1) The 1907-18 period is the only period when the Congress was more or less decently run. It was run by people who themselves were close to revolutionaries and were capable of working for India's independence coherently. Also, it was the period of novel attempts and experiences.
2) All the top leaders of the [Extremist] Congress came from a revolutionary milieu, were themselves either leaders or were deeply sympathetic to revolutionaries, and were genuinely thrown up from the ground. The threat they posed can be gauged by how the Brits broke them.
3) Tilak was experimenting with mass politics, Lala Lajpat Rai was experimenting with bringing in the workers into the freedom struggle, and Aurobindo was combining all the weapons of passive struggle used in history into a combination that would be deadly for the British.
4) The Brits acted extremely ruthlessly. All presses of Extremists were seized [with the help of the official `Moderate' Congress, to add to the irony] and the leaders were either jailed or exiled. And they parachuted in the great Mahatma who would finish revolutionaries forever.
