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

228 THE INDIAN STRUGGLE
March 4th, the negotiations came to an end and when the
Mahatma put before the Working Committee the terms of
the Pact, he made it quite clear that he would not proceed
one step further without their unanimous support. At this
juncture the responsibility of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was
very great. Besides being the President of the Congress, he
was the only member of the Working Committee who could
be expected to understand and advocate the Left-Wing point
of view and his refusal would have been sufficient to prevent
the final acceptance of the Pact by the Mahatma and the
Working Committee. Unfortunately he gave in and so the
Pact was approved by the Working Committee and the next
day, March 5th, the Mahatma and Lord Irwin put their
signature to it. When the publication of the Pact created
an uproar in the country, Pandit Jawaharlal came out with the
statement that he did not approve of some of the terms of
the Pact—but as an obedient soldier he had to submit to the
leader. But the country had regarded him as something
more than an obedient soldier.
The Pact—called the Delhi Pact or the Gandhi-Irwin Pact
—was published the next morning in all the papers. It was a
lengthy document and from the Congress point of view the
drafting was faulty, because it did not give the impression
that the Congress had scored a victory. The perusal of the
terms of the Pact had a damping effect on all ‘Congressite’
readers. The writer was in the Alipore Central Jail in Calcutta
at the time. For days the papers had published substantially
correct forecasts of the terms of the coming Pact. Even the
blind followers of the Mahatma, when they read the forecasts,
invariably remarked that it was unthinkable that their leader
—meaning the Mahatma—would agree to those terms.
Nevertheless, what was unthinkable came to be actual. The
Mahatma was not blind to the realities of the situation, and
in a Press statement issued simultaneously with the Pact, he
stressed the point that the settlement did not imply a victory
for either party and that he would strain every nerve to make
final what was provisional, so that the Pact would prove to be
a precursor of the goal, to attain which the Congress had been
striving. The terms of the Pact were briefly as follows: