From Setback To Reorganisation
(1930-34)

With the Meerut arrests ended the era of WPPs, and the endeavour to reinforce the ideological purity and political-organisational independence of the revolutionary party of the proletariat came to a grinding halt even before take-off. Then began a period when the communist movement in India fought a life-and-death battle to reorganise its shattered forces and assert as a revolutionary pole in the mighty wave of national movement known as Civil Disobedience Movement.

Great Depression And India
The Civil Disobedience Movement
Political Role of CPI
Documents On Party Line
From Fragmentation To Reorganisation

 

Great Depression and India

A severe depression gripped the world capitalist economy from the end of 1929 and influenced the colonial economy and polity as well as people’s movements in India in more ways than one. In the first place, along with the general decline in prices, the agricultural price index (base 1873-100) slumped from 203 in 1929 to 171 in 1930 and 127 in 1931, Land revenue and rent burdens remained practically unchanged. So did interest payments, irrigation charges etc. All those having a surplus produce to sell were directly hit and the demands of middle and rich peasants (from rent and revenue reduction to no-rent, no-revenue; return of alienated land etc.) figured prominently in the peasant movements of the period.

Secondly, on the industrial front contradictory pushes and pulls were set in motion, further promoting the love-hate relationship between British imperialism and Indian capital. Indian industry did face certain problems owing to dislocation in world commerce, but these were more than offset by lower prices of commercial crops like colon and jute and by enhancement of import duties on many items, resorted to by the Indian Government under severe financial constraints, which had the effect of a protective tariff. The 1930s therefore witnessed rapid development of cotton, sugar, cement and paper industries. British industry also sought to utilise the protective barrier by setting up behind it “India Limited” companies and manufacturing units of British giants like Lever Brothers, Metal Box, Dunlop etc. While capitalists prospered, the workers were made to bear the burdens of lay-offs and higher work-loads in the name pf “rationalization” (this was an international trend of the time) as well as customary wage cuts. How the working class answered this renewed onslaught, we shall discuss separately.

Thirdly, there was less easily documentable yet no less significant and widely recognised impact. The bright contrast of the sustained and remarkable progress of the Soviet Union as against the worst-ever crisis of all the mighty capitalist nations helped a faster spread of socialist ideals in the freedom movement and further accentuated the left-right contradiction within it.

It is against this world backdrop of the “Great Depression” of 1929-33 that the third great wave of national movement known as the Civil Disobedience Movement developed.


The Civil Disobedience Movement

In Parts II and III we have seen how the Gandhian leadership scuttled the non-cooperation Khilafat movement when it went out of Congress control and started injuring landlord interests and also how the next six-year lull began to turn into its opposite, thanks most notably to the Bombay textile strike, the activities of HSRA and the anti-Simon agitation. The national mood for a showdown with the British continued to grow and reflected itself very powerfully at the famous Lahore session of the INC (December 1929) which adopted the resolution of Puma Swaraj. Readers will remember that a similar resolution had been adopted at the Madras session (December 1927) in the absence of Gandhi, who later repudiated it and, jointly with Motilal and others, gave the British a year’s respite at the Calcutta session (December 1928). Throughout 1929 Gandhi tried heart and soul to arrive at a compromise. The masters were tricky but adamant, and left with no other option, the Congress leadership at Lahore decided upon the promised Civil Disobedience Movement (henceforth CDM). Even in the face of strong objection by the powerful rightist lobby, Gandhi got the youthful Jawaharlal elected as the Congress President for the forthcoming stormy year, assuring the former that Jawaharlal was “extremist” in thought but “practical enough” in action and that “responsibility will mellow and sober the youth”. And Jawaharlal, in his, Presidential speech full of battle-rattle, emphasised the creed of non-violence as the inviolable limit of the coming mass movement and did not forget to add that any “contemporaneous attempts at sporadic violence” must be avoided because they “only distract attention and weaken” the “principal movement”. The stage was thus set for a strictly controlled CDM. An alternative proposal, put up by SC Bose, for immediate “non-payment of taxes”, “general strike wherever and whenever possible” and “parallel government” was rejected[1] and the main political resolution kept the door open for future negotiations.

According to a decision taken at lahore, 26 January was celebrated .throughout India as independence day in huge meetings where the people took a solemn pledge for Puma Swaraj. Then came Gandhi’s last-minute attempt at compromise in the guise of his 11-point ‘ultimatum’ to viceroy Irwin. Puma Swaraj was not demanded — not even dominion status. A few general democratic and economic demands like release of political prisoners, 50% reductions in military and administrative expenses, abolition of the state monopoly of salt manufacture and the salt tax, etc. were combined with very specific demands of bourgeois and landlord classes: lowering of the rupee-sterling ratio, textile protection and reservation of coastal shipping for Indians (not for nothing did the CPI call Gandhi’s appeal “the moderate programme of chambers of commerce” — see below) and 50% reduction in land revenues. But even this moderate offer was ignored, and after another month of inaction Gandhi started his famous 240-mile-march from Sabarmati to Pandi in Gujarat coast and formally launched the CDM by preparing salt there on 6 April. The dramatic episode caught the imagination of the masses and if was sought to be emulated in the coasts of Malabar, Tanjore, Andhra, Bengal, Orissa etc. During late May and early June another form was tried out in several places. People in their thousands would try to enter a salt works (the first such being the one at Dharasana in Bombay coast) by peacefully breaking police cordons and silently bear up with the savage blow of battons and/or bullets. The people’s determination expressed in such encounters was truly astounding.

Barring a few incidents (for instance, violations of salt laws led to repeated clashes with the police in Madras), the salt satyagrahas and boycott campaigns against liquor and foreign cloth were more or less non-violent and under strict Congress control, but the mass demonstrations in Karachi, Calcutta and Madras against the arrest of Jawaharlal on 14 April were not. There were several clashes with the police. And then took place, in quick succession, three major events which rocked the Raj and demonstrated once again that the limits of Gandhian non-violence were too narrow for the stubborn anti-imperialism of the Indian people and their revolutionary vanguards.

First, at Chittagong in East Bengal a group of national revolutionaries led by Surya Sen staged the most organised and therefore most successful group action (as distinct from individual action) in the annals of revolutionary terrorism in India. They captured two armouries, snapped telephone and telegraph wires, disrupted train movements and captured the town — all in a few hours. More than sixty young men including Ananta Singh, Ganesh Ghosh and Lokenath Baul were involved in the operation carried out in the name of “Indian Republican Army, Chittagong Branch”. A Provisional Revolutionary Government was proclaimed and the tri-colour hoisted. The death-defying patriots faced the heavy British counter-attack first from the Jalalabad hills to the north of the town and then in the form of guerilla warfare from the nearby villages where they hid among the masses. A good many of them were killed in the first few days of battle or killed/arrested in 1930 itself, but not before killing a much greater number of enemy forces. Surya Sen was arrested in early 1933 and hanged in early 1934. After Chittagong, terrorist actions increased several times in Bengal and this was also echoed in Punjab in heightened activities of the HSRA.

