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| Vol. 4, Issue 2 February 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Essay |
How They Got Here
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| One Hundred and Twenty Five Years
of the Congress Party |
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© ADITYA ARYA ARCHIVE FOR THE CARAVAN |
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| Mahatma Gandhi exiting a train some time in the 1940s. Gandhi always insisted on travelling in a third-class cabin.
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OT A LONG AGO , I found myself in a panel discussion on television with three politicians. One was a Congress member of parliament, the second an MP from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the third the president of one of the smaller regional formations. In the course of the conversation I found reason to criticise the three netas for their |
sectarian stands. As the argument grew more heated, I found myself ignoring the others and turning on the Congressman in particular.
Coming out of the studio and driving home, I later reflected on this partisanship of my own. Why had I been less harsh on the others? It may have been because from them, a historian can expect no better. Despite its occasional disavowal of the Hindutva programme, the BJP is a party of bigots which detests minorities and atheists. For their part, the regional parties use the rhetoric of caste and linguistic discrimination mostly to advance the wealth and power of their leaders.
The case of the Congress is different. This was the party that led the movement for freedom, the party that united India and brought people of different religions and languages into a single political project. Its finest leaders were not confined by national boundaries; they had a universalist vision. Its ministers and legislators were men and women of high personal integrity. When confronted with the Congress of today, an Indian who knows some history cannot but be struck by the chasm between the present and the past. Hence the savagery with which I turned on the Congressman in the television studio. Unlike the representatives of the BJP or the regional party, he should have known better than to defend dynastic rule, duck the question of the massacre of Sikhs in 1984, disregard the growing evidence of corruption in a Congress-led government, and so on.
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ESPITE WHAT IT HAS DONE to itself in recent years, the Indian National Congress is one of the great political parties of the modern world. It has a lineage and record of achievement comparable to that of the Labour Party in Great Britain, the Social Democratic Party in Germany, and the Democratic Party in the United States. From its beginnings in 1885, the |
party’s ambitions were immense, these contained in its very title, with the last, definitive word indicating that it would not be sectarian, but embrace Indians of all shapes and sizes, or castes and communities.
In the first few decades of its existence, the Indian National Congress built a network of branches that spread across the country. The most intense Congress activity was in eastern India, where the major figures included Surendranath Banerjee and Bipin Chandra Pal, and in western India, where the acknowledged stalwarts were Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Gopal Krishna Gokhale. With their sophisticated intellectual cultures, Bengal and Maharashtra were in the vanguard—but the Congress had a reach and presence in north and south India as well. By the time Mohandas K Gandhi returned home from South Africa in 1915, the Congress was a genuinely national organisation. Still, it had two serious, and interrelated, weaknesses—it was active only in the major cities, and its debates and proceedings were conducted only in English. Given the shallow social base of the Congress, it was easy for the British to dismiss it as a front for lawyers and other English-speaking professionals seeking the loaves and fishes of office.
| © ADITYA ARYA ARCHIVE FOR THE CARAVAN |
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Gandhi with his top deputees Patel and Nehru at an All India Congress Committee meeting in Bombay, 1946. |
Gandhi felt this criticism keenly, and sought to refute it. First, he encouraged the Congress to function in the vernacular, by forming provincial committees that operated in Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Oriya, and other languages of the people. Next, he brought in peasants and women, two groups that had previously been excluded from the proceedings. Third, he campaigned to abolish Untouchability and to promote Hindu-Muslim harmony, to answer the charge that the Congress was a party of upper-caste Kayasths, Banias, and (especially) Brahmins. Fourth, he worked to nurture a second rung of political leadership, that would work with him in deepening the social base of the Congress and make it more representative of the nation in the making.
In the short and medium term, Gandhi was successful in all but the third ambition. The rejection of colonial provincial categories—the Madras Presidency, the Bengal Presidency, etc—through the creation of local Congresses based on language, proved to be a superbly effective link between the metropolis and the periphery. Through the 1920s and 30s, the nationalist credo was conveyed in newspapers and magazines printed in languages other than English. The flow was not unidirectional; rather, the concerns of the different linguistic communities were also brought to the attention of the All India Congress Committee. Long before Amartya Sen, Gandhi had concluded that a person possessed multiple identities—and that it was perfectly consistent to be both Bengali and Indian, or Kannadiga and Indian, and so on.
It was also Gandhi who brought the rural masses into the freedom struggle. Operating in the vernacular helped here; as did his dress and lifestyle, which resonated far more with the peasantry than the turbans and suits of an earlier generation of Congress leaders. Peasants played a notable part in the non-cooperation movement of the 1920s and the civil disobedience movement of the 1930s, although (as historians such as David Hardiman and Shahid Amin have demonstrated) they were motivated more by their own livelihood concerns—lower taxes, higher wages, freer access to forest and grazing resources, etc—than by abstract political categories such as ‘nationalism’ and ‘anti-colonialism.’
