Out of the election battle of 1937 the Congress emerged with 711 out of 1,585 seats in the provincial assemblies, mainly from the `general', that is, Hindu constituencies. It did badly in Muslim constituencies; contesting only 58 out of 485 Muslim seats, it obtained 26, about 17 of them from the NWFP. It did not win a single Muslim seat in eight out of eleven provinces.
The Muslim League, which organized its election machinery rather late, did not fare well; it won only 108 seats.
The Congress obtained an absolute majority in Madras, C.P., U.P., Bihar and Orissa and a near majority in Bombay. In July 1937 the interim ministries which had assumed office in April resigned and Congress ministries were formed in Bombay, Madras, U.P., Bihar, Orissa and C.P. By September 1938 the Congress assumed office either by itself or as part of coalition in the NWFP, Sind and Assam.
While permitting acceptance of office in the provinces where the Congress commanded a majority, the Working Committee warned that Congressmen in other provinces should not accept office. Again, at its meeting held in August 1937, the Committee stated that a minority Congress party in a provincial assembly could co-operate with other groups in the assembly without sacrificing Congress principles but warned against making commitments regarding the possible formation of a ministry to which the Congress was a party.(1) But opportunism triumphed while forming ministries in provinces like Sind and Assam. In Punjab, where the Unionist Party dominated by landlords -- Muslim, Hindu and Sikh -- was in office, the Congress, a negligible minority in the assembly, had no chance of forming a ministry. Bengal's case was different. Of that, later.
The ultimate selection of Congress candidates for the elections was made by a Congress Parliamentary Sub-Committee with Patel as president. The sub-committee also supervised the election campaign. There were allegations that "candidates had been chosen in such a manner that only the right-wing had found their way into the list, and that the whole plan was to find men who were rich, would endorse the constitution and accept office when the time came". This sub-committee with two other members -- Prasad and Azad -- had the task of guiding the flock of Congress ministers and all legislature parties. "The arrangement between the Congress ministries and the Parliamentary Sub-Committee", writes Shankardass, "was that the former had to do the bidding of the latter in everything.... The Parliamentary Sub-committee had the power to choose the cabinet in each Congress province."(2)
In an article on the Functions of the Working Committee in Harijan of 6 August 1938, Gandhi stated that the purpose of the Congress was "to fight the greatest imperialist power living". So, like an army, "it ceases to be democratic.The central authority possesses plenary powers enabling it to impose and enforce discipline on the various units working under it. Provincial organizations and Provincial Parliamentary Boards are subject to the central authority." What was expected, he said, was "unquestioned obedience". This claim of "fighting the greatest imperialist power living" was a ploy to justify the dictatorial methods and practices of the Congress leaders. Gandhi added: "The Ministers are mere puppets so far as the real control is concerned." The CSP was not wrong when it accused the Working Committee of "assuming the role of a Fascist Grand Council".(3)
The choice of the leader of the Bombay Assembly Congress Party, who would be Bombay's Prime Minister, showed that truth and justice were casualties so far as "the central authority" was concerned. On 3 March 1937, before the AICC met and adopted the conditional office acceptance resolution, Patel had a meeting with K. M. Munshi, who was close to Gandhi and became Bombay's Home Minister, and discussed ministry-formation in Bombay. They decided to nominate B. G. Kher, Munshi's friend, for prime ministership. Unaware of this secret development, the Congress legislators from Maharashtra, the largest provincial contingent of the Bombay Assembly Congress Party, met informally and recommended the name of K. F. Nariman, the president of the Bombay PCC, as the leader of the party. When this news appeared in the press on 9 March, Patel manipulated the election of Kher as the leader at a meeting of the party.