In 30 Seconds
Story
On 29 January 1939 the Indian National Congress did something it had never done in its history. It held a contested election for its presidency, and the sitting president, Subhas Chandra Bose, standing against Gandhi’s known wishes and his declared candidate, won. The victory, by 1580 delegate votes to 1377 over Pattabhi Sitaramayya, was the high water mark of the Congress left and the beginning of the crisis that broke at the Tripuri session that March, the confrontation in which the movement’s formal democracy and its actual structure of authority met head on, and the actual structure won.
The contest’s issue, beneath the personalities, was the war everyone saw coming. Bose had campaigned on the reading he had brought home from Europe, that Britain’s gathering emergency was India’s supreme chance, that the movement should serve an ultimatum, six months to concede independence, and prepare mass struggle to enforce it, and that a compromise on federation was being hatched by the right that only a fighting presidency could block. The high command’s veterans, Patel and Prasad, Kripalani and Azad, had published against his re election, and Gandhi, whose candidate Sitaramayya explicitly was, met the result with a statement of devastating candour, that the defeat was his more than Sitaramayya’s, that he was glad of it, and that the president was now free to form his own cabinet and pursue his own program, sentences whose surface generosity carried the operative point, that the Mahatma and his men would not serve the program they had opposed. Within days the machinery answered the ballot, twelve of the Working Committee’s members resigning in a body, and Bose, ill with the fever that shadowed his whole crisis, came to Tripuri in March to preside over a session managed by his opponents, carried into the pandal on a sick bed the hostile whispered was political.
Tripuri’s decision took the form of a procedural resolution with the force of a deposition. Govind Ballabh Pant’s motion, carried against the left’s resistance, reaffirmed the confidence of the Congress in the old Working Committee’s policies, declared Gandhi’s guidance indispensable in the coming crisis, and requested the president to nominate his committee in accordance with the wishes of Gandhiji, a formula that reduced the elected president to the appointee of the man his election had defeated. There followed the correspondence of the spring, Bose from his convalescence pressing Gandhi to name the committee or share it, Gandhi replying that their differences of outlook were fundamental and the president must choose his own men and his own path, each letter courteous, immovable and recorded, until Bose, unable to form a committee the Pant resolution had made impossible and unwilling to preside as a cipher, resigned the presidency at the Calcutta AICC of April 1939, Rajendra Prasad succeeding him, and in May announced the Forward Bloc, the story the next chapter carries. The machine completed the rupture in August, the disciplinary resolutions removing Bose from the Bengal Congress presidency and barring him from elective office for three years, the movement’s most popular Bengali expelled from its councils on the eve of the war he had predicted.
The crisis has been argued ever since along two honest lines. Bose’s partisans read it as democracy overturned by a high command that would not accept an election it lost, the Mahatma’s indispensability wielded as a veto, and the movement deprived, at the war’s exact threshold, of the one strategy, struck now, that events soon vindicated, 1942 arriving three years late and leaderless. The other reading holds that a movement built on one method could not be commanded against it, that a president without the confidence of the organisation’s builders and its moral centre could preside but not lead, that Bose’s ultimatum politics in 1939 would have met the repression of 1932 without the world audience of 1942, and that Gandhi’s refusal to lend his name to a strategy he judged disastrous was itself the honesty of the affair. What Tripuri settled in fact was narrower and harder, that the Congress’s sovereignty lay not in its ballot but in its indispensable man, and what it cost was measured six years later, when the rebel it expelled came back upon India’s imagination at the head of an army, the two captains’ argument resumed on a world stage.
