Strategy and Ideologies of the Indian National Movement

Strategy and Ideologies of the Indian National Movement

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The long-term dynamics of the Indian national movement cannot be understood merely as a series of protests against colonial exploitation. A people’s capacity to struggle depends not only on the fact of domination and its comprehension, but equally on the strategy and tactics underlying that struggle — and on the ideology that sustains mass participation in it.

Because the leaders of the Indian national movement, unlike those of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, were not theoretically inclined and rarely set down their political strategy in explicit written form, this dimension of the freedom struggle has often been underexamined.

Yet the movement’s phases of constitutional activity, constructive work, mass civil disobedience and Satyagraha can only be properly understood — and historically evaluated — when read as integral parts of a coherent underlying strategy, built upon an equally coherent anti-colonial ideology.

Part I: Strategy of the Indian National Movement

The Untheorized Character of Nationalist Strategy

• Large elements of the nationalist strategy were evolved during the Moderate and Extremist phases of the movement, but it was structured and brought to fruition during the Gandhian phase, in Gandhiji’s own political practice.
• Existing writings have largely failed to deal with the strategy adopted by the national movement, chiefly because that strategy itself remained largely untheorized.
  • Unlike the leaders of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, Indian nationalist leaders did not write books and articles setting out their political strategy explicitly.
• Even so, the movement’s various phases — constitutional work, constructive programmes, key political decisions, and forms of struggle such as non-violence and Satyagraha — cannot be properly evaluated except as parts of one basic strategy.

Factors Behind the Evolution of Nationalist Strategy

• The specific nature of British rule and the colonial state. The nationalist strategy was shaped, at its root, by Indian leaders’ understanding of the colonial state as semi-hegemonic and semi-authoritarian — a character best described as legal authoritarianism. Unlike Hitler’s Germany, Czarist Russia, Chiang Kai-shek’s China or Batista’s Cuba, colonial rule in India was not based on force alone.
  • The colonial state was established by force, and force remained its ultimate sanction — naked force was often used to suppress peaceful movements.
  • Yet it was equally based on civil institutions such as elected assemblies, local government bodies, courts, and schools and colleges, and, above all, on the rule of law. It provided a measure of civil liberties in non-movement periods and, even while suppressing popular opposition, often observed established rules of law and administrative codes. In short, it was semi-democratic, semi-authoritarian.
• The semi-hegemonic basis of colonial acquiescence. This character rested on two notions carefully inculcated among Indians over a long period.
  • First, that the foreign rulers were benevolent and just — the Mai-Baap of the people — who were economically, socially and culturally “modernizing” India.
  • Second, that the colonial rulers were invincible, that opposing them was futile, and that Indians were too weak and disunited to resist successfully.
• The policy of the carrot and the stick. The colonial rulers also offered constitutional, economic and other concessions to popular movements rather than relying on repression alone.
• It was in this specific context — against a semi-hegemonic, semi-authoritarian colonial state — that the national movement gradually evolved its strategy and tactics.

The Basic Strategic Perspective: A War of Position

• The core strategic perspective of the national movement was to wage a long-drawn-out hegemonic struggle — in Gramscian terms, a war of position.
  • A hegemonic struggle is, at bottom, a struggle for the minds and hearts of people, aimed at continuously growing nationalist influence among them through different channels and across the different phases of the movement.
  • The movement alternated between phases of extra-legal, law-breaking mass movement and phases of functioning within the four walls of the law — but both types of phases were geared towards expanding nationalist influence among the people.
• This was, moreover, not a strategy of gradual reform, but one of active struggle aimed at wresting power from the colonial rulers.

Objectives of Nationalist Strategy

The effectiveness of the nationalist strategy rested on the active participation of the masses, whose political passivity — especially in the villages — had been consciously nurtured by the colonial authorities as a pillar of colonial stability. Four key objectives followed from this.

