THE FREEDOM MOVEMENT AND THE PARTITION OF INDIAhoped that they would provide a social base for their rule. Had it not been
for the Great Depression this British plan of enfranchising peasants so as to
undercut the Congress would probably have worked quite well; now,
however, it had the opposite effect. On the other hand, the peasant
electorate also put the Congress under some obligation to accept office in
the provinces and legislate in favour of the peasantry.
The left wing of the Congress, by contrast, wanted to prevent office
acceptance and emphasised the fact that the provincial governor could
always suspend the whole experiment and run the province with his civil
servants. This emergency clause would make a Congress ministry
completely subservient to the governor, for it would hold office only as
long as it met the governor’s standards of good behaviour. Gandhi tried to
solve this problem by asking the governors for a solemn promise that they
would not make use of this emergency clause. Such a general promise, of
course, would have been completely ultra vires under constitutional law
and thus this was an impossible request.
Due to the Congress’s refusal to accept office, minority governments of
small splinter parties were formed and the Congress had to witness these
governments getting the credit for implementing the Congress programme.
Consequently, the right-wing Congress leaders became more and more
impatient and when the governor of Madras promised C.Rajagopalachari
(the provincial Congress leader) not to make undue use of the emergency
provision and to give the Congress a fair chance, this was taken as the
signal for office acceptance. Rajagopalachari had special reasons for being
eager to form a government. After the previous constitutional reform a
non-Brahmin party—proudly calling itself the Justice Party—had come to
power in Madras; it had now been trounced in the elections but was back
in power due to the Congress’s refusal to accept office.
In order to reconcile office acceptance with the aims of the freedom
movement the Congress passed a strange resolution: those who joined the
government as ministers had to vacate their positions in the Provincial
Congress Committees. The Congress organisation was to carry on the
freedom struggle in which office acceptance made sense only as a temporary
tactical move. Accordingly the ministers were under the jurisdiction of the
Congress organisation which could tell them to quit if this was thought to be
necessary in the interest of the movement. The practical effect of this was
that the minister’s rivals, who had just missed getting a ministerial post
themselves, took charge of the respective Provincial Congress Committee
and started breathing down the necks of the ministers. Everywhere there was
now a ministerial and an organisational wing of the Congress and the two
usually did not see eye to eye.
This was soon to affect the National Congress as a whole when the
Congress president, Subhas Chandra Bose, decided to stand as a candidate
for a second term against the wishes of Gandhi, who had sponsored the