A History of the Congress Socialist Party

While the role of the Indian National Congress in the freedom struggle is well-known, the contribution of the leftist parties to the movement for freedom has yet to be highlighted. The present work is an attempt to fill up this gap by making a critical assessment of the Congress Socialist Party, which played an important role in imparting a socialist orientation to the Indian national movement. It gives a full-length account of the Congress Socialist Party from 1934 to 1948. It also includes the period from the Party’s Kanpur Annual Conference held in February/March 1947 to its Nasik Conference held in March 1948 when the CSP had dropped the prefix “Congress” from its name but had not proclaimed its separate existence from the Congress. The book analyses the circumstances leading to the “parting of ways” from the Congress and the formation of a separate party – the Socialist Party. The concluding chapter of the book sets out the achievements and failures of the Congress Socialist Party.