right among the so-called ‘High Command’, effectively a small clique
with no legitimate status in the Congress’s organisation, ready to abandon
any pretence of intra-party democracy once the left had achieved the not
unremarkable feat of winning the Congress presidency unaided within
five years of organising itself (ironically, one of the issues on which Bose
had been re-elected was inner party democracy in the Congress). Having
resigned, Bose formed the Forward Bloc, initially within the Congress,
then, when he and his group were expelled from the Congress, outside it.
The left had been successfully split; the Congress survived, and remained
theoretically united under the new president, Maulana Abul Kalam
Azad. Azad, for his part, had refused to stand against Bose in the 1939
presidential elections; Dr Pattabhi Sitaramayya, who had been persuaded
to oppose Bose on behalf of the right, vanished from the equation with
Bose’s exit.
WAR AND A LIFELINE
The Congress’s internal equilibrium had been severely disrupted. The
organisation listlessly limped along, inevitably, continuing with its job
of running provincial governments. As an organisation it was already dead
for all practical purposes; the 1935 Act had successfully done its job of
divide and rule, with politics in the late 1930s being dominated by intra-
Indian squabbles and issues. The Congress had been functioning as both
quasi-parliamentary government and extra-parliamentary opposition,
operating as a left and a right completely at odds with one another; in the
Congress-ruled provinces, the only effective opposition to the Congress
governments were the organisations affiliated to and controlled by
the Congress left. Even that left was beginning to fragment, with the
expulsion of Subhas Bose from the Congress being merely the most
explicit example of fragmentation. Many anti-communist socialists were
resentful of the communists’ successful use of the CSP platform – a use so
successful, in fact, that in some areas the CSP wasthe CPI, and since the
Congress in that region was controlled by the CSP, the Congress was the
Communist Party.
And then, once again, the British government stepped in to provide
a unifying issue. On September 3, 1939, the long-anticipated war broke
out in Europe. The viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, declared war on India’s
behalf, without consulting any of the ‘representative’ bodies of Indians
‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39 101