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Forward Bloc and socialism
   
   
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Bose's three-line attack

 

 

After Bose was forced out of the Congress in 1939 for his radical economic ideas and political strategy challenging British imperialism, he formed his own political forum, the Forward Bloc, to consolidate the anti-imperialist, leftist forces in India. At the anti-Compromise Conference held in Ramgarh in 1940, he gave the slogan: "All power to the Indian people". Later, in explaining the leftist character of the Forward Bloc, he said that in post-independence India, leftism would mean national reconstruction on socialist lines. He made it plain that socialist reconstruction would require "scientific and large-scale industrial production for the economic regeneration of the country" and "social ownership and control of both production and distribution systems." As a socialist, his goal was "swaraj for the people, for the workers and peasants."

To realise his goal of socialism, Bose preferred a well-integrated and disciplined political party which he called the Samyabadi Sangh (Socialist Party). He desired such an ideologically committed political party to prepare the new generation of Indians for social and economic reconstruction and regeneration of India.

In the mid-thirties, he hoped that it would be possible to form such a party with the progressive-minded and left-oriented people within and outside the Indian National Congress, but the events following the Tripuri Congress in 1939 destroyed all chances of forming such a party.

Just on the eve of Bose's escape from India, he received a secret letter from the CSP leader Jayaprakash Narayan requesting Bose to take the lead in forming "a new revolutionary party…. based squarely on Marxism-Leninism, independent of all other political organizations and parties." But the message came too late for Bose. By then (late 1940) he had made up his mind to leave India to organise an armed struggle against British from outside India.

When Bose was on his way to Europe on his secret mission in 1941, he stayed for a few days in Kabul during which he wrote down his ideas on India's freedom struggle and the tasks for his newly formed party, the Forward Bloc. In this Kabul thesis, he observed that "..after attaining India's political freedom, the task would be to complete the process of national reconstruction on socialist lines."

 
   
   
           
 
           
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