“ We would whole-heartedly participate in any call for satyagraha given by the Congress. We would oppose, if it ever gave, the Forward Bloc call of s… - Puran Chand Joshi

“ Left nationalism, organised under the Forward Bloc, was born as an independent political force five months before the war. Five months of rapidly marching events after the outbreak have turned it into its very opposite and left it neither as genuine leftism nor good nationalism. It acts not as a progressive but as a retrogressive force. Its words are Left, its practice is anti-struggle, anti-unity, its aim remains settlement with imperialism.

“ The situation in Bengal since the very outbreak of war had become intolerable. Huq through an ordinance of his own had sought to make Bengal proof against struggle. A province-wide mass struggle in Bengal would have transformed the situation. Bengal Congress was under Left leadership and a struggle through Bengal Congress would have shown the path of struggle to millions of Congressmen. A province-wide struggle in Bengal would have rendered a national struggle inevitable. These were the great possibilities. Their successful realisation depended particularly upon Bose. He was the unquestioned leader of Bengal Congress and the Forward Bloc was the strongest single group inside Bengal Congress. Bengal was the strongest sector of people’s front of struggle. Exactly for the same reason Bengal invited the wrath and special attention of the anti-struggle national leadership.

With the outbreak of the war, the world seems to have turned upside down, slogans changed sides, friends became foes and so on. Ours is a colonial slave country. The fundamental contradiction is between imperialism on the one hand and the entire nation on the other. The very outbreak of the war deepens this antagonism. National struggle becomes a practical proposal. But it is an explosive struggle with gloves off. The division between the Indian people becomes between those that stand for struggle and those that don’t. We do not have a national struggle because the bourgeoise is at the top of the national movement. The obvious course would be to free the national front from the influence of bourgeois reformism and develop the political strength of the proletariat within the common front so as to develop the forces of struggle in a manner so as to make a national struggle inevitable and overw’helm and isolate the cowardly bourgeoisie. ”