Which Indian leader for the first time used the 'safety-valve theory' to attack the Moderates in the Congress?

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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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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) 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) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2025 Q71 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q71 — History PYQ with Answer