persecute and arrest socialists – Rajagopalachari’s ministry in Madras
was notable in this regard. The CSP-affiliated organisations like the
Kisan Sabhasand the left wing of the trade union movement – now that
the CPI was illegal it also operated through the CSP – were engaged in
struggles against the Congress governments, who in effect were running
the imperialist system. The Congress-run provinces were ruled as pro-
landlord and pro-business; if landlord and business interests clashed,
then and only then could the ‘masses’ get something by mistake. For the
most part Congress governments enacted repressive legislation against
workers and supported Indian business interests, failed to deliver on land
reform pledges and stood with landlords against peasants. It could, of
course, be argued that this accurately reflected their mandate; for with
a property-related franchise that granted about 16% of the population a
vote, it was those with property who elected governments to represent
them.
LEADING THE DISSENTERS: MASS CONTACT AND
SECTARIAN POLITICS
As the great hope for an organisation that was beginning to be seen by
its own membership as demoralised and fragmented, Nehru was now
the focal point for the left as well as for other discontented members of
the Congress. In the light of fascist successes in Europe, and fascism’s
apparent ability to form disciplined national units and demonstrate
a strong collective will behind a strong leader, not a few people began
to think in terms of similar leadership that could take India to indepen-
dence and strong nationhood. They began to cast Nehru as such a leader.
‘I shall put it in Hegelian terms,’ one correspondent wrote to him in 1936,
‘Capitalism is the thesis, Socialism is the antithesis and Fascism is the
synthesis.’ He hoped that Nehru would be a Mussolini rather than a
Hitler.^29 Nehru had furiously replied that he hated Fascism’s ‘crudity’.^30
But the question was not about to go away. In November 1937, the
Modern Review, a popular monthly journal with a significant national
circulation among intellectuals, ran an article entitled ‘The Rashtrapati’
(‘leader of the nation’) by someone using the pen name ‘Chanakya’. It
warned readers of a growing tendency to see Nehru as a saviour of some
sort, even a Führer, and suggested that it might even appeal to Jawaharlal’s
not inconsiderable vanity to see himself as a Napoleon or a Caesar, but
‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39 87