Struggle for hegemony in India [2nd ed., rev. ed] 9788132106548, 8132106547

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Volume I - A History of the Indian Communists: The Irrelevance of Leninism......Page 8
Contents......Page 12
List of Abbreviations......Page 14
Preface to the Revised Edition......Page 16
Preface......Page 20
Acknowledgements......Page 22
1 - Hegemony and the Historical Method......Page 24
2 - The Irrelevance of Leninism......Page 59
3 - The Non-cooperation Movement and the Birth of Workers and Peasants Parties......Page 81
4 - To Be or Not to Be: Communist Party or WPP?......Page 109
5 - The Colonial State, Indian Capitalists and the Left: State, Nation and Class......Page 148
6 - Nehru’s Paradigm......Page 182
7 - Towards Left Hegemony: Molecular Changes in Mass Ideology......Page 218
8 - Salt and the Steelframe: Contending Hegemonies......Page 243
9 - 'Sarkar Hargai'......Page 279
10 - Of Strategies and Methods of Struggle......Page 304
11 - The Politics of Nation and Class......Page 322
12 - ‘Sectarianism’ or Alienation?......Page 348
13 - In the Ghetto......Page 371
14 - M.N. Roy, Indian Communists and the Third International......Page 389
Conclusion......Page 409
Bibliography......Page 416
Index......Page 429
About the Author......Page 438
Volume II - A History of the Indian Communists: From United Front to Left Front......Page 445
Contents......Page 449
List of Abbreviations......Page 451
Preface to the Revised Edition......Page 453
Preface......Page 457
Acknowledgements......Page 459
Introduction......Page 461
1 - The Colonial State......Page 477
2 - Gandhian Strategy and the Framework of Hegemonic Politics......Page 500
3 - State Policy, Congress Crisis and the Birth of a New Ideology......Page 525
4 - Gathering Forces of the Left and Government’s Strategy of Suppression......Page 548
5 - The Third International and Indian Communists: Communist Party and the Disunited National Front......Page 579
6 - Marxisms and Marxist Practices......Page 608
7 - Of Political Issues and Ideological Conflicts: Colonial Constitution, Council Entry and Office Acceptance......Page 628
8 - The Ministries and the Left: Experiments with Class Adjustment......Page 657
9 - The Left and the Ministries: Experiments with Class Confrontation—I......Page 687
10 - The Left and the Ministries: Experiments with Class Confrontation—II......Page 707
11 - The Divided Left: Notes on Permanent Disunity......Page 732
12 - Politics of Transformation vs. Politics of Alternative......Page 764
13 - Communists since Independence......Page 793
Epilogue: From Naxalbari to Lalgarh: The Continuity of Insurrectionary Politics......Page 851
Conclusion......Page 858
Bibliography......Page 868
Index......Page 879
About the Author......Page 888
Volume III - Culture, Community and Power: A Critique of the Discourses of Communalism and Secularism......Page 895
Contents......Page 899
List of Abbreviations......Page 901
Preface to the Revised Edition......Page 903
Preface......Page 907
Acknowledgements......Page 915
Introduction......Page 917
1 - Culture, Community and Power......Page 919
2 - Outline of a Theory of Cultural Power......Page 975
3 - The Power of the Past: Two Paradigms of Cultural Hegemony......Page 990
4 - Power and Hegemony: The Site of Cultural Struggle......Page 1004
5 - The Cultural Faultline and Its Mirrors......Page 1018
6 - The State in Medieval North India and the Cultural Faultline......Page 1048
7 - Women and Sexuality in the Discourse of Communalism and Communal Violence......Page 1095
8 - Narratives of Cultural Contest......Page 1157
9 - The Cultural Complexion of the Nation: Indian National Congress versus Hindu Mahasabha......Page 1189
10 - Cultural Limits to Secular Politics: Sermons on National Unity......Page 1221
11 - Three Songs......Page 1242
Conclusion......Page 1265
Postscript: Dilemmas of Indian Secularism......Page 1279
Bibliography......Page 1300
Index......Page 1315
About the Authors......Page 1323

Citation preview

Praise for the Previous Edition

[Joshi and Josh] on their part go deep into the ‘medieval’ past of Indian history to try and find answers to the fundamental question of what hinders the creation of a ‘composite nation’. Sudarshan Sathianathan in Asian Affairs: Journal of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, Vol. XXVI (Part 1), February 1995 Bhagwan Josh and Shashi Joshi’s three volumes are a reconstruction and reinterpretation of the Indian independence struggle that is largely refracted through the central concept of ‘hegemony’… The structure of the narrative offered is distinct and takes it in a very different direction. Theirs is, above all, a detailed and insistent critique of the communist left in the National Movement period and, as a counterpoint to it, a defence of Gandhi and the ‘Gandhian strategy’ for securing independence via the Congress… What is distinct in the treatment here is the diagnosis and description given for this communist failure. Achin Vanaik in Economic and Political Weekly, 23 December 1995 Joshi and Josh made in my judgment an extremely useful contribution to our understanding of the Indian colonial state. This necessarily reopened several issues which historians have the need to grapple with afresh. Bhupinder Brar in New Quest, November–December 1995

Joshi and Josh provide good reason to suppose that there was a greater identity of interest between the Congress leadership and their mass following than Marxist-inspired histories generally allow. This, of course, is deeply committed history-writing. Joshi and Josh have few qualms about writing the history not merely of ‘what was’, but also of ‘what ought to have been’. Nicholas Owen in South Asia, Vol. XVII, June 1994 [As] a sociological analysis of various hegemonic struggles that have taken place in India this century, and their historical foundations, this is an excellent work, which displays possibly the most important criteria for such an undertaking: a clear and thorough understanding of the topic. Stuart Tilley in Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 25, No. 2, 1995 The study is a pioneering attempt to understand why the Communist Party in India, comprised of brave and sacrificing cadres and sympathizers and having conducted many heroic struggles could not provide an alternative to the National Congress, in leading the people to achieve freedom… [This work] is the first systematic endeavour during [the] post-independent period to examine the role of the Communist Party during the national movement since it became a mass movement under the unique strategy and tactic evolved by Mahatma Gandhi… The volumes should be studied because it has relevance in understanding the policies and practices followed by the Communist parties in the postIndependence era. A.R. Desai in The Book Review, Vol. XVIII, Nos 2–3 (February–March), 1994 [Joshi and Josh] look far more critically at the history of the formative period of the CPI in the wider context of the national movement for independence and study the process by which the communists cut themselves off from the national mainstream. Sham Lal in The Times of India, 7 November 1992. Joshi and Josh show that the communists were mistaken, too, about the sentiments of the Indian people… [They] explain communist blindness in terms of an unthinking adoption of Russian images as Indian facts,

and of a failure to grasp the truth that Gramsci had understood about how hegemonist or semi-hegemonist states can be fought. Rajmohan Gandhi in Indian Express Sunday Magazine, 20 December 1992 This is a significant contribution towards understanding of strategies and methods advocated by the rival ideological groups within India’s national movement… This is a mature analysis within a neat conceptual framework. Amal Ray in Deccan Herald, 12 September 1993 Undoubtedly, a great deal of effort has gone into the making of this book. The readings are impressive and extremely informative for anyone wishing to undertake research on communalism. There are several highly perceptive observations, especially in the postscript which deals with the present day scenario. Visalakshi Menon in The Economic Times, New Delhi, 24 April 1994 The book provides an excellent overview of a turbulent period in Indian history which continues to fascinate both laymen and experts. Amulya Ganguli in The Times of India, 12 April 1992 It is an extremely interesting book, worth reading for all social scientists, academicians and activists. Aditya Nigam in The Sunday Observer, 12–18 April 1992 [The] use of hegemony as a central category in politics when applied to an anti-colonial movement does provide a new frame for the discussion of our past. More significantly, it re-centres the role of ideas and culture as material forces influencing history. One wishes that these formulations generate serious debate, such that historical narratives return once again to the fold of history rather than remain mere pawns in sterile ideological polemic. Harsh Sethi in The Express, 2 August 1992 The most remarkable quality of Josh’s book is that it has been able to tell a controversial story with great plausibility. However unusual for a

Marxist to articulate such a view of Indian nationalist politics, he makes it a highly persuasive account, and it is underpinned by a theory which is certainly impeccably Marxist in its origins, if not in the conclusions it is made to support. He also achieves a commendable balance between the detailed empirical accounts of Congress policies, debates among the radicals, the politics of the ministerial government in the provinces after 1935, and his theoretical commentary on what is going on, within one single narrative frame. His work, which is the second in the series, is an interesting, if controversial, contribution to the history of Indian nationalism. Sudipta Kaviraj in Asian Affairs: Journal of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, Vol. XXVI (Part II), June 1995 Shashi Joshi has placed all who will—and may their number be legion— read her book deeply in debt to her. Those who want India and communism to grow will learn much from what she has written. Mohit Sen in Mainstream, 19 December 1992 Shashi Joshi’s work is an important contribution to the historiography of our freedom struggle. It helps us understand and critically appraise the Indian Left in a much better way. Ganesh Mantri in The Times of India, 29 July 1992. Shashi Joshi displays considerable grasp of detail without losing sight of the broad contours of her story which is related with fluent authority. Premen Addy in Asian Affairs, February 1993

A History of the Indian Communists The Irrelevance of Leninism

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A History of the Indian Communists

Other Volumes in the Series Volume 2 A History of the Indian Communists: From United Front to Left Front by Bhagwan Josh Volume 3 Culture, Community and Power: A Critique of the Discourses of Communalism and Secularism by Shashi Joshi and Bhagwan Josh

Struggle for Hegemony in India Volume I

A History of the Indian Communists The Irrelevance of Leninism

Shashi Joshi

Copyright © Shashi Joshi and Bhagwan Josh, 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. First published in 1992 This second edition published in 2011 by Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd B1/I-1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044, India www.sagepub.in Sage Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320, USA Sage Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP, United Kingdom Sage Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 Published by Vivek Mehra for Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd, typeset in 10.5/12pt Adobe Garamond by Star Compugraphics Private Limited, Delhi and printed at Chaman Enterprises, New Delhi. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Joshi, Shashi, 1949–   Struggle for hegemony in India/Shashi Joshi, Bhagwan Josh.     p. cm.      Includes bibliographical references and index.   1. India—Politics and government—1919–1947.  2. Nationalism—India— History. 3. Communism—India—History. I. Josh, Bhagwan, 1949– II. Title. DS480.45.J665324.254'07509041—dc23

2011

2011034896

ISBN:  978-81-321-0654-8 (HB) The Sage Team: Gayeti Singh, Sushmita Banerjee, Nand Kumar Jha, and Deepti Saxena

In memory of P.C. Joshi and K. Damodaran

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Contents



List of Abbreviations,  ix Preface to the Revised Edition,  xi Preface,  xv Acknowledgements,  xvii

  1. Hegemony and the Historical Method,  1   2. The Irrelevance of Leninism,  36   3. The Non-cooperation Movement and the Birth of Workers’ and Peasants’ Parties,  58   4. To Be or Not to Be: Communist Party or WPP?  86   5. The Colonial State, Indian Capitalists and the Left: State, Nation and Class,  125   6. Nehru’s Paradigm,  159   7. Towards Left Hegemony: Molecular Changes in Mass Ideology,  195   8. Salt and the Steelframe: Contending Hegemonies,  220   9. ‘Sarkar Hargai’,  256

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10. Of Strategies and Methods of Struggle,  281 11. The Politics of Nation and Class,  299 12. ‘Sectarianism’ or Alienation?  325 13. In the Ghetto,  348 14. M.N. Roy, Indian Communists and the Third International,  366

Conclusion,  386 Bibliography,  393 Index,  406 About the Author,  415

List of Abbreviations

AICC AITUC AIRED-TUC BMWU BTLU BTUC BB&CI CW CPI CSP CI CD CPGB CLAA ECCI FR (i) FR (ii) GKU GIP GOI HDP

All India Congress Committee All India Trade Union Congress All India Red Trade Union Congress Bombay Mill Workers’ Union Bombay Textile Labour Union British Trade Union Congress Bombay, Baroda and Central India Collected Works Communist Party of India Congress Socialist Party Communist International Civil Disobedience Communist Party of Great Britain Criminal Law Amendment Act Executive Committee of Communist International Fortnightly Report for first half of the month Fortnightly Report for second half of the month Girni Kamgar Union (Red Flag) Great Indian Peninsula Government of India Home Department Political

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HFM HSRA INC ILO INPRECOR IFTU LAI MCC MSA NBS NTUF NCO NAI NMML NWFP PCC RILU SW TSA WPP

History of Freedom Movement Files (Hyderabad) Hindustan Socialist Republican Association Indian National Congress International Labour Organisation International Press Correspondence Indian Federation of Trade Unions League against Imperialism Meerut Conspiracy Case Maharashtra State Archives (Mumbai) Naujawan Bharat Sabha National Trades Union Federation Non-cooperation National Archives of India Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (New Delhi) North West Frontier Province Pradesh Congress Committee Red International Labour Unions Selected Works Tamil Nadu State Archives (Chennai) Workers’ and Peasants’ Party