(4) When this was known there was an outburst of resentment in Bombay. Summoned by the Working Committee, Nariman accused Patel of influencing the election while Patel claimed to be innocent. Gandhi himself took up cudgels on behalf of Patel. On 21 June he wrote to Patel: "It seems Nariman will fall into the pit he is digging himself." As usual, Nehru mounted the high horse of moral indignation, certified that Patel was blameless and shouted down Nariman at the meeting of the Working Committee. The Committee adopted disciplinary measures against Nariman, who resigned as president of the Bombay PCC. Azad wrote later : "We all know that truth had been sacrificed in order to satisfy Sardar Patel's communal demands [Nariman was a Parsi]."(5)
The ministry-formation led to a development which had far-reaching impact on the history of this sub-continent. In 1936 and 1937, until the formation of Congress ministries, Jinnah and the Muslim League leaders were strongly in favour of a close alliance with the Congress, and their statements, resolutions and approaches were quite conciliatory and friendly. As regards the goal and the means of achieving it, there were actually no differences between the Congress and the League. To quote S. Gopal, "the Congress no longer claimed to be a revolutionary organization and there was no difference on that score between it and the League." The social and economic programmes presented in their election manifestos in 1936 were quite similar.(6)
Before the election in 1937, the Congress did not expect to win a majority of seats in the U.P. legislature; the two parties co-operated with each other and there was a tacit understanding between them that they would form a coalition after the elections. Pattabhi Sitaramayya stated that in U.P. Congress and League leaders had even co-operated "in the selection of candidates". When, after the elections, the Congress leaders for reasons of their own did not immediately accept office, the leader of the League Assembly Party in Bombay, under Jinnah's instruction, rejected the Bombay Governor's invitation to form a ministry. A Leaguer who joined the interim ministry in U.P. was expelled from the League. When a Muslim constituency from which a Leaguer had been elected fell vacant, the U.P. Muslim League left the seat uncontested in favour of a Congress Muslim, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai. Jinnah and the League wanted what he called `a united front' of Congress and League. In a press statement soon after the election, Jinnah affirmed that "nobody will welcome an honourable settlement between the Hindus and the Muslims more than I, and nobody will be more ready to help it", and he made a public appeal to Gandhi to take the lead. Jinnah declared that the League was willing to work with any other group or party in the legislatures on the basis of an agreed programme. It was prepared to fight for the country's freedom and wanted full self-government for its people.(7)
Jinnah wanted Congress-League coalition ministries, particularly in Bombay and U.P., where the Congress had set up very few candidates to contest from Muslim constituencies and was defeated in each of them. When the Congress "agreed to accept office", writes K. M. Munshi, "Jinnah told me...that `we'(Congress and the Muslim League) should work together. I promised to convey his wishes to Sardar [Patel] and Gandhiji, which I did. I understood at the time that Jinnah had a similar discussion with [B.G.] Kher." Munshi says that Jinnah also formally approached Patel and Azad through Sir Cowasji Jehangir.(8) But the Congress leaders wanted absorption, not alliance or `united front': they insisted that the Muslim Leaguers must resign from the League, join the Congress and abide by its discipline in order to become ministers. Jinnah, writes Kanji Dwarkadas, "wanted to co-operate with the Congress Ministry but not by liquidating and sabotaging his own party".(9)
Acknowledging Jinnah's message through B.G. Kher, proposing a Congress-League coalition ministry in Bombay, Gandhi, in his letter of 22 May 1937 to Jinnah, pleaded utter helplessness as he saw "no daylight out of the impenetrable darkness and in such distress" he cried out "to God for light".(10) The prayer remained unanswered and Jinnah's message was lost in that darkness.