• Politicizing and activizing the masses. The first objective of the movements of the Gandhian era was to bring the masses into active politics, since, as Gandhiji repeatedly declared, people “can have Swaraj for the asking” only when they “have attained the power to take it.”
• Eroding colonial hegemony inch by inch, in every area of life. Since the British ruled primarily through a carefully organized belief system rather than force alone, undermining that belief system — winning the battle of ideas — became central to nationalist strategy.
  • A major objective of colonial ideology was to hide the true face of the enemy — colonialism itself — that is, to obscure the primary contradiction between the interests of the Indian people and colonial rule. The counter-hegemonic task of the national movement was to expose this contradiction to the light of day.
  • The most important element of nationalist strategy was therefore ideological-political work, aimed above all at undermining the twin notions of British benevolence and invincibility.
    • The intellectual framework undermining the notion of benevolence was initiated by Dadabhai Naoroji, Justice Ranade, R.C. Dutt and other Moderates, and later carried to the lower middle classes by the Extremists and to the masses during the Gandhian era.
    • The notion of invincibility was frontally challenged by the sturdily independent newspapers of the late nineteenth century, legislative council work by leaders like Pherozeshah Mehta and G.K. Gokhale, the bold propaganda of Lokamanya Tilak, Aurobindo Ghose and other Extremists, and the death-defying deeds of the Revolutionary Terrorists.
    • It was, however, the law-breaking mass movements of the post-1918 period that performed this task among the ordinary people — destroying the myth of British invincibility, instilling fearlessness and the capacity for sacrifice, and inculcating the belief that no people could be ruled without their consent.
• Undermining the loyalty of the colonial state apparatus. A third objective was to weaken the hold of the colonial state on its own civil servants, police and armed forces, and to win them over — or at least loosen their obedience — to the nationalist cause.
  • The movement met with real success here: the behaviour of police and jail officials changed qualitatively over time, and a large number of officials actively helped the 1942 movement at great personal risk.
  • The virtual disappearance of loyalty among the police, army and bureaucracy after 1945, and the resulting disarray of British administration, were major reasons behind Britain’s eventual decision to quit India.
• Weakening colonial hegemony among the British public and expanding India’s democratic space. From its early days, the movement worked to erode colonial ideology’s hold on British public opinion — a continuity running from the British Committee of the National Congress in the 1890s, aided by William Digby and William Wedderburn, to the India League, in which V.K. Krishna Menon and Fenner Brockway were active.
  • This effort, together with attempts to win the support of non-Congress leaders and Indian public opinion, also served a fourth objective: to constantly expand the semi-democratic political space and prevent the colonial authorities from narrowing the space available for legal activity and peaceful mass struggle.

Struggle-Truce-Struggle (S-T-S’): The Long-Drawn-Out Character of the Hegemonic Struggle

• The second major aspect of nationalist strategy was the protracted, cyclical character of the hegemonic struggle, described as Struggle-Truce-Struggle (S-T-S’).
  • A phase of vigorous extra-legal mass movement and open confrontation with colonial authority was followed by a phase of withdrawal, during which any political concessions wrested from the regime were tested and shown to be inadequate.
  • In this more “passive” phase, intense political and ideological work continued among the masses within the existing legal and constitutional framework, while forces were gathered for the next round of struggle at a higher level.
  • This S-T-S’ strategy culminated in the call for Quit India and the eventual achievement of independence. Both types of phases were used — each in its own way — to undermine colonial hegemony, train nationalist workers, and build the people’s capacity to struggle.
• The entire process was an upward spiralling one, advancing through stages, with each stage representing an advance over the one before it.
  • At the same time, the national leadership recognized that liberation remained incomplete until state power was actually transferred — an advanced stage of constitutional reform did not amount to partial freedom.
  • Freedom was treated as a whole: until fully won, it was not won at all. Any other view risked turning Indians into “partners” of colonialism during reform phases, and the national movement into something co-opted by the colonial state.
    • Indian nationalists avoided this trap by treating even the non-mass-movement phases as phases of political, anti-colonial struggle.
  • A basic feature of the strategy was to move from stage to stage without ever being co-opted by the regime, which remained opposed and struggled against at every stage — only the form of struggle changed.
    • In extra-legal mass movement phases, laws were broken and civil disobedience practised; in the “passive” phases, there was mass agitation, intense ideological work — extensive tours by leaders, large-scale public meetings — and the organization of workers, peasants, students and youth, largely by the Left-wing, through the late 1920s and 1930s.
  • Both types of phases were thus seen as equally rich in anti-imperialist content and as parts of the same anti-imperialist strategy — the political struggle was perpetual; only its forms changed. As Gandhiji put it: “Suspension of civil disobedience does not mean suspension of war. The latter can only end when India has a Constitution of her own making.”