Preface to the Revised Edition

The discussion of the theme of irrelevance of Leninism for the Indian social conditions, as formulated in the first chapter of the first volume, was continued in the second and third volumes. The set of arguments developed in the second volume sought to demonstrate that given the semi-liberal nature of the colonial state, the very idea of forming a Communist party in the 1920s was in fact a misconceived project. The Indian equivalent of the European type of social democratic party, called the Workers and Peasants Party, formed in 1928, was arbitrarily dissolved under instructions from the Third International. This experience continues to be relevant even today. Was there any possibility of an insurrectionary armed revolution against the colonial state? The question has never been raised and discussed by the various communist parties or intellectuals sympathetic to these parties. This is one of the questions that has been discussed at length in this series. It was taken for granted that India needed a Bolshevik-type revolution and only a Communist party could lead such a revolution. Therefore, a Communist party should be created. It was as irrational a decision as the decision to dissolve the Workers and Peasants Party in 1928. The organisational conception of the Communist party as developed by the Third International was something qualitatively different from the social democratic type of parties already existing in Europe. The idea of

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the Communist party as the party of revolution was developed by Lenin, keeping in mind the feudal–absolutist character (i.e., non-hegemonic character) of the czarist state in Russia. The Russian state, unlike the semidemocratic colonial state in India, did not possess even a rudimentary constitutional framework or any civil liberties for the organisation and functioning of open democratic parties or trade unions. The Communist Party in Russia was an ‘underground’ party of ‘professional revolutionaries’, consistently working with the aim to create an insurrectionary situation. This situation was supposed to provide an opportunity conducive for the intervention of the Communist Party to forcibly capture state power. On the other hand, social democratic parties were designed to compete with other democratic parties within the constitutional arena and win majorities in the parliamentary systems, forming governments for a fixed period of time. The Indian Communists, from the very beginning, were of the view that there was no difference between the nature of the colonial state in India and the feudal–absolutist state in czarist Russia. Therefore, the lessons of the Russian Revolution regarding the nature of the Party to be formed, and its strategy and tactics, were equally applicable to India. For a long time the Indian Communists tried to stage the ‘Russian Revolution’ in India. The failed Telangana insurrection of 1948 and their suppression by the Nehru government forced the Indian Communists to participate in the first parliamentary elections held in India in 1951. After this, the Communist Party was compelled to come out in the open and compete with other democratic parties in parliamentary politics. Soon after, in 1957, the Kerala Communists succeeded in forming the first Communist government in the world within the framework of parliamentary politics. This was a turning point in the history of Communist politics. From now onwards, they began to be pulled in two opposite directions: between the preconceived notion of insurrectionary politics necessary for making a Russian- or Chinese-type violent revolution, on the one hand, and the attractions of parliamentary mass politics promising governmental power through peaceful means, on the other. Indian Communists were caught between the a priori commitment to the romantic dream of their youth, i.e., revolution and the need of a realistic mass politics in a parliamentary system. This tension, over a period, led to confusion and conflict within the ranks of the undivided party giving rise to endless debates, and finally resulting in the first split in



Preface to the Revised Contents Edition

the Communist movement in 1964. Once again, the ‘Kerala Experiment’ was repeated in Bengal in 1967 when the CPM-led front came to power. It immediately led to the ‘second split’ when the insurrectionary wing of CPM declared the path of ‘constitutional communism’ as nothing but revisionism—a word of abuse in the Communist lexicon. The point that must be emphasised is that the Indian Communists never attempted to provide a theoretical basis to place the ‘Kerala experience’ as well as the ‘Bengal experience’ in a strategic framework. Its significance has continued to be ignored till today. And this was done by reducing this rich experience to what Communists call ‘tactical participation in parliamentary politics’. Had the Communists undertaken this exercise seriously, i.e., working out a theoretical justification for building upon this rich experience, they would never have stopped Jyoti Basu from becoming India’s first Communist prime minister. They would have immediately realised not only its symbolic significance but also the far-reaching consequence it would have had on the Indian imagination. Moreover, in the context of the 2004 elections, when the Congress was unable to form a government without the Communists, they could have demanded one-third of the share of power in the Manmohan Singh ministry. Because, this was the only way the party could have enhanced its power and influence at the Centre and its political prestige among the poor masses. Had the Communists done this, the relationship with America would have certainly evolved differently. The Indo-US nuclear deal controversy would perhaps never have originated. It was precisely their absence from the ministerial power that the situation was precipitated. Here, there was a golden opportunity for them in the light of their stated goals to pressurise the Central government into genuinely implementing the Common Minimum Programme. Once again, as in pre-independence India, the Communists missed the bus. How should one interpret the Indian Communists’ ‘Kerala-type experiments’? The successful practical politics in Kerala had emphasised the point that what was required was the formation of a new type of social democratic party—a party of the broad left—that evolved its political perspectives slightly left of the Indian National Congress. This is because the Indian National Congress is itself a conservative social democratic party. But that presupposed a fundamental break with what the Indian Communists called ‘Marxism–Leninism’ and shifting to what was, once upon a time, denounced as ‘Revisionism’—that is critically embracing the

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traditions of European social democracy. This dilemma, inherent in the perspectives of revolution vs. ‘constitutional communism’, continues to confront the Communists even today. Do the Indian Communists possess the intellectual wherewithal to make such a fundamental rupture in their mindset? That is the challenge today, needless to say, a gigantic one. So far they have tried to resolve the above-mentioned dilemma by taking the easy way out: trying to make the Communist Party behave and act like a social democratic party by transforming it into an open mass Communist party. As a result, the Communists of India have fallen between the two stools. Over the years, what has emerged is a party which is neither ‘Communist’ nor ‘Socialist’. This continues to be the main problem with the Communists even today. The Congress at the Centre reminds them of their outdated commitment to Marxism–Leninism, while the Maoists denounce them for abandoning the true revolutionary road of insurrectionary politics. Obviously, the Communists (CPM and CPI) have lost their self-confidence to pose a serious challenge at the national level to both these forces by seeking to represent a viable practical politics of the broad democratic left. What is urgently required is the dissolution of sectarian Communist parties in favour of a new social democratic formation—‘a party of the broad left’ based on a realistic strategy that is left of the Congress. Otherwise, they would permanently remain what R.P. Dutt called ‘small and growing’. Actually, Communists are indirectly admitting the need for such a formation by constantly harping on the fact that to keep the Congress and the Right-wing at bay a third force is required. But they are knocking at closed doors by not coming to terms with their own historical experience. What is needed is not a ‘third alternative’ or ‘third front’ but a new type of social democratic party—‘a party of the broad left’. In the absence of this, the Communist politics would continue to revolve in a vicious circle: sometimes supporting the Congress and sometimes pitting itself against it.

Preface

In this project an attempt has been made to combine organically the perspectives of ‘a history from below’ with ‘a history from above’ to emphasise that their mutually exclusive deployment tends to blur rather than sharpen our understanding of historical events and processes. The macro-structures such as the colonial state/institutions/political parties/ kisan sabhas/trade unions/workers–peasants mobilisations have been placed in a context of interaction and interdependence, and their relationships focused upon. Theories in themselves do not confront history. They serve to provide meaningful questions and a language to explore historical problems. By discussing Gramsci’s theories in the context of mass movements, political representations, group alliances, ideological struggles, domination– subordination, conflict of interests between social groups and his insights into the specificity of the state structure and strategies, we evolve a new framework for the study of this theme. This has enabled the construction of a new paradigm: revealing the specific form and uniqueness of British rule in India, the rise of a mass movement, i.e., a protracted struggle to build ‘national hegemony’/‘state within a state’ and baring the logic of a ‘transfer of power’ rather than of a violent seizure of state power. In traditional historiography, what have been generally considered as three separate histories (history of state policies, history of the National

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Movement and the history of the left) are here treated as three strands of a single history. Also, we do not approach the reconstruction of this triangular relationship in the traditional way, i.e., dividing the project into three parts narrating the individual characteristics of each one of them separately. Rather, we chose the left, specifically the Communists, as the protagonists of this story and then constructed the experience of their interaction with the others as well as with social and political reality. The reason for this is the fact that for a long time the already existing historiography has revolved around the ‘Raj’ and ‘nationalism’/‘the Indian National Congress’. By conceptualising the period not in terms of a ‘dual contest’—the Congress and the Raj—but in terms of a ‘triangular contest’ we introduce a fundamental change in the reconstruction of the ‘national experience’. With the entry of the third contestant, the other parts of the picture also change. It becomes a different scenario—a very, very different history. In the historiography of the subaltern studies, which sought to write history of the third type, the heroes, despite appearing in brilliant but brief flashes on the political scene, do not constitute the ‘national experience’. They remain combatants but not contestants in the struggle for hegemony. The subaltern studies series reflected largely the traditional left’s historiographical premises exemplified in R.P. Dutt’s India Today. Logically, therefore, it focused upon the concept of subaltern insurgents rather than on hegemonic politics in the study of Indian history. We, on the contrary, begin with the rejection of R.P. Dutt’s methodology and analytical categories. A point in clarification of the focus in the three volumes: the first two volumes addressed, mainly, the political project of establishing hegemony of all the three contenders, i.e., the Colonial State, the National Movement, and the Left. However, the social–cultural project of integrating a hegemonic view of Indian society, as a basis for Indian nationhood is also taken into account. The third volume addresses the problems and perspectives involved in the contention over a social–cultural hegemony. Shashi Joshi Bhagwan Josh

Acknowledgements

This work was begun ten years ago, inspired by Professor P.C. Joshi (of the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi) whose critical questioning of the Marxist and Communist understanding of nationalism and the Indian national movement was pioneering. His fresh approach from within a left perspective and his emphasis on Antonio Gramsci persuaded me to address myself to the theme of a ‘struggle for hegemony’ in India. In the course of my research and writing, I received help and encouragement from Professor Bipan Chandra and Professor K.N. Panikkar. I owe special thanks to Professor Ravinder Kumar for his unstinting praise and encouragement and for inviting me to present some of my ideas at the prestigious Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. I also take this opportunity to thank Professor S. Gopal who has always been very helpful and encouraging to a struggling scholar. I must record my debt to friends who contributed to keeping one sane through the maze of documents and archives: Naren Panjwani, K. Gopalankutty, Murali Atluri, Sucheta Mahajan, Mridula and Aditya Mukherjee, Antony and Visha Thomas and P. Chandramohan. I thank the Indian Council of Historical Research, New Delhi, for providing financial help to visit various archives. Thanks are also due to the staff of the National Archives of India, Archives of Contemporary History of India, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library,

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and Jawaharlal Nehru University and its library (all based in Delhi), Maharashtra State Archives (Mumbai) and Tamil Nadu State Archives (Chennai). I also acknowledge my appreciation for the enthusiastic support extended by Primila Lewis and Swati Mitra. Thanks are finally due to the Principal, Miranda House, New Delhi, for supporting my requests for leave and appreciating my research interests, and my colleague Prabha Dixit for taking over many of my responsibilities. I am grateful to the British Council for a grant which helped me to visit the British Museum in London to consult the valuable R.P. Dutt collection. My gratitude to Ishan and Megha for sharing their mother with a formidable rival and my mother who was an effective surrogate. Shashi Joshi

Chapter 1

Hegemony and the Historical Method

This work was originally conceived as a history of the Communist Party of India (CPI). Very soon, however, it became clear that it would be impossible to understand the Party’s history without locating it in the wider frame of the anti-imperialist struggle. Also, it became necessary to trace the Communists’ theoretical premises and the political principles on which the CPI based its positions and practice vis-à-vis the national movement. We were confronted with sharp and categorical formulations made by the Communists on the nature of the Congress-led mass movements against imperialism. However, one looked in vain for documents where a detailed analysis of the structure of colonial society and the state would be made and on the basis of which the formulations would relate given historical reality with Marxist concepts. In brief, one searched for ‘a concrete analysis of the concrete situation’. But document after document detailed the history, problems and analysis of the Russian revolutionary movement, Bolshevik practice and ‘Leninist’ principles from which reductions were then made to the Indian context. ‘Even Dange’s book Gandhi versus Lenin, which sought to differentiate between, the historical reality in Russia and India, did not make any analysis of India’s colonial reality specifically; it only discussed some issues comparatively.’1 1

S.A. Dange, Gandhi versus Lenin, Bombay, 1921, Photocopy, ACHI, JNU, New Delhi.

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Thus began our quest to learn what the Congress movement against imperialism was all about and how one was to understand the Gandhiled mass movements in colonial India. From an empirical study of the Communist ‘party policy’ the focus shifted to studying the relation of the party to the surrounding society. A major source of inspiration were the writings of Antonio Gramsci, and as he put it: The history of a Party … can only be the history of a particular social group. But this group is not isolated; it has friends, kindred groups, opponents, enemies. The history of any given party can only emerge from the complex portrayal of the totality of society and state. The historian, though giving everything its due importance in the overall picture, will emphasise above all the real effectiveness of the party, its determining force, positive and negative, in having contributed to bringing certain events about and in having prevented other events from taking place.2

This work is neither intended nor claims to be a ‘complex portrayal’ of colonial India’s society and the state. It only takes this methodological approach as its point of departure to raise some questions and discuss a few aspects based on an empirical study of Indian political life during the period 1920–47. This is in the hope that the path towards a more complex treatment of the subject can thus be opened up historiographically. One question constantly rose to the surface throughout the course of this work: if Marxism is the theory—the ‘science’—of historical reality, then what was the nature of the Marxism upheld by the Communist movement in India? The running thread through all the aspects discussed in this work, including the chapters on the radicalisation of the Indian National Congress and the Civil Disobedience Movement, is an attempt to examine the nature of ‘Indian Marxism’. This central preoccupation with the Marxism of the Communist movement logically led to a large emphasis being placed on the role of ideology and the politico-ideological implications of a national liberation struggle against imperialism for class politics, organisation and consciousness. Class was not a self-sufficient category in colonial India; it was still in a process of formation. 2

Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, New York, 1971, p. 151.

