ABSTRACT
In a straightforward statement dated October 1937, Jayaprakash Narayan outlined the purpose of the united front, highlighting the differences between the Congress and the Congress Socialist Party (CSP). The united front was intended to be an intervention, an opportunity to decisively transform the national movement from a bourgeois–democratic revolution into a force struggling to secure comprehensive national liberation. M. N. Roy outlined theories that eventually permeated united front ideology. In his assessment of the Congress, he highlighted the potential of united front tactics. Roy's ideas about the united front—although not deliberately expressed as such—began circulating within international communism. The united front sought to coordinate the country's disparate Marxist ideologies. It expressed an ideal of Left unity. The founding of the CSP helped define the socialist attitude toward the united front, even before the concept was formally expressed in a specifically Indian context.