Why Two Types of Phases? The Logic of S-T-S’

• A basic question about the S-T-S’ strategy is why a phase of “war of position” had to inevitably follow a phase of “war of movement” — why the national movement could not simply take the form of one continuous mass struggle until freedom was won.
• The Gandhian strategy rested on the assumption that, by its very nature, a mass movement could not be sustained indefinitely: it must ebb sooner or later, and periods of rest and consolidation — “breathing time” — had to intervene so the movement could recuperate and gather strength for the next round.
  • This was because the masses on whom the movement was based invariably grew exhausted after some time; their capacity to confront the state or make sacrifices was not unlimited.
  • The national leadership made continuous efforts, through ideological work, to increase the people’s capacity to sacrifice and face repression — while simultaneously recognizing the limits of that capacity, and not overstraining it.
• The strategy also took account of the fact that the colonial state, at least till 1945, remained strong and loyal to itself, retaining considerable capacity to crush a movement, as it did in 1932–33 and 1942.
• The rationale for two types of phases also rested on the recognition that, while a mass movement needed a “standing army” or “steel frame” of whole-time political workers, it could not be based on them alone — its real striking power had to come from the masses themselves.
  • The national movement produced thousands of whole-time workers who devoted their lives to the freedom struggle, but while they played a crucial organizing role, the movement’s foundation had to remain the masses.
• Consequently, alternating between mass confrontation and a phase of non-confrontation was an inherent part of a mass-based strategy of political struggle — grounded in a specific understanding of the limits to which both the people and the government could go.
  • Once the need for both types of phases was accepted, the decision on when to shift from one to the other became a purely tactical question rather than a matter of principle.
  • Gandhiji offered rare glimpses of his thinking on this in his own writing. In 1938, he wrote: “A wise general does not wait till he is actually routed: he withdraws in time in an orderly manner from a position which he knows he would not be able to hold.”
  • In 1939, he added: “An able general always gives battle in his own time on the ground of his choice. He always retains the initiative in these respects and never allows it to pass into the hands of the enemy. In a Satyagraha campaign the mode of fight and the choice of tactics — whether to advance or retreat, offer civil resistance or organize non-violent strength through constructive work and purely selfless humanitarian service — are determined according to the exigencies of the situation.”
  • The timing of starting or withdrawing a movement, in other words, was decided by Gandhiji and the national leadership on the basis of their assessment of the movement’s strength, the staying power of the masses, and the government’s political and administrative reserves. Similarly, the question was never whether to negotiate with the government, but when, how, on what terms, and with what likely outcome.

Constructive Work

• Constructive work played an important role in Gandhian — and even pre-Gandhian — strategy, organized primarily around the promotion of khadi, spinning and village industries, national education, Hindu-Muslim unity, the struggle against untouchability and the social upliftment of Harijans, and the boycott of foreign cloth and liquor.
  • It was symbolized by hundreds of Ashrams that came up all over the country, almost entirely in the villages.
• Constructive work was basic to a war of position: during the “passive” or non-mass-movement phase, it filled the political space left vacant by the withdrawal of civil disobedience, solving the basic problem every mass movement faces — sustaining a sense of activism between rounds of confrontation.
  • It also had the advantage of involving very large numbers of people. Parliamentary and intellectual work could be done by relatively few, and not everyone could go to jail, but constructive work was within the reach of all.
  • The hard core of constructive workers also provided a large cadre for the Civil Disobedience Movement — Gandhiji’s “steel-frame” or standing army.

