again – a suggestion that seemed to hurt Gandhi. It was not only
Jawaharlal who was beginning to feel increasingly frustrated and annoyed
that Gandhi’s personal and moral experiments were to be projected onto
the country at large, to be undertaken and withdrawn seemingly entirely
upon his personal whims. To add insult to injury, Gandhi even seemed
willing to abandon his own clause about political prisoners: despite his
pleas, on March 23, 1931, the British government executed Bhagat Singh
and two of his comrades.
But for all his anger and disappointment, Jawaharlal was unable
and unwilling to become a focal point of anti-Gandhi tendencies in the
Congress; when Gandhi astutely suggested that Jawaharlal move the
resolution at the Karachi Congress in March that the Congress (again
retrospectively) ratify the Gandhi–Irwin Pact, he did so, throwing his
now slightly more substantial political weight behind the compromise
that he opposed so strongly. Jawaharlal’s personal and political feelings
were now severely out of joint. Gandhi, after all, was the alternative father
figure in whom Jawaharlal had sought solace after Motilal’s death, and the
Mahatma was able to rely on his emotional dependence.
Gandhi duly attended the Second Round Table Conference in
London to discuss the new Constitution in the autumn of 1931. The First
Round Table Conference had taken place without the Congress, as the
Third was to do the following year. Gandhi achieved nothing by attending
as the sole representative of the Congress; he had however, by going
to London, given the proceedings greater legitimacy – this was Lord
Irwin’s victory. The Congress had to accept being treated as one among
many Indian ‘interests’ at the conference, rather than as the party with
the largest mass base in the country; Gandhi’s lone voice could carry
no weight even with the support of his Indian businessmen friends.
Returning to India, Gandhi tried to re-start civil disobedience (which
nominally ran on from 1932 to 1934), but the momentum had been lost.
Congress leaders were re-arrested when it was thought necessary, and the
Constitution-making process went ahead now more as an internal issue
of British administrators who disagreed on how best to hold India to
the Empire than as a problem that Indians ought to be allowed to be
concerned with. British and Indian businessmen, for their part, became
entangled in market-sharing negotiations, aimed at shutting other
competitors such as the Japanese out of Indian markets. The negotiations
failed.72 ‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39