Secondly, the people of Peshawar, capital of NWFP, rose in arms against the arrest of Abdul Ghaffar Khan (nicknamed Badshah Khan) and other local leaders on 23 April and took the city under control. The backbone of the revolt was provided by Khan’s Khudai Khidmatgar (Servants of God), a volunteer brigade also known as Red Shirts[2] after their uniform. Hundreds laid down their lives in unequal battles with the armed police. Since 92% of the population in the NWFP were muslim, the British authorities called in the all Hindu 18th Royal Gharwali Rifles to quell the rebellion. But the Gharwalis, under subedar Chandra Singh Gharwali, who later became a communist, refused to open fire on whom they later (during court-martial) referred to as “our unarmed brethren”. This fitting rebuff against the communalist policy of “divide and rule” earned the respect and praise of the whole nation and the still extant WPP sent a special massage congratulating the patriotic soldiers but Gandhi condemned this “indiscipline” — clearly in such cases he preferred violence over an “unruly mob”. The British was able to retake the city after more than a week with the help of white troops. Inspired by the upheaval, the ever-restive tribals of NWFP launched a series of revolts in the second half of 1930.

Chittagong, Peshawar and other incidents of mass militancy at last forced the Viceroy to arrest Gandhi on 4 May, and this provoked the third great upsurge : that in Sholapur, a textile centre of Maharashtra. The industrial strike started on 7 May developed into a great rebellion in which more than 50,000 workers and toilers actively participated. Police stations, law-courts, liquor shops, British establishments and state properties were burnt down. A revolutionary parallel government was set up, which managed all the affairs of the town through workers' and citizens’ volunteers. British rule could be re-established only after 16 May by means of bloody  repression under martial law.

The arrest of Gandhi also sparked off a protest demonstration in Bombay which was so massive that the authorities did not dare to intervene. A six day hartal was observed by cloth merchants. In Calcutta, Delhi and elsewhere there were clashes with the police. In the meantime, the COM was fast becoming for women and men in different walks of life a grand occassion — a national platform — to fight for their basic demands. Thus Bengal saw an agitation against Union Boards and chowkidars or village guards who acted as government spies and landlords’ henchmen; the latter agitation became very Intense in parts of Bihar. There were important peasant struggles in UP and other provinces, as we shall discuss separately. Struggle against the anti-people forest laws broke out in Maharashtra, Karnataka and the Central Provinces. In Bardoli and certain other parts of Gujarat, villagers refused to pay land revenue even in the face of savage repression which led to mass exodus into neighbouring princely states like Baroda. A powerful student movement was launched in Assam against the humiliating “Cunningham circular” which demanded assurances of good conduct from students and guardians. There was a Naga revolt (1930-32) to establish a Naga state; and so on and so forth.

Beneath this metamorphosis of the CDM from an exercise in Gandhian non-violence into a revolutionary anti-imperialist upheaval lay a changed role of various classes and strata in it. During the first six months the bourgeoisie — particularly the merchants and petty traders but to a lesser extent also a good section of industrialists — accorded very enthusiastic support. In many trading centres like Bombay, Calcutta and Amritsar, merchants took collective pledge to boycott foreign goods (which was sometimes a prudent business policy in view of falling prices and depressed demands, but certainly this was not the sole concern). They also contributed generously to the Congress fund. The all-round support provided by GD Birla and Jamnalal Bajaj (the latter went to jail as AICC treasurer) is well-known; Wal-chand Hirachand wrote a letter to FICCI in late April urging his fellow businessmen to give up what he called a policy of “sitting on the fence” — “if the government oflndiadidnot wish to see eye to eye with Indian commercial opinion, we will be obliged to throw in our lot with those that are fighting with the Government for Swaraj.” [3] As RP Dutt reported in India Today, “British businessmen in Bombay joined with the Indian businessmen, through the Millowners’ Association (with a one-third European element) and the Chamber of Commerce, in demanding immedaite self-government for Indian on a dominion basis.” (P371)

By the autumn of 1930, however, the mood was definitely changing. Depression-hit traders found it increasingly difficult to carry unsold stocks of foreign goods and began to sell them either openly or on the sly. Among Bombay mill-owners, practices like passing off mill cloth as khadi, over-pricing Indian cloth by taking adantage of the boycott, clandestine use of foreign yarn etc. were already rife and in August 24 mills were blacklisted by the Congress as non-swadeshi. The business-community was also protesting against frequent hartals and other disturbances that hampered industrial and commercial activities. In addition to such economic factors, there was a major political factor responsbile for the added scrupulousness of the bourgeoisie. The steep decline in agricultural prices in autumn led to increased peasant mobilisation and militancy in most parts of the country while the incarceration of first-and-second-ranking Congress leaders made the various movements from below much more unrestrained.[4] Evidently the COM had already gone beyond a bargain-counter with the imperialists, and the bourgeoisie started to recoil. This did not detract from the revolutionary sweep of the movement (as Lenin had shown in the case of Russia in his Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution), but pressure for a quick compromise[5] was mounting on the Congress leadership.

The latter, like the colonial masters, were already alarmed at the growth of “violence”; both sides therefore started preparing for a settlement which was finally arrived at on 5 March, 1931 (Congress leaders had already been freed in January). The Gandhi-Irwin Pact, the second document of great betrayal after the Bardoli resolution of 1922, was signed on that date.[6]

The pact was condemned not only by the CPI and the other radical forces; within Congress itself there was great disappointment. The Congress agreed to participate in the approaching second round of RTC (it had boycotted the first round held during 1930 in which heads of princely states and liberal leaders like Tej Bahadur Sapru and Srinivasa Shastri participated) on the basis of a very vague promise of a federal constitution with “Indian responsibility” which excluded “such matters as, for instance, defence, external affairs; the position of minorities; the financial credit of India; and the discharge of obligations”. Only those political prisoners were to be released who were not guilty of violence or “incitement to violence”. Men of Gharwal Rifles were to rot in jails, Bhagat Singh and his comrades were to be hanged[7], there was to be no enquiry into police brutality during the movement. Only those plots of confiscated land were to be returned which had not already been sold to third parties, peacful and non-obstructive picketing of foreign goods was to be allowed only if it was not “for political ends” and not directed exclusively against British wares. In return for these and a few other half-concessions steeped in “ifs” and “buts”, the Congress suspended the CDM. In the hastily convened Karachi Congress (end of March 1931) the Gandhi-Irwin Pact was almost unanimously endorsed, for Bose, Nehru  and others who opposed it on other occassions did not find the courage to do so in the overbearing presence of Gandhi. On 29 August Gandhi sailed for London to take part in the second session of RTC amidst hostile demonstration by the same workers who had fought so valiantly in his name throughout 1930. He had already witnessed black flag demonstrations by the Naujawan Bharat Sabha and others, while a number of youth conferences throughout the country had expressed great shock and anger at the ignoble surrender. At the fag end of the year he returned from London empty-handed, as he himself had expected.[8]

While the Congress retreated into passivity during what is sometimes euphemistically called the “period of truce” (March-December 1931), the battle was going on between the real antagonists — the people of India and British imperialism. In the first place, there were wide-spread peasant struggles — most notably in UP and also in Bihar, Andhra, NWFP and elsewhere. Patriotic terrorism reached a record high in Bengal, even more than it did after the withdrawal of non-cooperation movement in 1922. Powerful movements developed also in many princely states against the arch reactionary, pro-British rulers — such as in Kashmir, Pudukottah (now in Tamilnadu) etc. These and many other people’s movements were, as usual, subjected to ruthless repression but the Congress organisation was by and large left alone. Actually the imperialists were utilising the ‘truce period’ for silently working out a detailed plan for a pre-emptive attack on the Congress before it would be able to resume the CDM after the inevitable failure of the RTC.

