Explanation:

• There is a theory that Hume formed the Congress with the idea that it would prove to be a ‘safety valve’ for releasing the growing discontent of the Indians. Hence option b is the correct answer.

• To this end, he convinced Lord Dufferin not to obstruct the formation of the Congress. The extremist leaders like Lala Lajpat Rai believed in the ‘safety valve’ theory. Even the Marxist historian’s ‘conspiracy theory’ was an offspring of the ‘safety valve’ notion. For example, R.P. Dutt opined that the Indian National Congress was born out of a conspiracy to abort a popular uprising in India and the bourgeois leaders were a party to it.

• Moderate Indian Historians argue that Congress was the natural culmination of the political work of the previous years: By 1885, a stage had been reached in the political development of India when certain basic tasks or objectives had to be laid down and struggled for. Moreover these objectives were correlated and could only be fulfilled by the coming together of political workers in a single organization formed on an all- India basis. The men who met in Bombay on 28 December 1885 were inspired by these  objectives and hoped to initiate the process of achieving them.