62 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Chatterji would not entertain such a possibility of assessing his subject as an opportunist politician. As it stands, however, Das appears to have changed his ideas on the role of labour thrice in a rather short period of four years. In the middle of that period, at the INC Gaya Congress in 1922, he made his famous speech on swaraj for the masses. The address was as much directed against the rule of the middle class bureaucracy (which was not actually defined in terms of any ownership class), as against class struggle. His programme of mass mobilisation was propagated with the clear warning that if Congress would not organise the workers and peasants, they would get attracted by new organisations, dissociated from the cause of swaraj, which would bring the class struggle within the arena of the peaceful revolution. Gandhi and Das in this respect had much more in common than Chatterji is prepared to accept. Would it not have been better to analyze the two leaders as the two sides of the coin in the INC dilemma of nationalist politics in the new era of emancipatory movements from below ? Th^ radical difference was that Gandhi realised that the organisation of workers as a militant guard in the nationalist movement, would set in motion uncontrollable processes which in the end might undermine and destroy the existing patterns of culture and industry. Also concerning the latter aspect, Gandhi and Das thought in unison. The wresting of power from selfish interests obviously did not include the industrial bourgeoisie, which actually had to be defended by the workers. On this point, Chatterji is quite confused. The shifts in position are rationalised as a sign of the fact that Das was "a nation-builder, and his view of the Indian nation was that it had to be multi-class, multi-group and multi-interest nation" (p. 163). As long as he was in the INC, he was "a leftist-nationalist", who strengthened the left wing "just to maintain balance within Congress" (p. 176), and who envisaged an independent India "in which the organised labour and the peasantry share power equally with the middle classes" (p. 142). The formation of the Swaraj Party by Das and Motilal Nehru in 1924 gives a clue, however, of where the real interests of Chittaranjan Das should be located. In the light of his class position and his cultural makeup, an interesting and detailed study could have been made on the manner which the nationalist politicians from the aristocratic circles tried to come to terms with the role and position of the working class in the nationalist movement in Eastern India. That study still remains to be done. G,K. LIETEN