When Titans Roamed The Party

At this the lowest moment in the nearly 130-year-old life of the Indian National Cong­ress, it is only meet that we should look back at how the party grew, evolved an inclusive Indian national identity and elaborated a framework, at once political as well as ethical and intellectual, for a free and independent India. Amales Tripathi’s Bengali-lan­g­uage mas­terpiece has now been made available to us in English translation by his son, Amitava Tripathi, who retired recently after a distinguished career in the Indian Foreign Service. It is an ext­remely fine and readable translation, for it reads as fluently and idiomatically as if one were reading a book written originally in English. The only fault, if that be one, is that since the book was originally written for a Bengali audience (and serialised in Desh) there is sometimes a distracting venture into details of the impact on Bengal politics of competing national forces and personalities. Oth­er­wise, the translator has done more than justice to his father’s encyclopaedic grasp of the pro­cesses that led to India’s independe­nce and her emergence as one nation.

It was neither an easy nor a smooth progression. The Congress, during the freedom movement, was less a political party than an open platform for an often bewildering variety of views, a kind of pre-Independence parliament in which opinions clashed, divergences were all too evident and synthesis generally achieved by Mahatma Gandhi as the final arbiter. But as Gandhiji’s closest lieutenants, particularly Jawaharlal Nehru, were more often that not in disagreement with Gandhi on both tactics and strategy, it is fascinating to see through Tripathi’s eyes how Gan­dhiji managed to weld these disparate elements into a coherent political army that took on the might and stratagems of the British Empire and ultimately prevailed, even if Partition was the ghastly price we had to pay for Independence.

Yet, unlike some 150 countries that came to one form of liberation or the other after we attained freedom at midnight, ours has proved to be the only one to have translated Indep­endence for the country into freedom for our people—and sustained it through seven turbulent decades, occasionally veering off the straight and narrow, but always returning to the middle path. That is no accident. It is the enduring contribution of the Indian National Congress to the building of contemporary India. And it is only by remaining true to that heritage, and its moral underpinning, that today’s down-and-out Congress can hope to climb its way back to a position of authority and responsibility in the polity of the nation, as well as face down the challenges to an inclusive nationhood that arose in Gandhiji’s time but were largely worsted in that unequal struggle—except for the overwhelming exception of the religion-based exclusivism of Jinnah’s Muslim League. Tripathi says, “Of the extremist Hindu leaders, Lajpat Rai had died in 1928 and Malaviya had retired in 1937. Their places were filled by the likes of V.D. Savarkar and Golwalkar” (p. 456). On August 15, 1943, four years to the day before Independence, Savarkar was to say that he endorsed Jinnah’s two-nation thesis. It is his most ardent followers who are today in office. The challenge before the nature of our nationhood remains undiminished.

In what is probably the most thought-provoking chapter of the book, the preface, Amales Tripathi convincingly argues that while the Subaltern School of Ranajit Guha and Gyan Pandey is undoubtedly right in stressing the contribution to the freedom movement of many whose names do not figure in school history books, as is the Cambridge School led by Judith Brown in  unveiling the power politics that often underlay the high-sounding arguments of the principal Congress proponents, it still remains true that the mainstream of the struggle did lie squarely in and with the Congress and its lasting contribution to defining the idea of India and forging a modern Indian nation. “Even as not all wavelengths can be captured on a radio transmitter, not all the complex valen­ces of nationalism can be projected through the methodology of the Cam­bridge School”. Tripathi also refers to the left-wing interpretation of India’s independence movement, in particular E.M.S. Namboodripad’s fascinating The Mahatma and the Ism but concludes that for the most part the Communists were too wedded to ideology and circumstance to really gauge the Indian mind with the instinctive genius that the Mahatma displayed. In describing the Congress leaders as “warriors of straw”, says Tripathi, the Communists were “totally unable to appreciate the cyclonic force of the awakened Indian nationalism”.

The wealth of historical detail and the telling use of statistical data to reinforce argument shows a great historian at his best—objective in evaluation and judgement, fair to those who disagree with him, but persuasive in his conviction that for all its many faults and blunders, the Indian Nat­ional Congress was the decisive force of the struggle for freedom. Although Tripathi ends his story at 1947, it is that momentum which led to the Congress becoming the natural party of governance through most of the initial decades of Independence.

Today, as the Congress sinks to under 10 per cent of the strength of the Lok Sabha, it needs to delve deep into its roots to discover its salience to the future of the nation it endowed with freedom. This book is as useful a starting point for the resurrection of the party as any other. Perhaps it should be widely distributed at the forthcoming Congress ‘chintan shivir’ in Nashik—the exact same place where in 1950 Purushottam Das Tandon challenged, with temporary success, the secular national identity that, as Tripathi shows, the Congress, and through its exertions the nation too, had evolved in response to persistent imperialist and communal taunts that India was, like the Italy of Metternich’s time, “a mere geographical expression”.