In U.P., Nehru agreed to include two Muslim League MLAs in the Congress ministry provided the League dissolved the League Assembly Party and its members joined the Congress Party, accepting its programme, policy and discipline in toto, liquidated the U.P. Muslim League Parliamentary Board and promised not to put up League candidates in by-elections in future and so on -- "pretty stringent conditions", as Nehru himself described them. What the Nehrus wanted was not a coalition with the League but wholesale defection from the League -- its peaceful,voluntary liquidation as the price for two ministerial posts. According to Nehru, when the U.P. League leaders "made an approach to the Congress" for formation of a coalition ministry, "They pointed out that last March their parliamentary board had offered co-operation to the U.P. Congress party on the basis of the `Wardha Programme' as laid down by the [Congress] Working Committee, and were prepared to work under the discipline of the Congress Party". U.P. League leader Khaliquzzaman "agreed to all the conditions except two: the winding up of the parliamentary board and not to set up separate candidates at by-elections.... In effect, he pointed out, this might happen anyhow." Nehru refused to "alter our previous conditions at all; if they were accepted in toto we would agree, not otherwise". Khaliquzzaman's suggestion to defer the question for a few days was not accepted.(11)
It appears that the Congress, which had been rejected by the Muslims in the elections in the whole of India except in the NWFP, was seeking to establish itself among them by buying over their elected representatives. Whether this move was ethical or not, it was the Congress leaders' aspiration to become the sole heir to the British raj and monopolize power in a future self-governing India that stood in the way of the formation of a coalition with the League even on the basis of a Congress programme. The result was disastrous for the people of India. K. M. Munshi, the Congress stalwart, called it "the beginning of the end of United India". This view was shared by many others including Azad, who laid the blame on Nehru.(12) But the policy was not Nehru's alone but that of the entire leadership.
This refusal of the Congress leaders to form a coalition with the League and share whatever little power the British raj had conceded convinced the Muslim leaders that they could not hope to enjoy a share of power in a unitary Indian State with an overwhelming Hindu majority, except as camp-followers of the Congress leaders. Later, Viceroy Wavell said: "Pakistan was the creation of the Congress, for it was the refusal to establish Coalition Governments in the Provinces that alarmed the Muslims and drove them to extremes." Thus V.P.Menon, who became India's Reforms Commissioner and afterwards Patel's right-hand man, wrote in July 1945:
"Thanks to the Congress policy of excluding all the other parties from the Provincial Executive, the minorities learnt that the majority in the legislature could set at nought the wishes of the minorities and that representation in the legislatures would not alone be a sufficient safeguard. This was the real motive power behind Jinnah's cry of Pakistan. Exclusion from a share in the power was the real foundation on which the present position of the Muslim League was built up."(13)
To equate the Western parliamentary system with the spurious one introduced by the British in India where conditions were entirely different, and to justify Congress refusal to form a coalition with any other party where the Congress was in a majority is quite wrong. Among other things, it may be noted that Congress Assembly parties and ministries did not function according to the principles of the parliamentary system in a bourgeois democratic country like Britain. Here the assembly parties and the ministries were responsible not to the assembly parties but to the High Command. Shankardass writes:
"Sometimes the ministers [of Bombay] found the constant supervision irksome, and they complained to the Governor, who in most cases was their confidant .... They did nevertheless accept the dictates of the High Command, for being out of favour with the High Command meant a speedy political death such as that brought upon Nariman."(14)
Secondly, and more importantly, separate electorates and reservation of seats for religious communities made majorities and minorities unchangeable, in the absence of a revolutionary party which was capable of uniting the different communities. If the principle of majority rule was applied inflexibly, it would mean, as Ram Gopal put it, "on the benches of the ruling Party sat all Hindus [and a few members of the minority communities who had cast their lot with them] and on the opposition benches sat all Muslims; the peculiarity consisted in the fact that the opposition could never hope to replace the ruling Party."(15) The reverse was true in a Muslim-majority province like Bengal.
In Bengal the Congress had not contested a single Muslim seat in 1937. In the absence of a coalition with some other party on the basis of a programme, the Congress, which was identified as a party representing the Hindus, would always remain in the opposition and there would be a perpetual Muslim ministry dependent on European votes. This would, instead of bridging the communal divide, make it many times wider and communalism would vitiate the atmosphere. This was exactly what happened because of the policies pursued by the Congress high command, and laid the basis of the dismemberment of Bengal.
At its meeting in March 1937 the Working Committee "decided that any Congressman accepting office in any province where the Congress had failed to get the majority made himself liable to disciplinary action". In an interview to the Amrita Bazar Patrika on 10 July 1937, Nehru, then Congress president, said:
"The plain meaning of the Wardha resolution [of the CWC on 7 July] is that only the Congress parties with a majority in the provincial assemblies are entitled to form ministries from among their own members."
