STftUGOLE FOk IDEOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATION 39 European and U.S. history, show that one of the most difficult but necessary political tasks is to provide political activity to the cadre as also the people during the inevitable intervals between mass movements. In fact, failure to provide meaningful activity during these intervals has led to these intervals being so prolonged that mass struggles appear to be short intervals between long periods of passive phases. 14. For -example, in Gujarat, Sardar Patel and others supported Halpatis— bonded labourers—to fight against bondage. In 1931, Sardar Patel as president of the Congress and Gandhi sanctioned the no-rent campaign in U.P. 15. These steps have often been seen as right manoeuvres or the right's efforts to coopt or bamboozle the left. A better explanation is that the right recognized the need to build a wider popular movement based on class adjustment, etc. c./. Francine Frankal, Indians Political Economy 1947-77, pp. 35. 16. N.G. Ranga, Kisan Handbook, p. 71. 17. Ireland and the Irish Question, Moscow, 1971. 18. Dong, Mao Ze, Selected Works, Vol. Two, London, 1954, p. 264. 19. Ibid,, p. 250. Emphasis added. 20. Ibid., p. 263. 20 (a). For details of their stand as also Mao Ze Dong's, see Bhagwan Josh 'Ministries and the Left", Mimeo. 20(b). This is what P.C. Joshi, then General Secretary of the CPI wrote to Gandhi in 1945 regarding the party's class struggle policy during the War. "We gave up our strike policy because we considered it anti-national in the conditions of the day....That we successfully prevented the Indian working class from resorting to strikes even in a period of their worsening national conditions is the measure not only of our influence over it but its capicity to understand national interesets as its own. Correspondence Between Mahatma Gandhi and P.C. Joshi, p. 12. 21. Jawaharlal Nehru, A Bunch of Old Letters, Bombay, p. 309. 22. National Front, 19 March 1939. 23. As pointed out earlier, the Congress right did not share any of the attributes of European, or Arab, or Latin American, or Chinese of Japanese right wing of the 1920s and 1930s. Nor did it have much in common with what was known as the right in Europe in 19th century (Guizet, Theirs, Bismark, British Tories or even Liberals, and so on). 24. Gandhi's theory of trusteesphip, opposite o^Marxism, was not used by Gandhi to justify the existing pattern of property relationships and was constantly developed by Gandhi and Gandhians in a more radical direction. 25. There were a few contrary voi .es See, for example, S.G. Sardesai in National Front, 30 April 1939. The hostility to Gandhi was codified in R. Palrne Dutt's India Today and has, on the whole, held sway since then. See, for example : Gandhi "was the most subtle and experienced politician of the older group". He was "the asectic defender of property in the name of the most religious and idealist principles of humility and love of poverty". He was "the prophet who by his personal saintliness and selflessness could unlock the door to the heart of the masses where the moderate bourgeois leaders could not get a hearing—and the best guarntee of the shipwreck of any mass movement which had the blessing of his association. This Jonah of revolution, this general of unbroken disasters was the mascot of the bourgeoisie in each wave of the developing Indian struggle". Regarding the period 1928-29. Dutt wrote ; "All hopes of the bourgeoisie (the hostile might say of imperialism) were fixed on Gandhi as the man to ride the waves, to unleash just enough of the mass movement in order to drive a successful bargain, and at the same time to save India from revolution*', India Today, p. 334.