THE FREEDOM MOVEMENT AND THE PARTITION OF INDIAViceroy Lord Lytton, a Conservative, inadvertently fostered the
cooperation of Indian nationalists by his reactionary measures; in this he
was to be surpassed only by Lord Curzon some decades later. Lytton
introduced a Vernacular Press Act in 1878 which subjected newspapers
published in Indian languages to a censorship so severe as to be practically
tantamount to a suppression of their publication. This raised a storm of
national protest in India and was also criticised by Gladstone and his
Liberals in Parliament. Henceforth, Indian nationalists believed that the
British Liberal Party was their natural ally. They were later disabused of
this notion, but for some decades a faith in the Liberals greatly influenced
their policy.
Lord Ripon’s appointment as viceroy in 1880 gave great encouragement
to India’s liberal nationalists, who intensified their contacts throughout the
country and finally held the first annual session of the Indian National
Congress in Bombay in 1885; the second was held in Calcutta, where the
Indian Association was in charge of the arrangements (indeed, the Indian
Association had wanted to host the first session, and Bombay got ahead of
Calcutta only by accident). In subsequent years all major Indian cities vied
with each other for the great honour of hosting the National Congress.
There was hardly any activity in the time between annual sessions, nor was
there any permanent office. The nationalists of the inviting city and the
local chairman of the reception committee did what was necessary; they
also decided whom to invite to preside over the session, which was more of
a mark of distinction than an onerous duty. An informal group of leaders
emerged to coordinate the affairs of the National Congress. For a long
time the political boss of Bombay, Parsi lawyer Pherozeshah Mehta, was
the mentor of the Congress. He felt that the Congress should work like an
Indian branch of the British Liberal Party and was therefore at loggerheads
with the national revolutionaries, who preferred to fight for Indian
independence rather than put their trust in any British party.
The liberal nationalists and the national revolutionaries held
fundamentally different views about the Indian nation. The liberals believed
in nation-building within the framework of British rule. To them an Indian
nation was a promise of the future rather than a fact of past and present.
The national revolutionaries felt that the Indian nation had existed from
time immemorial and that it only had to be awakened in order for it to
shake off foreign rule. These different views had immediate consequences for
Indian politics. The liberal nationalists welcomed British constitutional
reforms for India and also asked for social reforms legislation; the national
revolutionaries thought that any kind of British-granted reform would only
serve to strengthen the fetters of foreign rule and make the British the
umpires of India’s fate. Dissociation rather than association was the
watchword of the revolutionaries. Vedanta philosophy, the mainstay of Neo-
Hinduism, lent itself to a political interpretation by the national