Hegemony and the Historical Method

The history of the Indian people’s struggle against imperialism was ideologically over-determined because of the fully structured colonial ideology of the ruling power and the corresponding evolution of a nationalist ideology which sought to replace it—aiming at overthrowing colonialism. The ideological over-determination was even more pronounced due to the fact that the struggle between the Congress-led mass movements and British imperialism was fought on the terrain of ‘hegemony’ in which ideology was bound to play a major part. ‘Ideology’ not in the sense that it is superimposed on economic reality and ‘objective forces’, but in the sense in which ideology is itself a material force and an objective basis for political action. By and large the international Communist movement, after the death of Lenin, interpreted historical materialism in a way in which the ‘economic structure’ was given a decisive role to play and, to a lesser degree, was ‘a last appeal’, to use the ingenious formula of Althusser.3 Gramsci, however, wrote: ‘History is always the history between two hegemonic principles, between two religions’.4 And Gramsci’s interpretation of Italian history as well as his concept of ‘hegemony’, revealed this battle of ideologies and its role in determining the political fate of historical movements. Noberto Bobbio’s reading of Gramsci also concludes that in Gramsci, ‘the driving force of history is ultimately ideological’.5 Of course, as Luciano Pellicani says, no comprehensive or structured theory of ideology can be found in Marx’s writings but, on the other hand, no ‘single theory’ can be attributed to Marx in any case.6 Similarly, the terms ‘Leninism’ or ‘Leninist’ are often based on textual exegesis intending to prove what Lenin really said and are open to question on precisely the same ground.7 All references to the ‘Leninist Party’ in this work are to be understood not as an acceptance of some definite attributes of ‘Leninism’ but as a term that was constantly used in the Communist movement the world 3

L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital, London, 1970. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni, p. 1236, quoted in Luciano Pellicani, Gramsci: An Alternative Communism?, Stanford, California, 1981. 5 Noberto Bobbio quoted in Luciano Pellicani, Ibid. 6 Luciano Pellicani, Gramsci: An Alternative Communism. Werner Stark, The Sociology of Knowledge, Glencoe, Illinois, Free Press, 1958. 7 See, Marcel Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin, Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1975, and Valentino Gerratana, ‘Leninism’ in NLR, No. 103, May–June, 1977. 4

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over, to imply a ‘correct’ type or model for Communist parties. To us, the ‘Leninist Party’ can only mean the Communist Party that was formed and led by Lenin in the given conditions of Russia. The most crucial element in grasping the nature of the national movement and Gandhi’s leadership is to comprehend the character of the British–Indian colonial state. As Marx put it: ‘The state and structure of society are not, from the standpoint of politics, two different things. The state is the structure of society.’8 This generalisation could be interpreted to signify that the structure of the state moulds and limits the forms of politics of the society over which it exercises authority; the politics even of those who stand in opposition to it. Of course, on its part, the force of effective oppositional politics influences the response of the state. If may expand its institutions—modalities of rule—to accommodate opposition or at the least to neutralise it or strengthen its coercive machinery and employ repression to annihilate opposition to its power. Thus its opponents effectively guide the further structuring of the state. Nonetheless it remains true that the type of state that exists to begin with, before oppositional politics acquires strength and mass sanctions, definitively moulds the type and form of politics the opposition can practice to be effective. This political process was as true of the way in which early nationalist activities took shape, gradually crystallising into ‘moderate’ and ‘extremist’ trends, as it was of the type of politics that were conceived of and implemented in the era of Gandhian mass movements. The so-called ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’ among early nationalists had emphasised two equally important aspects of political reality in India. The ‘moderates’ were perfectly correct when they issued the warning that the colonial government was too powerful for nationalists to launch a frontal attack upon it. Not only would it be unsuccessful but the chances of smaller gains, on the basis of which further and bigger demands could be raised, would also be wiped out. The ‘extremists’ on their part rightly emphasised the necessity of organising mass movements without which no real or meaningful pressure could be built up against the authorities to compel them to concede even minimum national demands. The historical greatness of Gandhi lay in his capacity to link the two methods in a new strategy for the national movement. He fully accepted 8

T. Bottomore and M. Rubel, eds, Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, Pelican Books, 1979, p. 222.

Hegemony and the Historical Method

the ‘truth’ of what the ‘moderates’ said. For example, the method of taking British claims to liberal policies in a ‘legal’ and ‘constitutional’ framework at face value and calling upon them to fulfil their promises was employed by both the early nationalists and Gandhi. By this method the colonial authorities were forced either into conceding some rights to the nationalists in accordance with their claims and promises, or compelled to refuse fulfilment of their promises and thus reveal the truth of their rule to the people. On the other hand, Gandhi was also convinced of the ‘necessity’ and ‘correctness’ of organising mass movements so that the national struggle would actually represent the will of the people, as the ‘extremists’ had advocated. To combine ‘truth’ with ‘necessity’ was the hallmark of Gandhi’s strategy. The policy of the colonial government to appear effectively responsive to the demands for ‘reasonable reforms’ was developed slowly through the reforms of 1909 and 1919. The political restlessness of the Indian people after the First World War was enhanced under the influence of the events and propaganda for democracy and democratic rights throughout the War, and even more so under the great impact of the Russian Revolution in 1917. The changed political climate in India led to the colonial government’s attempt to ensure the continuity of British rule in India by not damming up the national and democratic aspirations expressed by the early Indian nationalists. The British policy-makers, responsible for evolving a strategy for preventing and containing any dramatic explosion of conflict in India, and trying to retain the initiative to make decisive moves in their battle against Indian nationalism clearly followed a definite pattern.9 The colonial state in India was semi-hegemonic in character and far closer to the type of state evolved in the West European countries than to the absolutist Russian Tsarist state.9a For the colonial state any period of extended military rule was considered dangerous and counterproductive in the long run because it would tend to convert the populace into embittered fighters. The precincts of ‘high policy’ often reverberated with the ‘Irish refrain’. Thus, the necessity of acquiring some measure of consent to its rule, by at least some

9

See D.A. Low, ed., Congress and the Raj, London, 1977, pp. 9–10. See Vol. II, Ch. I of this series.

9a

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sections of the society it governed, dictated the introduction of colonial constitutionalism by the British. The objective of colonial policy was to acquire the consent of as many sections of Indian society as was possible, and to wean them away from the politics of mass mobilisation and movements. More importantly, the colonial state sought to legitimise itself by projecting itself as the arbiter of the various ‘interests’ in Indian society. To acquire a hegemonic position in the war against Indian nationalism, the colonial government handled even the mass movements with conscious carefulness and deliberation. The desirability of retaining civil authority and avoiding drastic, military intervention and not appearing ‘arbitrary’ was an important part of their ideological policies. The core of the concept and policy of the colonial state which we characterise as one of establishing ‘hegemonic’ control was variously described as the policy of possessing ‘moral prestige’ and retaining ‘legal authority’ by the state itself. This was summed up succinctly in Birkenhead’s characterisation of the government as ‘a government founded so completely as ours is upon prestige’.10 As the Home Secretary, Emerson, put it: In a fight between government on the one hand and a mass movement (on the other) … the moral and psychological factors are of very great importance … . Generally speaking, it is undoubtedly desirable to retain the authority of the civil authorities so long as possible, and if the needs of the situation can be met by the grant to them, instead of the military, of drastic powers, so much the better.

Similarly, in March 1932, the Home Department issued instructions to all provincial governments to carefully avoid any action that could appear ‘arbitrary’. Whenever action is arbitrary or vindictive or is designed deliberately to cause humiliation … such actions are the cause of embarrassment to government and their friends; they tend to alienate supporters and they give Congress the opportunity of propaganda both in and outside India.11 10

Quoted in Simon Epstein, ‘District Officers in Decline: The Erosion of British Authority in the Bombay Countryside, 1919–47’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 16, No. 3, 1982, pp. 483–518. 11 Home Department Political, File No. 240/1929; File No. 14/18/1932.

Hegemony and the Historical Method

However, the concepts of ‘consent’ of the colonial people and their ‘collaboration’ with the colonial regime as argued by Anil Seal12 must not be confused with each other. What distinguishes ‘collaboration’ from ‘consent’ is the latter being rooted in the representative system. The colonial state’s efforts to secure collaboration were based on the notion of appointing Indians at high positions in the bureaucracy, offering them ‘a share in the government’. It opposed vehemently any kind of representative system as unsuitable for India. Therefore, the intended goals of the hegemonic moves of the British were to convert its opponents, i.e., the nationalists into collaborators. Unintended consequences however, from the state’s point of view, resulted from the counter-strategy of the opponents which turned every so-called and apparent act of cooperation or ‘collaboration’ in working the system into its opposite. The nationalist strategy produced a demand for continuously increasing political space for the Indian people, rousing and mobilising ever larger sections of people. Thus, collaboration can be said to exist when the perceived interests and goals of politically organised and articulate contenders for state power are common or overlap. To some extent this could have been applied to a few sections of the landlord and princely classes in colonial India. Consent, on the other hand, is established by hegemonic politics—when opposing interests and world views compel each other to temporarily accommodate and adjust with the long-term goal of replacing the other. The colonial state in India revealed many characteristics of the modern state (as developed in Western Europe) despite the imperialist content of its policies and the hard inner core of its exploitative functions. The civil liberties and democratic freedoms that had been won by the struggles of the people in West European states, of course, could not have existed in the same form in colonial societies. Nontheless, despite its authoritarian features, the colonial state was logically compelled, once it had made some constitutional commitments in India, to allow a semblance of civil liberty in specious imitation of its democratic practice at home. In the Indian context, it must be acknowledged that the peasant satyagrahas that were launched against the colonial government could have been operative only in a regime which allowed some scope for the 12 Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism, London, Cambridge University Press, 1971.

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expression of popular feeling. The satyagrahis found it possible to reach the masses and organise them for non-violent direct action. The mass meetings and demonstrations that the Congress organised throughout the period of struggle, and on such a large scale, speak volumes about the character of the state with which Indian nationalism had to contend. In juxtaposition, the military bureaucratic state of Tsarist Russia was such that as late as 1901 the journal Liberation was clandestine and had to be published in Germany and smuggled into Russia illegally. This is not to suggest that the coercion and repression employed by the colonial state was not real enough but to emphasise the fact that the colonial government’s policies and actions were usually calculated on the basis of ‘public opinion’ in general, and by giving due consideration and weightage to the attitudes of various social groups in particular, to the action contemplated. This aspect of government policy was of vital significance in terms of ‘politics’, that is, for the kind of politics that could emerge, grow and develop, and be an effective opposition to the state. Consequently, those who would achieve political effectiveness without succumbing to constitutional blandishments within the colonial framework, on the one hand, and without becoming sitting ducks in the range of imperialist fire, on the other, had, necessarily, to transcend the antithesis of ‘reform’ versus ‘revolution’. This, we hope, will be empirically demonstrated by the discussion of the Civil Disobedience Movement and its culmination in the Gandhi–Irwin Pact. The strategy of the colonial state to deal with the Congress-led national movement was manifest in the twin policy of offering negotiations while executing military operations and assuming emergency powers. The movement was constantly presented with a polarised choice: either to move towards constitutionalism or face repression on a scale that could be fatal. For an open, non-violent mass movement, negotiation and compromise were inherent in its strategy. The brilliance of the counter-strategy adopted by the Gandhi-led Congress lay in converting negotiations and compromises into channels of further erosion of state authority rather than allowing them to become vehicles of constitutionalism as desired by the state. Here, it is necessary to point out that constitutionalism was a very real current in the political life of colonial India. Its existence in the upper echelons of nationalist leadership has been described and substantiated often enough but its presence in the politics of different classes has not

Hegemony and the Historical Method

been emphasised adequately so far. For instance, an entrenched current of constitutional trade unionism in the colonial working class was the product of deliberate government policy. Also, the constitutionalist landlord based parties, like the Unionist Party in the Punjab and the Justice Party in Madras, successfully mobilised sections of the peasantry in direct negotiations with the colonial government, bypassing nationalist mass movements not to speak of the left. There existed a broad division of Indian political nationalists, all of whom were working towards a replacement of the colonial system into the constitutional and non-constitutional currents.13 Here, it is pertinent to avoid oversimplification, for all those who played their roles in the slot of constitutional politics—whether it was Gokhale earlier or Motilal Nehru and C.R. Das after him, or Vithalbhai Patel somewhat later—did not essentially view their own political positions as similar to that of the colonial state. For instance, Morley interpreted the reforms of 1909 as an exercise in persuading those who dreamt of ‘autonomy or self-government’ in the colonies into giving up their illusions and accepting the ‘possible’ and ‘real’. Gokhale, as representative of the nationalist intelligentsia of his times, welcomed the reforms as a prelude to future constitutional development towards self-government. An effective leadership of the united anti-imperialist movement would have had to evolve consensual politics in which both currents could be given practical scope to implement and evolve their respective positions within a broader, unified perspective. This role of bridging the gap between those who, according to Gandhi, had a ‘constitutional mentality’ and the ‘satyagrahis’, was played admirably by Gandhi. The necessity to do so in the interests of a national front against the colonial state was ‘dictated’ by the willingness of the ‘enemy’, that is, the state, to provide channels and institutions for the constitutional tendency to express itself. In other words, this necessity was imposed on the Indian anti-imperialist struggle by the ‘hegemonic’ character of the colonial state which sought to present its authority and power over colonial society as legitimate. The role of an arbiter (in which the colonial state cast itself ) was aided by the existence of casteist, communal, provincial and parochial segments in the Indian body politic which in the first place were encouraged to become articulate and, in the second, utilised as divisive tendencies by 13

See S.R. Mehrotra, The Commonwealth and the Nation, Delhi, 1978, pp. 76–77.