Constitutional Reforms and Legislative Councils

• Constitutional reforms and legislative councils formed a basic element of the colonial strategy for meeting the challenge of Indian nationalism, requiring the Indians to evolve an equally complex approach towards legislatures.
  • The complexity arose because constitutional structures represented, on the one hand, instruments of colonial domination and attempts to co-opt and derail the national movement, and, on the other hand, the fruits of anti-colonial struggle — a measure of the changing balance of forces and the widening democratic space in which the movement could operate.
  • The colonial authorities hoped constitutional work would weaken the nationalist urge towards mass politics and promote dissension between constitutionalist and non-constitutionalist, Right and Left, elements within the nationalist ranks.
• In response, national leaders had to follow both the logic of the constitutional reforms and the logic of their own strategy: once colonialism was forced to yield political space, that space had to be occupied so the political-ideological struggle could be waged from within it.
  • After considerable debate within nationalist ranks, the answer was to work the reforms, but in a manner that upset imperialist calculations and advanced the nationalist cause.
  • From 1880 onwards, the dominant sections of the national leadership viewed the councils in the wider perspective of undermining colonial hegemony.
  • Work in legislative councils, municipal bodies, and, after 1937, through popular ministries, was also used to secure relief for the hard-pressed people, build public confidence in Indians’ capacity for self-government, and win prestige for the Congress and the national movement.
• This strategy registered considerable success.
  • Council work filled the political void while the national movement recouped its strength, and those working in legislatures and municipal bodies largely avoided being co-opted or absorbed by the colonial state.
  • They successfully exposed the hollowness of colonial reforms, showing that India remained ruled from Britain in British interests, backed by “lawless laws” whenever it suited the rulers.
  • The Congress also successfully avoided a split once the lessons of the Surat split of 1907 had been absorbed — possible because Congressmen after 1919 were, as a whole, committed to mass politics rather than constitutional politics alone, and abandoned the legislatures for mass movement whenever the tide of mass upsurge rose. Legislatures were treated not as instruments for the gradual reform of the colonial structure but as arenas for the struggle to overthrow it.

Non-Violence as Strategy

• For Gandhiji, non-violence was a matter of principle; for most of his contemporaries in the Congress — C.R. Das, Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Azad, Sardar Patel, Acharya Narendra Dev and others — it was a matter of policy, an essential component of the Congress’s overall strategy.
• Non-violence was, in fact, integral to the nature of the Indian national movement as a hegemonic movement built on wide mass mobilization.
  • Non-violent forms of struggle allowed participation by people who could never have joined a movement organized on violent lines — particularly true of women’s participation. Women may have found it difficult to join an armed struggle in large numbers, but in enduring suffering, facing lathi-charges, and picketing for hours in summer or winter, women were often stronger than men.
• Non-violence was also linked to the semi-hegemonic, semi-authoritarian character of the colonial state and to the democratic character of British polity — it meant, above all, fighting on the terrain of moral force.
  • A non-violent mass movement placed the rulers on the horns of a dilemma. Hesitating to suppress a peaceful movement, even though it broke colonial laws, amounted to an abdication of administrative authority and a confession of weakness. Suppressing it by force was morally difficult to justify, since it meant crushing a peaceful, non-violent movement.
  • The colonial authorities were, in effect, in a no-win situation: a semi-democratic regime had no real answer to a non-violent mass movement with massive popular support. In practice, the authorities vacillated between the two choices, usually opting for suppression — and each act of suppression eroded colonial hegemony a little further, exposing the coercive foundations beneath the rule of law.
• Non-violence was also linked to the fact that a disarmed people had few other options.
  • The colonial state had systematically disarmed the Indian people since 1858, making it nearly impossible for them to obtain arms or training.
  • Nationalist leaders understood from the beginning that Indians lacked the material resources to wage an armed struggle against a strong colonial state, whereas in non-violent mass struggle, it was moral strength and mobilized public opinion that counted — resources in which a disarmed people were not at a disadvantage.
    • In a war of position, in other words, non-violent mass struggle was a way of becoming equal in political resources to the armed colonial state.
  • It was also understood that a disarmed people could not withstand massive government repression, and that resort to violence would hand the government justification for a crushing attack on the popular movement — repression that, it was believed, would demoralize the people and breed political passivity.
• Two further points follow: mass movements must, by their very nature, be non-violent; and in India’s case, non-violent struggle was every bit as revolutionary in its effect on the structure of state and society as armed struggle proved to be in other national contexts.

Assessing Success: Hegemony as the Criterion

• The proper criterion for judging success or failure is the extent to which colonial hegemony over the Indian people was undermined, and the people politicized and prepared for struggle.
  • Judged by this standard, these objectives were progressively achieved through successive waves of mass movement alternating with phases of truce.
  • Even movements that were suppressed (1932, 1942), withdrawn (1922), ignored and suppressed (1940–41), or ended in compromise (1930–31) — apparently falling short of their stated objective of winning freedom — were, in terms of hegemony, great successes, marking real leaps in mass political consciousness.
• The strategic practice of the Indian national movement, especially under Gandhiji’s leadership, carries a significance in world history comparable to that of the British, French, Russian, Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions.
  • India remains the only actual historical example of a semi-democratic or democratic-type state structure being transformed through the successful practice of the broadly Gramscian war of position.

