LET us then sum up what we have seen about the role and character of the Indian National Congress.
(1) After an initial phase of reckless loot, the British settled down to the more systematic exploitation of India. For this, they spawned and fostered a new set of semi-feudal intermediaries in land (landlords, moneylenders) and an entire class of compradors - Indian agents of the British interests.
(2) Initially, the main role of these compradors was to import British finished goods and export raw materials for British industry. However, as finance capital developed in Britain, as industries became monopolistic and more sophisticated and the capital goods industry was greatly developed, the nature of British exploitation of India changed. The compradors, therefore, assumed new roles - as industrialists dependent on British technology, finance, and protection. The British fostered these industrialists in innumerable ways: giving them tariff protection, subsidies, and often a guaranteed market, insofar as such support basically promoted British industrial and imperialist interests.
Standing in contradiction to the compradors was a fledgling class of national bourgeoisie, but they were unable to grow because of the discriminatory policy of control exercised by the imperialists and the compradors.
(3) The compradors were consistently alarmed at the growth of anti-imperialist sentiments, and intervened in Indian political life in order to divert the nationalist movement. Their disagreements with their imperialist masters were minor; and the compradors never started or supported a mass movement to win greater concessions. The only occasion on which a section of compradors even briefly attempted a break from the British rulers was when they believed that they would soon be working under Japanese rulers; once that prospect faded, so did their brief enmity with the Raj. Thus they never attempted to give up their role as compradors: though, as British imperialism weakened and other imperialist powers took its place, the Indian comprador class edged its way towards submission to these new masters.
(4) The Indian National Congress was a body whose leadership perfectly expressed the political sentiments of the large landowners and the Indian compradors - particularly the latter. The Congress was conceived of and brought into existence explicitly to defuse the possibility of an anti-imperialist anti-feudal revolt. It proceeded to condemn all anti-imperialist acts of the Indian people until the rise of the Swadeshi movement (1905).
(5) The Swadeshi movement set the pattern for the Congress as a mass organisation. The movement had sprung up spontaneously, outside the Congress, and in fact as a break from Congress style of petition-politics. The Congress was forced to participate in the movement because of some of its own militant members, and in fact to control it. When the movement went "too far", the Congress leadership openly attacked it, sabotaged it, and even expelled half its own ranks in order to isolate it.
(6) In the following years, as the British brought all manner of repression on nationalist groups in India, the Congress backed the British and condemned the nationalists. It backed the British imperialists in the First World War, even as the nationalists in India attempted a revolt against British rule.
(7) The post-war upsurge was, however, qualitatively more powerful than any previous upsurge, and the Bolshevik Revolution instilled inspiration in the people and fear in the compradors. Gandhi became the Congress's answer to the seething industrial and agrarian discontent. His methods of "opposing" the regime actually sapped people's existing upsurges and agitational energies through periodic brief bouts of non-violent struggle; even these were canceled at the slightest pretext. It is interesting that he never undertook a mass movement unless widespread mass unrest was already threatening to break out spontaneously. If ever a movement threatened to become a major revolt, the Mahatma would unilaterally call it off. He did this in each and every major Congress-led movement: the Rowlatt Satyagraha, the 1920-22 non-co-operation movement, the 1930 and 1932 civil disobedience movements, and the 1942 Quit India Movement.
(8) Whenever these or any other mass movements took the form of an anti-imperialist/anti-feudal mass revolt, Gandhi and the Congress openly condemned them and worked in concert with the Raj to put them down. Especially after the Second World War, the Congress became the open tool of British repression. The Congress had already received its schooling in the 1937-39 Provincial Governments and in the 1946 Interim Government; by 1947, it had demonstrated that it could be the best guarantor of British interests.
(9) In order to confuse and divert the growing trends of militant Nationalism, Leftism, and Communism, the Indian big bourgeoisie tolerated and even promoted pseudo-Leftists within the Congress ranks. Jawaharlal Nehru was the prime example. Throughout this period, the failure of the Communist leadership to properly assess the nature of Indian society, and therefore the big bourgeoisie and the Congress, hindered it from carrying forward the anti-imperialist movement. Thus when a major Communist-led agrarian struggle took place in India along the lines of the successful liberation war led by the Chinese Communists, the CPI leadership eventually unilaterally withdrew it.
(10) The Congress and Muslim League, each eager to assume office as the successors of the Raj, were willing to allow communal bloodshed rather than let the prize slip from their respective hands. The Congress, which had for over six decades been restraining the freedom struggle and making sure that no act of violence occurred against the British imperialists or their Indian agents, now promoted a plan of communal partition by which the masses of common Indians were set on each other.
(11) The transfer of power on August 15, 1947 essentially changed nothing. It created the internal conditions for the continuation and new methods of exploitation by imperialism in India. The foreign interests, indeed foreign constitution, and all the other trappings of imperial rule remained virtually intact.
Thus the Congress neither fought for Independence nor won it. That fight has yet to be waged and won.
It is true that the Indian National Congress achieved a remarkable feat; it deceived the vast majority into believing that, post-1947, the foreign yoke had been thrown off. The Congress has managed to lengthen the life of imperialism in India by many decades. But it is also true that people can as yet learn from these experiences; they can as yet win their independence; they have as yet a sure path to liberation - the path of people's struggles, in which the history of our freedom movement is rich with lessons.
While the common people today do not really place faith in either the Congress party or even any of the Opposition parties (all of which are effectively heirs to the Indian National Congress), and vote for these parties not out of the belief that radical change will result, but to gain some minor alleviations through trading their votes, they are somehow led to believe that the Congress and these parties in post-1947 India have simply betrayed their old nationalist trust. People's disillusionment can become cynicism if they do not draw the real lessons of their admittedly bitter experiences.
Those who died for our country's liberation will not have died in vain if we remind the people of their struggles and carry forward that cause. It is to represent the true facts as they took place in history - and so to make people aware of who are their real rulers, who are their enemies, and who are their friends - that we have attempted the present study. It is with the possession of this understanding that our people will be able at last independently to assert their destiny.
| Let ten months and ten days pass, Mother,
I'll be born again, Mother, in my aunt's home. If you can't recognise me, Mother, Look around my neck for the noose's scar. |
(Bengali folk song about Khudiram Bose, revolutionary martyr, 1905.)
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