The Warrior and the Saint 175that the Lahore resolution was not necessarily secessionist in its im-
port.^94 In a key essay published on May 4, 1940, Bose recalled that not
so long before, “prominent leaders of the Congress could be members
and leaders of communal or ga ni za tions like the Hindu Mahasabha and
the Muslim League.” Lala Lajpat Rai, the redoubtable nationalist of
Punjab, had been a leader of both the Congress and the Mahasabha,
just as the Ali brothers, Shaukat and Mohammad, had at one time been
leaders of both the Congress and the League. In the pre- 1920 period,
Bose might have mentioned Jinnah himself as a prominent leader of
both parties. He did cite the case of Akram Khan, who had served as
president of the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee even while he
was a leader of the Muslim League. Bose, therefore, did not wish to
treat the “communal or ga ni za tions” as untouchable.^95
Bose then went on to explain how his group within the Congress
had reached a pact with the Muslim League in the Calcutta Corpora-
tion, a pact which had infuriated “a certain number of communally-
minded Hindus.” After negotiations with the Muslim League leader
M. A. H. Ispahani, Abdur Rahman Siddiqui of the Muslim League had
been installed as mayor of Calcutta with the support of the Bose group.
Bose observed that for the previous three years, there had been futile
attempts to foster an un der stand ing between the Congress and the
Muslim League. His own attempts to negotiate with Jinnah and the
Muslim League in 1938 had been blessed by the Congress Working
Committee and Mahatma Gandhi. “Those who had not objected to
that attempt which failed ultimately,” he wrote, “now strongly object to
the present attempt, because it has succeeded.” His overall assessment
of the Bose group’s pact with the Muslim League in Calcutta was as fol-
lows:
We regard the present agreement with the Muslim League as a great
achievement not in its ac tuality, but in its potentiality. During the last
three years, we have been groping in the dark, but without success. Ev-
ery time we have come up against a dead wall of communal prejudice
and passion and we have been frustrated in our efforts. This time we
have broken through the wall and through the fissure, a ray of light has
poured in. There is now some hope that we may ultimately succeed in