Part II: Ideologies of the Indian National Movement

Formation of the Anti-Colonial Ideology

• The Indian national movement was, at its core, the product of the central contradiction between colonialism and the interests of the Indian people.
  • Its leadership gradually arrived at a clear, scientific understanding of colonialism — that the British were using political control to subordinate the Indian economy and society to the needs of the British economy and society, and that the country as a whole was regressing and underdeveloping as a result. On this basis, a clear-cut anti-colonial ideology took shape.
• By the end of the nineteenth century, the founding fathers of the national movement had already worked out a clear understanding of the three modes of colonial exploitation: through plunder, taxation and the employment of Englishmen in India; through free and unequal trade; and through the investment of British capital.
  • They had grasped that India’s colonial relationship was not a historical accident but sprang from the very character of British society and India’s subordination to it. This critique found its sharpest focus in the theory of the drain of wealth — that a large part of India’s capital and wealth was being transferred to Britain.
  • This understanding of imperialism’s economic mechanics was further sharpened after 1918 under the impact of anti-imperialist mass movements and the spread of Marxist ideas.
• This anti-colonial world view was fully internalized by the lowermost cadres of the movement, who disseminated it among the common people in both urban and rural areas during the Gandhian era of mass politics.
  • The twin themes of the drain of wealth and the use of India as a market for British manufactures — with the consequent destruction of Indian handicrafts — formed the very pith and marrow of their agitation, undermining the colonial myth that the British ruled India for Indians’ benefit, that they were the people’s Mai-Baap.
• If the primary contradiction provided the movement’s material or structural basis, grasping it through anti-colonial ideology provided its ideological basis — a crucial distinction, since active mass participation, involving immense sacrifice, cannot rest on a mere sense of being poor or exploited. It requires a strong ideological commitment grounded in an understanding of the causes of that condition.
• Alongside this anti-colonial world view, the movement’s broader socio-economic-political vision rested on the goal of bourgeois or capitalist independent economic development combined with a secular, republican, democratic, civil-libertarian political order, both grounded in principles of social equality.

The National Movement and Democracy

• The national movement was fully committed to parliamentary democracy and civil liberties, providing the soil in which these values could take root at a time when colonial rulers argued that India’s climate, historical traditions and religious and social institutions made it unsuited for democracy — that Indians had to be ruled in an authoritarian, despotic manner. The British also increasingly attacked the freedoms of speech and the press.
• It thus fell to the national movement to fight for democracy and to internalize and indigenize it — to root it in Indian soil.
  • From the outset, it fought for representative government based on popular elections. Tilak and other nationalists before 1920, and later Gandhiji and the Congress, demanded adult franchise for all men and women.
• From its inception, the Indian National Congress was organized along democratic lines: resolutions were publicly debated and then voted upon, and minority opinion was permitted and encouraged to freely express itself. Several of the Congress’s most important decisions were taken after heated debate and open voting.
  • The decision to launch the Non-Cooperation Movement was taken at Calcutta in 1920, with 1,886 votes for and 884 against Gandhiji’s resolution.
  • At the Lahore Congress of 1929, a Gandhiji-sponsored resolution condemning the Revolutionary Terrorists’ bomb attack on the Viceroy’s train passed by a narrow 942 to 794.
  • In 1942, thirteen Communist members of the AICC voted against the Quit India resolution. Rather than condemning them, Gandhiji began his famous “Do or Die” speech by saying: “I congratulate the thirteen friends who voted against the resolution, in doing so they had nothing to be ashamed of. For the last twenty years we have tried to learn not to lose courage even when we are in a hopeless minority and are laughed at. We have learned to hold on to our beliefs in the confidence that we are in the right. It behoves us to cultivate this courage of conviction, for it ennobles man and raises his moral stature. I was, therefore, glad to see that these friends had imbibed the principle which I have tried to follow for the last fifty years and more.”

