Telengana uprisings, and led a chorus of objections in Parliament, from
inside and outside the Congress, to accepting Soviet wheat in India – at
a time of food shortages verging on famine, and of US blackmail on food
aid in connection with India’s role in the Korean War negotiations – of
which more shall be said later.
Meanwhile, Kripalani and Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, the latter a close
associate of Nehru’s, left the Congress and formed the Kisan Mazdoor
Praja Party (translatable, in what was by now a recognisably populist
format for party names, as the ‘Peasants’, Workers’ and Subjects’ Party’).
Nehru was disappointed; this further narrowed his potential support
base in Congress. In September 1951, Nehru decided to force the issue,
staking the vast capital of his own reputation and standing against the
opportunists and factionalists within the Congress, resigning from all
Tandon’s committees and asking the party to choose between him and
Tandon (offering to resign was his tactical equivalent to Gandhi’s fasts).
Consequently, Tandon, outmanoeuvred, resigned.
Having recaptured the presidency of the Congress, Nehru appealed
to Congressmen who had left the party due to its rightward drift to return.
Notable among the prominent returnees was Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, who
abandoned the party he had so recently helped to found. After this, Nehru
was the acknowledged and largely unchallenged leader of the Congress.
From September 1951 to November 1954, Nehru himself was both prime
minister and Congress president (he was succeeded in the latter role from
1954 to 1959 by U.N. Dhebar, an administrator unimportant in actual
politics, then by his daughter, Indira Gandhi from 1959 to 1960). But the
character of the Congress itself did not substantially change; it rhetorically
took on a form more in keeping with Nehru’s views.
All these internal agonies did not appear to affect the standing of
the Congress before the ‘masses’. Nehru, unsurprisingly, was the central
figure in the Congress election campaign for the first general elections on
the basis of universal adult franchise in 1951–2, travelling the country and
making innumerable speeches and public appearances. The heroic, elegant
figure of Jawaharlal Nehru, the Mahatma’s anointed successor and the
Congress’s most articulate spokesman for so many years, was a familiar
figure across India; he was of course the successful leader of a victorious
movement for national liberation. Nehru was no orator; he could be
hesitant and flat in his delivery, but his speeches to large public gatherings
were disarmingly direct and straightforward, giving the impression of186 CONSOLIDATING THE STATE, c. 1947–55