The Indian National Congress is a social liberal and secularist political party in India, one of the two major parties in the country alongside the Bharatiya Janata Party. The INC was founded on 28 December 1885 in British Raj to fight for the independence of India from the British Empire, and Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were both leaders of the Congress as well as the independence movement in the early 20th century. The Congress Party was initially a nationalist party, and it adopted a policy of non-cooperation with the British government in 1920 after its Nagpur conference. Since the independence of India, the INC has followed Gandhi's views on religious freedom and nationalism and Nehru's views on a socialist economy and secularism, and the INC was India's dominant political party for decades. Its rule was weakened as the result of Indira Gandhi's proclaimed state of emergency, which led to the rise of the rival Janata Party as a serious conservative rival to the INC. The Congress party lost the 1977 election to the Janata Party, and it lost its status as the largest party in Parliament in 1996 when the Jatiya Party's successor, the Bharatiya Janata Party, claimed that title. The INC's economic views shifted towards economic liberalism during the 1990s, and the party transformed from a social democratic party into a liberal one.
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