THE twenty-seven months of Congress rule in the provinces served as a clear early pointer to the conservative character of the Congress-led social coalition. A whole set of democratic demands of the working class and the peasantry had already come to be articulated not only by the AITUC and the All India Kisan Sabha (formed in Lucknow in April 1936 under the presidentship of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati) but also in various AICC sessions and by the Bihar and UP PCCs. The Kisan Manifesto of August 1936, for example, demanded abolition of zamindari a graduated tax on agricultural incomes in excess of Rs. 500, cancellation of debts, 50% cut in revenue and rent, full occupancy rights to all tenants, abolition of forced labour and restoration of customary forest rights. The Congress governments in the provinces refused to take any significant step in this direction. Analysts found the chief merit of Congress agrarian legislations to be that “its treatment of landlords was not intolerably severe”.

The tenancy bill proposed by the Bihar government was considerably watered down in the face of landlords' threat to go on civil disobedience in September 1937 and in three months Azad and Rajendra Prasad would negotiate a secret agreement with landlords in Patna. Statutory tenants in Avadh region of UP were, however, raised to the level of hereditary occupancy raiyats, bakasht lands from which occupancy raiyats were earlier evicted in Bihar were partially restored, grazing fees abolished in Bombay and reduced in Madras.

Even these limited agrarian reforms were forced on the Congress governments by a massive peasant movement. In Bihar, kisans even marched right into the Assembly house and occupied its seats for some time in the first session under the Congress ministry. Sahajanand moved increasingly to the Left and advocated militant struggles with slogans like Danda hamara zindabad (Long live our lathis!). In October 1937, the Kisan Sabha adopted the red flag as its banner; the Comilla conference in May 1937 denounced Gandhian class collaboration and proclaimed agrarian revolution as the ultimate aim and the April 1939 Gaya conference called for unity with landless labourers.

The betrayal was perhaps even more glaring on the working class front. While in Bengal, the Congress Working Committee expressed solidarity with the jute workers who went on a massive general strike from March to May 1937 and denounced the non-Congress Fazlul Haq ministry for adopting repressive measures, similar measures continued to be freely applied by Congress ministries in other provinces. In Assam, during the Digboi oil strike of 1939 against the British-owned Assam Oil Company, the Congress ministry led by N C Bordoloi allowed free use of the war lime Defence of India rules to crush the strike. And in Bombay, the Congress ministry rushed through the Bombay Trades Disputes Act in November 1938 which was far worse than the earlier 1929 version of the Act. It imposed compulsory arbitration thereby making virtually all strikes illegal and raised the prison-penalty for illegal strikes from three months to six months. The Bombay Governor found the Act “admirable” white Nehru found it “on the whole ... a good one”. Barring the Gandhian labour leaders of Ahmedabad, the entire trade union movement opposed this draconian Act; 80,000 workers attended a protest rally in Bombay on 6 November addressed among others by Dange, Indulal Yajnik and Ambedkar and the next day the entire province observed a general strike.