The AAP and the 1935 parallel

Do Arvind Kejriwal and his men have the ability, the foresight, and the historical sense to tread a path different from their historical forebears? And, even more important, do they want to?

April 02, 2015 03:05 am | Updated December 04, 2021 11:31 pm IST

Philosopher and poet George Santayana once said, those who don’t remember history are condemned to repeat it. But Santayana was no historian. Making historical parallels is a fraught exercise. How far do we take the comparisons between history and the present? And, most importantly, why do we undertake the exercise in the first place? The Aam Aadmi Party today — at least till the stage before the recent internal squabbles — was best placed to potentially take over the centre-left-liberal space in Indian politics that was so fully occupied by the Congress for so many decades. At one level, it is quite ridiculous to compare a party created in 2012 with one founded in 1885. It is to the AAP’s credit that we can even contemplate such comparisons. But to a historian who remains as concerned with the present and future of Indian politics as to its past, the historical parallels between 1935 and the present are too glaring to ignore. I am referring here to the differences that arose within the Indian National Congress in the wake of the promulgation of the Government of India Act, 1935, by the colonial government.

A transformation The >split between some of the founding members of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has drawn its share of historical comparisons in the commentariat. But these are perhaps not the right ones. Rather than comparing this moment with the Mahatma Gandhi-Subhash Chandra Bose split, or even the Jawaharlal Nehru-Purushottam Das Tandon dispute, we should be looking at one of the most important, but often overlooked, dates in modern Indian history: 1935.

The differences in 1935 were resolved without a split in the party. Yet, the changes initiated changed the character of the party forever. The Congress’s decision to participate in the elections following the 1935 Act transformed it from an oppositional movement to a party that exercised real political power. From being the chief opponents of the British Raj, the Congress, after 1935, became an organisation that behaved more and more like the Raj. Are we witnessing the beginnings of a comparable change within the AAP? For the first time ever, the 1935 Act offered the opportunity for elected members of Provincial Legislative Assemblies to exercise real power in colonial India. Now, elected members of provincial assemblies would not be outnumbered by appointees of the colonial government. It was quite possible for an individual who had recently been the victim of a police lathi charge to become a cabinet minister and be in charge of the police force at whose mercy he or she had been just a few months earlier. However, the Congress under the leadership of Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, was committed to the ideals of non-cooperation and civil disobedience. From 1929, the party outlined complete independence, purna swaraj , as its political goal. Idealists in the party, including Nehru, wanted to reject the terms of the 1935 Act, calling it “a new charter of slavery”. Power, they argued, ultimately remained with the colonial state, and Bose saw it simply as a new way for the British to retain their power in India.

Idealists versus pragmatists However, the pragmatists among the party leadership disagreed. In their opinion, there was a great deal to be achieved by participating in the elections, not the least of which was real access to the levers of power. Very surprisingly, Gandhiji, despite his commitment to non-cooperation, chose not to come out in support of the Left. His silence ensured the victory of the pragmatists.

There are many ways to understand the split within the AAP. No doubt, personal equations, suspicions, personality clashes, and the like have all contributed to the drama in the AAP we have seen over the last few weeks. Nor is there any doubt that we can also see this as a battle between the idealists and the pragmatists in the party. The idealists wanted the party to stay true to its stated goals. They were upset when they learnt about back room deals between the AAP’s leaders and the Congress to form a non-BJP government in Delhi. They wanted continued and close scrutiny of donations to the party. They wanted the AAP to remain a party with a difference. And, they had a point. But then, so do the pragmatists in the AAP. To stop the Modi juggernaut, they argue, pragmatic steps needed to be taken. They had to make deals. They had to bring in proven election-winners to represent the party in the polls. They could not afford to scrutinise each and every donation that came to the party at a time when funds were desperately needed to fight the good and necessary fight. We are still better than the mainstream parties, they rightly argue. We are still a party of difference, they say. Perhaps so. But here is where some interesting historical parallels might be useful.

Once the pragmatists in the Congress party won the internal battle after 1935, the party as a whole was committed to participating in the elections of 1937. We know the result. It was a huge and somewhat unexpected victory for the Congress. In the short run, it seemed the pragmatists were right. The Congress formed governments in initially seven and later eight of the 11 provinces of British India. There was undoubtedly a period of euphoria following the electoral victory, for instance, at seeing the tricolour now legitimately hoisted on government buildings. Hundreds of Congress volunteers had suffered beatings and bullets in their efforts to do that just a few years before this date. But the people and the polity soon had to pay a price for this pragmatism. To “prove” their credentials as effective providers of “good governance”, Congress ministries made use of colonial laws of sedition to shut down free speech. The Congress governments were praised by imperialists for their commitment to “law and order”. The same Congress that had hesitated even to participate in the elections and form governments was, within a year, engineering what Sumit Sarkar describes as “sordid assembly manoeuvres and floor crossings” to form a government in Assam. In their second term in office in 1946, Congress functionaries played a significant role in undermining the General Strike called for in Bombay to support the mutiny among the Indian ratings of the Royal Indian Navy. The road to dark places is often paved with good pragmatism.

The ‘what ifs’ The pragmatism that drove the Congress to participate in the elections and form governments in 1937, also led to the break-up between the Congress and the Muslim League. The rejection of a coalition with the League in United Provinces after the elections was typical of the arrogance of the pragmatic victors. These reverses also made the League recognise the unviability of contesting the Congress in all-India elections. Their strength, they realised, would at best remain in provinces. A series of events transformed the goal of provincial autonomy into the demand and realisation of Pakistan over the next decade. History is about what happened, rather than what might have happened. But a few historians can help contemplate the “what ifs” of history. What if the idealists had won their battle within the Congress in 1935? What if Gandhiji had supported their efforts to persist in not cooperating with the colonial governments and institutions? “What ifs” are not history, but that alternative vision is not one we can afford to abandon altogether. Rather than a commitment to victory in electoral politics, and consequent minorities and majorities, might we have seen a different sort of polity altogether, perhaps one with a different and more inclusive space for minorities? Perhaps so.

The pragmatists have clearly won the day in the battle within the AAP today. But what do Arvind Kejriwal and his group wish to achieve with that pragmatism? The vision of the Congress pragmatists of 1935 led them, 12 years later, to take over the power that the Raj transferred to them. By that time, the idealists too had been co-opted into the systems of power. In some eyes, the Congress pragmatists were the greatest architects of its political success. Others might prefer to commemorate 1935 as the beginning of the end of the dream of a different India, the death knell of an alternative polity and ideology that would transcend the traps of modern politics. Eighty years on, do Arvind Kejriwal and his men have the ability, the foresight, and the historical sense to tread a path different from their historical forebears? And, even more important, do they want to?

(Sanjay Joshi is a Professor of History at Northern Arizona University, U.S.)

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