the Indian Peace Keeping Force to Sri Lanka's civil war (1987-90), which ended in heavy Indian casualties and withdrawal. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a suicide bomber linked to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam at an election rally in Sriperumbudur on 21 May 1991.

Liberalization and the UPA Years (1991-2014)

P.V. Narasimha Rao, who became Prime Minister after the 1991 election, led a minority Congress government that, with Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, dismantled much of India's postwar licensing regime and opened the economy to liberalization from July 1991. His tenure was also marked by the demolition of the Babri Masjid by a mob of Hindu nationalist activists in December 1992, an event his government was widely criticized for failing to prevent, which set off nationwide communal riots. Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi's widow, took over the party presidency in 1998 and, after the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance won the 2004 election, declined the prime ministership in favor of Manmohan Singh, who led UPA governments from 2004 to 2014. That period saw the passage of the Right to Information Act (2005) and the rural employment guarantee scheme MGNREGA (2005), and, in foreign policy, the 2008 Indo-US Civil Nuclear Agreement, which the government survived a confidence vote in parliament to secure after its Left-party allies withdrew support in protest. The UPA's second term (2009-2014) was dominated by corruption controversies, including the 2G telecom spectrum and coal-block allocation cases, and by the anti-corruption protest movement led by Anna Hazare in 2011, all of which contributed to the party's steep decline in public support.

Contemporary Congress (2014-present)

The Congress suffered its worst-ever result in the 2014 general election, winning only 44 of 543 Lok Sabha seats as Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party swept to power, and it fell to 52 seats in 2019. Rahul Gandhi, who had led the party through both defeats, stepped down as party president afterward; a group of senior leaders, subsequently referred to as the G23, wrote to the party leadership in 2020 calling for organizational reform, reflecting continuing internal strain. Mallikarjun Kharge was elected Congress president in October 2022, the first person outside the Nehru-Gandhi family to hold the post in over two decades outside of caretaker tenures, the same year Rahul Gandhi undertook the Bharat Jodo Yatra, a months-long cross-country walking campaign intended to rebuild the party's public presence. As part of the opposition INDIA alliance, the Congress improved its position substantially in the 2024 general election, and Rahul Gandhi took up the position of Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, while the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance retained power with a reduced majority dependent on coalition partners.