Meeting in August, the Working Committee heard Congress representatives from Bengal, Punjab and Sind, and warned the minority Congress parties in these provinces "against making commitments regarding the possible formation of a ministry to which the Congress is a party".(16)
In Bengal the Congress won 54 seats; the Tripura Krishak Samiti with 5 Muslim MLAs merged with the Congress; the total strength of the Congress increased to 60. Of the Muslim seats, 39 went to the League and 36 to the Krishak Praja Party (KPP), though the latter polled more votes than the former. Independent Muslims won 43 seats and many of them joined either the League or the KPP after the election. The strength of the League rose to 60 and that of the KPP to 59.
The KPP with a sprinkling of Hindu members was predominantly a Muslim organization with a non-communal approach to political and social issues. It believed in the principles of liberal democracy and constitutional action, represented mainly jotedar interests, was widely popular among Muslim peasants, and had some influence on Namashudra (scheduled caste) peasants. Its election manifesto demanded, among other things, the abolition of zamindari without compensation, reduction of rent, relief to peasants from the burden of indebtedness, full autonomy for Bengal, repeal of all repressive laws, and release of all political prisoners.(17) The "Aims and Objects and Programme" of the KPP included, besides other things, "immediate steps for the fixing of a minimum price of raw jute" -- Bengal's main commercial crop. This item and full autonomy for Bengal were distasteful to the Calcutta-based big compradors, particularly the Marwaris, with whose agents the jute centres in Bengal were honeycombed. To them it was a very profitable pastime to depress the price of raw jute.(18)
The task of reviving the Muslim League in Bengal was entrusted by Jinnah in 1936 to up-country Calcutta-based Muslim compradors like the Ispahanis, the Siddiquis and the Adamjis. Jinnah wooed Fazlul Huq, the leader of the KPP, but the talks broke down on the issues like the abolition of zamindari without compensation, the KPP's right to maintain its separate identity, and its right to contest general (that is, Hindu) seats, to which Jinnah refused to agree. Fazlul Huq accused the non-Bengali Muslim businessmen of Calcutta of seeking to dominate the destiny of the Bengali Muslims.(19)
In a statement to the press, Fazlul Huq said that "all talks of Muslim unity and solidarity" were "worse than useless", for more than 90 percent of Bengali Muslims were cultivators on whose labour the others feasted and that there was "no difference whatever between the Hindus and Mussalmans, for their interests are welded into one another, together they stand and together, we are confident, they shall triumph".(20)
During the election battle, the Congress lent its support to the KPP. To quote Ayesha Jalal,
"The Congress and the Krishak Praja had an unwritten agreement not to poach on each other's territory, and this worked to the electoral advantage of both."
Speaking of Fazlul Huq in a postscript to his Autobiography, added in 1941, Nehru stated that "even in organizing this party [KPP], he expressed his friendliness to the Congress. I remember his coming to see me, during a visit of mine to Calcutta prior to the elections, and telling me that he and his party were wholeheartedly for the Congress."(21)
Negotiations started between the Bengal Congress and the KPP for a coalition between the two parties, the prospects of which seemed bright. Many unattached MLAs were willing to support the Congress if it formed a ministry in coalition with the KPP. According to Abul Mansur Ahmed, the talks failed because the Bengal Congress refused to agree to his proposal to give precedence to the amendment to the Tenancy Act and the passing of a Moneylenders' Act over the release of political prisoners. The real reasons were different, of which Mansur might have been unaware.
To quote Gallagher,
"for a while, members of all the factions, such as J. C. Gupta, B. C. Roy, Sarat Bose and T. C. Goswami, could hope to take office in alliance with the Muslim-Namasudra party of Fazlul Haq (Nalinaksha Sanyal to Nehru, 20 February 1937; File E5/840 of 1937, AICC Papers). But the Working Committee would not hear of it (F.N. 144, AICC Papers .... Nehru directed that in Bengal the Congress should not negotiate for membership of any coalition.) `The Praja Party members headed by Maulavi Fazlul Huq begged of the Congress members to form a coalition with them.... Due to Congress decision we were unable to accede to their request'. (J. C. Gupta to Jawaharlal Nehru, 14 Aug. 1937, File P 5/868 of 1937, AICC Papers)."