And the plan was carried out with perfect precision. Just before Gandhi’s homecoming on 28 December, Jawaharlal and Gaffar Khan were arrested and on January, 1932 Gandhi’s request for an interview with the Viceroy was answered with an arrest warrant. On the same day a whole bunch of ordinances were promulgated which ushered in a veritable martial law regime under civil authorities. The Congress and many other organisations were banned and their leaders all over the country put behind bars. The people fought back. There was a new wave of stubborn picketings, observation of various national days, boycott of British as well as loyalist business concerns, hoisting of Congress flags as a mark of defiance and salt satyagrahas. Anti-feudal and other struggles as mentioned above continued in the face of wholesale arrests and tortures, shooting-at-will, punitive expeditions, community fines and so on. But after six months or so, the leaderless movement began to decline, Gandhi had already given up all interest in the ongoing political movement, concerning himself exclusively with social problems like untouchability. It was on this score — and not against the mounting repression or any other issue of the national struggle — that he undertook a much-advertised “fast-unto-death” on 20 September 1932[9] and repeated the feat in May next year.

Convinced of his bonafides, the British rulers now set the holy man free. Out of jail, he again asked for a date with the Viceroy, only to be refused again. To oblige the latter, the High Command cried halt to the mass CDM and officially disbanded Congress organisations at all levels. Selected individual satyagraha only was conducted at a few places, but even these came uncer ruthless repression and Gandhi was again arrested in August. Once again there was a fast and he was released in a month. In May 1934 the AICC was allowed to meet in Patna to declare a total and unconditional end to the CDM, a decision was also taken to contest the forthcoming elections. In June the ban on the INC was lifted.[10]

Like all great movements, the CDM set in motion all political and social forces and gave rise to a number of realignments. Firstly, the British rulers after taming the Congress spearheaded the attack once again on the communists, whose influence was again on the ascendancy since the end of 1933 thanks to the release of Meerut prisoners and reorganisation of the CPI during December 1933-early 1934. Secondly, the British policy of “divide and rule” achieved a fair degree of success; thus the November 1934 elections to the Central Assembly were contested by the Nationalist Party of Malaviya, the Muslim League of Jinnah and the INC. Thirdly, disillusionment with the Gandhian programmes and policies and the victorious march of socialism in the USSR in the midst of the world capitalist crisis led to the evolution of the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) during 1933-34 (the process had started even earlier and culminated in an all-India conference held in Bombay in October 1934). The leading figures included Acharya Narendra Dev, Jayprakash Narain, Achhut Patwardhan, Yusuf Mehe-rali and Minoo Masani. The original socialist Nehru expressed his sympathies, but did not join. The leaders and activists of the new group had heterogeneous ideas about socialism and Marxism, but they were united on at least three points, as Narendra Dev put it in 1934 : that it would be a suicidal policy for them to cut themselves off from the national movement which the Congress undoubtedly represents; that they must give the Congress and the nationalist movement a socialist direction; and that to achieve this objective they must organise the workers and peasants in their class organisations, wage struggles for their economic demands and make thdm the social base of the national struggle. Despite the many ideological confusions[11] even among those like Jayprakash and Narendra Dev who sought to stress “Marxism” or “Scientific Socialism” as against “social reformism” and other brands of pseudo-socialist systems, without a doubt the CSP represented a positive development as a stage in left polarisation within the national movement. Already in 1934 it had good work in the vast peasant areas of UP and Bihar, which would soon spread to other zones including Kerala and become a base for rapid expansion of the CPI.

Notes:

1.  Bose, it may be added here, was to be arrested well before the CDM was actually launched; other leaders were arrested much later.
2. To dispel a popular misconception, let it be noted that the red colour had nothing to do with the red flag.
3. See Modern India, op. cit., p-292

4. To cite one of many available examples, the forest satyagraha mentioned above was turned into a violent tribal unrest by the Kols in Maharastra and Gonds in the Cental Provinces. Within the Congress itself, the most radical and steeled elements were now taking the lead. Thus P Krishna Pillai, later to become the founder of CPI in Kerala, created news by his (and his comrades’) heroic defence of the national flag, which they hoisted on the Calicut beach on 11 November, 1930, against a shower of blows by the police.

5. Thus the FICCI, which had in May 1930 decided to boycott the Round Table Conference (RTC) till Gandhi decided to participate and Viceroy promised Dominion Status, started reconsidering the decision by mid-Setptember. And by February next year the merchants and industrialists who had so long been supporting Gandhi were, according to the Bombay Governor’s report to Viceroy Irwin, “... contemplating a breach with him unless he adopts reasonable attitude”. This insistence on compromise was understandable in view of the baits just held out by the cunning British : a 5% surcharge on cotton piece-goods imports, which provoked loud protests from the Lanchashire lobby, and temporary shelving of  “Imperial Preference” (i.e., additional charges on non-British imports). Birla’s lieutenant DP Khaitan indeed represented the entire community when in his presidential address to the Indian Chamber of Commerece (Calcutta, 11 February) he urged “Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress” to “explore the possibilities of an honourable settlement”, declaring that “We all want peace”. (See Modern India, op. cit., p 308-11 for details).

6. An attempt has often been made by liberal national historians like Bipan Chandra to present the surrender as a strategic retreat necessitated by signs of exhaustion of mass energy. Gandhi, however, never thought so. In an interview to the French magazine Monde on February 20, 1932, he stated categorically about the situation at the time of signing the pact: “the suggestion of the impending collapse of our movement is entirely false; the movement was showing no signs of slackening.” (Cited by RP Out in India Today, op. cit., p-374)

7. The three heroes were actually executed just after 18 days.
8. Gandhi had clearly hinted at this possibility at the time of the departure - see India’s Struggls For Independence. 1885-1947 ed. by Bipan Chandra, op. cit. p 286

9.  To be more specific, the fast of 20 September was directed against a clause in the “Communal Award” declared in August 1932, which alloted to each minority community a certain number of seats in the legislatures, to be elected by a separate electorate in each case. Muslims, Sikhs and Christians were already recognised as minority communities, but the Award added to this category also the “Depressed Classes”! SCs and STs of today) and it was against this segregation of untouchables from the Hindu community as a whole that Gandhi launched his fast. He demanded that the representatives of the DCs be elected from seets reserved for them, but by the general electorate. After a lot of mediations the demand was conceded — the Poona Pact was signed which substantially increased the number of reserved seats for DCs, to be elected by the general electorate, in the provincial and central legislatures. Gandhi withdrew his fast. The amended Communal Award remained and, opposing it from a Hindu chauvinist point of view, MM Malaviya and others formed the Nationalist Party in 1934.

