The CSP as it was constituted in 1934 already contained Marxist and
non-Marxist, even anti-Marxist, socialists. Its most influential spokesman
was Jayaprakash Narayan, who as a student in the 1920s at Madison,
Wisconsin, had been a member of the Communist Party of the United
States of America. Jayaprakash Narayan explicitly adopted a Marxist
and a Leninist programme and framework of analysis, claiming that the
CSP remained part of the Congress as a matter of strategy and sought to
win over those of its members who were ‘objectively anti-imperialist’ –
‘petty-bourgeois’ elements and peasants. The only force capable of fighting
imperialism was the masses ‘because they are not dependent on it’; while
the Indian bourgeoisie was ‘not in a position to play a revolutionary role’
due to its close ties with and dependence upon imperialism.^23 The CSP
therefore sought to work together with the trade union movement and
the growing kisanmovement, now organised in kisan sabhaswith an all-
Indian leadership. (The kisanmovement was perfectly happy to affiliate
themselves to the CSP, but its leaders did not wish to be bound by the
rules of the Congress organisation, because they felt this would curtail
both their freedom of action and the kisanmovement’s radical content.)
At the same time, the first battle to be won was that against British
imperialism, for national independence. The CSP’s role was therefore
to work within the Congress, the main anti-imperialist organisation in
India, for the attainment of independence, while at the same time moving
the Congress towards the left to prepare it for the later struggle for
socialism that was to take place after the attainment of independence. The
CSP was a relatively small group, but its members believed it was destined
to grow, although, they acknowledged, it was unrealistic to expect a
socialist group to dominate the Congress in the near future. The CSP
appeared to take the possibility of fascism in India more seriously than the
CPI. They sought to mobilise the petty-bourgeoisie in unison with the
proletariat and the peasantry, arguing that the former were a disillusioned
class due to large-scale unemployment; some sections of them suffered,
like the working class, and were capable of being either on the side of
fascism or of socialism, depending on the leadership offered to them.
Some of this new cluster of socialists had turned to the CSP largely
through an admiration for the achievements of that other ‘backward’
country emerging from backwardness, the Soviet Union. News of Soviet
miracles with the Five-Year Plan and collectivisation, and the good press
the USSR was beginning to get even among the respectable left in the80 ‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39