JAIL AGAIN, AND A EUROPEAN INTERLUDE:
KAMALA’S DEATHBy the end of 1931, Jawaharlal was behind bars again, arrested on
December 26 and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for organising
and supporting agrarian agitation in the United Provinces. For him, jail
was getting more and more familiar. Once again, he read books, and wrote
letters to Indira, his daughter, in the form of essays on history (later
published as Glimpses of World History). He was released on August 30,
1933, twelve days early – his mother was seriously ill (she eventually died,
after a long illness, in January 1938).
Jawaharlal used his time outside jail to publicly denounce ‘communal’
groups, being particularly harsh on Hindu communalism as organised
in the Hindu Mahasabha. He was also critical of Muslim communalism,
but took the view that to some extent it was understandable because
minority communities are afraid of the majority. This was to be a recurrent
theme in his public pronouncements – the responsibility of the majority
towards the minority.
In India and outside, impatience with Nehru was building up among
the left. ‘They feel that you are too weak,’ Vithalbhai Patel had reported
to Jawaharlal in 1931.^13 A few left-wing resolutions of no particular
practical significance at annual Congress sessions were poor evidence
of commitment. In October 1933, Jawaharlal’s serialised thoughts on
Whither India?, thereafter published in pamphlet form, sought to answer
the vexing question of what was to come after independence: surely,
socialism – the end of ‘exploitation of nation by nation and class by class’,
and the beginning of a redistribution of wealth among the masses. The
question that had hitherto been asked, of whether socialism ought to be
brought about gradually or by violent revolution, was no longer all that
relevant: the Depression had shown that the only viable social system
would have to be one of socialism, as capitalism had been found wanting
and was beginning to collapse of its own accord.^14 This statement of
political intent earned him a reprieve of sorts in left-wing circles that had
increasingly begun to doubt his intentions: ‘I had decided,’ one union
leader wrote to him, ‘... no more to burn incense to a leader whose
feelings were so correct, but actions halting.’^15
Government sources in this period still seemed to regard Jawaharlal as
a communist, a Leninist who wished to be a Lenin. Examining his speeches74 ‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39