Indian National Congress

The Indian National Congress ( pronunciation ) (INC, often called the Congress), is one of two major political parties in India; the other being the Bharatiya Janata Party. Congress is one of the largest and oldest democratically run political parties in the world. The party was founded in 1885 during the British Raj; its founders include Allan Octavian Hume (a prominent member of the Theosophical Society), Dadabhai Naoroji and Dinshaw Wacha. In the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries, Congress became a pivotal participant in the Indian Independence Movement, with over 15 million members and over 70 million participants in its opposition to British colonial rule in India.

After independence in 1947, Congress became India's dominant political party; as of 2015, in the 15 general elections since independence, it has won an outright majority on six occasions and has led the ruling coalition a further four times, heading the central government for 49 years. There have been seven Congress Prime Ministers, the first being Jawaharlal Nehru (1947–64), and the most recent Manmohan Singh (2004–14). The party's social liberal platform is generally considered to be on the centre-left of Indian politics.