across India, with everyone called upon to take an Independence Pledge;
the national flag (at the time, this was the flag of the Indian National
Congress) was unfurled, and processions and public meetings were held.
Even this victory was only narrowly secured. In October 1929, the
viceroy, Lord Irwin, had declared that dominion status was the logical
goal for India, and promised that after the publication of the Simon
Commission’s report, there would be a round table conference, with
various Indian interests represented, to discuss the proposals. Gandhi,
convinced of Irwin’s good intentions, decided that the Congress should
join the Liberals and other moderates in responding positively, through
the so-called ‘Delhi Manifesto’, setting out conditions for cooperation:
among them a general amnesty for political prisoners, adequate repre-
sentation for progressive political organisations at the conference, and an
agenda that did not discuss whendominion status was to be established,
but the details of a scheme for a dominion constitution. Even the Nehru
Report had gone further than this.
In May 1929, Gandhi had pushed Jawaharlal upwards to the position
of Congress president, from general secretary of the All-India Congress
Committee. For Gandhi this was a means of controlling his young pro-
tégé. Gandhi was only too aware of his power over the younger man who
called him Bapu. On the issue of the response to Irwin’s statement,
Jawaharlal had signed the ‘Delhi Manifesto’, and had been persuaded not
to resign from his official positions in Congress on the grounds that the
British would never accept the conditions. Gandhi knew, therefore, that
Jawaharlal’s revolutionary zeal could be curbed by the nature of the office
to which he was appointed.
At Lahore, Jawaharlal’s presidential speech acknowledged that he was
not the Congress’s favoured choice for the job. Nonetheless, he used the
speech as a manifesto: he was a socialist and a republican, no believer in
kings and princes either of the hereditary kind or of the new, capitalist
kind. The problems of India could not be solved by a narrow nationalism,
but by socialism. With this in mind, he advocated that the Indian
National Congress and the All-India Trades Union Congress should work
together. In 1929, Jawaharlal had also been elected the president of the
AITUC, a platform he used, among other things, to criticise the anti-
worker orientation of the second Labour government in Britain. But he
sent out conflicting signals. The previous year he had attended the annual
AITUC session at Jharia as a delegate and had piloted a resolution
‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39 65