The National Movement and Civil Liberties

• The national movement was, from the beginning, zealous in defence of civil liberties, fighting attacks by the colonial authorities on the freedom of the press, speech and association.
  • Lokamanya Tilak often claimed that “liberty of the Press and liberty of speech give birth to a nation and nourish it.”
  • Gandhiji’s commitment to civil liberties was total. He explained: “Liberty of speech means that it is unassailed even when the speech hurts; liberty of the Press can be said to be truly respected only when the Press can comment in the severest terms upon and even misrepresent matters. Freedom of association is truly respected when assemblies of people can discuss even revolutionary projects.”
    • He also wrote: “Civil liberty consistent with the observance of non-violence is the first step towards Swaraj. It is the breath of political and social life. It is the foundation of freedom. There is no room there for dilution or compromise. It is the water of life.”
  • Jawaharlal Nehru was perhaps the strongest champion of civil liberties, giving them as much importance as economic equality and socialism.
    • The Resolution on Fundamental Rights, passed by the Karachi Congress in 1931 and drafted by Nehru, guaranteed the rights of free expression through speech and the press and the freedom of association.
    • In August 1936, largely through his efforts, the Indian Civil Liberties Union was formed on non-party, non-sectarian lines to mobilize opinion against encroachments on civil liberties. He declared: “If civil liberties are suppressed, a nation loses all vitality and becomes impotent for anything substantial.”
    • In March 1940, he added: “The freedom of the Press does not consist in our permitting such things as we like to appear. Even a tyrant is agreeable to this type of freedom. Civil liberty and freedom of the Press consist in our permitting what we do not like, in our putting up with criticisms of ourselves, in our allowing public expression of views which seem to us even to be injurious to our cause itself.”
• Over the years, the national movement thus created an ideology and culture of democracy and civil liberties, built on respect for dissent, freedom of expression, the majority principle, and the right of minority opinion to exist and grow.

Limitations of the National Movement

• Secularism was, from the beginning, made a basic constituent of nationalist ideology, with strong emphasis on Hindu-Muslim unity.
  • Although the movement ultimately failed to eradicate communalism and prevent Partition, this stemmed not from any deviation from secular ideology but from weaknesses in its strategy against communalism and its incomplete grasp of communalism’s socio-economic and ideological roots.
• The movement also opposed caste oppression, and after 1920 made the abolition of untouchability a basic part of its programme, though serious ideological flaws remained here too — in particular, a strong anti-caste ideology was never fully formed or propagated.
• The cause of women’s liberation was also not taken up with the seriousness it deserved.

Nation-in-the-Making: Recognizing India’s Diversity

• The national movement fully recognized the multifaceted diversity of the Indian people, accepting that India was not yet a developed or structured nation but a nation-in-the-making, and building its political and ideological work on this understanding.
  • It grasped that common subjection to colonial rule provided the material and emotional basis for nation-making, and that the movement’s own political and ideological practices would play a crucial role in structuring the nation through common struggle.
  • It clearly understood that unifying the Indian people into a nation required taking regional, religious, caste, ethnic and linguistic differences into account.
    • The cultural aspirations of different linguistic groups were given full recognition — from 1921, the Congress organized its provincial committees along linguistic lines rather than the British-created multilingual provinces.

Economic Vision of the National Movement

• The national movement accepted, from the beginning and with near unanimity, the goal of a complete economic transformation of the country through modern industrial and agricultural development.
  • From Justice Ranade onwards, nationalists agreed that industrialization was the only means of overcoming mass poverty.
  • Gandhiji was a partial exception. He opposed machines only when they displaced the labour of the many or enriched the few at their expense, repeatedly saying he would “prize every invention of science made for the benefit of all,” and that he was not opposed to modern large-scale industry so long as it augmented and lightened human labour rather than displacing it — provided such industry was owned and controlled by the state, not private capitalists.
• Nationalists were fully committed to independent, self-reliant economic development — free from foreign capital, with an indigenous capital-goods sector and independent science and technology.
  • Since the 1840s, British economists and administrators had argued for foreign capital investment as the chief instrument of India’s development.
  • Indian nationalists, from Dadabhai Naoroji and Tilak to Gandhiji and Nehru, disagreed vehemently, arguing that foreign capital underdeveloped rather than developed a country, suppressing indigenous capital and, sooner or later, wielding a dominating political influence over the administration.
  • Beginning with Naoroji and Ranade, nationalists envisaged a crucial role for the public sector in building an independent, modern economy. In the 1930s, Nehru, Gandhiji and the Left-wing all argued for the public sector, especially in large-scale and key industries, as a means of preventing the concentration of wealth.
  • By the late 1930s, economic planning was also widely accepted.
    • In 1938, the Congress, then under Subhas Chandra Bose’s presidentship, set up the National Planning Committee under Nehru’s chairmanship to draw up a development plan for free India.
    • During the Second World War, several other plans emerged, the most notable being the Bombay Plan, drawn up by J.R.D. Tata, G.D. Birla and Sri Ram, which also envisaged far-reaching land reforms, a large public sector, and massive public and private investment.
• The movement’s overall world outlook — grounded in anti-colonialism, anti-Fascism, peace and national independence — was itself a powerful element of its wider ideology.

