old trick of placing Nehru in a position of formal responsibility from
which he could not exercise power.
Gandhi, however, had been able to work this tactic because of Nehru’s
undoubted reverence and respect for him. Patel could command no such
respect from Nehru, who would publicly praise him when necessary, but
made no particular secret of their differences. Nevertheless, Patel was
firmly in control of the Congress organisation and the leader of the right
wing of Congress, supported by surviving members of the ‘old guard’
such as Rajendra Prasad, who if anything was more anti-Muslim than
Patel himself. These members of the Congress right, increasingly sensing
their potential for achieving effective power, no longer felt it necessary to
hide behind the legitimating rhetoric of Gandhism. Genuine Gandhians,
whose discomfort with a centralised state apparatus and large-scale
industry as envisaged by Nehru had long been apparent, now withdrew to
the background. J.B. Kripalani, who had been the Congress president
at independence, resigned his presidency in November 1947, raising
uncomfortable questions about corruption in the party and in the civil
service inherited from British rule, and warning of the dangers of ‘invest-
ing the State with the monopoly of political and economic exploitation,
which is what happens in the centralised economy of a communist or a
fascist state’.^15
Meanwhile, Nehru’s natural constituency within the Congress, the
old Congress Socialist Party, were by now beginning to feel he had
ignored or betrayed them too often. At its conference in March 1948, the
Socialist Party announced its intention to secede from the Congress.
Surveying the post-independence situation, the Party’s resolutions noted
that the partition of India, with its emphasis on religious communities,
negotiations by an elite of leaders, and the integration of the princely
states on the basis of the sovereignty not of the people but of the princes,
had moved the emphasis of politics towards communalism and against
popular sovereignty. The Congress, now in government and completely
identified with it, dominated by the vested interests of ‘finance capitalists’,
refused to support the ‘social struggles of the masses’ and could therefore
not be relied upon to ‘sustain its revolutionary tradition’; it was, ‘because
of its authoritarian bias’, in danger of ‘being overwhelmed by anti-secular,
anti-democratic forces of the right’. The communists, on the other hand,
were accused of ‘adventurism’, of insufficient respect for ‘democracy, and
of being agents of powers outside India.^16 It was therefore up to the
CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55 181