10.  K is interesting to note that the CPI was declared illegal the very next month. Evidently, battle-lines were being re-drawn.
11.   For an early Marxist critique, see RP Dutt’s article in Text VIII1


Political Role of CPI

Thus ended the great COM in the very first year of which almost a lakh of people went to jail and the import of foreign cloth was reduced by 50% — to cite two of the many indices of the intensity and strike power of the movement. But for certain areas (e.g., Hindu-Muslim unity, boycott of educational institutions and courts, etc.), it marked a major advance for the national struggle. This is true not only as regards the resoluteness, sacrifice and heroic deeds of the people and their vanguards, but also the movement’s declared goal (Puma Swaraj, or at least Dominion Status, in place of the deliberately vague concept of swarajya as in the Non-Cooperation Movement), method (deliberate defiance of laws in place of mere non-cooperation), the relative tenacity of central command (for all its vacillations and compromises as noted above, the latter did not withdraw the movement just after incidents like Chittagong and the militant peasant and tribal movements in various places, as it did after Chauri Chaura). Together, all these reflected the enhanced self-confidence and maturity of the In­dian bourgeoisie to accommodate and utilise alien class movements in its own bid for power. This point the CPI failed to see. In its conception, the bourgeoisie had completely gone over to imperialism, doing everything, from the very start, merely to hoodwink and restrain the masses and sabotage the movement. This extreme and erroneous position rendered the Party’s otherwise correct exposure of the vacillations, compromises and the essentially bourgeois character of the Congress far less convincing. This will be evident from even a cursory glance at the representative samples of CPI propaganda during this period excerpted in Texts VI22 to VI26.

What was the CPI doing during the CDM? It presented before the people of India a comprehensive alternative framework of freedom movement to be based on the revolutionary struggle of workers, peasants and the “revolutionary section of middle classes” and to be informed, from the very beginning, by socialist ideals. An Anti-Imperialist League was founded on this basis in a conference held in Bombay in October 1930. The approach paper for this conference (Text VI22) called for “an independent united front platform” since it was “an idle dream to think of” capturing “the Congress and converting it into a genuine anti-imperialist body.” (Emphasis in the original). But the League failed miserably to mobilise diverse forces. Formation of the new League signified a split in the national liberation movement and the split was complete at the international level when, within a few days after the signing of the Gandhi-Irwin Pact or Delhi Pact, the Congress was expelled from the “League Against Imperialism” by the communist-dominated international leadership. The charge was that the Congress had practically gone to the camp of British rulers.

Perhaps the worst act of sectarianism on the part of the CPI during this period was the split away from AITUC in its Calcutta sessions (July 1931) and formation of the Red Trade Union Congress (RTUC). This we shall discuss in some detail in Part VI of this volume. However, the CPI continued to address the “Congress rank and file” on all important junctures of the anti-imperialist movement — e.g., on the RTC (February 1931 — Text VI23), on the occasion of the Karachi Congress (March 1931 — Text VI24) and the Bombay Congress (1934 — Text VI26) and so on. The political attack on Congress grew sharper as the latter’s vacillations and compromises became more and more pronounced. Thus the Calcutta Committee of CPI declared in its organ in July 1934 : “the revolutionary unity of the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie can be affected only outside the Congress and in opposition to it — in country-wide organisation fighting against imperialism and its ally the National Congress” (Here “petty bourgeoisie” covers the peasantry. Emphasis ours — Ed.). The same committee organised a “Gandhi Boycott Committee” (later renamed “League Against Gandhism”) which staged a demonstration against Gandhi and proudly regarded this as an evidence of the anti-imperialist, anti-Congress unity.

In early 1935 another anti-imperialist conference was organised by the already banned CPI in secret. A new All India League Against Imperialism was founded (the League founded in 1930 had become defunct much earlier). The new league was only marginally more successful than its predecessor in mobilising fresh forces; most of the organisations it assembled were TUs, youth leagues and other frontal organisations of communists.

An interesting feature about the 1934 conference was the communist initiative to involve the socialists in it.[1] A call addressed to the Congress Socialists and to the revolutionary youths was distributed at the first all-India conference of CSP held in October 1934. It was a broad-minded and friendly call for unity in the context of a series of compromises by the Congress, blended with a balanced dose of political struggle: “... By undertaking to be loyal to the Congress creed and constitution you also undertake to preach Gandhism or social-Gandhism (socialism in words and Gandhism in deeds) of the type of Jawaharlal Nehru, so long as you remain a minority, and to attain a majority in the Congress on the basis of a revolutionary programme of action is impossible, for the simple reason that the capitalist class has at no period in history accepted the programme of the working class in action.” (see Text VIII2). The CSP declined the invitation, saying that as a part and parcel of the Congress it was not in a position to associate with anything illegal or organised secretly.

In its endeavour to build up the revolutionary anti-imperialist united front, the CPI made repeated overtures to another significant force — the patriotic terrorists, with whom many communists maintained warm personal relations. A specimen of the CPFs appeals to them has been reproduced in Text VIII3, which was issued on the international youth day (2 September) of 1934 by the Calcutta Committee. The combination of sincere appreciation of the terrorists’ heroic sacrifices with patient yet clear-cut exposition of their mistaken path was indeed appealing. No wonder that the most advanced section of the patriotic petty bourgeois revolutionaries joined the communist movement in the 1930s, including a majority of the surviving members of Surya Sen’s group.

Despite all these efforts, why did the CPI remain basically a peripheral force during the period ?

The reason must be sought, firstly, in the Party’s left sectarian line which debarred it from any meaningful united front programme, i.e. devising some form of joint activities with the Congress as the recognised champion of the national movement. Had it undertaken such activities as far as possible, it could have utilised the only available national-level mass forum for propagating the alternative communist policies and augmenting its own forces and mass base. Secondly, the reason lay in the organisational incohesion and the absence of a central leadership following the Meerut arrests — a factor which disabled the Party to take any concerted all-India initiative. Thirdly, the Party's abject failure on the peasant front rendered it basically incapacitated to challenge the Mahatma as an indpendent mass force. Fourthly, sectarian politics and fragmented organisation kept the Party’s otherwise good work in the labour front confined to local levels only. In the next two chapters we should investigate the first two areas, leaving the two other factors for Part VI.

Note:

1. The communists had already started ideological struggle against the trend of Congress socialism with an article by RP Dutta which first appeared in Indian Forum and was then reprinted in the English Edition of Ganashakti, September 1934 (actually appearing only October). With excerpts from this fine piece of polemics we open Text VIII of our Documents section (covering documents on unity and struggle with other left forces and on inner-party polemics). But the ideological struggle did not prevent the CPI from opting for unity on the basis of a minimum programme.

 

Documents on Party Line

As we have seen, the CPI during 1929-34 refused even to try to unite with the Congress as a conditional and probably temporary mass ally against the main enemy, thus deviating from a basic tactical principle of Leninism. But the most peculiar feature of the Party line was that fire was concentrated against the relatively left elements within the Congress although the known rightists were not spared. The logic was that while essentially and at all critical junctures subscribing to Gandhian policies and decisions, they with their left phrases and gestures only served to arrest and reverse the process of popular disillusionment with the Congress, thus hindering a left polarisation in the freedom struggle under communist leadership. As the impotent role of Nehru and Bose at the crucial Karachi Congress revealed, this contained — in the ultimate analysis — an element of truth. But what is true in the ultimate analysis does not always deliver as an immediate slogan, for the masses have to be led up to it through intermediate stages in the development of their consciousness on the basis of their own direct experience. This was what the young communists either did not understand or lacked the perseverance to practice. They behaved as though what was obvious to them can be rendered obvious to the masses with a little reasoning and a sharp language. In real life, this happened only in the cases of few advanced elements; the rest was carried away by the Congress propaganda that communists were opposed to the foremost leaders of the national movement and therefore to the movement itself.