The Growing Socialist Orientation of the National Movement

• From its earliest days, the national movement adopted a pro-poor orientation — the entire economic agitation of the Moderates, and their critique of colonialism, was linked to the growing poverty of the masses.
  • This orientation was greatly strengthened by the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the rise of Gandhiji, and the growth of powerful Left-wing parties and groups through the 1920s and 1930s.
• Across various stages of the struggle, the movement adopted policies and reform programmes that were quite radical by the standards of the time. Major reforms demanded included compulsory primary education; lower taxation on the poor and middle classes; reduction of the salt tax, land revenue and rent; relief from indebtedness and cheap credit for peasants; protection of tenants’ rights; a living wage and shorter working day for workers; higher wages for low-paid government servants, including policemen; the right of workers and peasants to organize; protection and promotion of village industries; the promotion of modern science and technical education; eradication of the drink evil; improvement in the social position of women, including their right to work, education and equal political rights; legal and social measures for the abolition of untouchability; and reform of the machinery of law and order.
• The movement’s basic pro-people orientation, and its belief that politics must be built on a politicized, activized people, made it easier to impart a socialist orientation to it — even though the underlying nationalist developmental perspective remained confined within essentially bourgeois parameters.
  • After 1919, as the movement became a mass movement, Gandhiji evolved a different, non-capitalist, essentially peasant-artisan outlook, though his socio-economic thought was not, by itself, capable of challenging bourgeois ideology’s overall hegemony over the movement.
  • As an anti-colonial movement in a colony where the primary contradiction pitted the entire society against colonialism, the national movement was necessarily a multiclass, popular movement representing diverse and sometimes conflicting class interests.
    • Different classes and strata had different degrees of contradiction with colonialism, and with each other, and therefore participated in the anti-imperialist struggle to different extents and in different ways.
    • The final outcome of the struggle could, as a result, favour different balances of class, political and ideological forces — deciding, in effect, what kind of India — socialist or capitalist — would emerge after freedom.
• Beginning in the 1920s, a powerful socialist trend developed within the national movement, challenging its bourgeois developmental perspective through early Communist groups, Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose, and a large number of socialist-minded individuals and groups.
  • This struggle intensified in the 1930s, joined by the Congress Socialist Party, a reorganized Communist Party, and the Royists.
  • The Great Depression in the capitalist world, the Russian Revolution and the success of the Soviet Five-Year Plans, and the worldwide anti-Fascist wave of the 1930s all made socialist ideas attractive — drawing in most leaders of the late-1920s youth movement and many former Revolutionary Terrorists.
  • The Left-wing worked to popularize the idea of ongoing class struggles within India — between peasants and landlords, and workers and capitalists — organizing these through kisan sabhas and trade unions, while above all striving to push the national movement leftward and give it a vision of a socialist India after independence.
• Jawaharlal Nehru played a crucial role in popularizing this vision of a socialist India, both within the national movement and in the country at large, arguing that political freedom must also mean the economic emancipation of the masses.
  • Through the 1930s, he repeatedly pointed to the inadequacy of existing nationalist ideology and the continued hegemony of bourgeois ideology, stressing the need for a new socialist, essentially Marxist, orientation that would let people study their social condition scientifically.
• Though Left-wing and socialist ideas spread rapidly through the 1930s, they never became the dominant ideological trend within the national movement — but they did become a basic constituent of it, and succeeded in constantly shifting the movement leftward.
  • The national movement increasingly defined freedom in socio-economic terms that went well beyond the mere absence of foreign rule, and by the late 1930s, it was among the most radical of the world’s national liberation movements.
    • This radicalism found expression in Congress resolutions at Karachi, Lucknow and Faizpur (1931 and 1936), in the election manifestoes of 1936 and 1945–46, and in the reforms enacted by Congress ministries between 1937 and 1939.
    • The Congress progressively evolved in a radical socio-economic direction, adopting most Left demands — with a time lag of a few years — a process in which Left politics and workers’ and peasants’ struggles played a crucial role.
    • As a result, even the Congress Right, though opposed to socialism, remained firmly anti-imperialist and committed to basic changes in political and economic power — bourgeois in outlook, but reformist in orientation.
  • This evolution is clearest in the Congress’s shifting agrarian policy, given that the peasant’s social condition was the key question in India.
    • Prodded by the Left-wing and peasant movements, the Congress accepted at Faizpur in 1936 a programme of substantial reduction in rent and revenue, abolition of feudal dues and forced labour, fixity of tenure, and a living wage for agricultural labourers.
    • Congress ministries passed legislation — varying in radical content across provinces — to protect tenants’ rights and prevent expropriation by moneylenders.
    • Finally, in 1945, the Congress Working Committee accepted the policy of abolishing landlordism and vesting land in the tiller, declaring: “The reform of the land system involves the removal of intermediaries between the peasant and the state.”

