Alan Hume’s ultimate aim in encouraging the foundation of the Indian National Congress was to provide a ‘Safety Valve’ for the release of growing Indian discontent.

The theory. William Wedderburn's 1913 biography of Hume recorded that he had seen secret police reports pointing to imminent unrest and founded the Congress to give discontent a constitutional outlet. Lala Lajpat Rai took this up in Young India (1916) to argue the Congress was a safety valve protecting British rule; R. P. Dutt in India Today gave it a Marxist form.

The evidence against.

• The source is thin. It rests on Wedderburn's account of documents no one else saw and which have never been produced.
• Officialdom did not behave as if it had a valve. Dufferin turned hostile almost at once and by 1888 dismissed the Congress as a microscopic minority; Curzon later worked for its demise.
• It was not Hume's creation alone. Its predecessors were Indian — the Indian Association, the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, the Madras Mahajana Sabha.

Bipan Chandra's reading, now generally accepted, inverts the theory: Indian leaders used Hume as a lightning conductor, because an Englishman's presence made suppression harder in the organisation's fragile first years.

Conclusion. The theory survives as a myth useful to two opposite parties — imperial writers who wanted the Congress to be a British gift, and radicals who wanted it discredited. The evidence supports neither.