Humayun Kabir, a leading member of the KPP at the time, afterwards its general secretary and, still later, in the sixties, a minister of the Indian government, regretted that
"In Bengal Mr. Fazlul Huq pleaded and pleaded in vain for active co-operation or even tacit support. Forced into the arms of the Muslim League, he did perhaps more than anybody else in India to restore the prestige of the League and win for it support among the masses of the land."(22)
Nalini Sarkar, close to Birla, served as the link between the KPP and the Muslim League and in his house the League-KPP alliance was formed. He became the Finance Minister in the League-KPP Coalition Ministry and, though expelled from the Congress, his cordial relations with Gandhi remained unimpaired.
The ministry was formed with Fazlul Huq as the Prime Minister, but six out of eleven ministers were zamindars. The KPP's programme of abolition of zamindari and the fixation of a minimum price for raw jute, on which the lives of millions of Bengali peasants depended, had to be shelved. Big up-country Muslim compradors such as the Ispahanis and Adamjis, like their Hindu counterparts, the Birlas, came to play a key role in Bengal's politics. The ministry became dependent also on the support of the British expatriate capitalists. To quote Omkar Goswami,
"Not only did half a dozen ministers (including Nalini Sarkar, Nazimuddin and H. S. Suhrawardy) depend on jute mill interests in varying degrees but the Government's very existence depended on support from the European group in the Legislative Assembly, for which any price was worth paying. In fact, the degree of patronage was strong enough for Benthall to remark, `What a powerful position we have with the Government.... In fact, if we work things rightly I believe they would adopt any policy that we liked to press on them'."(23)
There were revolts within the KPP. Throughout 1938 there were attempts to form a coalition between the Congress, the KPP rebels and some others. Congress leaders of Bengal and rebel KPP leaders pleaded and pleaded in vain for the high command's permission. But Gandhi and the Congress Working Committee would not be persuaded. On 18 March 1938, 20 MLAs and MLCs of the KPP met Gandhi and intimated to him "their desire to see the political situation in Bengal changed and their readiness to work in co-operation with the Congress Party in the legislature if the administration of the Province was run on purely national lines and on an economic basis". Gandhi refused to "be drawn into local politics". It was reported in the press on 5 April that the leaders of the Independent Praja Party (a breakaway group from the KPP), the KPP (another breakaway group led by the former general secretary of the united KPP, Shamsuddin Ahmed), and the Scheduled Caste Party had an interview with Subhas Bose, then Congress president. A written statement proposing a coalition was submitted to the Congress Working Committee, and Shamsuddin Ahmed and two comrades of his met the Committee on invitation. On the same day Birla and Nalini Sarkar had "another interview" with Gandhi. The Committee rejected the proposal.(24)
Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who was Sarat Bose's private secretary and who also handled much of Subhas's correspondence, wrote that "the Congress high command, more especially Mahatma Gandhi, strongly opposed this move" at different times from the autumn of 1937 to break up the League-Huq alliance and to form a Congress-KPP coalition.(25)
When Subhas made another attempt in October 1938, Gandhi at first gave his approval. But Birla, Azad and Nalini Sarkar saw him at his ashram and he changed his mind. Withdrawing his consent in a letter of 18 December to Subhas marked "strictly confidential", Gandhi wrote that "the best way of securing comparative purity of administration and continuity of a settled programme and policy would be to aim at having all the reforms that we desire carried out by the present ministry". He advised Subhas that the ministry's proposed amendment to introduce separate electorates in place of joint electorate for Calcutta Corporation elections should be supported. The Calcutta municipal amendment bill was intended to serve the interests of the Ispahanis and Siddiquis, who controlled the Calcutta District Muslim League, and of British expatriate capitalists.
