BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 71 of 150

Correct — B, Lala Lajpat Rai. The 'safety-valve' story is a claim about why the Indian National Congress was born. It holds that Allan Octavian Hume, the retired Bengal civilian who convened the first Congress at Bombay in December 1885, had read secret Government reports predicting an imminent explosion of discontent, and helped create the Congress partly to give that discontent a constitutional outlet — a valve to let off steam and so protect the Raj. The story reached print in William Wedderburn's 1913 biography, 'Allan Octavian Hume: Father of the Indian National Congress'. The standard textbook history of the freedom movement — Bipan Chandra's account and those written after it — credits Lala Lajpat Rai with being the first Indian leader to pick that story up and swing it at the Moderates: writing in Young India in 1916, he argued that a body conceived by an Englishman as a lightning-conductor for British rule could not be the authentic instrument of Indian nationhood, and that the Moderates' politics of prayer, petition and protest was simply an organisation behaving as it had been designed to behave. Three qualifications belong on this card, because they are what separates learning the point from parroting it. First, the attribution is historiographical: it is what the standard textbooks say, and it should be carried as the received account rather than as a quoted primary document. Second, the safety-valve theory itself is no longer accepted — the secret reports Wedderburn described were never produced, and modern scholarship reads the claim as an argument about Hume's private motives, adding that Indian nationalists of 1885 deliberately recruited a well-connected Englishman as a shield for a fledgling organisation. Third, there is a naming trap here that this very paper fell into four questions later: the 'Young India' of 1916 is Lajpat Rai's own BOOK — 'Young India: An Interpretation and a History of the Nationalist Movement from Within', New York, B. W. Huebsch — and not Gandhi's weekly of the same name, which Gandhi only took over in 1919.

• (a)Bipin Chandra Pal — A genuine Extremist and a genuine critic of the Moderates — the 'Pal' of Lal-Bal-Pal, who brought out the English daily Bande Mataram from Calcutta in 1906 and spent the Swadeshi years attacking Moderate faith in British good intentions. But his quarrel was with Moderate method, not with the Congress's paternity, and the first use of the safety-valve argument is not credited to him.
• (c)Bal Gangadhar Tilak — The strongest trap on the page. UPSC itself has keyed Tilak as the leader under whom 'the Congress policy of pray and petition ultimately came to an end', and his Kesari (Marathi) and Mahratta (English), both begun in 1881, were the loudest anti-Moderate presses in India. Yet demolishing the Moderates' methods is a different charge from denying the Congress's Indian parentage; and in 1916 Tilak, freed from Mandalay in June 1914, was busy founding his Indian Home Rule League, not writing origin-histories.
• (d)Dadabhai Naoroji — Self-eliminating once you notice which side of the argument he stood on. Naoroji was the archetypal Moderate — President of the Congress in 1886, 1893 and 1906, author of 'Poverty and Un-British Rule in India' (1901) and of the drain theory, and the first Indian elected to the British House of Commons, for Central Finsbury in 1892. He worked alongside Hume; he was the target of the safety-valve charge, never its author.

The safety-valve theory is a claim about the origin of the Congress, and it has had three separate lives. Its first life was British and friendly: William Wedderburn — himself a retired civilian and a Congress President — wrote in his 1913 biography that Hume, who had served at Etawah through 1857 and left the Bengal Civil Service embittered, had seen voluminous secret police reports warning of a coming upheaval, and had helped found the Congress in 1885 to provide a safe outlet for it. Its second life was nationalist and hostile: Extremists used the same story to argue that an organisation of British paternity could never win freedom, and by 1940 R. Palme Dutt's 'India Today' had given it a Marxist form, presenting the Congress as a device engineered from above to forestall revolution. Its third life is scholarly rejection. The secret reports were never produced, and historians point to the entirely Indian bodies that already existed before 1885 — the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha (1870), the Indian Association of Calcutta (1876), the Madras Mahajana Sabha (1884), the Bombay Presidency Association (1885) and Surendranath Banerjee's Indian National Conference of 1883 — as proof that the demand for a national platform was Indian and organised before Hume acted on it. The now-standard reading inverts the theory altogether: Indian leaders used Hume as a lightning conductor, a respectable Englishman whose association made an infant organisation harder for the Government to crush.

