Indian National Congress
인도 국민회의
An Indian political party founded in Bombay on 28 December 1885. From around 1920, under Mahatma Gandhi, it led the Indian independence movement. After independence in 1947 it governed for long periods and produced six prime ministers, beginning with Jawaharlal Nehru; since the 1990s the Bharatiya Janata Party has been its main rival.
In depth
In 1883 Allan Octavian Hume, a retired British civil servant, proposed a body to represent Indian interests, and the first session met in Bombay on 28–31 December 1885. It was attended by 72 delegates, and Umesh Chandra Banerjee became the first president. At first moderates who sought Indianisation of the administration and reforms within British rule led the Congress, but after the partition of Bengal in 1905 the extremists led by Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal came to the fore.
After Gandhi returned from South Africa in 1915 and joined, the Congress became a mass movement. In 1920 Gandhi allied with the Khilafat Movement and used civil disobedience (satyagraha). The 1929 Lahore session, presided over by Jawaharlal Nehru, declared complete independence (Purna Swaraj) as its goal. In the 1937 provincial elections the Congress won power in eight of eleven provinces, but its ministries resigned in 1939 when the Viceroy declared India a belligerent in the Second World War without consulting Indians. That year Gandhi expelled the socialist groupings, including the Congress Socialist Party, along with Subhas Chandra Bose. When Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement in August 1942, the colonial government arrested the leadership en masse.
After independence in 1947 the Congress became the dominant party and held power nationally until 1977. Nehru, its paramount leader from 1951 until his death in 1964, introduced the Planning Commission, Five-Year Plans, a mixed economy, a secular state and non-alignment. In 1969 Indira Gandhi's faction broke away to form the Congress (R), which won the 1971 election by a huge margin and became the dominant faction. After her Emergency of 1975–1977, the party lost power for the first time in 1977, to the Janata coalition.
It returned in 1980 and lost again in 1989; in 1991 the government of P. V. Narasimha Rao turned to economic liberalisation. After the 2004 and 2009 elections it led the United Progressive Alliance government under Manmohan Singh, but in 2014 it won only 44 of 543 seats. In the 2024 election it won 99 seats and became the official opposition.