Underline the growth of various forms of Socialist ideologies in the Indian National Movement between World Wars I and II.

Answer:

Between the two World Wars socialist ideas took firm root in Indian nationalism. The Russian Revolution, the Great Depression and the visible poverty of the masses combined to produce communist, Congress Socialist, Nehruvian and revolutionary-socialist currents within the movement.

Sources of the socialist impulse

• The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 offered a model of anti-imperialist transformation.
• The Depression of 1929 exposed the failures of the capitalist order.
• Growing trade union and peasant organisation raised questions of class.
• Indian students returning from Europe carried Marxist and Fabian ideas home.

The communist current

• M.N. Roy founded the Communist Party of India at Tashkent in 1920.
• The party was organised within India in 1925 at Kanpur.
• The Meerut Conspiracy Case of 1929-33 gave communists national visibility.
• They led major strikes and organised the AITUC's left wing.

The Congress Socialist Party

• Founded in 1934 by Jayaprakash Narayan, Acharya Narendra Deva and Ram Manohar Lohia.
• It worked within the Congress rather than against it.
• It pressed for land reform, workers' rights and the abolition of landlordism.
• It sought to give the freedom struggle an explicit social and economic content.

Nehru, Bose and the revolutionaries

• Nehru returned from Europe in 1927 convinced of socialism and planning.
• As Congress President he pressed for economic equality and founded the National Planning Committee in 1938.
• Subhas Bose combined militant nationalism with a programme of planned industrialisation.
• Bhagat Singh's HSRA adopted an explicitly socialist goal after 1928.
• The Karachi Resolution of 1931 on Fundamental Rights reflected this influence.

Impact on the movement

• Peasant organisation grew, culminating in the All India Kisan Sabha of 1936.
• Socialist pressure pushed the Congress towards a programme of social transformation.
• These ideas shaped the economic policy of independent India, including planning and land reform.

Tensions within the movement

• Communists opposed Quit India in 1942, damaging their nationalist credentials.
• Gandhi's doctrine of trusteeship differed fundamentally from class struggle.
• The Congress right, led by Patel and the business classes, resisted socialist demands.
• Socialists nonetheless remained within the Congress until after independence.

Socialist ideologies thus grew from a marginal presence to a formative influence within Indian nationalism between the wars. As Bipan Chandra observed, they broadened the movement from a purely political demand for independence into a wider vision of social and economic reconstruction that shaped the republic to come.