masses who were not yet Congress supporters. Muslim mass contact, in
particular, was to be a central concern. This provoked a debate on the
left: some opposed ‘Muslim’ mass contact on the grounds that it followed
a sectarian logic itself. Would there then be a Muslim mass contact
committee for Muslims, a Sikh mass contact committee for Sikhs, a
Christian mass contact committee for Christians, a Harijan mass contact
committee for Harijans, and so on? Was that not simply acknowledging
that communities were separate entities rather than that classes were?
But such debates were, by now, ideological luxuries, because the bald fact
was that Muslims had to be convinced of the possibility of trusting the
Congress.
This was next to impossible in the current circumstances. The case that
cropped up most in these debates was that of Bengal. The CSP considered
the Bengal Congress one of the most backward and right wing of the
Provincial Congresses, dominated by cliques whose ostensible observance
of the secular creed of the Congress could not hide the fact that they were
anti-Muslim and often also members of the Hindu Mahasabha. The KPP’s
victory in the elections, on a mixture of peasant and Muslim rhetoric,
reinforced the CSP’s belief that an economic programme could potentially
work best in Bengal, both to combat communalism and to actually deliver
to the masses a government that would reflect their needs. The CSP also
believed that the main obstacle to this was not so much the KPP as the
Bengal Congress itself. The Bengal Congress represented the interests
of the Bengali Hindu bhadralok, whose more influential sections held
their wealth in zamindarilands granted by the Permanent Settlement of
the Governor-General, Lord Cornwallis, in 1793, and who lived off this
income often as absentee landlords in Calcutta, while their estates were
run on their behalf by agents, sub-agents and sub-sub-agents, all of whom
lived off the work of the primary producer. Even the slightly extended
franchise of the 1930s meant that the Congress, as a zamindarparty, could
not win an election. There was no room for a left to function within the
Bengal Congress. As a result, space was left to the KPP, a peasant-Muslim
party that could easily, by a change of emphasis, become a Muslim-peasant
party, especially while the KPP remained in alliance with the Muslim
League. According to the Congress Socialists, the KPP was not unam-
biguously a party whose rationale was based on defending the economic
and social needs of a poor peasantry – in an area where the Hindu–Muslim
divide corresponded so closely with the zamindar–peasant divide, the
‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39 91