Civil Liberty and the Indian National Congress (An Old and Rare Book)

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The thesis seeks to prove that the Indian National Congress could not live up to the ideals of Civil Liberty, which it advocated and championed in the pre-Independence days. The circumstances which were responsible for the earlier advocacy and the later departure from it have been explained with reference to the Reports of the Congress, contemporary official documents, memoirs, newspapers and journals. The main factors for bringing about the change in the policy and outlook of the Congress leaders were three. First, the concept of Civil Liberty comes from Individualism and Liberalism, which the earlier generations of Congressmen were wedded to; but Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and many of his contemporaries were steeped in the doctrine of Democratic Socialism. Secondly, the Congress assuming power inherited the vicious tradition of the colonial government which was callous to all ideas of freedom. The bureaucracy, whether white or brown, had become accustomed to the exercise of dictatorial powers. The Indian Constitution itself was deeply influenced by the Government of India Act, 1935 which was designed for the governance of a subject people by an imperial authority. Thirdly, the atmosphere of Satyagraha, defiance of law and civil disobedience bred a class of people, who considered disobedience to any legally constituted authority and the resorting to strikes for all sorts of causes as highly meritorious acts. It was not easy to deal with such people in the ordinary conventional way. The difficulties of the Congress government were all the more enhanced by the increasingly widespread activities of the communists, communalists and the persistently hostile attitude of India's closest neighbour, Pakistan, which had been for centuries a part and parcel of India. These adverse factors clouded the vision and idealism of the new governing classes in India.