mirrored the socialists’ own position on the communists.^20 Narayan
was unconvinced; he had told the Socialist Party conference that the
Congress as it now stood was a far cry from the common anti-imperialist
platform it had been, and that it was necessary for political campaigners
to give it no special deference on account of it having in effect inherited a
recognisable label – this was the very label whose safety many were now
seeking. As for Nehru staying with the Congress, this was another
example of his inability to back what he stood for by concrete action. ‘You
want to go towards socialism,’ Narayan sarcastically wrote to Nehru, ‘but
you want the capitalists to help in that.’^21 Narayan made no secret of the
fact that he believed Nehru to be trapped in a right-wing party.
The socialists perhaps erred in not giving Nehru adequate credit for
his major contributions, and his principled opposition to Patel and the
right, on the ‘communal question’. Patel believed that supporters of
the erstwhile Hindu Mahasabha as well as members of the RSS logically
belonged in the Congress, and that steps should be taken to attract
them in – a strange position for a ‘Gandhian’ to take, soon after Gandhi’s
assassination by an RSS man.^22 Nehru strongly opposed this tendency.
When communal violence broke out in East and West Bengal in the
winter of 1949, Patel’s preferred solution was once again large-scale
population exchanges. Instead, in April 1950, Nehru was able to persuade
the Pakistan Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan to sign the ‘Delhi Pact’
with him, which asserted the right of minority communities in both
India and Pakistan to equality of citizenship irrespective of religion – an
underlining of Nehru’s victory over Patel on the issue of nationality for
Muslims in India.
With the socialists’ departure from the Congress in 1949, Patel’s
followers could attempt to disarm Nehru and gain control. The 1950
Congress presidential elections saw seven candidates enter the fray. Three
of them (J.B. Kripalani, Purshottam Das Tandon and Shankarrao Deo)
contested the elections; the other four (among them Nehru himself)
withdrew. Tandon, a Hindu communalist and a close follower of Patel’s,
beat Kripalani by 246 votes (1,306 to 1,052) and was elected Congress
president in August 1950. Nehru, clearly aware that this was now a matter
of his own political survival, refused to join Tandon’s Working Com-
mittee, without which the president of Congress was powerless (Nehru’s
tactics recalled Gandhi’s non-cooperation with Subhas Bose in 1939).
A stalemate followed; Nehru eventually, in October, joined the Working184 CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55