Nehru: The Invention of India

A Note on Indian

Political Movements

This book mentions a number of Indian political parties and movements of importance to understanding Jawaharlal Nehru’s life and times and appreciating his legacy.

The Indian National Congress was founded in 1885 by a liberal Scotsman, Allan Octavian Hume, to provide a forum for the articulation of an Indian viewpoint on issues of the country’s governance and political development. The Congress evolved into the country’s premier political party (whose annual sessions, in different venues around India, attracted ever-greater attendance and attention). Its leadership was initially drawn from the educated professional classes, and its presidents, who were elected annually, belonged to various faiths, with Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Parsis among the first two dozen presidents. Around the cusp of the century a schism developed within the Congress between the Extremists, led by Tilak, and the Moderates, led by Gokhale — the former seeking more radical action to overthrow the British, the latter pursuing their goals through constitutional means while seeking fundamental reforms leading to self-government. This schism ended around the time of the First World War.

The advent of Mahatma Gandhi, who returned to India from a long sojourn in South Africa in 1916, transformed the Congress from an elite debating society passing largely ineffectual resolutions into a mass movement for complete independence. In order to engage the Muslim masses and to promote Hindu-Muslim unity, Gandhi committed the party to supporting the Khilafat movement, which organized anti-British demonstrations around India clamoring for the restoration of the Caliphate in the defeated Ottoman Turkey. The victory of the secular republican Kemal Ataturk in the Turkish civil war rendered that cause otiose, but the campaign demonstrated both the potential and the limitations of popular mobilization cutting across communal lines. During the 1920s the major division in the Congress Party was between those advocating civil disobedience and noncooperation with the British and those who, calling themselves Swarajists, contested elections for seats in the institutions of limited self-governance allowed by the British. By the turn of the decade, though, both groups had reunited under Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership to demand full independence (though many were prepared to settle for Dominion status within the British Empire). The principal differences within the Congress through the 1930s were between the radical socialists and the more conservative party elders. As the book explains, Jawaharlal Nehru had a foot in both camps.

Outside the Congress, a number of minor parties advanced various particularist interests, of which the main group mentioned in this book is the Liberal Party, led by Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, which sought to work with the British to progressively expand Indian self-rule. The Liberals had little popular support and sought no mass base, but the British accorded them attention out of proportion to their political importance.

In the meantime, a far more fundamental challenge developed within the nationalist movement, this time not on ideological or tactical lines but on communal ones. The All-India Muslim League was founded in 1906 after a deputation of Muslim notables called on the viceroy to affirm their loyalty to British rule and seek the authorities’ support for Muslim interests. For a long time the League was not seen as a viable alternative to the Congress, and indeed many of its leaders enjoyed membership in both bodies. Up until the late 1920s it is possible to find the same names presiding over different sessions of the Congress and the League. Serious differences arose in the course of the Gandhian success at mass mobilization, leading the League, under Mohammed Ali Jinnah, principally out of fear of the consequences of “majority rule” (which they saw as likely to permit Hindu domination), to develop an increasingly separatist platform. While the Congress claimed throughout to represent Indians of all faiths, and continued to have important Muslim leaders (notably Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, its president from 1940 to 1946, and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the “Frontier Gandhi”), the League increasingly asserted that it alone spoke for India’s Muslims. Though various regional parties sought to transcend the Congress- League divide by including members of all communities on nonsectarian platforms — notably the Unionist Party in Punjab, which advanced agrarian interests, and the Krishak Mazdoor Praja Party (Farmers, Workers, and Tenants Party) in Bengal — the League eventually triumphed in its aspirations. This book describes the evolution of the chasm between the Congress and the League and its ultimate conclusion — the partition of the country into two states, India and Pakistan, when the British left in 1947.

One other political movement deserves mention. Hindutva, literally “Hinduness,” is the cause advanced by Hindu zealots who harken back to atavistic pride in India’s Hindu heritage and seek to replace the country’s secular institutions with a Hindu state. Their forebears during the nationalist struggle were the Hindu Mahasabha, a party advancing Hindu communal interests neglected by the secular Congress, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or National Volunteer Corps, modeled on the Italian Brown Shirts. Neither found much traction within the Congress, and the Hindu Mahasabha faded away, but the creation of Pakistan and the terrible communal bloodletting that accompanied partition provided Hindu zealots new sources of support. The Bharatiya Jana Sangh, or Indian People’s Party, was founded after independence as the principal vehicle for their political aspirations. The Sangh merged into the short-lived omnibus party, the Janata, in 1977, and reemerged in 1980 as the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. Today the principal votaries of Hindutva are a “family” of organizations collectively known as the Sangh Parivar, including the RSS, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council), the Bajrang Dal, and a large portion of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which since 1998 heads a coalition government in New Delhi.