There is a hypothesis that Hume shaped the Congress with the possibility that it would end up being a ‘safety valve’ for delivering the developing discontent of the Indians. To this end, he persuaded Lord Dufferin not to discourage the development of the Congress. The radical chiefs like Lala Lajpat Rai put stock in the ‘safety valve’ hypothesis. Indeed, even the Marxist history specialist’s ‘paranoid idea’ was a posterity of the ‘safety valve’ thought. For instance, R.P. Dutt thought that the Indian National Congress was conceived out of intrigue to cut short a well-known uprising in India and the average chiefs were involved with it.
Modern Indian historians, notwithstanding, debate the possibility of a ‘safety valve’. As they would like to think the Indian National Congress addressed the desire of the politically cognizant Indians to set up a public body to communicate the political and financial requests of the Indians. Assuming that the Indians had met such a body all alone, there would have been unsurmountable resistance from the authorities; such an association could never have been permitted to shape. In the conditions, as Bipan Chandra notices, the early Congress pioneers involved Hume as a ‘lightning conductor’ i.e., as an impetus to unite the nationalistic powers regardless of whether all the while intending to mislead and misdirect.
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