COMMUNISTS AND 1942 47 not very such more so perhaps than that presented about the Communist movement. In April 1942, PGJoshi promised to help the British recruitment drive. Gandhi had done the same a quarter-century earlier, going out to Gujarat villages as "recruiting sergeant" (as he himself described it)> just three years after Jatin Mukherji and many Ghadr heroes had been shot down and at a time when a large number of patriots were jailed or interned under the Defence of India regulations. The move was resented by the peasants of Kheda, whom Gandhi had just led in a no-revenue satyagraha: "peasants who had met them (Gandhi and his' companions) with garlands now refused them food."1 Gandhi's total opposition to revolutionary terrorism is well-known, and his failure to insist upon a reprieve for Bhagat Singh before concluding the Delhi Pact with Irwin in March 1931 even led to black flag demonstrations at the Karachi Congress. It was again largely at Gandhi's insistence that a move towards redefinition of the Congress creed in terms of complete independence was rejected at the Ahmedabad session of December 1921, and the passage of the Purna Swaraj resolution was delayed by him for nearly two years during 1928-1929. Gandhi's habit of calling off movements abruptly and unilaterally produced repeated doubts and controversies, most notably in 1922 and 1931. Nehru recalls in his Autobiography that the Bardoli resolution withdrawing Non-cooperation was deeply resented by the bulk of the Congress leaders and even more by younger militants while the Gandhi-Irwin pact which terminated the first Civil Disobedience movement led Jawaharlal to muse on the world ending "not with a bang but a whimper". Turing to the period specifically discussed in the articles, Shourie states, rightly, that Gandhi and the High Command, between 1939 and 1941, took the stand that "while the Congress would continue to fight for India's freedom it would do so non-violently in a way that would not impede Britain's war efforts". Not impeding British war efforts evidently becomes unpatriotic collaboration only when Communists are doing it, for Shourie passes this without criticism, and in fact abuses the Communists for attacking such moderation. The Communist about-turn in December 1941 was blatant enough, but was the somersault in the opposite direction by the Congress High Command in 1942 (along with Shourie's double-standards in 1984) very much less so ? There is ample evidance, finally, that the Congress leadership repeatedly discouraged mass upsurges in the winter of 1945-46 around issues like the release of INA prisoners, preferring a path of compromise and negotiation which ultimately led to a freedom truncated by partition and communal holocaust. During the great RIN strike in Bombay in February 1946, for instance, the provincial bosses of the Congress and Muslim League (S K Patil and Chundrigar) offered "the help of volunteers to assist the police".2 There was remarkable anti-British unity on the streets among Hindus and Muslims in Calcutta and Bombay