Indian National Congress Founded

December 28, 1885

Seventy-two delegates - lawyers, teachers, merchants, mostly English-educated - met in Bombay to form the Indian National Congress. They intended a loyal consultative body; they would become, under Gandhi forty years later, the most important mass political movement of the twentieth century and the builders of modern India. Their early petitions were polite and ignored, but the organizational framework they laid would prove indispensable when the struggle turned serious.