Pherozeshah Mehta

A FOUNDER MEMBER of the Indian National Congress, Sir Pherozeshah Mehta was born on August 4, 1845. He entered Lincoln’s Inn in England in 1864 to study law and was called to the Bar in 1868. On his return to India, he delved into public life with characteristic dedication and served as the commissioner of the Bombay Municipal Corporation in 1873. He grew in stature and served as the chairman of the corporation from 1884 to 1885. He later served as Additional Member of the Legislative Council of the Governor of Bombay.
Throughout his life Mehta remained a moderate who believed in the good sense of the British who, he assumed, would give India a fair chance. He played a mediatory role in the split of the Congress at the Surat session in 1907. After the exit of the extremists, whom he helped to keep out of the party, he dominated the politics of his party up to his depth in 1915.
As a student in England, Mehta used to frequent the house of Dadabhai Naoroji and these visits shaped his liberal outlook. Many of his close friends were, in fact, liberals; Telang, Badruddin and Mehta were known as the “Three Bright boys of Bombay”. His Antipathy to violence in politics alienated him from Tilak and his dislike of communal methods made him criticize Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. To him, education was a means by which India could modernize rapidly.
Mehta, in fact, played a role in establishing a Swadeshi bank – the Central bank of India. He was responsible for founding the English newspaper Bombay Chronicle an April 1913, which went on to become an important platform for expressing Indian public opinion.
Mehta held a commanding position in the founding of the Indian National Congress. He presided over the congress session held in Calcutta in 1890 and was twice President of the Reception Committee when the Congress session met in Bombay in 1889 and 1904. In the various Congress sessions he attended, he either moved or supported resolution for reforming the administration of the country. He founded the Bombay Presidency Association in 1885 along with Telang and served as its secretary.
A decorated leader, Mehta was made a Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1894 and was knighted in 1904. In the Presidential address of the Congress in 1890 he said: “All movement of the kind in which we are concerned pass through several phases as they run their course. The first of the ridicule. That is followed, as the movement progresses, by one of abuse, which is usually succeeded by partial concession and misapprehension of aim. The final stage is a substantial adoption of the object of the movement, with some expression of surprise that it was not adopted before.”
The leading role Mehta played in forming the Congress has left an impress which is immortalized in the party’s constitution. He died in 1915.