Was it a safety valve thesis?

Ques. The 'Safety valve thesis' doesn`t adequately explain the birth of the INC in 1885?  

(UPSC 2014, Mains – History 2^nd)

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.