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

228 THE INDIAN STRUGGLE March 4th, the negotiations came to an end and when the Mahatma put before the Working Committee the terms of the Pact, he made it quite clear that he would not proceed one step further without their unanimous support. At this juncture the responsibility of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was very great. Besides being the President of the Congress, he was the only member of the Working Committee who could be expected to understand and advocate the Left-Wing point of view and his refusal would have been sufficient to prevent the final acceptance of the Pact by the Mahatma and the Working Committee. Unfortunately he gave in and so the Pact was approved by the Working Committee and the next day, March 5th, the Mahatma and Lord Irwin put their signature to it. When the publication of the Pact created an uproar in the country, Pandit Jawaharlal came out with the statement that he did not approve of some of the terms of the Pact—but as an obedient soldier he had to submit to the leader. But the country had regarded him as something more than an obedient soldier. The Pact—called the Delhi Pact or the Gandhi-Irwin Pact —was published the next morning in all the papers. It was a lengthy document and from the Congress point of view the drafting was faulty, because it did not give the impression that the Congress had scored a victory. The perusal of the terms of the Pact had a damping effect on all ‘Congressite’ readers. The writer was in the Alipore Central Jail in Calcutta at the time. For days the papers had published substantially correct forecasts of the terms of the coming Pact. Even the blind followers of the Mahatma, when they read the forecasts, invariably remarked that it was unthinkable that their leader —meaning the Mahatma—would agree to those terms. Nevertheless, what was unthinkable came to be actual. The Mahatma was not blind to the realities of the situation, and in a Press statement issued simultaneously with the Pact, he stressed the point that the settlement did not imply a victory for either party and that he would strain every nerve to make final what was provisional, so that the Pact would prove to be a precursor of the goal, to attain which the Congress had been striving. The terms of the Pact were briefly as follows: