economic freedom for workers and peasants would not be true freedom.
(This was to be a statement echoed in the Communist Party of India’s
post-1947 slogan, ‘Yeh Azadi Jhuta Hai’ – ‘This Independence is a Lie’- withdrawn in 1956 after the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s visit
to India in December 1955 and his warm endorsement of the Nehru
regime.)
One could not, however, accuse Jawaharlal of being unduly optimistic
regarding the prospects of international solidarity. In his report written
for the Indian National Congress in 1928, he commented that one of the
themes at Brussels had been solidarity between oppressed peoples and
the working class in the oppressor country. Jawaharlal observed that
such cooperation would be difficult to achieve; it would be easier to create
cooperation among the different oppressed peoples themselves. But if
such cooperation had to be achieved, nationalist movements of oppressed
peoples would need to stand clearly for ‘the economic liberty of the
masses’.^2
Jawaharlal’s European sojourn was the beginning of his close rela-
tionship with the international left. In Berlin in 1926 – Berlin fascinated
him, as the centre of all that was exciting in political and intellectual life,
the city of radicals and exiles – he had met the communist, Virendranath
Chattopadhyay, brother of the poet and sometime Gandhian, Sarojini
Naidu. ‘Chatto’, as he was known, was an important member of the Indian
exiles’ group in Berlin, as well as one of the organisers of the Brussels
Congress. This was the beginning of a friendship, carried out mostly by
correspondence, that was as warm as it was fiercely critical, with Chatto
repeatedly castigating Jawaharlal for his weakness and vacillation in
political situations. Chatto was at the time living with Agnes Smedley,
an American involved with the Indian nationalist movement in exile, first
in New York and then in Berlin, later to be closely involved with the
Chinese Communist Party. Jawaharlal was to continue a long correspon-
dence with her that sustained for him a lasting fascination with China.
In November 1927, Jawaharlal and his father, who had arrived
in Europe that autumn, were invited by the Soviet Ambassador in Berlin
to visit the Soviet Union on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of
the revolution. They arrived on November 8, the day after the main
celebrations, and the Nehrus, Motilal in particular, were carefully non-
committal about their support for the USSR. However, writing on his
experience of a not yet completely Stalinised Soviet Union for the Hindu,
60 ‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39