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the colonial state itself. Class contradictions were, likewise, sought to be exploited by the state though, in a much more limited way. ‘The more it is made obvious’, wrote Lord Birkenhead to Lord Reading, ‘that these antagonisms are profound and affect immense and irreconcilable sections of the population, the more conspicuously is the fact illustrated that we and we alone can play the part of composer’.14 An analysis of the colonial state and its conscious efforts to structure Indian politics in a definite direction which it called ‘legal’ and ‘constitutional’, and its promotion of a certain ‘political culture’, has never been taken into account by the Communists in their characterisation of the Indian National Movement and its leadership by Gandhi. They have tended to pose the question in an either/or fashion, not seeing the politics of the Gandhian era as having been generated by the structure of society and state as it had evolved under colonial rule. E.M.S. Namboodripad writes: What was to be the path of struggle for the realisation of the national demand? Was it to be peaceful negotiations with the British, or militant struggle against them? Was it to be a path of rallying the mass of our people in determined actions against the regime or a path of reliance on the constitutional machinery to secure more and more reforms?15

In this framework, the role of Gandhi was naturally paradoxical. Gandhi’s political sagacity and his capacity to transcend these polarities of political action lay in being able to unite the constitutional and non-constitutional currents at different points in time. It must be noted, however, that Gandhi himself led and guided the non-constitutional current throughout his political career and in times of constitutional experiments, chose to withdraw into mass work which can be interpreted as preparatory work for launching mass movements. In brief, Gandhi’s 14

Birkenhead, The Last Phase, Vol. II, pp. 245–46. Quoted in B.R. Nanda, Mahatma Gandhi: A Biography, New Delhi, Allied Publishers 1968, p. 261. For studies on various divisive groups and parties which actively collaborated with imperialism to oppose the nationalist movement, see, Gail Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman Movement in Western India (1873–1930), Bombay, Scientific Socialist Education Trust, 1976; Eugene Irschik, Politics and Social Conflict in South India, Berkeley, California, 1970; for a discussion of the pro-imperialist Unionist Party of the Punjab, B.S. Josh, Communist Movement in the Punjab: 1926–42, Delhi, Anupama Publications 1980. 15 E.M.S. Namboodripad, The Mahatma and the Ism, New Delhi, People’s Publishing House, 1959, pp. ix–xii.

Hegemony and the Historical Method

unparalleled supremacy as the leader of the Congress-led national movement was forged by his matching the ‘hegemonic’ moves of the colonial state with ‘counter-hegemonic’ politics, that is, by slowly building nationalist hegemony over wide sections of the Indian people. As harsh a critic of Gandhi’s as R.P. Dutt could see, in howsoever derogatory a fashion, the brilliance of the former in checkmating the British state: So the phrases were poured out, by Gandhi on the one side as by MacDonald on the other, … in a wealth of legal interpretation and theological casuistry, until it was difficult to know whether to award the palm to Gandhi or to MacDonald, both masters of the art of the bewildering phrase …16

The growth and extent of the Congress’ wide-ranging and deep influence over the Indian people was recorded in a special survey carried out by the Home Department in Gujarat and Karnatak. It complained bitterly of the loss of the government’s ‘prestige’ and ‘authority’ which had been replaced by the prestige and authority of the Congress. The Governor of Bombay, who had to put the Act of 1935 to work, discovered that constitutional issues per se were not the problem: ‘the main difficulty lies in the accession to power of a party which has vilified and defied government and government officials for the previous twenty years and which now claims to be the only party in the state’.17 The Gandhian strategy was basically characterised by periods of mass movement with intervals of truce. This method of struggle established a rhythm and pattern in the Indian National Movement. The periods of truce were used to perform constructive work among the masses and to forge close ties between the people and Congress political workers. Gandhi emphasised this greatly because, he explained, it would consolidate people’s power. Also, it would keep the organisation of the Congress and its political workers ready for any call to action. The colonial bureaucracy, unlike many critics of Gandhi, was fully aware of

16

R.P. Dutt, India Today, PPH, Bombay, 1947, p. 308. Political Situation in Gujarat and Karnatak’, Home Department, Special, Government of Bombay, H.S. 800 (97) of 1935, Maharashtra State Archives; also see Simon Epstein, ‘District Officers in Decline: The Erosion of British Authority in the Bombay Countryside, 1919–47’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 16, No. 3, 1982, pp. 493–518. 17

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the significance of Gandhi’s programme of constructive work and felt extremely threatened by it. It interpreted this to mean, in effect, that Congress workers would penetrate the rural areas in large numbers and would rouse the political consciousness of the masses. And, yet, it could not prevent Congress workers from undertaking the tasks of village and Harijan uplift, Hindu–Muslim unity, education and campaigns against untouchability, etc., unless it abandoned all claims to governing India for the good of its people and eschewed all pretence to being a legal–constitutional power. Thus, the struggle between the Gandhian movements and the state was fought on the terrain of hegemony. By alternatively following the policy of waging mass satyagraha against state power and making peace with it, the national movement forced the colonial government to respond to Congress moves and attempted to keep political initiative in its own hands. The alternative perspective of violent mass struggle—insurrection— upheld by the Communist paradigm was impossible in Indian conditions. The colonial state was prepared and determined to crush any violent challenge to its authority and to deal with all such contingencies, militarily. More importantly, the perspective of a violent overthrow of British rule presupposed a society face to face with undisguised brutality and oppression. In reality, ever since limited constitutionalism was introduced within the colonial framework, the British state had attempted the management of social tensions—whether by managing to aggravate them by patronising one section as in the case of Muslim communalists or by trying to adjust them through necessary legislation as in the case of class conflict between workers and capitalists, or tenants and landowners. Such a state provided opportunities for a mass movement to develop and grow within ideological and organisational terms that were not easily denied or repressed. For example, the ideological parameters of ‘law’ and ‘legality’ and the organisational principles of ‘peaceful’, ‘non-violent struggles’. The ideological infrastructure of ‘legality’ and ‘legitimacy’ on the basis of which the government claimed to rule and be the arbiter of Indian interests had to be tackled by their opponents’ strategy which had to make deep inroads into mass consciousness before calling upon the people to revolt. Gandhi’s method was to take hold of the proclaimed liberality of the colonial state and, bit by bit, expose its hollowness. This process was one of the sine qua nons of a hegemonic struggle.

Hegemony and the Historical Method

The historiography generated by the work of R.P. Dutt nurtures the perspective of insurrection as a critique of the Gandhi-led mass movements and also propounds the equation that mass violence equals politically revolutionary activity. This approach, advocating commando tactics to combat commando tactics as Gramsci said, overlooks the nature of the colonial state and appears to believe that the state remains perpetually inert. Therefore, only a Gandhian mass movement could have made the state appear impotent and inert from time to time precisely because it was fought on the terrain of hegemony where the military potential of the state was only tested but never tried in its brutal nakedness by the movement. The effectiveness of the Gandhi-led movement was demonstrated by the colonial state’s conclusion that it was immensely frustrating to tackle ‘obstinate but peaceful’ satyagrahis than to meet stones with bullets, and that more damage was done to the government by non-violent methods than by violent ones. The Communists in India maintained for long periods of time that the Indian National Congress (INC) was a party of the bourgeoisie, and that it did not and could not represent the masses. Yet, in 1936, the Dutt–Bradley thesis on the ‘Anti-Imperialist People’s Front in India’ felt compelled to acknowledge that the INC was already the united front of the Indian people in the national struggle, because it had carried out the gigantic task of uniting the diverse forces of the Indian people, and it remained the principal mass organisation seeking national liberation. And for this reason, they advocated, nothing could be allowed to weaken the degree of unity that had been achieved by the Congress.18 Interestingly, this was identical to the attitude that Nehru had expressed all along towards the Congress. Communists, if in close contacts with the masses, should not have normally failed to observe the phenomenon of the INC acquiring a hegemonic influence over a widespread anti-imperialist consciousness. Many years later, A.K. Gopalan, who started as a Congressman and later joined the CPI, gave a moving account of how the Congress movement broke the even tenor of so many lives and captured the imagination of 18

R.P. Dutt and Ben Bradley, ‘The Anti-Imperialist Peoples’ Front’, Inprecor, Vol. 16, 29 February 1936. Also see Bhagwan Josh, ‘The Indian National Congress and the Politics of the Capitalist Class before 1947’, in D. Tripathi, Business and Politics in Modern India, Manohar, Delhi, 1992.

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the people.19 However, during the course of the national movement the Communists did not acknowledge this. Without a total conceptualisation of the social and political processes no party or its leadership can understand the specific nature of the existing con-juncture in which they must act. The social and political process in India generated an anti-imperialist consciousness, a consciousness of a ‘nationalism of the oppressed’ against the ‘nationalism’ of the oppressors. Anti-imperialist nationalism is historically given. Nationalism as an emotive force is intrinsic to being a victim of national oppression. That is, the interiorisation of the humiliation of an entire nation by an alien power—a power which appears in the consciousness of the oppressed as first and last a ‘nation’. Marx said: ‘As long as the independent life of a nation is suppressed by a foreign conqueror it inevitably directs all its strength against the external enemy; it is incapable of working for social emancipation.’20 However, given the different histories of different parts of the world, there is no single ‘nationalism’ that we can speak of.21 Each class articulation in order to be effective in colonial society had to be expressed through the idiom of nationalism. In the concrete and specific instance of antiimperialist movements, nationalism could only be a non-class or an allclass ideology. The Indian National Movement was therefore unlikely to capitulate before a marxism which would not engage in a dialogue in the nationalist idiom. A search for the ‘class essence’ of a popular mass movement is based on the assumption that in the long run there can be no discrepancy between 19

A.K. Gopalan, In the Cause of the People, Bombay, Orient Longman, 1973. Quoted in Karl Marx, The First International and After, Political Writings, Penguin Books and NCR, Harmondsworth, 1974, p. 391. For the various strands of Marx’s thought on nationalism and their critical evaluation see Roman Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism, New York, OUP, 1988. 21 The debate among Marxists on the question of ‘nationalism’ is varied and highly polemical. Cf. Tom Nairn, ‘The Modern Janus’, NLR, No. 94 and Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Some Reflections on “The Break-up of Britain”’, NLR, No. 105, Sep.–Oct., 1977, pp. 3–23; Nossiter, ‘Some Reflections on Nationalism’ in Imagination and Precision in the Social Sciences: Essays in Memory of Peter Nettl, edited by T.J. Nossiter et al., London, Faber and Faber, 1972; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, Verso, 1983; Walker Conner, The National Question in Marxist–Leninist Theory and Strategy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984; also, Regis Debray has given us a penetrating analysis of the conception of ‘nation’ and nationalism. See his ‘Marxism and the National Question’, New Left Review, No. 105, September–October, 1977. 20

Hegemony and the Historical Method

the economic positions of agents and their ideologico-political position. The natural outcome of this belief is the position that ruling class ideologies may delude sections of the working class, but, in the long run, the economically determined development of the struggle will polarise the class forces and bring the mass of the workers to ‘see their class interest and position’.22 It was within the fold of this economistic Marxism and through this deterministic logic that the Communists in India viewed ‘nationalism’ as a bourgeois ideology. On what basis could a Marxist identify the Indian bourgeoisie as the ‘ruling class’ under conditions in which the whole Indian people were dominated by an alien imperialistic bourgeoisie? How were Marxists to understand the relationship between the bourgeoisie of an oppressed country and the political party (in this case the Indian National Congress) which sought to unite all the antiimperialist elements in society, including the bourgeoisie, into a common struggle? Following from that was the question: could ‘nationalism’ in such conditions be defined as the ideology of only the bourgeoisie and would it inevitably usher in a bourgeois regime? To the extent that the working class followed the nationalist party, could one speak of its ‘delusion’ by the ideology of another class? In other words, could one locate separate proletarian ‘class interest’ divorced from and running parallel to the struggle for national liberation? In the long run, nationalism and the movements it inspired could be the vehicle for expressing the interests of a variety of classes. Historically they did precisely that. In no case, however, was there an inevitability of only the bourgeoisie coming to power on the crest of these movements. The anti-imperialist movements were open to the contrary pulls of various ideologies. Their varying influence in the struggle ‘determine’ the eventual ideologico-social and political vision the movements would acquire. The social composition and ideological significance of ‘people’s movements’ do not denote a fixed ‘class character’ which is inherent in such mass popular movements from the start, nor does it follow that the ideology that appears to be predominant within such movements at one juncture inevitably hegemonises the movement up to its fruition, continuously rising on the scale of a linear progression. The characterisation of social classes such as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and their role in the 22 See for example, Paul Hirst, ‘Economic Classes and Polities’, in Alan Hunt, (ed.), Class and Class Structure, London, 1977.

