Indian National Congress

The Indian National Congress is a broadly based political party of India, founded in 1885 by Indian nationalist leaders including Dadabhai Naoroji and Surendranath Banerjee together with Allan Octavian Hume, a British colonial official. It led the Indian independence movement through the twentieth century, most prominently under Mohandas K. Gandhi's campaigns of nonviolent noncooperation and civil disobedience in the 1920s and 1930s. After independence in 1947, the Congress formed most of India's national governments for decades, particularly under Jawaharlal Nehru and members of the Nehru-Gandhi family. A 21 month period beginning June 1975, known as the Emergency, saw the constitution suspended under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the government widely criticized for curtailing civil liberties, and the party lost power in the following 1977 election as a direct result. Its dominance has declined since the 1990s, and it has been out of power at the national level since 2014.