politically committed ‘socialist’ one. Jawaharlal’s juggling of the mutually
entangled roles of ‘modernist’ and ‘socialist’ left much to be desired.
The nationalist movement had from the mid-nineteenth century
consistently claimed the right to industrialise India; the business interests
that now worked with the right wing of the Congress, pouring substantial
funds into the Congress coffers, could legitimately claim to be heirs to this
line of thinking. From their point of view, the government had to be
pressurised to provide better conditions for the growth and development
of industry in India. In as much as such demands were ‘national’ demands,
they could expect support from the Congress as a whole. The left wing of
the Congress often found itself in the position of backing capitalists’
demands as ‘national’ ones while at the same time opposing capitalists’
everyday activities of trying to bring down wages, keep flexible working
hours and therefore a flexible workforce, and providing extremely poor
working conditions. Businessmen sometimes used the infant-industry
argument in an instrumental manner: better working conditions could
only be provided at a later stage of development of industry, for the
early industrialisers had had a free hand to exploit their labour force in
the early days of the industrial revolution. The left’s duty was to disag-
gregate what it considered business’s legitimate national demands from
what it regarded as illegitimate exploitation of labour in the name of
national advancement – taking it back to the general argument that
capitalists were only provisionally anti-imperialist, when they needed
to extract further concessions from the government by working with
the national movement. Paradoxically, the legitimacy of capitalists within
the Congress was provided by Gandhi’s ‘trusteeship’ theory – the rich held
their wealth as ‘trustees’ of the nation – which also meant that the pro-
capitalist right wing of the Congress referred to itself as the ‘Gandhian’
wing, even as capitalists distanced themselves from Gandhi’s anti-
industrialisation rhetoric.
Jawaharlal’s contributions to the Congress left often remained
characteristically intellectual: as a journalist and pamphleteer, and as
organiser of the circulation of left-wing propaganda. Jawaharlal was on
the board of editors, alongside several Congress Socialists, of the National
Publications Society, whose aim was to publish literature ‘for the enlight-
enment of the masses, and dealing with day-to-day problems that affect
them’.^24 Jawaharlal’s patronising attitude towards the people he sought to
enlighten was largely unchanged from his Gandhian days. The Socialist82 ‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39