Can we identify an international source of this theoretical and political blunder? Yes, we can. Soon after the sixth congress, a further shift to the ‘left’ became quite clear in the Comintern press — both in respect of advanced capitalist countries and the colonies. A counter-productive line of only struggle and no unity was adopted, in the former case, against social-democrats for their conciliatory role vis-a-vis the main enemy, fascism; in the latter, against the “national reformists” for their compromises with imperialism. Within the national reformists, again, the ‘leff elements (who were sometimes regarded as representing petty bourgeois political groups — such as Wang Chang-Wei in China and J Nehru in India) were believed to be the most dangerous because they served to hide the real face of appeasement and subverted the workers’ and peasants’ movements by working on these fronts. A good number of authoritative articles by P Schubin, D Manuilsky, Lozovsky and others drove home the point again and again with particular reference to India. Then at the tenth plenum of ECCI held in July 1929 this policy was formally affirmed:

  • “... At the present time a powerful revolutionary movement is developing in India. ... The undisguised betrayal of the cause of national independence by the Indian bourgeoisie (the resolution passed by the Swarajist Indian National Congress in favour of Dominion Status), and their active support of the bloody suppression of the workers on strike, expose the counter-revolutionary character of the Indian bourgeoisie. This signifies that the independence of India, the improvement of the conditions of the working class, and the solution of the agrarian problem, can be achieved only by means of the revolutionary struggle of the workers and peasants led by the proletariat in the struggle against British imperialism, the Indian feudal rulers, and Indian national capital. ...”[1]

This inclusion of national capital as a whole at par with imperialism and feudalism, among the targets of national democratic revolution in a colonial countries was clearly non-Marxist. And since the Congress leadership was correctly identified with the Indian capitalist class, it was only normal that the CPI, “a section of the CI”, would treat Gandhi, Nehru and Subhas almost at par with the British crown! But we are concerned not so much with the mistakes of the CI as with the evolution of the Party line in India during this period. We shall therefore discuss here only the more important Indian and international documents related specifically and directly to this.

One of the important communist documents to appear shortly after the Meerut arrests was OV Kuusinen’s “The Indian Revolution and Gandhi’s Manoeuvre”, published in Inprecor, 29 March, 1930 (pp 241-42). It begins with a more or less convincing criticism of Gandhi’s   insistence on “absolute non-violence” and his “national reformist manoeuvre” (the 11-point ultimaUim to the Viceroy). For the CPI, the question is not violence or non-violence, but “victory or defeat” and against the mounting imperialist violence victory can be achieved only through a revolution. With this end in view, “the mass forces of workers and peasants” must be immediately organised and “all mass actions, all great collisions which are taking place” must be utilised in order to “extend and strengthen the revolutionary mass organisations in town and country”. The highly commendable “Girni Kamgar” experience must be emulated in other places and on all fronts. “Revolutionary workers’ demonstrations with independent class slogans” are to be organised. Workers should be sent to villages to organise campaigns for “non-payment of taxes and rents” and to form “peasant committees”. “The striking railways workers” should prepare for the “political general strike”. Generally speaking, the CPI’s basic attitude “can only be: determined fight against the National Congress. This does not exclude but presupposes the utilisation of even the sham fights of the Indian bourgeoisie, the utilisation of its narrowly restricted conflict with the British imperialism by the CP for the purpose of mobilising the broad toiling sections. ...” (emphasis ours).

In this popular presentation of the Sixth Congress line, we find the special class tasks of the communist party clearly formulated in the context of the high tide of mass movements that started in the spring of 1930. What was more important, the emphasised words sounded an warning against isolation from the national struggle — an warning that was not heeded, as we shall just see, in framing the most important document of the period : The Draft Platform of Action of the CPI.

The above document (see Text VII2) first appeared in Inprecor, 18 December 1930 and then distributed at the Karachi session of INC in March 1931. Given the shattered, leaderless state of the Party organisation, it can be safely assumed that it was drafted by leaders of some other party or parties conversant with the Indian situation. However, it was issued in the name of the CPI, which forwarded the Indian edition with an appeal to “all CPs of Europe, America and Africa” for reprinting the draft “in all working class papers" so as to mobilise criticisms and suggestions of all concerned before working out a final version.

So far as political line is concerned the main points of the document reads like this.

  • 1.   British rule “is the basis of the backwardness, poverty and endless suffering of our people” and so its “violent destruction” becomes the very first task. But the Congress follows “a consistent policy of compromise with British imperialism at the expense of the people. ...” The latter, however, “still harbour illusions about the National Congress”, the anti-people, bourgeois character of which must, therefore, be exposed by all possible means.
  • 2.  Mounting a most ruthless political attack on the Congress (e.g., that Gandhi’s 11 points “represented the moderate programme of the chambers of commerce”) the document states that the Congress “and particularly its left wing have done and are doing all in their power to restrain the struggle of the masses within the framework of the British imperialist constitution and legislation.” In fact, “The most harmful and dangerous obstacle to the victory of the Indian revolution is the agitation carried on by the ‘left’ elements of the National Congress led by Nehru, Bose and Ginwala and others.” Therefore, “The exposure of the 'left' Congress leaders, who may again undertake to set up a new party or organisation like the former League of Independence in order once again to bamboozle the mass of workers, is the primary task of our party. Ruthless war on the ‘left’ national reformists is an essential condition if we are to isolate the latter from the workers and mass of the peasantry.”
  • 3.  On the TU front, “all efforts must be made to expel and isolate reformists of all shades, from the open agents of British capitalism such as Joshi, Chamanlal, Giri, etc. to sham ‘left’ national reformists such as Bose, Ruikar, Ginwala and other agents of the Indian bourgeoisie, who constitute a reactionary bloc for joint struggle against the revolutionary wing of the trade union movement.”
  • 4.  “While the national revolutionary groups are fighting for bourgeois rule and a bourgeois-democratic form of government, the CPI is fighting for the dictatorship of the working class and peasantry, a workers’ and peasants’ soviet government of India.”

Compared to Kuusinen’s article published some eight months back, the further drift to the left is easily noticeable. The concept of at least utilising the Congress-led movements is withdrawn. The task of exposing the basic class character and compromising nature of the Congress is correctly placed, but no proper method of doing that is suggested. This omission, together with the absence of a rousing call to join the mainstream of freedom movement, led to a passive position of totally negative criticism against the admittedly still very poplar INC. Spearheading the attack against the relatively ‘left’ Congressmen — whatever logic the CPI might have for it —  only alienated the left-minded people within and outside the Congress, for the CPI could produce no strong evidence to show that the former were betrayers to the nation. This grossly immature method of conducting political struggle against a powerful political contender had to prove counter-productive — and it did so — as far as winning over the masses was concerned. It elicited hardly any positive response when distributed at the Karachi Congress although disillusionment with the Congress leadership was spreading and the situation was quite favourable for a popular shift to the CPI.

The Platform, of course, has its plus points. The warm appeal of proletarian internationalism — so very rare today — comes as a source of inspiration. It presents a very comprehensive charter of immediate as well as long-term demands and issues — both for the people in general and for particular classes and sections. But all these are so badly mixed up that there is hardly an order of priority and this renders the documents rather ineffective as a platform of action. The basic nature of the Indian revolution is defined with scientific precision (“an agrarian revolution against British capitalism and landlordism”), but the soviet form of government is rather mechanically copied without due regard to the peculiarities of India.[2] Overall, the Draft Platform of Action actually pushed the CPI to a position of inaction in the foremost battle of the day — the general anti-imperialist upsurge — though it did not specifically ban communist participation in the national movement and though a good many communists individually took part in it out of natural patriotic instinct.

