influential or lucrative posts. Jawaharlal was perhaps merely reading the
message of these years when in the 1930s he was deeply opposed to
participating in the Constitutional machinery for fear of being a party
to imperialist exploitation. Motilal also realised that this was beginning
to happen. The propaganda value of continuously being able to defeat the
government and then being unable to make any difference to laws being
passed or not was by now wearing a bit thin. The point that had to be
made had been made. In 1926, Motilal led the Swaraj party out of the
Central Legislative Assembly.
Meanwhile Jawaharlal had also returned to the desultory politics of the
locality that had been left for Indians to play in. Jawaharlal had opposed
council entry – it would, he had argued, inevitably lead to compromise
and dilution of objectives. But, in April 1923, he reluctantly allowed
himself to be pushed forward as the consensus candidate for chairmanship
of the Allahabad Municipal Board. (He was not alone in this: leading
Congressmen were indeed becoming presidents of municipalities and
corporations in the 1920s – the natives could discuss their own ‘schools
and drains’ without subverting the British Empire, as one administrator
had put it some four decades earlier.^22 ) C.R. Das became the first mayor of
Calcutta, Vithalbhai Patel the president of the Bombay Municipality, and
Vallabhbhai Patel, his brother, of Ahmedabad. Municipal politics gave
Indians – Congressmen not excluded, despite the new moral connotations
of Congress membership – plenty of scope for petty factionalism.
As chairman of the Municipal Board, Jawaharlal dealt mainly with
practical issues of administration – among them regulating prostitutes
rather than banning them (he cited some European examples);^23 organi-
sational matters for the Kumbh Mela, the great festival held at the
confluence of the sacred rivers of the Ganga and Yamuna at Allahabad;
finances; and of course hygiene. During his tenure, the Education
Committee of the Allahabad Municipal Board introduced the Boy Scout
movement and the singing of Muhammad Iqbal’s (1876–1938) patriotic
song ‘Hindustan Hamara’ (‘Our Hindustan’) into their schools. Jawaharlal
congratulated them on the latter – a small gesture towards the national
movement at a time of general disillusionment. Iqbal later came to be
considered the national poet of Pakistan; ‘Hindustan Hamara’ claims that
‘Hindustan’ is the greatest land in the world, and has the refrain ‘Hindi
hai hum’ (‘We are Hindi’) – a term denoting geographical rather than
religious loyalty, as opposed to ‘Hindu’, which by now had religious
THE YOUNG GANDHIAN 53