could live with Nehru in a leadership position. Meanwhile, the British
could always be relied upon to provide unifying issues of national
significance.
But beneath this apparent unity, throughout the mid- to late 1930s,
there continued a struggle for the heart of the Congress – a struggle that
divided broadly into a left and a right. And the struggle within the
Congress was also mirrored outside it. The fate of the Congress was seen
as the fate of the Indian nationalist movement in microcosm. How was
that nationalism to be defined – as a broad, inclusive and secular one
in which all religions and regional groups could feel a sense of belonging,
or a specifically upper-caste-Hindu-tinged nationalism, even when not
explicitly stated in those terms? Outside the Congress, groups watched
with interest and anticipation – if the right won, or seemed to be winning,
the Congress would be an organisation of Hindu and upper-caste property
owners, and minorities such as the Depressed Classes and Muslims could
not work with or within it. Muslims who were more inclined towards
social equality or radical social change than towards the Muslim zamindar-
based social order that the Muslim League defended at the time were
more comfortable with the left wing of Congress, even if they did not
altogether see themselves as ‘socialists’. Many of these smaller groups only
contemplated working with the Congress for the same reason as the
socialists had decided to work within it: the Congress was the pre-eminent
nationalist body, it was an organisational platform, not a political party,
and its immediate goal was a shared one of independence from British rule.
But if the left won, other problems would emerge: what, in particular,
would become of property owners? This question divided Muslims,
Christians, Backward Castes and regional ‘interest groups’ amongst
themselves as much as it divided ‘Hindus’.
The right, for its part, was also an organised political group. One of its
main organisers was the businessman G.D. Birla, the man who was widely
acknowledged as having advised the Mahatma on what to say at the Round
Table Conference in 1931. Birla, who had a deliberately ambiguous
relationship with the Congress (he was not actually a member), had even
been willing to use his contacts with British businessmen and politicians
to explain to them that they had misread Gandhi. Despite appearances
to the contrary, Birla argued (not in public, of course), Gandhi, far from
being a radical opponent of British rule, was a friend: a moderate whose
hand within the Congress ought to be strengthened against the Congress84 ‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39