Bose, suggested that Bose, since he had won, should appoint his own
working committee – which would definitely have precipitated a split in
the Congress. Bose, for his part, was unwilling to publicly oppose Gandhi,
whom he still referred to as ‘India’s greatest man’. The cult of Gandhi’s
personality, not discouraged by Gandhi, was now the yardstick of
legitimacy within Congress politics. The Congress president could not
function without a working committee, and the Great Soul would not let
him have one.
Nehru at first tried to play the mediator, keeping a distance from
the controversy; then, after giving the matter some thought, he deserted
Bose. The Congress Socialists, having also given the matter much thought,
decided not to split the anti-imperialist movement and the Congress,
and abandoned Bose as well. Once again, Nehru had lacked the courage
to make a decisive difference in a crucial debate. In the acrimony that
followed, Subhas Bose justifiably felt that Nehru had betrayed him.
Bose angrily referred to defects in Nehru’s character and his character-
istic weaknesses when it came to the crunch, to Nehru’s ambiguous and
therefore damaging statements to the press about the period of Bose’s
presidency, and Nehru’s assumption that coalitional politics condemned
that coalition to being perennially a coalition led by the right rather than
by socialists – the last making it impossible for him to envisage a left-
wing victory within the Congress. Nehru, sounding tired and isolated,
acknowledged the charges and avoided Bose’s direct challenge to him to
clarify his position:Am I a socialist or an individualist? Is there a necessary contradiction
in the two terms? Are we all such integrated human beings that we
can define ourselves precisely in a word or a phrase? I suppose I am
temperamentally and by training an individualist, and intellectually a
socialist, whatever all this might mean. I hope that socialism does not
kill or suppress individuality; indeed I am attracted to it because it will
release innumerable individuals from economic and cultural bondage... Let us leave it at this that I am an unsatisfactory human being who
is dissatisfied with himself and the world, and whom the petty world he
lives in does not particularly like.^41
Bose was forced to resign by the end of April 1939 as a result of a
campaign against him that was engineered by Gandhi and the Congress100 ‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39