Later, Nirad Chaudhuri told Leonard Gordon that "Bose felt that...G. D. Birla was interfering. Bose was said to feel that Birla feared Hindu-Muslim unity in Bengal because this would adversely affect Marwari economic domination of Calcutta....In Mr Chaudhuri's opinion, Gandhi acted knowingly in the Marwari interest because he was against Bose personally and against Bengali interests (other than those of his men in Bengal)."(26)
A copy of Gandhi's letter was sent to Birla as copies of all such letters were. Writing to Gandhi's secretary Pyarelal on 25 December, Birla said:
"Please inform Bapu that at the request of Nalini I gave him also a copy of Bapu's letter to Subhas. Of course, I told him to treat it as strictly confidential and he promised to do so. He told me that he might have to show that copy in confidence to Lord Brabourne... and I left the matter to his discretion." (27)
The handing over of a copy of Gandhi's "strictly confidential" letter addressed to Congress president Subhas on a very serious issue to Nalini, which Nalini "in his discretion" might show to Bengal Governor Brabourne, is quite revealing. Like many such facts, it points to the Gandhi-Birla-British raj nexus. Though Birla was the main conduit, there were many others of the type.
Interestingly, Nehru, who was the best defender of Congress ministries, criticized Subhas's move to form a coalition ministry in Bengal as "a rightist step". In reply to Nehru's charge, Subhas wrote :
"If you scrap the policy of office acceptance for the whole country, I shall welcome it.... the proposal of a Coalition Ministry arises because the active struggle for Purna Swaraj has been suspended. Resume this struggle tomorrow and all talk of a Coalition Ministry will vanish into thin air."(28)
Subhas held that under the circumstances a Congress-KPP coalition ministry was necessary to stop the spread of communalism in Bengal.
The Congress leaders' ban on the Bengal Congress Assembly Party's coalition with the KPP proved ominous for Bengal. It resulted in two things, both pernicious. First, it drove many of the secular-minded and progressive Muslims into the arms of communal and reactionary Muslim leaders. The KPP gradually disintegrated. Fazlul Huq became the president of the Bengal Muslim League and a member of the Working Committee of the AIML and provided the League with a mass base in Bengal. Second, it forced the Hindus represented by the Congress to remain in permanent opposition to a Muslim alliance, which formed the government. This gave rise to the politics of confrontation between the two major communities in place of confrontation between the people and British imperialism. As Ram Gopal put it, the Huq-League alliance "was an event of outstanding importance. A Congress-Praja Party coalition would have put itself on a road to Hindu-Muslim understanding; the Praja Party's merger with the League made the Ministry almost wholly communal and gave communalism a foothold to expand." So did the KPP leader Mansur lament that Bengal's politics, if not India's, would have assumed a different character if the Congress had co-operated with the Praja Party.(29) It may be noted that a ban of this kind was not imposed in Sind or Assam, where the Congress Assembly Parties were in the minority.
During this time Birla was after partitioning India and dismembering Bengal and Punjab on a religious basis. On 11 January 1938, more than two years before the Muslim League demanded the partition of India on a religious basis, Birla had pleaded for it. In a letter of that date to Mahadev Desai, Gandhi's secretary, he wrote:
"I wonder why it should not be possible to have two Federations, one of Muslims and another of Hindus. The Muslim Federation may be composed of all the provinces or portions of the provinces which contain more than two-thirds Muslim population and the Indian states like Kashmir.... if anything is going to check our progress, it is the Hindu-Muslim question --not the Englishman, but our own internal quarrels."(30)
Muslim leaders had dismissed Chowdhury Rehmat Ali's `Pakistan' scheme, first proposed in 1933, as "chimerical". The Joint Parliamentary Committee was told by a Muslim delegation in 1934 that Pakistan was "a student's scheme which no responsible people had put forward". Several other schemes were proposed in the thirties, but most of them, like Mohammed Iqbal's in 1930, envisaged grouping of Muslim provinces in North-Western India within an Indian federation or confederation. But at the Sind Provincial League Conference, held in October 1938, Sir Abdulla Haroon, Chairman of the Reception Committee and a big comprador merchant, proposed in his speech the division of India into separate Hindu and Muslim federations and incorporated his proposal in a draft resolution. It is reported that Jinnah opposed this move and references to the division of India were dropped.(31)
In December 1939, Birla had only one solution to offer to Stafford Cripps: "separate Hindu and Muslim nations, with the cession of districts and appropriate population movements, followed, perhaps, by a loose federation holding the minimum powers necessary". But the League's general secretary Liaquat Ali Khan proposed to Cripps three alternatives: partition; free sovereign states, with Hindu and Muslim federations, and a confederation; and Dominion status for each province with a federal government exercising such powers as the provinces chose to cede, subject to their right to opt out.(32) More of this later.
