As the Congress’s regional allies — first the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and then the Shiv Sena (UBT) — face splits and the BJP strengthens its position ahead of the Monsoon Session of Parliament next month, possibly to reintroduce Constitutional amendments defeated in April, Leader of Opposition (LoP) Rahul Gandhi has reminded them of the Congress’s past as a “party of resistance”.
In a message to the Congress’s allies on June 8, Gandhi told other INDIA bloc constituents that the Congress had been the “party of resistance” in colonial times. He said the state now, like in colonial times, was not providing parties with a level playing field, indicating that it would need to be something similar if it had to take on the BJP. “… this party began as a resistance movement when modern India did not exist. Unlike all other political parties, it was not built using the infrastructure and protection of the Indian state. The Congress Party is a resistance movement protecting the idea that all Indians are equal. We are fundamentally opposed to the vision of the RSS. We will die — we will die in the Congress Party — before we stand with or compromise with the BJP or the RSS,” he said.
“The Congress Party faced this very same decision more than a hundred years ago. We were a political organisation before 1927. The day Gandhiji said we want independence, we became a resistance movement,” Gandhi said.
The analogy sought to mark the Congress as a party different from all others and evoked the freedom struggle to emphasise the point. However, what remained unsaid was the fundamental difference between the Congress of the 1920s and the present-day party. What Gandhi overlooked is that the Congress was not just a party of resistance 100 years ago, but also a catch-all umbrella party that it isn’t at present.
Umbrella party
While the LoP sees the Congress and Hindutva as fundamentally opposed to each other, this was not the case a century ago. In 1920, when the Congress adopted Mahatma Gandhi’s resolution on non-cooperation at its special session in Calcutta — it was the first mass movement of resistance that the organisation launched — its president was Lala Lajpat Rai, who was also a member of the Hindu Mahasabha. Lajpat Rai presided over the Mahasabha in 1925, 12 years before V D Savarkar became its president. However, Rai had a much more accommodative view of Hinduism. While wanting a secular state, he insisted that Hindus should bargain hard where their interests clashed with those of Muslims. In line with this, he saw no contradiction in being part of both the organisations: as an Indian, he was a Congressman and as a Hindu, a member of the Hindu Mahasabha. A prominent co-traveller of Lajpat Rai in this brand of politics was Madan Mohan Malaviya, who founded the Banaras Hindu University and straddled the worlds of the Congress and the Mahasabha.
One reason why the Congress could manage this apparent contradiction was the personality of Mahatma Gandhi, who was accommodative but overtly religious. The saintly image of the Mahatma made many religious men gravitate towards the Congress. One such example was Swami Shraddhanand, a sanyasi from the Arya Samaj and the Hindu Mahasabha who plunged into the freedom struggle after heeding Gandhi’s call of non-cooperation. The Swami saw the movement as a “Dharmyuddh (religious war)”. He added an extra condition to Gandhi’s manifesto for the hartal on March 30, 1919: “Every person should on that day meditate for half an hour and pray to Parmatma that he may turn the hearts of our opponents.”
The link went even deeper. The followers of Lokmanya Tilak, the predecessor of Gandhi in the Congress, tended to turn to the right after his death. One such figure was B S Moonje, who mentored RSS founder K B Hedgewar. Moonje is also believed to have asked Golwalkar to join the Anushilan Samiti to learn about revolutionary societies. In his book The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India, John Zavos says that the RSS gana vesh (uniform) was first used when Hedgewar, as a Congressman, made volunteers organising the Nagpur session of the Congress in 1920 wear it. Five years later, when he founded the RSS, it became the Sangh’s uniform.
Left within Congress
One of the most “secular” among Congressmen in the colonial times was Jawaharlal Nehru, who stood somewhat apart from the party. He was part of the left-wing turn of the Congress, alongside Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, in the 1930s. In 1934, the Congress Socialist Party was formed within the Congress and aimed at turning the Congress leftward from within. At independence, the socialists broke with the Congress. Such was the ideological diversity in the Congress in the late 1930s that when the Gandhi-Bose clash happened in 1939, Bose repeatedly called those in the pro-Gandhi camp, including Sardar Patel, “right-wingers”.
The socialists apart, even the Communists worked within the Congress for significant periods of time. Historian Bipan Chandra said about the CPI’s foundation in 1925, “The CPI called upon all its members to enroll themselves as members of the Congress, form a left wing in all its organs…”
However, Communist participation in the Congress was guided by the position of the Communist International – for instance, they broke with the Congress in 1928-29, labelling it a bourgeois organisation. In 1935, when the Communist International called for unity with “capitalist” forces in colonised countries to counter the threat of fascism, the Communists under P C Joshi again began to work within the Congress. This was to change yet again during the Second World War, when the Communists boycotted the Quit India Movement, as Britain and the Soviet Union were part of the same camp during the War.
Post-Independence
The diversity within the Congress continued even after Independence, though the socialists broke with it. In 1937, the Congress tried to discourage the participation of Congress members in “communal organisations”. However, the conservatives were part of the Congress in large numbers.
In the Constituent Assembly too, Congress members spoke passionately in support of cow protection. Those like Seth Govind Das wanted it prohibited under Fundamental Rights, but B R Ambedkar prevailed on them to have cow protection as part of the Directive Principles of State Policy, as Fundamental Rights dealt with human rather than animal rights. It was Congress governments in northern states that banned cow slaughter in the 1950s, with Nehru being uncomfortable with their priorities. When in 1949 Nehru wanted the idol of Ram Lalla placed in Babri Masjid removed, Baba Raghav Das, the Faizabad MLA of the Congress, threatened to resign.
The first jolt to ideological diversity in the Congress came in Indira Gandhi’s time, when she tactically took a left turn to triumph against the Syndicate, or the Congress old guard. The conservatives of the Congress largely went with the Congress (O) when the party split in 1969. To save her government, Indira took support from the CPI and Left entrenchment in academic institutions began in the next few years, when Communist historian S Nurl Hasan was Minister of State for Education.
Indira Gandhi, however, reached out to even conservative sections of society in her second stint in power from 1980, with her tough action against Khalistani militants — which ultimately led to her assassination in 1984 — endearing her to conservative Hindus too.
The real break of the Congress with conservatism in India came with L K Advani’s Rath Yatra for a Ram temple at Ayodhya. After the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the Congress made secularism its core mantra to counter the BJP and the ideological diversity within the organisation dwindled.
The Communist parties also turned hostile to it with the advent of liberalisation in 1991. In recent years, however, many former Communists have joined the Congress and are also known to be close to the Nehru-Gandhi family, something that is being called the Left turn of the party leadership.
Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi. (Source: FB) 
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