Samipya 1991 Vol 08 Ank 01 02

Author(s): Pravinchandra C Parikh, Bhartiben Shelat
Publisher: Bholabhai Jeshingbhai Adhyayan Sanshodhan Vidyabhavan

Page 86

The awareness of rural India became an inalienable part of Nehru's being. For the first time he realized what the peasants were and what they meant to India. This realization came to me during these Pratapgarh visits and ever since my mental picture of India always contains this naked, hungry mass. Perhaps there was some kind of electricity in the air, perhaps I was in a receptive frame of mind and the pictures I saw and the impressions I gathered were indelibly impressed on my mind.
Nehru was filled with shame and sorrow of a bourgeois and not with anger and hatred of a revolutionary leftist. The first step of Nehru's advance towards Socialism was marked by academic interest, the second one was characterised by actual observation of the problems which Socialism aims at solving.
The next important step towards Socialism was taken with his visit to Europe in 1926-27. The visit helped shape his outlook as a social scientist. In England, Nehru visited Derbyshire after the historic general strike of 1926. There, he learnt an important lesson of class justice. One reads often about about class justice, and in India nothing is commoner than this but somehow I had not expected to come across such a flagrant example of it in England. It came as a Shock'."
The second lesson was about the condition of the working class in imperialist Britain. The general atmosphere of fear among the workers after the general strike surprised him. The miners had been terrorised by the authorities. That picture of the British miners stayed with Nehru forever, almost as fresh and vivid as that of the Pratapgarh peasants. The sight of the terrorised, helpless, starved and pitiful miners did more than touch his humanistic sensitivity. He learned that exploitation knew no barriers of land, race and colour, that the poor were everywhere the victims of the monstrous Capitalist system. The Derbyshire visit was thus an important step away from parochialism towords Socialism.
Another notable event, was his participation in the Congress of oppressed Nationalities at Brussels in February, 1927. He attended it as a representative of the Indian National Congress. There he came in contact with several stalwarts of European Socialist movements and representatives of national organizations of many Asian and African countries. The Brussels Congress was an important factor in the evolution of his thought and in his progress towards Socialism, and had a profoundly radical impact on Nehru's thought.
For the first time in his career Nehru came into contact with the communists, during the Brussels Congress. The next important event was his short visit to the Soviet Union for only three to four days, on the eve of its tenth anniversary in November 1927. Many intellectuals and sensitive souls were deeply impressed with the Russian Revolution, and much more with the Soviet experiment for re-organization of the economic foundations of Society in order to secure the welfare of the masses and elimination of all forms of exploitation. Within a year of Nehru's return to India, he wrote sixteen articles on the Soviet Union, published as a book in 1929.
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[Samipya : April, '91-March, 1992