to supporting India’s demand for complete independence, and Brockway
believed that the ILP’s participation in the League against Imperialism
(LAI) would help convince Indians of the seriousness of the British left’s
commitment to anti-imperialism. The ILP kept up its LAI links until
1929.
At Brussels, invited members of various incipient or developed national
liberation movements, and various communist parties, joined together
to discuss common problems; sympathetic anti-imperialists from the
metropolitan countries and prominent intellectuals, among them Romain
Rolland and Albert Einstein, lent their weight to the proceedings.
Sun Yat-Sen’s widow, Song Qingling, brought to the Congress the legiti-
macy of a nationalist movement struggling against the informal empire
of the Western powers in China, ironically a mere two months before
the Guomindang–Communist Party alliance collapsed in violence in
Shanghai, initiated by her sister’s husband, Chiang Kai-Shek. (Nehru
invited Song Qingling to the next session of the Indian National Congress,
but the British government refused her a visa.)
It was at Brussels that Jawaharlal’s career as an internationalist
really began to take off. He played a large part in the proceedings of the
Congress, drafting a number of resolutions and making several of the
major public statements. Jawaharlal’s understanding of imperialism as an
economic and political system rather than as a form of local oppression
owed a lot to these discussions: his understanding of the need for capitalist
countries to continually seek outlets for goods and capital, therefore the
need for colonies as captive sources of cheap raw material and outlets for
the profitable investment of surplus capital, was sharpened here. The
exhilarating sense of not being alone, of the solidarity born of injustice
and oppression and the recognition that the urge to change was shared
across the world was also uplifting. He acquitted himself well in his
speeches to the Brussels Congress, his first performance on a world stage.
Jawaharlal noted in one of his speeches that in the years to come, it would
be American imperialism that would be the major threat to the world,
judging by developments in Latin America, and that it would either
replace British imperialism as the major threat, or lead to the formation
of ‘a powerful Anglo-Saxon bloc to dominate the world’.^1 Jawaharlal took
the liberty, endorsed by his father, of interpreting the Indian National
Congress’s vague formulation of its goal, ‘swaraj’, as ‘independence’. At
the same time he argued that mere political independence without
‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39 59