Gandhiji’s Social Outlook and Agrarian Radicalism

• A major ideological dimension of the national movement was Gandhiji’s own overall social outlook.
  • He did not accept a class analysis of society or the role of class struggle, and opposed the use of violence even in defence of the poor. Yet his basic outlook remained one of social transformation, committed to fundamental changes in the existing structure of economic and political power — and he moved steadily in a more radical direction through the 1930s and 1940s.
  • In 1933, he agreed with Nehru that “without a material revision of vested interests the condition of the masses can never be improved,” and increasingly opposed private property, radicalizing his theory of trusteeship. He repeatedly argued for the nationalization of large-scale industry, condemned the exploitation inherent in capitalism and landlordism, and was sharply critical of the socio-economic role of the middle classes.
  • His emphasis on removing the distinction between physical and mental labour, his stress on social and economic equality and the self-activity of the masses, his opposition to caste inequality, his active support for women’s social liberation, and the overall thrust of his thought towards the exploited and the downtrodden all lent a radical ideological direction to the national movement.
• Gandhiji’s most remarkable shift was towards agrarian radicalism.
  • In 1937, he said: “That the land today does not belong to the people is too true… But Land and all property is his who will work it. Unfortunately the workers are or have been kept ignorant of this simple fact.” In 1942, he reiterated that “the land belongs to those who will work on it and to no one else.”

Gandhiji’s June 1942 conversation with Louis Fischer offers a striking window into this radicalism. Asked what his programme was for improving the lot of the peasantry, Gandhiji replied that “the peasants would take the land. We would not have to tell them to take it. They would take it.” Asked whether landlords would be compensated, he said, “No, that would be fiscally impossible.” Pressed on how he saw the impending civil disobedience movement unfolding, he explained: “In the villages, the peasants will stop paying taxes. They will make salt despite official prohibition… Their next step will be to seize the land.” When Fischer asked if this would involve violence, Gandhiji replied, “There may be violence, but then again the landlords may cooperate… They might cooperate by fleeing.” When Fischer suggested landlords might organize violent resistance, Gandhiji said, “There may be fifteen days of chaos, but I think we could soon bring that under control.” Asked finally whether this meant “confiscation without compensation,” Gandhiji answered plainly: “Of course. It would be financially impossible for anybody to compensate the landlords.”

Conclusion

The national movement thus based itself on a clear-cut anti-colonial ideology and a vision of a civil-libertarian, democratic, secular and socially radical society, with the Indian economy to be developed along independent, self-reliant lines. It was this vision — combined with anti-colonial ideology and a pro-poor, radical socio-economic orientation — that allowed the national movement to root itself among a politically awakened and politically active people, and to acquire the character of a genuine popular people’s movement.