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revolutionary process is always a dynamic one. At a particular moment in history amidst these juxtaposed social forces, if a class or combination of classes fails to intervene consciously as an ideological force in the historical process, it leaves a political vacuum to be filled by other classes with their own potential for ideological growth and hegemony. A class ‘appellation’ could not be assigned to the Indian National Movement in advance, from its very inception, but only when it would result in a definite type of regime within a particular developmental perspective. One could only characterise a movement of the type led by the Congress in India as a movement of the entire people which was open to contending socio-political ideologies and visions. Of course, in the Indian National Movement, a significant role was played by the urban middle classes. Their predominant role, however, was not inimical to or incompatible with the long-term ideological hegemony of socialist ideas provided, of course, that the socialist tendencies made their influence felt as an active constituent of the people’s movement. To the extent that a perspective of socio-economic development and a political vision with a socialist orientation, as an alternative to the bourgeois developmental perspective and goals, permeated the people’s movement effectively, it could have been said to have acquired a hegemonic influence over Indian society. Here, it is necessary to clarify that we have used the term ‘hegemonic influence’ in a specific, historical sense—as an influence which is acquired through a process—experientially, within which people’s minds are gripped by the objectification of historical impulses. The objectification is not only apparent, but experienced.23 Such a concept of an experiential process (which leads to the formation of an ideology) is equally applicable to understanding the hegemony that the Congress movement acquired and the failure of the Communist movement to do so. It is only today that some Communists in India, grudgingly acknowledge the ‘reality’ of the anti-imperialist struggle which overwhelmed the consciousness of different classes. However, it is of crucial significance that this reality of anti-imperialist nationalism is still identified with

23 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction, p. 254, in Early Writings of Marx, in Lucio Colletti (ed.), London, 1975.

Hegemony and the Historical Method

‘peasant consciousness’ and the working class is meticulously excluded from it. B.T. Ranadive writes: How is it that despite a blatantly reactionary class policy the Congress succeeded in getting the masses and forcing the British to retreat? How is it that the vast numbers from the peasantry, consisting of diverse lower castes, joined the Congress? The appeal of nationalism and antiimperialism attracted the peasant who found no difficulty in identifying his misery with foreign rule. This was the new class reality—the unity forged by imperialist exploitation—which the Congress fully utilised, and those who pitted themselves against it were inevitably routed.24

What is implicit in this view of nationalism, and anti-imperialism, is that it fostered and encouraged a ‘false consciousness’, that is nationalism as opposed to the ‘real’ class interests of different social strata; that Gandhi and the Congress were the purveyors of this false consciousness and the poor, backward peasant masses were ready victims of it. The unity forged by imperialist exploitation was a historically conditioned consciousness. Gandhi and the Congress were perceived by the people as the representatives of this unity; and despite class and caste differentiation the people felt compelled to pursue this overarching reality. To put it concretely, as long as the unruffled continuance of political power expressed itself in the imperialist government, the struggle for national independence would continue to represent in the eyes of the masses the struggle for widening the sphere of basic liberties, for the right to combine and even to strike. An anti-imperialist, popular national movement of the type led by the Congress in India needs to be analysed at various levels. In this context, Gramsci’s method of historical analysis can prove very useful. He suggested that, in general, all popular movements with a mass following had to be analysed ‘realistically’ along the following lines: (a) Social content of the mass following of the movement; (b) what function did this mass have in the balance of forces, which is in process of transformation as the new movement demonstrates by its very coming into existence? (In this case the new movement was that of the left-wing in it—S.J.); (c) what is the political and social significance of those demands presented by the movement’s leaders which 24 B.T. Ranadive, ‘Caste, Class and Property Relations’, in Economic and Political Weekly, Annual Number, 1969. Emphasis added.

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find general assent? To what effective needs do they correspond?; (d ) examination of the conformity of the means to the proposed end; (e) only in the last analysis, and formulated in political not moralistic terms, is the hypothesis considered that such a movement will necessarily be perverted, and serve quite different ends from those which the mass of its followers expect. But economism puts forward this hypothesis in advance, when no concrete fact yet exists to support it. (That is to say, none which appears as such to the evidence of ‘common sense’ in the generalised consciousness of all social classes rather than as a result of some esoteric ‘scientific’ analysis—S.J.) It thus appears as a moralistic accusation of duplicity and bad faith, or (in the case of the movements’ followers) of naivète and stupidity. Thus the political struggle is reduced to a series of personal affairs between on the one hand those with the genie in the lamp who know everything and on the other those who are fooled by their own leaders but are so incurably thick that they refuse to believe it.25

The concept of hegemony as used in Marxist discourse is no simple equation, even though it is often substituted by ‘leadership of society’ in less theoretical texts. But, today, it is Gramsci whose name is inextricably linked with it. Consequently, historians and theoreticians of repute have interpreted and polemicised on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Eugene Genovese, explaining the theory of ‘hegemony’—alternative to the ‘coercive theory’ of social order—emphasises that in the structuring of hegemony: … an essential function of ideology … is to present a coherent world view that is sufficiently flexible, comprehensive, and mediatory to convince all classes of the justice of its hegemony. However, this cannot be seen as an exercise in deception—a form of ‘false consciousness’, for, continues Genovese, ‘if this ideology were no more than a reflection of immediate economic interests, it would be worse than useless, for the hypocrisy of the class, as well as its greed, would quickly become apparent to the most abject of its subjects’.26

25

Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 167. Eugene Genovese, quoted in Pellicani, op. cit. Also see Selections from the Prison Notebooks, Introduction by Quintin Hoare and G.N. Smith, New York, 1971; E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, London, 1978; Chantal Mouffe, ed., Gramsci and Marxist Theory, 1979. 26

Hegemony and the Historical Method

We use this concept of hegemony as basic to our analysis because historical praxis at the point in Indian history that we have studied is closely approximated and becomes intelligible by employing it. It explains not only the building of the hegemony of one party but also the failure of any other to do so. As the editors of the Prison Notebooks put it: ‘For Gramsci a crucial conceptual distinction’ exists between power based on ‘domination’ and the exercise of ‘direction’ or ‘hegemony’. In our understanding, when the term ‘hegemonic’ is used ‘as an opposite of economic corporate to designate a historical phase in which a given group moves beyond a position of corporate existence and defence of its economic position and aspires to a position of leadership in the political and social arena’,27 then this usage is precisely the kind we are trying to insert into our historical material. In other words, we seek to examine our historical evidence in the light of Gramsci’s statement that: ‘A social group can, and indeed must, already exercise “leadership” (i.e., be hegemonic) before winning governmental power (this indeed is one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power).’28 From our point of view, in the colonial situation, both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat were subordinate classes—subordinate to British imperialism—but partners in the anti-colonial movement. The struggle to overcome imperialist domination required a united struggle by a unified people. In the course of this struggle contending ideologies and developmental perspectives would seek to acquire a hegemonic influence over the movement and society at large, to signify their ‘direction’, and to imbue them with their own socio-political vision and world view. For example, the capitalist class led by the politically active and most intelligent leaders such as G.D. Birla and Purshottamdas Thakurdas, strove broadly to relate with the national movement led by the Congress. The programme of national regeneration, establishment of democracy and rapid industrialisation bequeathed to the Congress by the early nationalists was accepted by the capitalists. They made it subservient to the interests of their class through political interventions which would promote and strengthen constitutionalism and thus give democracy a liberal tone. This would also encourage development and industrialisation along 27 28

Prison Notebooks, Preface, p. xiv. Ibid., ‘Notes on Italian History’, p. 57.

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capitalist lines. A left perspective, to be effective, would have had to accept the ‘national programme’ historically evolved within the national movement but seek to accomplish a radical people’s democracy and impart to the programme of industrialisation a socialist direction. To the extent that certain ideologies are experienced as truly representing the national interests of the entire people, they can be said to have acquired a hegemonic position over the national movement and its mass following. That the overall character of the Indian anti-imperialist movement was also a struggle for ‘hegemony’ was apparent from the ‘crisis’ in which the British-Indian colonial state found itself from the beginning of the thirties. The crisis was a product of the fact that, to quote the words of Gramsci in another context, … huge masses (especially of peasants, and petty bourgeois intellectuals) … (had) passed suddenly from a state of political passivity to a certain activity, and put forward demands which taken together, albeit not organically formulated, add up to a revolution. A ‘crisis of authority’ is spoken of: this is precisely the crisis of hegemony, or general crisis of the state.29

Here, the notion of a mass of petty-bourgeois intellectuals must not be misunderstood; for Gramsci the term had very broad connotations: That all members of a political party should be regarded as intellectuals is an affirmation that can easily lend itself to mockery and caricature. But if one thinks about it nothing could be more exact … . What matters is the function, which is directive and organisational, i.e., educative, i.e., intellectual. A tradesman does not join a political party in order to do business, nor an industrialist in order to produce more at lower cost, nor a peasant to learn new methods of cultivation, even if some aspects of these demands of the tradesman, the industrialist or the peasant can find satisfaction in the party.30

Texts have a remarkable way of saying different things to different minds. Gramsci’s concept of ‘passive revolution’ has, for instance, recently been torn out of context by Sumit Sarkar. He writes that the Indian National Movement led by Gandhi and the Congress was a ‘passive revolution with religious overtones’, because ‘the privileged groups 29 30

Antonio Gramsci, ‘State and Civil Society’, in Prison Notebooks, p. 210. Ibid., p. 16.

Hegemony and the Historical Method

in town and country were able to successfully detach attainment of political independence and unity from radical social change’.31 Drawing a comparison with the Italian example, where bourgeois groups led by Cavour asserted their hegemony by absorbing the Mazzinian opposition, Sarkar sees its counterparts in India as the right-wing high command of the National Congress absorbing left (Mazzinian) elements typified by Nehru and the Congress Socialists. The term ‘passive revolution’ was borrowed by Gramsci from Cuoco, a conservative thinker of great influence in the early stages of the Italian Risorgimento. Cuoco used it to describe the political work of an ‘enlightened’ bourgeois class which involved no mass participation. While referring to Gandhism in India, Gramsci did not use the term in a similar sense for the Gandhi-led mass movement. He categorically characterised the Gandhian movement as a ‘war’ which was sometimes a ‘war of position’, at other times a ‘war of movement’ and at times ‘underground warfare’.32 These different methods of the war were, in our view, linked by Gramsci to the nature of the state and civil society, as is clear when he writes: ‘It seems to me Illitch (Lenin) understood that a change was necessary from the war of maneouvre applied victoriously in the East in 1917, to a war of position which was the only form possible in the West.’33 The ‘war of maneouvre’ was, clearly, the insurrectionary form of seizure of power while the ‘war of position’ implied the use of different methods of struggle, which led to Gramsci’s developing the concept of ‘hegemony’. Thus, the sense in which ‘passive revolution’ was applied to Gandhism by him was as follows: ‘One may apply to the concept of passive revolution the interpretative criterion of molecular changes which in fact progressively modify the pre-existing composition of forces, and hence become the matrix of new changes.’34 In our view, the term ‘passive revolution’ in the sense of a revolution without active mass involvement is not applicable to the Gandhi-led struggle in India. It is in the second sense of Gramsci’s usage of the term, in which ‘molecular’ social transformation which takes place as it were 31 See Sumit Sarkar, ‘Popular Movements and National Leadership 1945–47’, EPW, 1983. 32 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 229. 33 Ibid., p. 237. ‘In Russia the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society’. Ibid., p. 238. 34 Ibid., p. 109.

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‘beneath the surface of society, in situations where the progressive class cannot advance openly’,35 that is true of the Gandhian movement. Here it implies the spread of a counter-ideology and its hegemony over society without any direct challenge to the existing ruling power, because of certain specific conditions which we have described as (a) the semi-hegemonic character of the colonial state and (b) the military might of the government backed as it was by the armed power of the technologically modern state of Britain. Gramsci, on his part, saw the ‘passive revolution’ led by Gandhi, as involving both a ‘war of position’ and a ‘war of movement’: ‘Gandhi’s passive resistance is a war of position, which at certain moments becomes a war of movement, and at others underground warfare.’36 The war became the second, obviously, during periods of ‘strikes’, that is, nationwide hartals, and the third during phases of ‘peace’ or ‘truce’ when the movement expanded its contact and work among the masses. Gandhi’s ‘boycotts are a form of war of position’. This formulation of Gramsci’s was based upon the conviction that ‘political struggle’ (i.e., long-term ideological struggle for influence and hegemony), as compared to ‘military war’ (i.e., direct confrontation and armed, insurrectionary conflict), was ‘enormously more complex’ and could be compared to ‘colonial wars’ in which not an actual occupation of territory but the colonial peoples movement’s capacity to do so ‘potentially’ was demonstrated by a struggle on ‘the terrain of politics’. It was in this context that he remarked: ‘India’s political struggle against the English knows three forms of war ….’37 Moreover, the difficulty of creating any organisation for mass armed struggle in India was clearly envisaged by Gramsci: If the English believed that a great insurrectional movement was being prepared, destined to annhilate their present strategic superiority … then it would suit them to provoke a premature outbreak of the Indian fighting forces, in order to identify them and decapitate the general movement.38

Thus, as remarked earlier, a ‘war of position’ was, perhaps, inevitable in India given the nature of the state which was colonial but incorporated 35

Ibid., p. 46. Introduction to ‘Notes on Italian History’. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 229. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., p. 230. 36