This does not, of course, mean that there was absolutely no struggles against the prevailing harmful tendency. For instance, the “Open Letter” of the CPs of China, Great Britain and Germany to the Indian communists quotes from a June 1930 document[3] of the Bombay organisation which says:

  • “We came in Bombay to a position when we actually withdrew from the struggle and left its field entirely to the National Congress. We limited our role to a role of a small group who sit aside and issue once in a while ... leaflets. The result was one which could have been expected, that in the minds of the workers there grew an opinion that we are doing nothing and that the Congress is the only organisation which is carrying on the fight against imperialism and therefore the workers began to follow the lead of the Congress. ...”

In all likelihood there were others in the Party who sensed the harm being done by the sectarian policy. But such realisations at lower levels or scattered individual exceptions could not and did not change the Party line, the more so because there was not even a semblance of Party system or Party forums.

The CPI’s isolationist position was called in question for the first time in May 1932 by an Open Letter addressed to it by the Communist parties of China, Great Britain and Germany (Text VII3).

The Open Letter did not question the ultra-left line and practice and even greeted the communist-sponsored 31 July split in AITUC as a positive development, but argued against the “... self-isolation of communists from the anti-imperialist mass struggle as a movement alleged to be purely a Congress movement”. It endorsed the “struggle against ‘left’ national reformism”, but pointed out:

  • “... A distinction must be made between the bourgeois Congress leadership and those sections of the workers, peasants and revolutionary elements of the town petty bourgeoisie who, not understanding the treacherous character of the National Congress, followed it, correctly seeing in the domination of British imperialism the basis of their slavery.” And further:
  • “if the existence of 'United National Front' illusions played its part in maintaining the influence of the National Congress, the self-isolation of the Communists objectively assisted the reformists and retarded the process of the breaking away of the workers from the bourgeois National Congress.” And therefore, “... It is necessary to participate in all mass demonstrations organised by the Congress, coming forward with our own communist slogans and agitations; support all the revolutionary student demonstrations, be at the forefront in the clashes with the police, protesting against all political arrests etc., constantly criticising the Congress leaders, especially the ‘left’ and calling on the masses for higher forms of struggle...”

Continuing in the same vein, the Open Letter also critised sectarianism in TU work and aloofness from workers’ daily struggles (for details see Part VI).

All these fine advice, however, were destined to be ineffective because the theoretical-political premise of isolationism, i.e., the basic position of the Draft Platform of Action of the CPI was not challenged but categorically endorsed (this was, again, quite natural as long as the post-Sixth-Congress sectarianism prevailed in the Comintern). For the same reason, i.e., in the absence of a correct tactical line, the other strong plea contained in the Open Letter — that for “an all-India illegal centralised CP” — did not help much either. A number of other valid points of criticism (e.g., against the neglect of struggle for workers’ economic interests and other everyday problems) also failed to cut much ice.

The main points of the three-party Open Letter were summed up and elaborated in an article published in the Communist International, February and March 1933. However, it took a crucial step ahead when it criticised the Indian communists for allowing the splits in AITUC.

At about the same time (early 1933) the Calcutta group or Calcutta Committee published a document entitled The Indian Revolution and Our Tasks (Text VII4). It broadly accepted the points of criticism contained in the Open Letter and carried signs of some fresh thinking. The invective against the ‘left’ Congressmen continued; but its warm invitation to “dear terrorist friends” to join the communist movement which “is not ... a thing imported from Russia” but is “adapted to the requirements of the Indian people and the process of evolution of Indian society” and its lucid and convincing presentation of the stages and tasks of Indian revolution indicated the start of a break with ;left’ phrasemongering.

Shortly afterwards, i.e., in July 1933 came the second open letter — this time from the CPC only (Text VII5). On the TU front the letter said:

  • “It seems to us that the absence of a Communist Party explains the fact that the process of separating out of the revolutionary wing of the proletariat in 1929-32 from national reformism took the form of splitting the trade unions. ... Such a sectarian policy has only strengthened the position of the bourgeoisie and their agents. ...” While carrying on consistent struggle against national-reformism including its various ‘left’ variants represented by Subhas Bose and Nehru on the one hand and Roy-Kandalkar and Co. on the other, it was therefore necessary to go in for “agreements with the national-reformists in the trade unions, ... or even the unity of the Red and national reformist trade unions in places where the latter have the masses with them. ...” Moreover, “it is necessary to begin serious work in the reformist trade unions and every kind of mass reformist organizations ...”

But this was not all. In a very cautious and non-committal way, the UF approach intruded into the then forbidden realm of general tactical line as well. Drawing attention to the success of the tactic of UF with the national bourgeoisies in China, the Open Letter prescribed the following task in the Indian context : “... to call for united front of workers, peasants, students and urban poor, and to begin to form it in the struggle against the Constitution[4], appealing to the rank and file adherents of the Congress to support the struggle of workers and peasants ...” (emphasis ours).

The fight against isolationism, which had to be slow and halfhearted because it took place within the confines of the Draft platform of Action, continued in 1934. A new Draft Political Thesis (or Theses) was drawn up by the newly-formed Provisional Central Committee (PCC) of CPI and published in the first issue of The Communist, organ of the PCC (January 1934), with an abridged version also appearing in the July 20 issue of lnprecor. While basically keeping within the theoretical bounds of the Draft Platform, it marked a notable advance in developing the Party line. The theses pointed out that the mistake of viewing the Indian bourgeoisie simply as an ally of imperialism, and the consequent underestimation of the influence of its political party (the INC) over the masses, had cost the CPI very dear. “It is a fact”, the theses frankly admitted, “that during the CD movement of 1930-31 the Communists did not realise the full significance of the movement and objectively isolated themselves from the struggle of the masses. ...” It was therefore necessary, while relentlessly exposing the national reformists in general and their 'left' elements in particular, to utilise the Congress platform and other mass organisations in a planned way (See Text VII6).

Originating from Bombay, however, the Draft Theses was not equally appreciated in all places. Thus when the Calcutta Committee brought out the first issue of its organ The Communist Bulletin in July 1934, it republished the older Draft Platform of 1930 and ignored the latest Party document, i.e., the Draft Theses. The very next month the same committee approvingly reprinted an Inprecor article by one V Basak,[5] but again not the Draft Theses.

Despite these regional disparities, a lively — though not at all systematically organised — discussion on tactical line was thus developing throughout the Party. The Indian communists were slowly over-coming the sectarian errors both on the basis of their own experience and with comradely help from other communist parties. The process would, however, come to fruition only in the coming year — after the 180° turn in the Comintern line at its Seventh World Congress.

Notes:

1. See The Communist International 1919-43 Documents, Vol. Ill op.clt p 45, Emphasis added.
2. It is interesting to recall that the General Statement issued by 18 Meerut prisoners at about this time clearly stated that “the formation of Soviets is not the immediate task in India” but a long-term perspective. Also its (the Statement’s) portrayal of the Indian bourgeoisie was more dialectical, though not flawless (See Text VI25). While accepting that the capitalist class in India was prone to compromises and in the long run even counter-revolutionary, the Meerut prisoners did not agree that it had completely gone over to imperialism.

