Indian socialists’ 1948 exit from Congress foreclosed their return and shaped Nehru’s left turn

Evidence

The combination of such elements proved decisive for Nehru’s calculated leftward turn after the 1952 elections. By then, the ban on the Communist Party had been lifted and it emerged as the second largest party in Parliament, followed closely by the Socialist Party in third place; Congress itself got less than half the votes polled in that year, when the deaths of Gandhi and Patel had left Nehru wholly in charge of the party and in a position to claim unchallenged leadership of the nationalist legacy. The Socialists’ departure from Congress in 1948 had infuriated Nehru a great deal, and their relatively good showing at the polls sealed the possibilities of their return; Nehru’s fear was that both the Communists and the Socialists might expand their electoral bases substantially over the next five years, while many of the right-wing elements in his own party might gravitate towards the newly founded Jan Sangh, so that Congress might possibly not get enough parliamentary seats even to form a government. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 573

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the general logic of party faction exits as self-sealing paths — a pattern familiar from social-movement and party-systems literature. — connects to: Fear of nuclear war with the US drove Nehru’s Afro-Asian bloc — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1269

Related

• Fear of nuclear war with the US drove Nehru’s Afro-Asian bloc (similarity 0.78)