Hegemony and the Historical Method

hegemonic institutions of constitutionalism which, however limited initially, held out the promise of more to come to the various layers of Indian society. Was a ‘war of position’, such as the one fought by the Gandhi-led movement in India, an obstacle per se in the accretion of strength by socially more advanced and radical internal forces? In concrete terms, did the character of the Gandhian movement as a ‘passive revolution’ fighting a ‘war of position’ against the colonial state imply that the left in India, including the Communists, would be obstructed in their objective of ushering in a transformation of the anti-imperialist movement towards a socialist direction? It is essential that historical developments be judged dynamically, that is, in their interrelationship and not in isolation. The most common historiographical approach to the left and the national movements is to split them into two mutually exclusive entities. The slow formation of the Communist Party, its marginal existence in terms of becoming a politically powerful force, and the failure of the Congress movement to get transformed into a people’s party under left-wing hegemony are not seen as two facets of the same totality. In this approach, the Communists made ‘mistakes’ and therefore could not acquire a ‘leading’ role in the anti-imperialist movement, while the trajectory of the Congress movement is a consistent and linear expression of its ‘bourgeois’ character. The burden of our entire effort in this work is to demonstrate their interrelationship. We discuss the way in which the Gandhian movement undermined colonial hegemony—as a slow process of molecular change in society—and opened the path for radical forces to enter the scene. We have also traced the gradual spread of the left ideology and socialist tendencies within the Gandhian movement, leading to the emergence of a left-bloc in a paradigm different from that of the Communists. In the struggle between various ideological currents for hegemonic influence over Indian society—for the right to represent the generalised oppression in colonial society—a crucial and novel formation thus emerges: the formation of a ‘bloc’. We have introduced the concept of a ‘bloc’ even though such a ‘bloc’ might exist within a people’s party under one banner, to distinguish it from the concept of a single-class party. The notion of the ‘bloc’ must be distinguished from the united front of classes. In the case of the latter, those classes which come together have already crystallised themselves distinctly through preceding struggles, and

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embody their experience of past confrontations in their consciousness. While the formation of the united front of classes is thus preceded by class struggles, in the formation of the ‘bloc’ class adjustment is the basis of its unity. Before 1927, the unified struggle of the Chinese people took the form of a ‘bloc’—organisationally and ideologically. The Kuomintang (KMT), the old revolutionary party, to which only intellectuals, officers and merchants had belonged formerly, was reorganised in January 1924 with the collaboration of the workers and peasants under the leadership of Sun Yat-Sen. We are aware, that the Communist movement internationally rued the day when such a bloc had been formed in China. The decimation of the working class in the Shanghai massacres and Chiang Kai-shek’s great betrayal of 1927 were the major reasons for the Communists’ reaction against the existence of a similar bloc in other countries. In India, Workers’ and Peasants’ Parties were seen to be heading towards a disaster similar to the Chinese and were told to dissolve themselves. In our view, however, the Chinese disaster was specifically related to the non-existence of a hegemonic centralised state in China (unlike that of India), and due to the military–feudal character of large parts of China under warlordism, apart from the armed might of the Kuomintang, which could be used against the Communists, no comparisons to which existed in India. The International Communist Movement, which generalised the schema of the Russian revolution to include the entire colonial world, believed that no colonial country could possibly achieve independence, in a world dominated by capitalism and imperialism, without a Communist-led revolution. This notion was belied not only by India’s successful liberation from British rule but with its establishment of representative democracy after independence. Hence, the nature of state and society in colonial India needs to be examined without drawing analogies with Tsarist Russia or semi-colonial China. In the Indian context it would have been impossible to follow a strategy of seizing power from the British through a ‘war of manoeuvre’. A ‘war of position’ was the ideal method available, for ‘the truth is that one cannot choose the form of war one wants, unless from the start one has a crushing superiority over the enemy’.39 However, the Communists clung

39

Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 234.

Hegemony and the Historical Method

to the seizure of power model as the only way to achieve ‘real’ independence. Their object, even during phases of cooperation with the Congress movement, was not so much to transform the anti-colonial movement as to ‘capture’ it for their own organisation and then to ‘lead’ it as the ‘true’ representative of the Indian masses. Their constant prescription for a successful anti-imperialist revolution remained ‘armed struggle’ at least theoretically. The colonial state’s capacity for military repression if challenged by a ‘military model’, and the necessity of not imitating the methods of the state in waging political struggles against it was not grasped by the Communists. Precisely this, that politics had to have priority— and only politics of hegemony could create the possibility for effective opposition—was grasped by Gandhi. As Gandhi put it: ‘In politics, its (power of satyagraha) use is based upon the immutable maxim that government of the people is possible only so long as they consent either consciously or unconsciously to be governed.’40 Gandhi’s political conceptions were significant because he comprehended that politics had to have priority over the military aspect, in fact, to negate the latter. Otherwise, one could fall into easy pitfalls planned by the imperialist state. Addressing the imperialist government he wrote: ‘You have great military resources. Your naval power is matchless. If we wanted to fight with you on your own ground, we should be unable to do so, but if the above submissions be not acceptable to you, we cease to play the part of the ruled. You may, if you like, cut us to pieces. You may shatter us at the canon’s mouth. If you act contrary to our will, we shall not help you; and without our help, we know that you cannot move one step forward.41 Our reading of the Gandhi-led movement suggests that Gandhi was aware of his own role as the unifier of the generalised impulse of antiimperialism in Indian society. He was equally aware of the role of the Communists who, by positing a ‘war of manoeuvre’ permanently and intransigently, threatened to disrupt his primary focus of a national war against foreign rule. The Communists, on the other hand, did not seem to have been aware of their own or Gandhi’s role within the parameters of the anti-colonial movement. If, on the contrary, the Communists had possessed such awareness then the equilibrium which resulted from the convergence of both Gandhi’s and their own activities would have been 40 41

M.K. Gandhi, Indian Opinion, Golden Number, 1914. M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, p. 100.

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different; it would have been more favourable to socialism. In other words, the independent Indian state that followed the overthrow of colonial rule would have been constituted on a less conservative and more radical basis. Understood in this ‘dynamic’ fashion it was possible to ‘apply to the concept of passive revolution the interpretative criterion of molecular changes which in fact progressively modify the pre-existing composition of forces, and hence become the matrix of new changes’.42 This interpretative criterion can easily apply to both Gandhi’s achievement (and the form in which it was achieved) in the breaching of colonial hegemony and to the projected activity of the left within the Gandhian movement. The process of the progressive modification of the pre-existing composition of forces was a process of ‘transformation’, and Gramsci emphasised it precisely because its ‘importance as a form of historical development … (had not) been adequately emphasised’ in Marxist thought.43 A major reason for our exposition of Nehru’s ideas and theoretical interventions is that he was the only nationalist leader to initiate the process of transformation in the national movement towards the left by positing a paradigm that transcended the positions of the nationalists and the Communists. He also envisaged an effective hegemony for the left at the end of such a process of transformation. He did not believe that for such a historical outcome, the organisational victory of a separate, independent left ‘party’ and a popular armed insurrection were an imperative necessity as the Communists believed to the point of obsession. And that is why the Nehru paradigm of gradually permeating the existing Congress movement with a left and socialist ideology appears to have been a project of tremendous potential. This, however, did not become the perspective of a united left in the country, and consequently, to use Gramscian language, the popular intervention which was not possible in the concentrated and instantaneous form of an insurrection, did not take place even in the ‘diffused’ and capillary form of indirect pressure—though the latter would have been possible, and perhaps was in fact the indispensable premise for the former.44

It was possible for the Indian left—the C.S.P. and other small unstructured revolutionary groups and individuals—to intervene in the social 42

Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 109. Ibid. 44 Ibid., p. 110. Emphasis added. 43

Hegemony and the Historical Method

direction of the liberation movement and to orientate it towards their radical goals. To do this the potential of the Nehru paradigm had to receive a fair chance and had to be worked out to its ultimate logic. The attitude of the Communists during the self-acknowledged phases of ‘sectarianism’, as for example in 1929–34, is not seen by us as a period when ‘mistakes’ were committed by them but in the literal sense of the term as designed to promote the narrow, organisational interests of a ‘sect’. This resulted in the absence among a substantive section of the radical forces of any awareness of the role of the ‘other side’ which prevented them from being fully aware of their own role either. In concrete terms, being unable to assess the role of Gandhi and left radicals and socialists, such as Nehru and the Congress Socialists, who valued Gandhi’s leadership in the totality of the anti-imperialist struggle, the Communists decried their activities as a ‘bourgeois manoeuvre’ and at the service of the bourgeoisie. As a consequence they were also unable to locate their own role as social radicals who could reinforce and further extend the mobilising and politicising function of the Gandhian movement. Having failed to discover and locate their historically concrete role in the given conjuncture of the national liberation struggle, they failed to weigh in the final balance of forces, in proportion to their effective power of intervention as a part of the left tendency in the Congress movement. Thus, they failed to determine a more advanced result on more progressive and revolutionary lines on the morrow of independence. If the Communists had accepted Gandhi as the central unifying force of the national movement they could have strengthened every pro-left political or social position advocated by Gandhi, whether it was ‘Harijan uplift’ or a conception of ‘justice’ between capital and labour and between landlords and peasants. Working within such a perspective would have amounted to conducting a ‘passive revolution’ in the molecular development sense within the Congress movement, progressively modifying the pre-existing composition of forces in it, and hence, becoming the matrix of new changes. The Communists, however, did not effect a juncture with actual reality. Thus, they did not become a general and operative national–popular consciousness. The Gramscian thesis of ‘passive revolution’ brilliantly explains the tasks and problems that confronted the left in the Indian National Liberation Movement precisely because it was conceptualised by Gramsci for ‘complex historical upheavals’ which the anti-colonial movement in India certainly was. Why was the left in India not the dominant or hegemonic

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mode of expression through which the impulse for social change in Indian society channelised itself? In his own context Gramsci had posed vital questions pertaining to theory within the given Marxism of the time and in the praxis of the Communist movement. In the context of Italy he posed the question: why could Communists not hegemonise the passive revolution occurring there? His answer was that the Communists were wrongly basing their politics on ‘sectarian ideas on the theory of the party’.45 Striving for hegemony in the revolution, he argued, required the formation of a mass Communist Party. The Communist movement in India consistently believed that only a Communist Party could represent socialist trends in society while the non-Communist left was seen as an obstacle in the way of revolutionary change and was, therefore, more dangerous than the right-wing or conservative currents. In our view, the hegemony of the left in the colonial liberation movement in India did not call for any ‘revision of sectarian ideas on the theory of the party’ à la Gramsci. On the contrary, the Indian context required that no Communist Party be formed at all if the left-bloc was to remain together. In fact the continuous attempts to form a Communist Party became the major obstacle in the path of left hegemony in India. Therefore, Gramsci’s ideas on the question of the Communist Party are irrelevant to our context. What was required and could organically grow within the mass movement was a loosely joined and flexible left-bloc in the National Congress, and not a Bolshevik-type Communist Party of the working class. The fact that there were individuals in India who identified themselves as Communists, logically led them towards building a Communist Party. However, there was an inherent contradiction between the forging of a left-bloc and the formation of a Communist Party. Each could grow only at the expense of the other, the Communists becoming a part of the left-bloc only by ceasing to be Communists. Some of the major theoretical problems of the ‘Marxism’ expounded by the Communist movement in India have been discussed by us and commented upon in different chapters. Frequent references to ‘economism’ in the Communist movement are to be found in this work. One result of economism, as we have pointed out in our text, was that the term ‘bourgeoisie’ was used synonymously with the National Congress. 45

Ibid., p. 114.

Hegemony and the Historical Method

‘In the eyes of the people the Congress leads the struggle of the people against imperialism’; however, it ‘actually serves the interests of the bourgeoisie’, was the most common lament of the Communists. In other words, the National Congress was seen as having no ‘material basis’ to lead the struggle of the mass of people, regardless of the fact that ‘popular beliefs’ and similar ideas are themselves material forces. The ‘economistic superstition’ that the Communists practised led to ‘critical activity’ being reduced to ‘the exposure of swindles, to creating scandals, and to prying into the pockets of public figures’.46 (How much money did Birla or XYZ give to the Congress funds or to Gandhi? How many of the demands put forward as ‘national demands’ would directly benefit Indian capitalists?) Confronted by a popular movement with a mass following such as the Gandhian movement, which upheld all class unity, economism asks the question: ‘who profits directly from the initiative under consideration? And replies with a line of reasoning which is as simplistic as it is fallacious: the ones who profit directly are a certain fraction of the ruling class.’47 The presence of the bourgeoisie in the ranks of the Congress movement against imperialism and the apparent coincidence between their class developmental interests and the independent developmental interests of the whole country made this answer seem omnipotent (unquestionable, in the Communist view). ‘Infallible’ forecasts were made by the Communists: of the bourgeoisie ‘initiating’ and ‘leading’ the national movement to further their own interests and to utilise popular struggles and sacrifices. These were—apart from being historically false—politically irrelevant. ‘This sort of infallibility comes very cheap. It not only has no theoretical significance—it has only minimal political implications or practical efficacy. In general, it produces nothing but moralistic sermons and interminable questions of personality.’48 With this type of ‘analysis’, it was easy to forecast the failure of the Congress-led movement to overthrow colonial rule. While, on its success in doing so, the ‘economistic’ hypothesis asserted an immediate element of strength like the financial backing of capitalists or the backwardness of the masses, as the conditions for its success. If, however, an analysis 46

Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 164. Ibid., p. 166. 48 Ibid. 47

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of the balance of forces at all levels is made then it would culminate in the sphere of hegemony. It is economism that invariably leads to ‘the rigid aversion on principle to what are termed compromises—and the derivative of this, which can be termed ‘fear of dangers’.49 This theoretical explanation can be seen in the context of the premises of the Communist movement which led it into branding a ‘compromise’ or settlement between the Indian National Movement and the colonial government or between different internal classes as a ‘betrayal’. (See fn. 18). The aversion on principle to compromise is closely linked to economism which argues on the basis of ‘iron laws’ and teleological conceptions: since there exist ‘objective laws of historical development’ and ‘favourable conditions are inevitably going to appear’, compromises (which attempt by deliberate political initiative to plan the conditions in which further action is possible, by effecting a temporary truce, and not remain at the mercy of the opponent’s political will) are considered unnecessary or even harmful. The ‘objective laws’ and ‘favourable conditions’, of course, are invariably seen to emerge from economic phenomena, that is, the increasing pauperisation of working masses. Hiding under the cloak of ‘revolutionariness’ and ‘intransigence’, economism does not have a conception of totalising politics—the intervention of will—that operates within the dialectic of destruction/reconstruction. No account is taken of the ‘time’ factor, nor in the last analysis even of ‘economies’. For there is no understanding of the fact that mass ideological factors always lag behind mass economic phenomena, and therefore, at certain moments, the automatic thrust due to the economic factor is slowed down, obstructed or even momentarily broken by traditional ideological elements.50

This understanding implies two things in our historical study: (a) that the colonial economic exploitation and enslavement of the Indian people did not automatically generate anti-imperialist consciousness, and (b) that they had to be educated on this issue; that the traditional view of the ‘Sarkar’ (i.e., the government) as the trustee of their well-being (a view carefully fostered and nurtured by colonialist ideology) and of its being omnipotent and hence impossible or futile to oppose needed to 49 50

Ibid. Ibid., p. 168.

