Western civilization, were going to be useful to backward countries.
(This was an assumption he had used before when discussing Jewish
immigration into Palestine. Jews were ‘exploited in Palestine’ by British
imperialism’s divide and rule tactics: ‘Palestine is and must continue to
be essentially an Arab country. If that is admitted cooperation is easy
and Jews will be welcomed in Palestine, as well as in Trans-Jordan, to
help, as they are in a position to do, in the development of the country.’^38 )
With this in mind, he wrote to Govind Ballabh Pant, prime minister of
the United Provinces, and to Subhas Bose, Congress president. Pant was
responsive, but not overly helpful; Bose was dismissive: the Jews were
none of Nehru’s or India’s concern, because India had larger problems of
her own. A few Jewish technicians and scientists did find their way to
India in these years; their numbers were not significant.
THE ‘TRIPURI CRISIS’
Crucially for long-term trends in Indian politics, Nehru was by now losing
support at home among his natural allies: socialists were becoming
increasingly disillusioned with his inaction and with his desertions at
crucial moments. By 1938, even the most optimistic were beginning to
be sceptical of Nehru’s commitment to practical support for the left. ‘[I]t
would be unfair of you, who are naturally used to doing things on a grand
scale,’ Jayaprakash Narayan wrote to Nehru, ‘to noncooperate with the
efforts of Socialists in India just because they are puny as compared with
those of older and wider organisations. We are, I think, not unjustified in
expecting that, if you will not fully identify yourself with us, you will, as
a socialist, at least help us in doing well the little we may undertake to
do.’^39 If the criticism was harsh, it was also a criticism born of hopes
betrayed.
The activities of the Congress left, from its modest beginnings in 1934,
were not quite as ‘puny’ as Jayaprakash thought. By 1938, the Congress
presidency was held by a man supported by the left who was willing to
back his rhetoric with action, and in 1939, it was the right that was
willing to split the Congress to avoid a left-wing swing. The Congress’s
new president in 1938, Subhas Chandra Bose, was of course the other
Congressman apart from Nehru with first-hand international experience.
Externed from India by the government, he had spent the mid-1930s in
Europe; arrested as he returned to India in March 1936, he had been
‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39 97