against workers’ militancy. Events in business bargaining and factory
politics began to convince more and more people who were inclined to
take the side of the downtrodden that Indian capitalists were at best
ambiguously anti-imperialist and at worst collaborators.
Meanwhile, and perhaps paradoxically given the rise of class-based
politics in various other contexts, increased tension between Hindu and
Muslim groups became more evident. The temporary unity during the
Non-Cooperation-Khilafat Movement was now receding, with older
Hindu agitations for cow protection once again coming to the fore.
Gandhi had appealed to Muslims as brothers not to kill cows and pointed
to the Hindus’ own cruelty to animals, in the spirit of ‘he who has not
sinned, cast the first stone’. But he was not able or willing to deflect debate
away from cow protection as an issue altogether. This was part of a larger
problem. The Congress was uncomfortable with, and not altogether
willing to confront, the issue of such sectarian tendencies, pointing instead
to the government’s strategy of ‘divide and rule’ as the root cause, which
for its part the government strenuously denied ever having practised. And
although the government was certainly guilty of stirring up Hindu–
Muslim tensions whenever it could or whenever it might be useful, this
was an insufficient explanation for the periodic tensions or violence that
emerged between religiously defined communities. A better approach was
available according to the poet Rabindranath Tagore’s famous dictum:
we accept that the British divide and rule. But there must be a flaw in our
character that enables them to do this.
More questions than answers had been brought to the fore by the period
of intense activity and the lull that followed it. After the anticlimax of the
end of Non-Cooperation and the futility of participation in councils and
municipalities, Jawaharlal was susceptible to – and in search of – a new
political orientation. To the right of Gandhi was a group of conservative
Congressmen, gathering under the broad banner of the increasingly vague
term ‘Gandhian’, and often drawing on conceptions of Hinduism that
Jawaharlal rejected; and the growing alliance of the so-called ‘Gandhian’
wing of Congress with the interests of Indian big business was not
particularly attractive to him. Leftwards was the only logical way for him
to go.
THE YOUNG GANDHIAN 57