Three of the four names offered were Extremists who attacked the Moderates, so 'who criticised the Moderates' discriminates nothing at all. The real question is whose attack took this particular form, in this particular text — and it yields to three steps. Step one, drop Dadabhai Naoroji: he did not criticise the Moderates, he was the Moderates, thrice their Congress President and Hume's collaborator. Step two, fix the date. The safety-valve charge is dated to 1916, and in 1916 Tilak, out of Mandalay since June 1914, was launching the Indian Home Rule League, while Bipin Chandra Pal's great years of platform agitation were the Swadeshi years of 1905-1908. Lajpat Rai had sailed west in 1914, been kept in the United States by the war, and was writing a book-length interpretation of the Indian movement for an American readership — the one genre in which an argument about the Congress's origins naturally belongs. Step three, name the text: Young India, 1916. That single title is the discriminator. It is also the trap, because the same words are the title of Gandhi's weekly of 1919-1931, and that exact confusion is what got Q75 on this same paper cancelled. The fastest exam-hall route is therefore: the safety-valve charge is about paternity, not method; the man who wrote the movement's history in 1916 is the man who made it.

• 'Young India: An Interpretation and a History of the Nationalist Movement from Within' is Lala Lajpat Rai's book, published in New York by B. W. Huebsch in 1916; it narrates British rule from 1757 to 1857 and the growth of political consciousness from 1857 to 1905, later extended to 1915 — a different publication entirely from Gandhi's weekly Young India of 1919-1931.
• The safety-valve account entered print in William Wedderburn's 1913 biography 'Allan Octavian Hume: Father of the Indian National Congress'. The secret Government reports on which it rests were never produced, which is why later scholarship treats the theory as unproven rather than as established fact.
• The first session of the Indian National Congress met at the Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College, Bombay, from 28 to 31 December 1885 with 72 delegates; W. C. Bonnerjee presided and A. O. Hume, who had convened it, served as General Secretary.
• Lala Lajpat Rai (1865-1928), the 'Lal' of Lal-Bal-Pal, sailed for Britain in 1914 and was kept in the United States by the war; he founded the Indian Home Rule League of America at New York in October 1917, was elected President of the Congress at the Calcutta special session of September 1920 — the session that launched Non-Cooperation, under which the Congress boycotted that year's council elections, and died on 17 November 1928 after the police lathi charge on the anti-Simon procession at Lahore on 30 October 1928.
• Dadabhai Naoroji, the Moderate at whom the charge was aimed: Congress President in 1886, 1893 and 1906, author of 'Poverty and Un-British Rule in India' (1901), and the first Indian elected to the British House of Commons, winning Central Finsbury for the Liberals in 1892.

• Reading 'Young India' as Gandhi's weekly. The 1916 Young India in this question is Lajpat Rai's book, published in New York; Gandhi took over the Bombay weekly of that name only in 1919.
• Treating the safety-valve theory as settled fact. It is a contested claim about Hume's motives, first printed in 1913 and unproven since — a card or an answer that asserts it as history is repeating propaganda from both sides.
• Answering Tilak because he is the loudest anti-Moderate voice you can name. Attacking Moderate methods is not the same charge as attacking the Congress's British paternity.

BPSC asks this as a flat one-line attribution — one name, one mark — and its modern-history section leans heavily on 'who first said, wrote or started X', so a memorised person-to-text list pays directly. UPSC has never named the safety valve in a prelims stem; it approaches the same terrain sideways and asks you to place a critique inside the Moderate-Extremist argument — who wrote 'New Lamps for Old' (2008), under whom did 'pray and petition' end (1999), what really caused the Surat split (2016).

• practice — not a real PYQ

  'Young India: An Interpretation and a History of the Nationalist Movement from Within', published at New York in 1916, was written by

  • (a)Mahatma Gandhi
  • (b)Lala Lajpat Rai
  • (c)Bipin Chandra Pal
  • (d)Annie Besant

  Answer(b) Lala Lajpat Rai — the 1916 Young India is his book, brought out by B. W. Huebsch of New York during his wartime years in America. Gandhi's connection with a paper of the same name begins only in 1919, when he took over the Bombay weekly.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The 'safety-valve' account of the founding of the Indian National Congress first appeared in print in a 1913 biography of A. O. Hume written by

  • (a)William Wedderburn
  • (b)R. Palme Dutt
  • (c)Bipan Chandra
  • (d)Lala Lajpat Rai

  Answer(a) William Wedderburn — his 1913 life of Hume put the safety-valve story into print. R. Palme Dutt gave it a Marxist form in India Today (1940), Bipan Chandra is the historian who rejected it, and Lajpat Rai is credited with first using it against the Moderates, not with originating it.