Ideas before action

The oldest current, and for two decades the dominant one. Its method was argument inside British institutions: annual congresses, memorials to the Secretary of State, evidence to royal commissions, and campaigning in Britain itself. Dadabhai Naoroji sat as a Member of Parliament at Westminster in the 1890s and built the economic case that British rule was systematically draining wealth out of India.

Its premise was that Britain could be held to its own stated principles — that if the injustice of colonial administration were properly demonstrated, British liberalism would be obliged to concede reform. The Indian Councils Act of 1909, passed the same year Dhingra was hanged, was the fruit of that method: more Indian representation on legislative councils, no transfer of executive power, and separate electorates by religion.

After the partition of Bengal in 1905, a second current took hold: politics conducted outside the councils and in public. Its instruments were boycott of British goods, promotion of Indian manufacture, national schools, and mass meetings. It made politics available to people who had never been near a Congress session, and it treated ordinary economic behaviour as a form of pressure.

This current did not depend on British goodwill and it did not depend on assassination. Its rupture with the constitutionalists came at Surat in December 1907, when the Congress split. Its logic — withdrawal of cooperation rather than either petition or violence — is the one Gandhi would later build a mass movement on.

The smallest current, and the one Dhingra entered. Its starting proposition was that British rule in India was maintained by armed force, that a government resting on force is not a government by consent, and that a people so governed are in a condition of war whether or not they acknowledge it. From that premise, violence was not a departure from politics but a recognition of what was already the case.

In practice this current produced secret societies, journals, bomb manufacture in Bengal, and a handful of assassinations. It never approached the scale of the other two currents, and it never commanded broad public support. Its significance lay elsewhere: in the intensity of the state response it provoked, and in the political memory it left behind.

Setting out this argument is not endorsing it. Two men died at the Imperial Institute, one of whom had no connection to the politics involved. This archive describes what the revolutionaries believed in order to explain the period, not to justify it.