Who commented in 1913, the following words? "No Indian could have started the Indian National Congress... If an Indian had come forward to start such a movement embracing all India, the officials in India would not have allowed the movement to come into existence. If the founder of the congress had not been greet Englishman, such was the distrust of political agitation in those days that the authorities would have at once found some way or the other to suppress the movement". Select correct option:

Who commented in 1913, the following words? "No Indian could have started the Indian National Congress... If an Indian had come forward to start such a movement embracing all India, the officials in India would not have allowed the movement to come into existence. If the founder of the congress had not been greet Englishman, such was the distrust of political agitation in those days that the authorities would have at once found some way or the other to suppress the movement". Select correct option: Correct Answer Gopal Krishna Gokhale

• The Indian National Congress (INC) was established when 72 delegates from all over the country met at Bombay in December 1885. A retired British official, A.O. Hume, played an important part in bringing Indians from the various regions together.
• The first meeting of INC began on December 28, 1885, in the hall of Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College, Bombay.
• It was presided over by Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee. Hereafter, the Congress met every year in December, in a different part of the country each time.
• However, there is a theory that Hume formed the Congress with the idea that it would prove to be a ‘safety valve’ for releasing the growing discontent of the Indians. To this end, he convinced Lord Dufferin not to obstruct the formation of the Congress. The extremist leaders like Lala Lajpat Rai believed in the ‘safety valve’ theory. For example, R.P. Dutt opined that the Indian National Congress was born out of a conspiracy to abort a popular uprising in India and the bourgeois leaders were a party to it.
• Modern Indian historians, however, dispute the idea of ‘safety valve’. In their opinion, the Indian National Congress represented the urge of the politically conscious Indians to set up a national body to express the political and economic demands of the Indians. If the Indians had convened such a body on their own, there would have been unsurmountable opposition from the officials; such an organisation would not have been allowed to form.

In this context, Gopal Krishna Gokhale said that- "No Indian could have started the Indian National Congress... If an Indian had come forward to start such a movement embracing all India, the officials in India would not have allowed the movement to come into existence. If the founder of the congress had not been greet Englishman, such was the distrust of political agitation in those days that the authorities would have at once found some way or the other to suppress the movement".