Emphasising differences

THE unseemly and undignified spectacle which some leaders of the Swaraj party have presented to the world militates against the position which that outfit has hitherto justly claimed as the best organised political party in India, and is the culminating point of that fissiparous tendency in our public men which has been the bane of Indian politics now for nearly two decades. This tendency was first visible at the Calcutta Congress session of 1906 and was directly responsible for the Surat disaster of 1907. For one full decade after Surat, it was in the ascendant in Congress politics, and everyone knows what it meant both to the party and the country. In 1916, there was a rapprochement between the two wings of the Congress, but it did not last more than two years. Since 1918, the Liberals as a party have been definitely out of the Congress. In 1920, when the Mahatma captured the machinery of the Congress with his gospel of non-cooperation, a further division in the forces of nationalism appeared imminent. Thanks to most of those who opposed the Mahatma strongly at the Special Congress at Calcutta being either induced to acquiesce or frightened into acquiescing to the Mahatma’s policy and programme at Nagpur, it did not actually take place on a large scale, but a small minority of the old nationalist party did separate from the rest and came to be known as Independents, and some of them left the Congress, as the Liberals had done sometime before.