द इण्डियन स्ट्रगल / भारतीय स्वाधीनता संग्राम (नेताजी सुभाष चन्द्र बोस - ऐतिहासिक विश्लेषण)

136 THE INDIAN STRUGGLE
It was the unique personality of Deshbandhu Das that was
able to combine into one party such dissimilar elements, to
wrest the Congress machinery from the hands of the orthodox
'No Changers' and to carry on a fight against the bureaucracy
on many fronts. But in his absence, there was no one com-
petent enough to continue his many-sided activities or to
keep together the diverse elements that composed the Swaraj
Party. The result was that the Swaraj Party remained in
power only so long as the Mahatma did not emerge from his
voluntary retirement. When he did emerge in 1929, the
Swarajist leader, Pandit Motilal Nehru, surrendered without
even the show of a fight.
The death of Deshbandhu C. R. Das may be regarded as
the beginning of a period of all-round depression in the
country. If Mahatma Gandhi had come out of his retirement
exactly at this juncture, things might have taken a different
course, but unfortunately for India, he did not do so. The
Deshbandhu's personality was, among other things, a power-
ful cementing factor within the Swaraj Party and also in the
domain of Hindu-Moslem relations. It served, moreover,
to tone up the attitude of the Party to an extremist pitch. In
his absence, dissensions began to appear within the Party.
The most important of these was the revolt of the Mahrash-
trian Swarajists led by Mr. M. R. Jayakar of Bombay and Mr.
N. C. Kelkar of Poona. The Maharashtrian Swarajists had
never fully believed in the 'uniform, continuous and con-
sistent' opposition of the Swaraj Party, but they had never-
theless followed the Deshbandhu and his policy with unques-
tionable loyalty. They believed in the theory of 'responsive
co-operation' propounded by Lokamanya Tilak at the time of
the Amritsar Congress in December 1919. This theory implied
that there should be co-operation with the Government
in so far as they adopted measures calculated to benefit the
country, but non-co-operation or opposition, in so far as
their policy was harmful to the public interest. The Maha-
rashtrian Swarajists looked upon the Deshbandhu as their
leader since the time of Lokamanya's death and had therefore
given their support and allegiance to his policy, regardless of
their personal views. When Pandit Motilal Nehru assumed