Several explanations for this complex phenomenon suggest themselves:
1. The Left invariably fought the dominant Congress leadership on wrong issues and, when it came to the crunch, was either forced to trail behind that leadership or was isolated from the national movement.
2. Unlike the Congress right-wing, the Left failed to show ideological and tactical flexibility.
It sought to oppose the right-wing with simplistic formulae and radical rhetoric. It fought the right-wing on slippery and wrong grounds. It chose to fight not on questions of ideology, but on methods of struggle and on tactics. For example, its most serious charge against the Congress right-wing was that it wanted to compromise with imperialism, that it was frightened of mass struggle, that its anti-imperialism was not wholehearted because of bourgeois influence over it.
3. The Left also failed to make a deep study of Indian reality. With the exception of Jawaharlal Nehru, the Left saw the dominant Congress leadership as bourgeois, its policy of negotiations as working towards a compromise with imperialism and any resort to constitutional work as a step towards the ‘abandonment of the struggle for independence’.
4. A major weakness of the Left was the failure of different Left parties, groups and individuals to work unitedly, except for short periods. All efforts at forging a united front of left-wing elements ended in frustration. Their doctrinal disputes and differences were too many and too passionately held, and the temperamental differences among the leaders overpowering. Nehru and Bose could not work together for long and bickered publicly in 1939. Nehru and the Socialists could not co-ordinate their politics. Bose and the Socialists drifted apart after 1939.
