light of the USSR’s immunity to the economic disasters the Depression
had brought to the rest of the world, played a large role in this. Others
were far more moderate, emerging from their student days in England
with an affinity towards Fabian socialism or merely defecting from the
Gandhians in the hope of something more radical and less compromising
in every important situation. Indeed, some of them hoped to get Gandhi
involved in the CSP by convincing him of their point of view: Gandhi
remained to them a great and popular leader, unfortunately too reticent to
take his own tactics to their logical conclusion. They were particularly
frustrated by his insistence that industrialisation was inherently evil, and
that India’s future lay in reviving her village industries, using only very
basic technology, and decentralising state power so that the relevant
economic and political unit was the village.
For the CSP, it seemed self-evident that the person to work with in
the higher ranks of the Congress was Jawaharlal Nehru. The CSP saw him
as one of them, their strategy of raising the profile of the left crucially
dependent on what they hoped Nehru would do for them. Consequently,
Jawaharlal acted as a sounding board and a junction box for many of the
ideas and programmes of the left; as one regarded as their spokesmen,
he was often instrumental in the acceptance or rejection of these ideas
as strategy or potential policy. He was involved in influencing the polit-
ical ideas of a number of people. Conversely, it was also important for
the CSP to continue to educate Jawaharlal so that he was in tune with
their ideas and goals. This was especially important because for all their
hopes and for all his expressions of sympathy, Jawaharlal never joined the
CSP.
It was also in this period, however, that Nehru became the spokesman
for, and the political focal point of, self-proclaimedly ‘modern’ trends
in Indian politics, as opposed to the ‘indigenist’ trends. The former cut
across conventional left–right boundaries, with industrialists, technocrats
and socialists sharing a faith in ‘modern’ goals – in practice, that of an
industrialised, independent and self-sufficient state – while Gandhians
as well as a number of Hindu sectarians proclaimed faith in a society and
polity compatible with ‘indigenous’ traditions, although they defined this
differently and not always consistently, and certainly refused to concede
the point that their goals were less ‘modern’. This left Jawaharlal with two
main roles to juggle, overlapping but often in contradiction: the simply
‘modern’, pro-industrialisation and pro-technology one, and the more
‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39 81