3.   Unfortunately we have not been able to trace the original document from which the “Open Letter” quotes. However, a clue is available from the following. According to Horace Williamson, Director of the intelligence Bureau from April 1931, the open letter was issued not arbitrarily or spontaneously, but in response to persistent requests from the leaders of CPI then in jail. He mentions a "memorandum" intercepted by the IB in early 1933, which referred to two reports sent by Meerut prisoners in 1931 and 1932 to the international authorities via visitors in India. From the memorandum, Williamson gathers that the two reports “contained a lengthy analysis of the causes of the Party’s downfall and instructions for reorganisation on an all-India basis” as well as a number of proposals “for the rehabilitation of the Party”. The CI was urged to issue an “open letter” to CPI pointing out its mistakes, particularly those of factionalism in the nominal Party centre at Bombay, mutual isolation of the existing Party groups etc. These recommendations we shall discuss under the next sub-heading; but the pertinent question that comes first is : are we to believe Williamson ? We could not trace the original copies of these documents, and we know that like all IB reports, Williamson's book India and Communism contains ,so many distortions, slanders and lies. But in this particular case he does not appear to have a motive to concoct the memorandum or the reports. The whole thrust of British policy was to project the Indian communists as blind followers or agents of Moscow, always awaiting the latter's instructions for mischief-making; so there is no reason why Williamson should concoct documents to project some sort of independent thinking on the part of Meerut prisoners. Besides, the details given by him (see pp 176-79 of his book, op. cit.) are rather convincing. Finally, it is known from other sources that comrades in Meerut jail did have many differences on political and organisational questions, so there is nothing abnormal about such reports from veteran leaders. Taking these factors into account, we tend to believe Williamson provisionally, i.e., till something definite is established on this question.

It is possible that the June 1930 document referred to in the “Open Letter” was also sent to the Cl by some Meerut prisoners belonging to the Bombay organisation.

4. The reference is to the constitution embodied, first, in the Simon Commission Report of 1930, then in the “White Paper” issued by the British Government in 1933 and finally given the shape of the Government of India Act of 1935.

5.   The article, entitled A Few Remarks on the Indian Communist Movement (Inprecor, June 1,1934, pp 345-49), observed : “in the course of mass actions (strikes, for example), it is permissible to raise the question of uniting some of our parallel TUs and the reformist TUs into joint TUs, under the condition that this unification shall take place from below, that the election to the management committee shall be made by the workers — delegates from the mills — and that the advanced workers shall have the right to bring forward before the workers their proposals and defend them.” The article also proposed that the CPI should, through its revolutionary trade unions, from joint action committees comprising delegates from peasant, youth etc. organisations and also — mark it — Congress rank and file and that such committees should take the initiative in developing a mass protest movement against the draft constitution and may be on other issues. In other words concrete steps were to be taken to acquire the leadership of the anti-imperialist movement and for this purpose the communist-sponsored anti-imperialist league should stop being “a replica of a Communist Party” and become “a broad mass organization”. The reprint of the article in the organ of the Calcutta Committee was accom­panied by an editorial note : “The article is a sort of self-criticism of our Party comrades in Bengal. I hope that it will help to correct our comrades as regards the defects pointed out in the article.”

 

From Fragmentation to Reorganisation

“The building of a centralised, disciplined, united, mass, underground communist party is today the chief and basic task long ago overdue” — declared the Draft Platform of Action in December 1930. Even the rudiments of all-India party system had been effectively crushed by the Meerut blow and the scattered groups in the provinces of Bombay, Bengal, Punjab, the Central Provinces etc. were working according to their different perceptions in almost total isolation from one another. The three-party open letter to the CPI issued in May 1932 (Text VII3) gave a correct portrayal of the state of affairs : “Instead of a struggle for a united all-Indian Communist Party, we find localism, provincialism, self-isolation from the masses, etc., which though it could be understood in 1930, now represents the main danger to the revolutionary proletarian movement.” Particularly disturbing was the factional fight in the Bombay organisation between the groups led by SV Deshpande and BT Randive (in early 1932 the latter formed the “Bolshevik Party of India” and sought the recognition of the CI, but in vain). Expressing the same anxiety, the open letter from the CPC (Text VII5), issued a year later, called for “the Bolshevisation of your ranks”. It drew attention to the necessity of “struggle on two fronts” (i.e., against right opportunism and ‘left’ sectarianism) and added : “You must struggle against petty-bourgeois individualism, self-centred pride; you must struggle against those who deny the necessity or oppose the formation of an underground all-Indian Communist Party, who neglect to use legal possibilities, who occupy a tailist position, who draw the Communists away from the democratic movements and the anti-imperialist struggle”. This clear enunciation of the political basis of reorganisation and consolidation of the Party greatly helped the movement in India.[1]

This does not mean, of course, that comrades in India were just listeners. If Horace Williamson is to be believed[2], the Meerut prisoners hi 1931-32 had put forward a set of most valuable suggestions to the international leadership for reorganising and revamping the Party ideologically, politically and organisationally. The more important of organisatinal recommendations were:

  • “A provisional central committee should be set up forthwith, composed of four elected representatives each from Bombay and Bengal, two from the Central Provinces and possibly one or two from the Punjab.” The committee should adopt “a suitable constitution”, elect a secretariat and take steps to establish necessary inter-provincial contacts etc.
  • In place of using the P & T services, a secret courier system should be established through Party supporters among railwaymen.
  • “... the immediate publication of vernacular weekly papers in various centres, the free distribution of weekly or fortnightly news-sheets in large numbers, and the circulation of 'international material' through the medium of an English monthly” to help provincial leaders and “also to attract intellectuals.”
  • “... a substantial number of young men, about thirty to begin with, should be sent forthwith to Moscow for training ...”
  • The CI should immediately issue an “open letter” to the CPI analysing its mistakes.
  • Two representatives of the CI should be sent to India — preferably British citizens who were immune to the Foreigners Act. The emissaries “should not work wholly underground, as previous representatives had done, but more or less openly and as far as possible within the law. They could, for instance, associate openly with trades-unionist and political movements of all complexions on the pretext of studying them. ... Past experience had shown that the usefulness of comrades who remained strictly underground was seriously reduced.”

The requested open letter came soon, but in the form of a letter issued by three parties; this was followed by another one from the CPC. In the meantime, the Calcutta Committee of CPI issued in March 1933 a fervent call: “The CC of the CPI has been split up with quarrels on account of its own faults and weaknesses. Let us close that sad chapter in the history of the CPI and reform with new vigour and earnestness a strong and really representative Central Committee of the CPI, let us bring out a Central organ of the CPI, let us infuse fresh blood into the party ...” (Text VII4). Thus it was within India, and not in Moscow, that the ground was being prepared for party reorganisation — both at the conceptual level from above and, as the following account would show, in the heat of class struggle from below.

The most painstaking work was being carried out by young communist cadres on the labour front in and around Bombay, Calcutta, Kanpur and many other centres. TU work was closely linked up with Party building and scores of legal and semi-legal magazines — mostly in the vernaculars but a few also in English — were brought out for revolutionary propaganda among workers, students and youths. Byway of example, let us briefly examine the diverse work base from which the CPI re-emerged in and around Calcutta in the early thirties to become the main centre of Party reorganisation.

