द इण्डियन स्ट्रगल / भारतीय स्वाधीनता संग्राम (नेताजी सुभाष चन्द्र बोस - ऐतिहासिक विश्लेषण)

136 THE INDIAN STRUGGLE It was the unique personality of Deshbandhu Das that was able to combine into one party such dissimilar elements, to wrest the Congress machinery from the hands of the orthodox 'No Changers' and to carry on a fight against the bureaucracy on many fronts. But in his absence, there was no one com- petent enough to continue his many-sided activities or to keep together the diverse elements that composed the Swaraj Party. The result was that the Swaraj Party remained in power only so long as the Mahatma did not emerge from his voluntary retirement. When he did emerge in 1929, the Swarajist leader, Pandit Motilal Nehru, surrendered without even the show of a fight. The death of Deshbandhu C. R. Das may be regarded as the beginning of a period of all-round depression in the country. If Mahatma Gandhi had come out of his retirement exactly at this juncture, things might have taken a different course, but unfortunately for India, he did not do so. The Deshbandhu's personality was, among other things, a power- ful cementing factor within the Swaraj Party and also in the domain of Hindu-Moslem relations. It served, moreover, to tone up the attitude of the Party to an extremist pitch. In his absence, dissensions began to appear within the Party. The most important of these was the revolt of the Mahrash- trian Swarajists led by Mr. M. R. Jayakar of Bombay and Mr. N. C. Kelkar of Poona. The Maharashtrian Swarajists had never fully believed in the 'uniform, continuous and con- sistent' opposition of the Swaraj Party, but they had never- theless followed the Deshbandhu and his policy with unques- tionable loyalty. They believed in the theory of 'responsive co-operation' propounded by Lokamanya Tilak at the time of the Amritsar Congress in December 1919. This theory implied that there should be co-operation with the Government in so far as they adopted measures calculated to benefit the country, but non-co-operation or opposition, in so far as their policy was harmful to the public interest. The Maha- rashtrian Swarajists looked upon the Deshbandhu as their leader since the time of Lokamanya's death and had therefore given their support and allegiance to his policy, regardless of their personal views. When Pandit Motilal Nehru assumed