affiliating the AITUC to the League against Imperialism; he had spent the
intervening year publicly denying that the LAI was a communist organi-
sation, preferring instead to say that although there were communists
in it, it was an organisation independent of the CP. Now, as a president
with no trade union experience at all, he appeared as adjudicator between
those who wished to affiliate the AITUC to the Second International and
those who wished to affiliate the AITUC to the Third International.
He advocated neither: the Second International was too concerned with
being anti-communist, the Third had recently been proved wrong in
China when the Guomindang had turned on its communist allies, and it
would be dangerous to be bound by its methods even if one had (as he had)
sympathy for the communist point of view.
Within the Indian National Congress, as far as practical politics
was concerned, the initiative remained with the old guard. Jawaharlal
was entrusted with building up Provincial Congress Committees, with
implementing the Gandhian ‘constructive programme’ of spinning and
weaving, and – along with Subhas Chandra Bose, the Bengali Congress-
man whose popularity had already given the government considerable
cause for alarm – with organising the Congress Volunteer Corps to work
in villages and among city labourers. (The ‘Hindustani Seva Dal’, as it
was also known, had been set up in December 1923 to provide ‘a well-
disciplined all-India corps trained to do national work under the general
guidance of the Congress’;^6 at the time there had been some opposition
to a militarised element in the Congress, but Jawaharlal was not among
that opposition.) The last appealed slightly more to Jawaharlal, for this
opened out the possibility for political propaganda among the masses,
conducted by a dedicated band of young men and women. But the
All-India Congress Committee resolution that authorised this had been
passed more to fob off a troublemaker than as serious politics: after all,
the Volunteer Corps were supposed to be loyal to the ‘constructive
programme’.
This was an important moment in the history of the Indian nationalist
movement. Many were looking for a new orientation. The problem of
the increasing influence of the vested interests of businessmen and large
landowners within the Congress seemed troubling. An independent
dissatisfaction with Congress politics and a separate mobilisation on the
left could potentially come together. The intellectual coherence of a
socialist position – certainly as opposed to a Gandhian one – also appealed66 ‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39