The Warrior and the Saint 159At Tripuri, the right wing of the Congress struck a calculated po lit i-
cal blow in their campaign to avenge their defeat in the presidential
election. They proposed a resolution—put forward by Govind Ballabh
Pant, the Congress premier of the United Provinces—that “the Con-
gress executive should command [Gandhiji’s] implicit con fi dence and
requests the President to nominate the Working Committee in accor-
dance with the wishes of Gandhiji.” The bulk of the Congress left wing,
including M. N. Roy’s radical democratic party and the communists
using the “National Front” label, opposed the Pant resolution. The
Congress socialist party, however, dithered and abstained, and so the
resolution passed. It left the Congress president shackled to the wishes
of the Mahatma, if the latter agreed to give expression to them. Quite
apart from the spe cific resolution, the atmosphere at Tripuri was so
suffused with the spirit of vendetta that Bose left the place with “a
loathing and disgust for politics.”^55
From Tripuri, Bose left for a place called Jamadoba (near Dhanbad,
in Bihar) for a period of convalescence. “At the last Congress session,”
Tagore wrote to the Mahatma on March 29, 1939, “some rude hands
have deeply hurt Bengal with an ungracious persistence[.] Please apply
without delay balm to the wound with your own kind hands and pre-
vent it from festering.” Gandhi replied that the poet had set before him
a dif fi cult prob lem.^56 Gandhi at this time was living in Birla’s house in
Delhi and was engrossed with the Rajkot affair. “I suggest your coming
here and living with me,” Gandhi wrote to Bose. “I undertake to nurse
you to health while we are slowly conferring.” Bose did not accept the
offer to reside in Birla’s house, and in any case Gandhi left for Rajkot
after a few days. The task of consulting him on the formation of a new
Working Committee was carried out by correspondence in late March
and early April of 1939. “I am temperamentally not a vindictive per-
son,” Bose explained to Gandhi, “and I do not nurse grievances. In a
way, I have the mentality of a boxer—that is, to shake hands smilingly
when the boxing bout is over and take the result in a sporting spirit.”
All he wanted was to see the Mahatma renew the struggle for swaraj. If
he could give the British an ultimatum over Rajkot, why couldn’t he do
the same with India’s national demand? Gandhi disagreed with Bose’s
view that the country was more nonviolent than ever before; he could