From the perspective of the modern feminist, some of Gandhi’s statements about women appear to be less than emancipatory. He was opposed to contraception, for example, and decidedly ambivalent about the role of women in the workplace. At the same time, he extolled their character and goodness, and considered them more courageous than men. At first, he was hesitant to allow them to offer satyagraha, but his reservations were overcome by his independent-minded colleagues, such as Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Sarojini Naidu. In the end, thousands of women courted arrest during the Salt Satyagraha of 1930 and the Quit India movement of 1942. Thus, as the social commentator Madhu Kishwar once pointed out, more women participated in Gandhi’s campaigns than in movements led by any other man in modern history. In this respect he was conspicuously more successful than ostensibly more ‘modern’ and less ‘chauvinist’ leaders such as Lenin, Mao, and even Mandela.
One of Gandhi’s less noticed achievements was his making leaders of followers. Vallabhbhai Patel was given charge of building the party organisation; Jawaharlal Nehru instructed to reach out to the youth and the world outside India; C Rajagopalachari asked to take the nationalist message to the South; Maulana Abul Kalam Azad told to take this message to the Muslims. The delegation of responsibility was also followed with regard to the constructive programme; thus, from among his other colleagues, JB Kripalani was asked by Gandhi to establish khadi centres, JC Kumarappa set to work on reviving the agrarian economy, Zakir Hussain charged with designing an educational curriculum. In later years, the trust reposed in them by Gandhi helped these individuals make substantial contributions to the political and cultural life of the nation.
A unique and very appealing aspect of Congress nationalism was that it did not demonise the foreigner or the alien. Here Gandhi and his colleagues were acting under the inspiration of Rabindranath Tagore, who made a necessary distinction between the nation of the West and the spirit of the West. The former had manifested itself in pillage and imperial exploitation, and had to be resisted. The latter had promoted freedom of expression, equal rights for all, and the spirit of scientific enquiry—all this had to be made India’s own.
To be sure, there was often a slippage between the ideal and the practise. Dalits and Muslims did not always feel at home in the Gandhian Congress—hence the appeal of rival leaders like BR Ambedkar and MA Jinnah. While emphasising freedom, the Congress did not lay adequate stress on equality—industrial workers and agricultural labourers did not feature strongly in its programmes. Among the Congress leaders in the Gandhian era were some Hindu conservatives, who were deeply unsympathetic to the idea that Dalits and women could enjoy the same rights as upper-caste men.
Despite its failures and inconsistencies, the Congress that brought India freedom was a party of distinction and achievement. It had many imitators, such as the African National Congress. Across the colonised countries of Asia and Africa, the party of Gandhi and Nehru acted as a beacon of hope and inspiration. Even when they did not mimic its name or its methods, anti-colonial nationalists remained in thrall to it. Indeed, among the admirers of Gandhi and company was that gun-toting Marxist revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh. | | | |
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Constance
2 January 2012
11:05 AM
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Super informative writing; keep it up.
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ashwini
2 September 2010
05:03 PM
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I enjoyed reading thsi essay. I have nejoyed Guha's earlier writings too. It is good conbination of information and analysis of events which shaped the Party and the our country over these years. It is important that scholarls of all disciplines write for people beyond their subject audience. I am thankful to Guha for bringing contemporary history into Books and Essays for general public.
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R.Rao
27 March 2010
04:55 AM
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Guha calls Kamaraj 'one of the forgotten heroes of Indian democracy'. It should not be forgotten that State Chief Ministers like Kamaraj are the ones who signed away states rights over to New Delhi. If Kamaraj had put up a stiff resistance there would not have been a centralized license raj state where India lost many opportunities in being in the forefront of many industries like Automobiles, planes, steel, electronics and defense. Remember till recently many of these industries needed a bureaucrat signature before anyone could even contemplate manufacture or increase existing capacity to effectively compete in world markets. For some like defense even today the private sector cannot participate.
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Mano
20 March 2010
04:37 PM
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This has given a deep view, though more or less we know all these things. Guha's writing is like mentioning the problem without solution.
Though Rahul looks promising, still he is the grand son of Indiara and son of Rajiv, above all a congressman of 21st century. So all his work are just eye wash and nothing is going to change in the party.
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Anuj Arora
11 March 2010
03:33 PM
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It is a very important piece if we see it in the current context. Rather than sticking to flowery writing, it is always great to read well reported pieces. Looking forward for more pieces like this, we want information first, than comes the description and colourful writing. Thanks!
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Zahid H Javali
6 March 2010
02:44 PM
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Like most writers, Guha's analysis falls short of suggesting clear-cut agenda for the Congress. Just documenting the rise and fall of dynasty politics is just not it. Just mentioning that the Congress should steer clear of sycophancy and cronyism may not be the only way for the national party to stand tall. However, I do acknowledge that his writing is lucid and he has an authoritative take as a historian. But he could do with more instrospection and thinking out of the box, rather than just report history the way it was. Today's generation demands answers and not more questions. Hoping to see another lengthy installment from Guha on how Congress can repair itself with clearly spelt out agenda for both Sonia and Rahul.
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Kabir
5 March 2010
07:02 PM
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Guha's writings are always amazing. The critical analysis of the things around Congress party can only be done by him.
Congress has to learn a lot of lessons from its own past. Otherwise the history will never forgive the party for its own deeds to demoralise its own very character and identity.
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