ABSTRACT
But the Muslim League was not Congress’s main concern as yet. After the ministries’ resignations, the question of how next to respond remained to be settled. There were genuine moral and political dilemmas to consider. Nehru and the left were committed anti-fascists; but they would not support a war on the basis of continued subjection to British rule, especially as they did not take British claims to anti-fascism at all seriously. The CPI, still outlawed but still in the CSP – until 1941 – characterised the war as another imperialist war (1939-41 was the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact). Nehru himself accepted the CPI line: ‘the war is a purely imperialist venture on both sides. Fine phrases are being used by politicians as they were used in 1914. It seems to me highly important and vital that we should not be taken in by these phrases and pious protestations.’7 Nehru undertook the task of explaining the apparent anomaly of the Nazi-Soviet Pact to Gandhi: unable to find an ally in Europe, the USSR had been forced into an illogical and temporary alliance that held off the immediate threat of war and gave them the breathing space to prepare for the inevitable later war to come. Nehru fully expected the imperialist and fascist powers to collectively turn against the Soviet Union and proclaim ‘a holy war against communism . . . That would be a calamity from every point of view, quite apart from our agreement with Russian policy or not.’8