Hegemony and the Historical Method

be demonstrated as false. This was the work accomplished in theoretical understanding by the early nationalist intelligentsia and in ‘practice’ by Gandhi who, by initiating mass movements, tore through the people’s fear of the government’s repression and coercive machine, the colonial police and army. The fatalistic acceptance of the social status of so-called ‘untouchables’ as preordained was also challenged by Gandhi’s ‘Harijan campaigns’. The initiatives of the Indian National Movement to change the political direction of certain forces which ‘have to be absorbed if a new, homogeneous politico-economic historical bloc, without internal contradictions is to be successfully formed’,51 proved to be effective and were essential steps on the road to building the anti-imperialist hegemony of the National Congress. For instance, the constitutional stream in Indian politics was effectively absorbed into the anti-imperialist struggle. To the extent the communal tendencies survived and were not ideologically disarmed and the underlying search for identity not channelised into broader national perspectives, the process of nation-in-the-making remained incomplete and became an area in which the hegemony of the anti-imperialist politics of the National Congress remained correspondingly weak. This process of countering the old order, that is, colonialism, necessarily involved a series of internal compromises: Since two ‘similar’ forces can only be welded into a new organism either through a series of compromises or by force of arms, either by binding them to each other as allies or by forcibly subordinating one to the other, the question is whether one has the necessary force, and whether it is ‘productive’ to use it. If the union of two forces is necessary in order to defeat a third, a recourse to coercion (supposing it is available) can be nothing more than a methodological hypothesis; the only concrete possibility is compromise. Force can be employed against enemies, but not against a part of one’s side which one wishes to rapidly assimilate, and whose ‘goodwill’ and enthusiasm one needs.52

This formulation of the necessity to effect compromises in the interests of forging a historical bloc is more than true as far as the union of all elements and constituents of national liberation struggles were concerned.

51 52

Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 168. Ibid.

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No class or group could fruitfully reject compromises and internal adjustment in face of the common enemy—imperialism. A self-conscious, planned struggle against traditional social ideologies and attitudes could be waged only by programmatic compromises. However, such compromises also presupposed a perspective in which the Communists acted upon the process of transformation at work. This implied a rejection of economistic logic. Economism based itself on the ‘superior predictive capacity’ of a determinist conception of the world and the ‘laws’ of historical development. It produced predictions such as, ‘the bourgeoisie is bound to go over to imperialism’, the ‘petty-bourgeois “socialists” are bound to betray the interests of the working class and be hegemonised by the bourgeoisie’. Such ‘predictions’ ruled out compromises in advance of concrete historical developments and reflected the ‘fear of dangers’ that Gramsci spoke of. What was also ruled out by such a tendency of economism was the element of ‘choice’, ‘intelligent intervention’ and capacity to ‘direct’ reality on different lines. In other words, what was ruled out was the political will of the left. ‘Reality’ was thus conceived as a static, immobile category. Effective reality was not seen as ‘a relation of forces in continuous motion and shift of equilibrium’. If this process is not seen in its continuity from conjuncture to conjuncture then ‘seizing the moment’ would be rather difficult, the situation would not be taken advantage of, and contradictory outcomes (from those intended by the movement’s followers) would ensue. A very profound observation of Gramsci’s needs to be emphatically repeated here: that side by side with economism (in fact, as its political obverse) exists the ‘tendency to rely blindly and indiscriminately on the regulatory properties of armed conflict, … entirely without logic and consistency’.53 The numerous descriptions of ‘peasant movements’ that are termed ‘revolutionary’ because they are ‘violent’ and ‘armed conflicts’ suggest a serious problem in the present day historiography of the Indian peasant movements. Only mutual compromises, establishing political unity by subordinating organisational and corporate–economic interests, making concessions on this score, could effect a ‘political fusion’ of different groups and classes, ideological currents or tendencies. By failing to grasp this ‘science’ or ‘art’ of politics, the Communists remained a conjunctural phenomenon, in the sense that though they too depended on the organic 53

Ibid., p. 168.

Hegemony and the Historical Method

movement of the people they did ‘not have any far-reaching historical significance; they (gave) rise to political criticism of a minor, day-to-day character; which (had) its subject top political leaders and personalities with direct … responsibilities’54 to the movement. For instance, the type of criticism levelled at Gandhi by the Communists ‘restraining the mass movement’, and at Nehru ‘deceiving the masses with sham socialist slogans and rhetoric’. They did not understand that ‘Organic phenomenon on the other hand gives rise to socio-historical criticism, whose subject is wider social groupings—beyond the public figures and beyond the top leaders’.55 Our generalisations on what constituted effective reality at the time and discussing what positions the left could have taken to effectively intervene in it is incomprehensible to an empiricist–pragmatist historiography. Criticism is often levelled at any attempt to discuss the historical past of the left in the anti-imperialist movement on the terrain of ‘potential’ and what ‘ought to have been’. We believe, however, that discussion of what ‘ought to be’ is concrete; ‘indeed it is the only realistic and historicist interpretation of reality, it alone is history in the making and philosophy in the making, it alone is politics’.56 A conception of applying one’s will to the creation of a new equilibrium on the basis of existing forces by continuously strengthening those one believes to be more progressive lies at the heart of the concept of ‘transformation’. This concept of ‘transformation’ is employed in our work to describe and characterise a movement and ideology in flux. It mobilised and brought within its fold new and wider sections of the people with each political upsurge (1921–22, 1930–32 and 1942), organically oriented towards a continuous radicalisation of its ranks and programme. This perspective of transformation is relevant to the entire, wideranging spectrum of anti-imperialist nationalism in India. If one sees the primary contradiction of the Indian people with imperialism as having produced two forms of politics which were practised against it, that is, constitutionalism and mass movements, then the first constituted the ‘right’ of the anti-imperialist movement and the latter its ‘left’. Within the ‘political left’, that is, those who stood for non-constitutional mass movements, there existed a ‘right-wing’ (as the characterisation of those 54

Ibid., p. 177. Ibid., p. 178. 56 Ibid., p. 172. 55

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who were opposed to the inclusion of socialists within the Congress) and a ‘left-wing’. The ‘right-wing’ of the ‘politically left’ stream of nationalist politics included socially conservative leaders such as Vallabhai Patel, Rajendra Prasad and Rajagopalachari who we see as standing for the development of bourgeois–capitalist relations in Indian society. The left-wing (as the defining characteristic of those who emphasised the organisation of workers and peasants in the national movement and the incorporation of their economic demands in its programme) was constituted by Jawaharlal Nehru, the Congress Socialists and the Communists, who can be defined, broadly, as the ‘socialist tendency’. At the centre, holding the two wings in equilibrium, stood Gandhi as the leader of the united anti-imperialist struggle, sometimes throwing his weight towards maintaining right-ofcentre and at other times maintaining left-of-centre positions. This broad characterisation of various tendencies in the overall national movement was suggested by Jawaharlal Nehru; he described them as follows: If the Congress is looked upon from the Right and Left point of view it might be said that there is a small rightist fringe, a left minority, and a huge intermediate group or groups which approximate to left-centre. The Gandhian group would be considered to belong to this intermediate left-centre. Politically, the Congress is overwhelmingly left; socially, it has leftist leanings, but is predominantly centre. In matters affecting the peasantry it is pro-peasant.57

It was Nehru’s complex understanding of the Congress organisation as an ideological spectrum which distinguished Nehru from the Communists. It enabled him to locate the role and position of Gandhi as left-of-centre and the right-wing leaders such as Patel and Rajendra Prasad as politically left. The Communists on the other hand divided the Congress into two compartments, i.e., left-wing and right-wing, placing Gandhi in the camp of the right-wing. Because of this they not only failed to appreciate Gandhi’s role but also the anti-imperialist role of the right-wing leaders. Given the complex of political and social tendencies in the antiimperialist movement, a paradigm of ‘transformation’ was the only real and effective form of strategic intervention that could have been practised 57

Jawaharlal Nehru, The Unity of India, 1941, pp. 121–22.

Hegemony and the Historical Method

by the left. They were faced by the historical necessity to evolve a complex counter-strategy of fully supporting non-constitutional politics vis-à-vis the constitutionalist tendency, of consolidating the Centre in relation to the right-wing, and of working to constantly extend the influence of the centre–left and left in the movement. This strategic conception, however, could emerge only within a paradigm of ‘transformation’ of the Congress-led movement: it could not be based on the politics of forging an ‘alternative’ to it. And, of course, it could be best nurtured into reality by a united left and socialist tendency and not by separate left groups competing with each other. Above all, it could not be accomplished by a Communist Party.

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Chapter 2

The Irrelevance of Leninism

The Indian Communist Movement has given Lenin’s colonial theses of 1920 the status of a scriptural source. The official history of the Communist Party of India edited by G. Adhikari traces all acts of commission or omission to a correct or incorrect ‘application’ of these theses. For, Adhikari, ‘Lenin’s theses already contained the essential guidelines for developing a harmoniously integrated theory, strategy and tactics of national democratic revolution in colonies and backward countries.’1 Strangely, even non-Marxists begin their accounts of Communist history with a comparison of the manner in which Communists swore allegiance to Lenin’s theses; a certain section, however, tended to misrepresent it in ex-colonial countries.2 1

G. Adhikari, Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India, Vol. I, p. 169, 1971, and Vol. II, 1974. Also see, P.C. Joshi and K. Damodaran, Documented History of the Communist Movement in India, Vol. I, ‘Origins of Indian Communism’ (1917–33), (unpublished). Archives of Contemporary History of India, Jawaharlal Nehru University (henceforth ACHI, JNU); A.B. Reznikov, Lenin and Revolution in the East, Moscow, 1969; B.G. Gafurov and G.F. Kim (eds), Lenin and National Liberation in the East, Moscow, 1978. 2 See, G.D. Overstreet and M. Windmiller, Communism in India, Berkeley, 1959; J.P. Haithoox, Communism and Nationalism in India, Bombay. 1971; Helene C. d’Encausse and Stuart R. Schram, (eds), Marxism and Asia: An Introduction with Readings, London, 1969.