As noted before, Gandhi began to insist in London in 1931 that the Congress represented all communities and all classes in India and was capable of delivering the goods, and wanted the British Government to settle the Indian problem with the Congress alone. The same message he sent to Lord Lothian on 20 January 1938. At a meeting of the Gandhi Seva Sangh on 25 March 1938 Gandhi said:
"There will be only one power in India with whom they [the British] can discuss matters, and that power will be the Congress."
In Harijan of 6 August 1938 Gandhi wrote that "the Governors must recognize the Congress as the one national organization that is bound some day or other to replace the British Government".
Gandhi stated in Harijan of 3 December 1938:
"It is surely in their [the Princes'] interest to cultivate friendly relations with an organization [Congress] which bids fair in the future, not very distant, to replace the Paramount Power, let me hope, by friendly arrangement."
In an interview in December 1938 with H. V. Hodson, Gandhi laid down the law that "so far as the political programme is concerned" there could exist no other party in India and that "For religious and social activity, of course, every community can have its separate organizations".(33)
If Gandhi could, he would not allow any other political party representing communities or classes to exist. This totalitarian claim was the same as that of the fascists of Europe.
Nehru did not lag behind. In May 1936 he said: "The Congress represents all people and all views in the country." He continued to speak and write in the same vein.(34) He claimed that there were only "two forces" or "two parties" -- the Congress and the British raj -- and that "Intermediate groups, whatever virtue they may possess, fade out or line up with one of the principal forces".(35)
How reasonable was the Congress leaders' claim that the Congress represented all classes and communities? The claim was a spurious one. First, representing as they did the interests of the big compradors, landlords and princes, they were hostile to the interests of the workers and peasants. Second, the claim that they represented all communities was disproved by facts. As noted before, the Congress won only 28 seats out of 485 Muslim seats in the whole of India in the elections to the provincial assemblies in 1937. Its influence on the scheduled castes was far from what the Congress leaders claimed. B. R. Ambedkar hurriedly knocked together an Independent Labour Party in Bombay a few months before the elections and his party won 13 out of 15 seats reserved for the scheduled castes in Bombay, though its resources were nothing compared with those of the Congress. According to Ambedkar, the seats won by the Congress with a majority of scheduled caste votes were only 38 out of 151 reserved for scheduled castes in India. He said that "the results of 1937 Election conclusively disprove the Congress claim to represent the Untouchables". The Congress organization itself was overwhelmingly Hindu. In 1936, out of 143 members of the AICC only six were Muslims -- 3 from the NWFP, 1 from Bihar and 1 from U.P. and the sixth member, Abdul Kalam Azad, sat in the committee as a former Congress president.(36)
It appears that, rhetoric apart, the Congress leaders did not themselves hold that the Congress represented the entire Indian people. On 25 March 1938 Gandhi said to a Gandhi Seva Sangh meeting:
"Today, we have power neither over the Princes, nor over the zamindars, neither over the Muslims nor over the Sikhs."
Kripalani said: "As for the Muslims, their hatred of Congressmen exceeds their hatred of Hindus."
On 28 March Gandhi said that the Congress
"got many Muslims enrolled as members. But they had to be coaxed into becoming members. This is a kind of flattery, or you may call it a politically motivated policy. We maintained friendly relations [with the Muslims] merely from a practical point of view: it was like a businessman's practical policy".
At a meeting of the Congress Working Committee Nehru observed that "the Mussalmans had absolutely no trust in him [Gandhi] and considered him their enemy".
On 31 August 1937 Birla, the great benefactor of the Congress and Congress leaders, wrote to Gandhi:
"The Congress is without doubt a party enjoying mass support, but it is essentially a Hindu Party..."(37)