  • More than ten broadly communist or socialist groups, each with its own magazine, worked on the TU front and conducted study circles among workers, such as : the Labour Party (later Bolshevik Party) with New Front (later Labour Front) as its paper; the Karkhana (meaning Factory) group named after its organ; the Sarbahara (meaning proletariat) group, named after its paper; the Gananayak (People’s hero) group, also known as “Indian Proletarian Revolutionary Party”, active in the districts of Hooghly and Burdwan (not far away from Calcutta); the Samyaraj Party (Communist Regime Party) active in Calcutta as well as Dhaka; the Chandannagore group connected with Lal Nishan (Red Flag) magazine; Saumendranath Tagore’s group which later became the RCPI; Moni Singh’s “Young Comrades League” and so on.
  • Renowned communist leaders who started political work in this region and during this period include : MA Farooqui, Somenath Lahiri, Ranen Sen, Moni Singh, Muhammad Ismail, Genda Singh, Bhowani Sen etc.
  • Abdul Halim, who had started work earlier, organised the Calcutta Committee of the CPI in early 1931. This committee established contacts with most other communist groups or circles in Bengal and for some time acted as the provincial committee of Bengal. By early 1935, district committees/organising committees came up in Howrah, Hooghly, Burdwan, Midnapore and the far away district of Jessore. In the last three districts there was good work among the peasants.
  • In 1932, the “Workers’ Party of India” was floated by the Calcutta comrades to work as the Party’s open front and recruitment system. The experiment was however short lived.[3]
  • Work among students was going on simultaneously. There were a number of papers like Chhatra Dal (Students Group) and Chhatra (The Student). Many students actively joined forces with the working class movement and the Communist Student League was established in 1932.

On the basis of this organising work at the grassroots and the conceptual developments noted earlier, the actual process of reorganisation on an all-India basis started from August 1933 when Meerut prisoners began to be released. Dr. Gangadhar Adhikari was the first to come out. He spent some time in the Bombay organisation and then proceeded to Calcutta in November. The Calcutta Committee, which had already started publishing The Communist as its organ, shouldered the responsibility of secretly organising a meeting in December 1933. The participants included, inter alia, Halim, Lahiri and Sen from Bengal, Adhikari himself and SG Patkar from Bombay, PC Joshi from UP, Gurdit Singh from Punjab and ML Jaywant from Nagpur. The meeting was held for almost five days in four different places within Calcutta to avoid police harassment.

The principal outcome of the meeting was “the nucleus of the Provisional Central Committee of the CPI”. The expression “nucleus” was used to signify that the full PCC would come into being only after co-opting several other comrades from various provinces and a few of the Meerut prisoners due to be released shortly; however the word was not generally used in public.

Dr. Adhikari was the natural choice for the post of general secretary because his theoretical calibre had become known while in prison (and would be reaffirmed soon). It was decided that a new political thesis and new statutes or constitution should be drafted; contact should be established with other provincial groups; factional quarrels in Bombay and elsewhere must be resolved; and a more representative all-India conference was to be held around March 1934 to elect a regular central committee.

Early next year the new Draft Political Theses (Text VII6) and the Statutes of the CPI (Text III14), authored mainly by Dr. G Adhikari with the help of Somenath Lahiri and others, were published and circulated among all provincial organisations. About the former we have discussed earlier; the latter is remarkable for its comprehensiveness blended with precision. Rules regarding such details as extraordinary congresses, “auditing commission” etc. are very carefully formulated. Most interestingly, a number of provisions reflect the experience and need of strictly underground existence — such as separating “special work” (presumably link systems, work among enemy ranks etc.) from “general work”, appointing CCMs and PCMs (Provincial Committee Members) as “manager of technical apparatus and organiser of distribution of literature” and as “head of the special apparatus” at all-India and provincial levels respectively, and so on. At the same time, Party education is taken care of, with a special department devoted to this task at all-India and provincial levels. Reflecting the real situation and trend of the period, collective or group admission is also allowed in certain cases after careful scrutiny (see Art. 4 and the note to Art. 36). In short, this was an excellent document, many of the basic provisions of which are upheld to this day by all the three stream of communist movement in India.

The two companion documents (Political Thesis and Statutes) having thus laid down the political-organisational basis for reorganisation, 1934 saw the Party emerge from years of stagnation and decay.[4] Already at the fag end of 1933 the PCC was strengthened by the inclusion of KN Joglekar, SS Mirajkar and SV Ghate on their release from prison, and from January The Communist, the organ of the Calcutta Committee, began to appear as the central organ. The very first issue declared its resolve to “act as an ideological guide to the numerous party groups scattered throughout the country”; to “invite and promote healthy discussion on certain points on which perfect ideological unity has not been achieved; and thus prepare for the “convention” to elect a properly constituted CC”. An appeal was held out to “all communist groups which have come inside the Party after the first session of the Provisional CC and other groups which are still outside, to make their contributions and criticisms of” the draft political thesis and join forces with the CPI. Throughout 1934 the progress in Party work continued in different provinces despite the ban on the Party declared in July and the re-arrest of many leaders and cadres including G Adhikari (whereupon Ghate and then Mirajkar became the general secretary). Thus in July itself the reorganised Bombay Provincial Committee called upon all worjcers, then engaged in a hard battle against a renewed capitalist onslaught, to “Unite Under the Banner of the Communist Party” (Text III16). The same month the Calcutta Committee began republishing its organ as The Communist Bulletin (re-named The Communist Review from August). In Text III15 we reproduce excerpts from the editorial of its first issue. At the end of the year the PCC met again in Bombay taking advantage, as they often did, of the Congress session and worked out plans for a year that would mark — though they did not know it at the moment — a great turning-point in the Party’s history.

Notes:

1. The CI also helped the work of Party building by sending comrades Amir Hyder Khan, HG Lynd and a few others and through a “Indian Secretariat” set up in Berlin with Clemens Palme Dutt and Virendranath Chattopadhyaya. But in a show of one-sidedness characteristic of this period, the CI negated the entire history of CPI before the 1930s. Thus Valia, a leading commentator on India, wrote in February 1933: “The revolutionary groups, which came out in defence of Communism and considered themselves Communists, in reality remained part of the National Congress to the end of 1929. ... [They] energetically participated in the independence movement, and had great influence, but by their policy, they in reality, almost amalgamated with the “left” national reformists, and did not appear before the working masses as an independent class force. As the result, there was no Communist Party.” The blame lay squarely on “the renegades, Roy and Co.”, who strove for “the formation of a national revolutionary (!) Party (the reference is obviously to the WPP — Ed.) and the replacement of the Communist Party by it. ...” It was only in 1930, notes Valia, that the “Communist groups took definite form. A break was made with “left” national reformism. A severe struggle commenced. ...” (“The Development of the Communist Movement in India”, The Communist International, February 1, 1933, pp 81-82) The theme is repeated in many other authoritative writings of this period.

2.   See p 135-36. The following quotes are from Williamson's book India and Communism, op. cit, pp 177-79.

3.   During this period, the Comintern approved the formation of legal labour parties at local levels on the following conditions — that an illegal communist organisation existed capable of organised revolutionary activity in such a party, that it did not take the place of a communist party, that it had a class programme, that it did not divert the workers from revolutionary to reformist activities. Clearly, the emphasis was on continuing the advantages of WPPs while steering clear of its negative tendencies.

4. This took place in the midst of a notable resurgence in the working class movement, as we shall see in Part VI.