Ques. The 'Safety valve thesis' doesn`t
adequately explain the birth of the INC in 1885?
(UPSC 2014, Mains –
History 2nd)
Answer:
o
Many historians said that the `safety
valve thesis` was a conspiracy theory relating to the birth of the congress.
o
The thesis originated from the William
Wedderburn`s biography of Hume published in 1913.
o
Wedderburn`s wrote
that in 1878 that Hume had come across “the seven volumes of secret
reports at Shimla which showed that there had been seething discontent among
the lower classes and a conspiracy to overthrow the British rule by force”.
o
He met Lord Dufferin and together
they decided to established an organization with educated Indians.
o
This would “serve as safety valve by
opening up a line of communication between the rulers & the ruled, and
would thus prevent a mass revolution”.
o This safety valve theory was believed by
the earlier Nationalist historians; the Imperialist historians used it to discredit
Congress, the Marxist historians developed a conspiracy theory from this.
o
The Safety-Valve thesis doesn`t explain
the birth of INC due to the following reasons:
ü First
of all those seven volumes of secret reports have not been traced in any of
place in India either in London. Whether in the 1870`s many of the secret documents
were existed by the British informative system.
ü Hume
was the secretary of the Department of Revenue, Agriculture & Commerce. How
he gets access to the Home Department files or secret document?
Also, he was in Shimla while Home Department
files were kept in Delhi; they were not sent to Shimla.
ü If
congress was founded out of the fear of an outbreak, then why did Hume &
British officialdom wait for seven years?
(report in 1878 & congress established
in 1885)
ü Wedderburn
writes that a warning of the threatened danger came to Hume from a religious Guru
of Tibet & the evidence of the seven volumes was shown to the Hume by
the Gurus.
Though Hume was the student of Eastern
religious & impressed by Gurus, why should Hume believe that these reports
must be necessarily be true?
ü Dufferin
was not sympathetic to the congress. It was not only in 1888 that Dufferin
attacked the congress in vicious manner by writing that we cannot allow the
congress to continue to exist.
Dufferin openly castigates congress for its dubious
motives.
