Birth of Indian National Congress (contd-1)

Some more events or efforts to form an All India Organisation may be traced as follows;
Tarapada Banerjee, a lawyer of Krishnagar, suggested the foundation of a national Assembly to agitate for the introduction of representative institutions in India --a suggestion which was published in  the Indian Mirror on 4th Jan 1883.
  Ganapathy Dikshitar Subramania Iyer (Tamil: கனபதி தீக்ஷிதர் சுப்பிரமணிய அய்யர்)(b. January 19, 1855 - d. April 18, 1916) was a leading Indian journalist, social reformer and freedom fighter who founded 'The Hindu' newspaper on September 20, 1878. He was proprietor, editor and Managing Director of The Hindu from September 20, 1878 to October 1898.

G.Subramania Iyer, one of the member of the first Congress, held the view that the origin of the Congress should be traced to the International Exhibition held in Calcutta in 1883.
 The idea of the Congress has also been attributed to the farewell of
Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (August 2, 1832 – February 17, 1907) was an American military officer, journalist, lawyer and the co-founder and first President of the Theosophical Society.
Col H.S. Olcott was one of the founders of Theosophical Society of India, asserted in 1886, that the idea of an organisation like the National Congress was conceived in a meeting of Theosophical Society held in Madras in 1884.
Even Mrs Annie Basant wrote in 1915 that the decision to summon the Congress was first taken at the time of the of the annual conference of the theosophical society at an informal meeting of seventeen persons held at the residence of Raghunath Rao towards the end of Dec 1884.

(Olcott was the first well-known American of European ancestry to make a formal conversion to Buddhism. His subsequent actions as president of the Theosophical Society helped create a renaissance in the study of Buddhism. Olcott is considered a Buddhist modernist for his efforts in  1889 Besant was converted to Theosophy i.e the supreme wis­dom religion that would supersede Christianity. Within a very short time, she was visiting Melbourne “for the purpose of lecturing on Theosophy. Mrs Besant's daughter is married to a Melbourne pressman .. and was a spokeswoman of an adult-suffrage deputation to the Vict­or­ian Premier” (Bulletin, Sep 1894). Then Mrs Besant continued her lecturing tour in Sydney interpreting Buddhism through a Westernized lensViceroy Lord Ripon in Dec, 1884.)