The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c15.s1.52

c15.s1.52

The Congress was not a movement, still less a party, but an all-India arena for handling the pervasive conflicts of particularistic society. It did not aim at eliminating particularism—an impossible task—but at accommodating it in a universalistic setting. While it accommodated conflict, it took care of national consensus as well. Now Congress had since its beginnings in the eighties of the last century laid great stress on producing unanimous resolutions, to the point of simply skipping important but controversial points. But consensus enforced by the renouncer's transcendent authority was altogether a different matter, as the concerned Indian parties found to their discomfort, for instance, in the heated controversy over the separate vote for untouchables, when Gandhi started on a fast unto death to force consensus. But even more important was the fact that Gandhi practically transferred his authority to the consensus-making center of the Congress, which during the last decade of the British regime came to be known by journalists as "the high command." With that, Gandhi's role virtually ended and he could be safely enshrined in India's mythology.