ABSTRACT
The founders of the groups were, like the Communists, left-wing middle-class intellectuals who, inspired by a conviction that liberation from colonial rule was an essential prerequisite for the development of Socialism in India, had joined the fight for national independence. The party's objective, the congress declared, was India's 'complete independence in the sense of separation from the British Empire and the constitution of a Socialist social order'. The formation of the Socialist party had, understandably, been a great inconvenience for the Communists. The Congress Socialist party had almost bled itself to death through its alliance with the Communists. The ideology and methods of the Praja Socialist party had been moulded on the Western European style of Social Democracy. Moscow's version of the war, which condemned Britain as its creator, released the Indian Communists from any embarrassment of conscience in the crucial struggle of democracy against Fascism.
