I earnestly hope that you will fully utilise the strength of your public
position in making decisions. Please do not consider your position to
be weaker than it really is. Gandhiji will never take a stand which will
alienate you.’^21 Bose also returned to India in March 1936, and was
promptly arrested and imprisoned again; he remained in prison until
March 18, 1937.
CONGRESS EQUATIONS
Nehru returned to a very different political environment from that he
had known before his interludes in jail and in Europe. Disappointment
with Gandhi’s leadership had inaugurated a new phase in Indian nation-
alist politics. Disagreements about the validity of Gandhi’s political views
had often been combined with a faith in Gandhian tactics, but Gandhi’s
tendency to unilaterally call off a movement, his compromises at the
moments of the movements’ greatest strengths, had disillusioned too
many. They had already been looking at other forms of political movement
and left-wing, or more specifically socialist, ideas, Marxian or other, were
beginning to make an impact (as were, also, some more authoritarian
trends drawn from European fascism – but which did not come to
dominate Indian nationalism at the time).
From 1934, Gandhi withdrew from active Congress politics to the
relative safety of his ‘constructive programme’; the time was ripe for a
move to explicitly establish a Congress left. In 1934, the Congress
Socialist Party (CSP) was founded as a group within the Congress, and
called for the formation of a United Front of all anti-imperialist forces,
including the Communist Party of India. The Communists, who had just
been banned, joined the CSP a year later, when the CPI adopted the
Comintern’s Popular Front policy (its earlier ‘class against class’ line had
seen Nehru expelled from the League Against Imperialism in 1931 for
being too involved with bourgeois nationalism; even Nehru admitted that
the League had ‘had ample provocation’).^22 The CPI then interpreted the
directive to unite with bourgeois democratic forces against fascism as a
directive to unite against imperialism. The reasoning was simple: if
fascism was capitalism in crisis in a developed country, and imperialism
was capitalism abroad, in the absence of a serious fascist threat in the
colonised country, it was logical that the popular front be formed against
imperialism.
‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39 79