existing provinces and states were not congruent with nationalities. But
these intellectual distinctions made far more sense to a leadership than to
followers. Nehru found them unviable.
Ahmad’s report to the CPI noted that Nehru had temporarily lost
his sense of perspective because of his admiration and respect for the
underground activists of 1942, but that his respect for the CPI as a party
of principle still remained. Ahmad concluded that Nehru would still have
to be educated: he would have to be sent Party literature regularly, and
would benefit from conversations with the main CPI theoreticians, but
that the CPI should not give up working through Nehru.
This was logical enough, because by 1945 Nehru was for the first time
unquestionably being pushed forward as the leader of the Congress and
of an independent India – not merely as a leader of the left, with whom
he had been identified in his years of equivocation. Gandhi had more
or less by now anointed Nehru as leader-in-waiting, and as his own
spiritual and moral successor, despite their political differences that were
in many cases overt by this time: Nehru had no time for the Gandhian
ideal of self-sufficient village communities, as he refused to compromise
a modern and industrial India by a return to the idiocy of rural life.
Equally importantly, the British would deal with him (he was ‘inter-
nationally better known’, as he politely put it), a pattern strengthened by
the Labour victory in Britain, so the Congress right would deal through
him. Although Vallabhbhai Patel would have dearly loved to be the
leader, a choice that would also have been welcomed by many of India’s
big business lobby, Gandhi could persuade them that Nehru would be a
more useful leader. This set up a pattern to follow through to independent
India. Nehru would be a leftish leader of a mainly right-wing party that
was forced, because it was led by him, to appear to be left wing in terms
of rhetoric, and held back from its more right-wing tendencies by Nehru
and by the public support commanded by Nehru. The left slowly left the
Congress – first the CPI was edged out, then the CSP left, soon after
independence. As a result Indian politics would look particularly radical
in the post-independence years: an apparentlycentre-left party in power
(the right hiding behind Nehru’s image), the opposition almost entirely
to the left of this, and a mostly empty right wing.
THE END OF THE RAJ 125