The Irrelevance of Leninism

However, at the second Congress of the Comintern, Lenin did not address the issue of colonial revolutions. As a matter of fact, he acknowledged that he knew very little about conditions in the colonies. Lenin’s colonial theses can only be located in what Lukacs called ‘the actuality of the world revolution’.3 For Lenin, as for Marx and Engels, the socialist revolution was essentially a world revolution, even if it was not possible for the working class to take power simultaneously in every country or even in several countries at once.4 It was Marx and Engels who had first established the theoretical connection between the struggle for national liberation and the struggle of the working class in capitalist countries. They regarded this link as a problem of internationalism and hence the well-known formulation: ‘No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.’5 Lenin, likewise, concretised this connection in the form of an ‘alliance’, positing it as one of the basic elements of the strategy of world revolution: ‘We shall exert every effort to foster association and merger with the Mongolians, Persians, Indians, Egyptians. We believe it is our duty and in our interest to do this, for otherwise socialism in Europe will not be secure.’6 Lenin emphasised the ‘cardinal idea’ underlying his theses as ‘the distinction between the oppressed and the oppressor nations’.7 Thus, when he presented his ‘colonial theses’ in 1920 in the midst of an imminent world revolution, he stood at the head of ‘an advancing world revolution’ in which the national liberation movements were also opposing the main enemy of the world revolution, that is, imperialism. In his theses, Lenin sought to unite all the existing anti-imperialist forces and tendencies in the world. Here an important distinction needs to be made between Lenin’s writings before and after 1920. Before the Second Congress he spoke many a time of the internal alliances of classes in colonial countries in 3

George Lukacs, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought, London, 1970. For a detailed discussion see Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement from Comintern to Cominform, Part I: The Crisis of the Communist International, New York, 1975, pp. 46–102. 5 K. Marx and F. Engels. V.I. Lenin, On Scientific Communism, Moscow, 1965, p. 382. 6 V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, CW, Vol. 23, p. 67. (All references from CW are to the Moscow, 1965 edition.) 7 V.I. Lenin, CW, Vol. 31, p. 247. 4

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their ‘bourgeois–democratic revolutions’. As for example, in his address to delegates, purported to be representatives of Communist organisations of various Eastern peoples, he warned: … the majority of the Eastern peoples are typical representatives of the working and exploited peasant masses who are victims of medieval oppression. In this respect you are confronted with a task which has not previously confronted the Communists of the world, in which the task is to wage a struggle against medieval survivals and not against capitalism. You will have to base yourselves on the bourgeois nationalism which is awakening, and must awaken, among those peoples, and which has its historical justification.8

In his colonial theses of 1920, on the other hand, he was mainly concerned with the question of international alliances between the Comintern and national liberation movements. As he himself put it, he approached all the questions in his colonial theses primarily from the point of view of the dictatorship of the world proletariat which, he was convinced, was on the immediate agenda because of the acute crisis of world capitalism. In the process of an immediate confrontation between imperialism and the ‘world socialist movement’, the national liberation movements were seen as playing a vital role. For Lenin, at this time, the colonial question was a part of an imminent world revolution, and thereby, a purely conjunctural problem.9 This aspect of Lenin’s colonial theses was confirmed by Lenin himself when he wrote to Bhupendra Nath Dutta who had prepared a thesis à la Roy discussing the role of various classes in Indian society in the making of an Indian revolution. Wrote Lenin: ‘I have read your thesis. We should not discuss about the social classes. I think we should abide by my thesis on colonial question.’10 Clearly, all later interpretations of Lenin’s theses which claim (example, Adhikari), that he advised the Communists on their attitude towards the bourgeoisie, misinterpret it. M.N. Roy’s intervention at the Second Congress achieved renown because he challenged Lenin’s theses. He questioned the validity of Lenin’s ‘world alliance’ between socialism in the West and ‘bourgeois 8

Lenin, National Liberation Movement in the East, (henceforth NLME, Moscow, 1969, pp. 251–52. 9 NLME, pp. 227–28. 10 Ibid., p. 307.

The Irrelevance of Leninism

nationalism’ in the East, from the point of view of existing conditions in India. Lenin’s generalisations on the progressive role of the colonial bourgeoisie against imperialism on a world scale were rejected by Roy as inapplicable, especially in the case of India. Roy argued that the Indian bourgeoisie was reactionary and incapable of a sustained fight against imperialism.11 Consequently, Lenin left it to him and other Communists ‘if they existed’ in India, to decide if their bourgeoisie was ‘genuinely revolutionary’. In Lenin’s theoretical conception a genuinely revolutionary bourgeoisie was that which completed anti-feudal tasks in the classic ‘bourgeois–democratic revolution’. If Roy argued that it had links with feudalism and was inseparable from it then it certainly could not be termed progressive. The Indian Communists have never had any difference on this issue with Roy. On this count, therefore, both of them have only continued to adhere to Lenin’s logic. Equally important. Lenin’s basic postulate that a Communist Party had to maintain a strict distance from the nationalist movement and an absolutely independent existence was faithfully upheld by M.N. Roy throughout his career as a Communist. The Indian Communists likewise were in complete agreement with this premise and were as Leninist as they were Royist. Their criticism of Roy therefore has always remained peripheral. Thus Adhikari, for example, criticises Roy’s incorrect assessment of Indian conditions and underestimation of nationalist strength. However, the basic postulates of Leninism–Royism characterising nationalism as a bourgeois ideology and insisting on the independent and separate existence of the Communist Party are accepted as immutable maxims. Naturally there is little to distinguish the Communist movement in India from Roy except minor differences in assessing Indian conditions from time to time. It was M.N. Roy who first introduced the perspective of a revolution within colonial society at the theoretical level. This perspective was unquestioningly accepted by the Communists in India. Roy posed the theoretical problems presented by the socio-economic formations and class relationships within the framework of the colony. Considering that no Communist Parties existed in the colonial countries which could act as instruments for revolution, he asked: ‘How could then the Communist International develop the national liberation movement there as part of the world proletarian revolution?’ Lenin’s answer, given his perspective 11

G. Adhikari, Documents, Vol. I, pp. 180–86.

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of an impending world revolution, could only be a conjunctural one: ‘The Communist International’, he said, (and it must be noted that he speaks of the ‘International’ and not of the ‘Communist Party’), ‘must enter into temporary alliance with bourgeois democracy in colonial and backward countries, but must not merge with it … .’12 M.N. Roy, speaking exclusively from the point of view of the colonial country, asked the question as to how the colonial countries would advance towards socialism? Lenin replied: If the victorious revolutionary proletariat conducts systematic propaganda among them, and the Soviet governments come to their aid with all the means at their disposal, in that event it will be mistaken to assume that the backward peoples must inevitably go through the capitalist stage of development.13

Thus in the event of the failure of the world revolution Lenin had no answer to Roy’s specific question regarding the path to socialist revolution in the colonies. The basic irrelevance of Roy and other Indian Communists was the conversion of conjunctural alignments, on a world scale in Lenin’s theses, into abstract tactics for all times and places. After 1923, when the expected world revolution failed to materialise, Lenin’s theses of 1920 lost their relevance even for the Comintern. Consequently, clinging to the Leninist legacy of the colonial theses was quite fruitless and even misleading. It can lead to alternative and contradictory conclusions. On the one hand we have Claudin’s conclusion that Lenin’s theses implicitly admitted that the colonial revolution would remain under the leadership of the bourgeoisie and that Lenin seriously doubted the possibility of forming Communist parties in the colonial countries.14 On the other, Adhikari claims that Lenin placed the two tasks (of supporting bourgeois nationalism while preserving and strengthening the Communist Party) before the Communists in the colonies.15 Both treat Lenin’s theses as the crucial source of the theory of colonial revolution. J. Banaji offers a third view and interprets Lenin’s basic division of nations into the oppressor and oppressed as implying that there were 12

Adhikari, Documents, Vol. I, p. 158; Lenin’s Preliminary Draft Theses, ACHI, JNU. Documents of the Second Congress of the Communist International, ACHI, JNU. 14 Fernando Claudin, op. cit. 15 G. Adhikari, Documents, Vol. I. 13

The Irrelevance of Leninism

two types of nationalism in the colonies, the nationalism of the colonial bourgeoisie and the nationalism of the masses.16 This is identical to M.N. Roy’s position at the Second Congress. Lenin’s colonial theses have also often been interpreted in terms of the ‘two stage theory’ developed by Lenin in the midst of the Russian Revolution of 1905.17 The two stage theory which was, irrelevantly, first appropriated for India by M.N. Roy, had an inner and coherent logic of its own. Lenin’s theorisation of the two stages of the Russian Revolution had been developed to accomplish the ‘bourgeois–democratic stage’ under the ‘leadership of the working class’. M.N. Roy identified the first stage of the colonial liberation movement with the first stage of the bourgeois–democratic revolution, on the model of 1905. Consequently, it required the formation of a Communist Party which would establish its leadership over the nationalist movement. The Indian Communist movement inherited this conception. The adoption of the strategy and tactics of the Bolshevik revolution, even if only for the first or ‘bourgeois–democratic’ stage, meant that the obsession with the Communist ‘hegemony’ of the national revolution was a natural corollary to its logic. The Communist movement’s obsession with exercising ‘hegemony’—literally translated as ‘leadership’—in the national revolution led to a false counterposing of their own activity with the anti-imperialist national movement before 1947. Their failure to acquire that leadership gave birth to a ‘conspiracy theory’ in which the clever bourgeoisie had conspired to outmanoeuvre them. Ajoy Ghosh acknowledged the Communists’ failure when he wrote: ‘Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the key task of building a united anti-imperialist front under proletarian hegemony could not be carried on.’18 Mohit Sen on the other hand has argued that the concept of proletarian hegemony was totally irrelevant to the Indian situation before independence.19 However, he does not raise the question why then a Communist Party should have been formed or whether it was necessary at all? For M.N. Roy the imperative necessity of forming a Communist Party which would lead the peasant masses in the Indian version of the

16

J. Banaji, in K.N. Panikkar, National and Left Movements in India, Delhi, 1980. P.C. Joshi and K. Damodaran, Documented History, and G. Adhikari, Documents. 18 New Age, February 1958, p. 4. 19 Mohit Sen, Revolution in India, New Delhi, 1977, p. 91. 17

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Russian ‘1905’ naturally meant that the bourgeoisie could not be seen as an equal partner in the anti-imperialist national revolution with whom power could be shared. It was to be seen as a compromising class which was bound to become increasingly pro-imperialist when confronted by a revolutionary movement of the masses lead by the Communist Party. He did not view it as a class that would concretely show itself to be antior pro-imperialist but as a class which, by definition, was bound to go over to imperialism when confronted with a revolutionary mass movement.20 This was, likewise, the interpretation that was popularised by the Leninist Comintern in its well-known ‘third period’.21 From this position it was easy to unfold the logic of the ‘fusion of two revolutions’, the logic that characterised the formulations of the Comintern and Communists in India after 1928.22 M.N. Roy put forward the following assessment of Indian sociopolitical reality: (a) the bourgeois–democratic nationalist movements in the colonies are limited to the small middle class which does not reflect the aspirations of the masses; (b) the masses, especially in India, are not with the bourgeois–nationalist leaders—they are moving towards revolution independently of the bourgeois–nationalist movement; (c) the masses distrust the political leaders who always lead them astray and prevent them from revolutionary action; (d ) there are to be found in the dependent countries two distinct movements which everyday grow farther and farther apart from each other. One is the bourgeois–nationalist movement with a programme of national independence and the other is the mass action of the ignorant and poor peasants and workers; and (e) it would be a mistake to assume that the bourgeois–nationalist movement expresses the sentiments and aspirations of the general population.23

Roy maintained that the nationalist movement in India, which had ‘found its expression in the National Congress, (had) embraced broad circles of the student, youth and the middle classes, but the call of nationalists to fight for India’s independence (had) not struck a response among 20

M.N. Roy, The Communist International, Bombay, 1943, p. 48. Theses on the Eastern Question, in Adhikari, Documents, Vol. I, pp. 546–54. 22 See Vol. II of this work. 23 ‘Roy’s Original Draft’ in Adhikari, Documents, Vol. I, p. 184 (thesis 7). When Roy returned to India in 1934 he abandoned these premises and joined the INC. See Vol. II, Ch. VI. 21

The Irrelevance of Leninism

the masses’. He asserted that ‘the masses of India are not infected (sic) by the national spirit. They are interested solely in questions of a socioeconomic nature’. Consequently, they were ‘absolutely not interested in bourgeois–nationalist slogans; only one slogan can interest them—land to the tiller’. And thus, Roy categorically declared, ‘the revolutionary movement in India, in as much as the broad masses are concerned, has nothing in common with the national liberation movement’.24 Proceeding from this ‘analysis’ Roy concluded that thesis 11 of Lenin’s preliminary draft which spoke of the Third International helping the bourgeois–democratic liberation movements ought to be deleted. On the contrary, he argued, ‘in India the Communist International should help solely to create and develop the Communist movement, and the Communist Party of India must concern itself only with organising the broad masses to fight for their own class interests’.25 Behind this presentation of the Indian situation and the liberation struggle led by the Indian National Congress lay certain definite premises which were the product of the Marxism that Roy had absorbed. At the core of these premises lay the notion that ‘nationalism’ was a bourgeois ideology and that the mass of the people were alien to it. He spoke of the masses not being ‘infected’ by it, that the ‘national spirit’ was a virus that came from the outside, from the bourgeoisie. Moreover, nationalist slogans were bourgeois because the masses were moved only by ‘economic’ questions. Naturally, therefore, the broad masses could have ‘nothing in common with the national liberation movement’. Most importantly, nationalism was seen by Roy as antagonistic to the development of class consciousness among the masses. In Roy’s view nationalism could only be the ideology of the bourgeoisie and not of the masses and therefore the ‘relation of the Communist International with the revolutionary movement in the subject countries is not tantamount to the former’s upholding the doctrine of nationalism’.26 Helping the national liberation movements automatically cancelled out the creation and development of a Communist Party in the colonies, for, ‘in the colonies we have two contradictory forces; they cannot develop

24

Adhikari, Documents, Vol. I, pp. 161–62. Thesis 10 in ‘Roy’s Original Draft’. Adhikari, Documents, p. 186. 26 Ibid. Thesis 5, p. 180. 25

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together’. It was only ‘mass action through the medium of a Communist Party’ which could and would ‘bring the real revolutionary forces to action’ even for the overthrow of foreign imperialism.27 Logically, these positions indicated that the Communists’ task was ‘to initiate at as early a stage as possible, the class struggle in the colonies’.28 Despite correcting and amending Roy’s political positions vis-à-vis national liberation movements in the given conjuncture, Lenin completely agreed with the theoretical premises which informed Roy’s theses. These were regarding the ideology (i.e., nationalism), composition (the division of colonial liberation movements in two parallel streams), and tasks (the anti-feudal social revolution was inextricably woven into Roy’s conception of anti-imperialist revolution), of national liberation movements. This was crucial to the survival of ‘Royist’ positions in the international Communist movement in later years, both as advanced by Roy himself and the Leninist Third International, as the period between 1929–34 made clear. To sum up, the theoretical framework of the Russian revolution that Roy put forward in India gave absolute priority to the formation of a Communist Party. Lenin’s theses, on the other hand, mainly emphasised the alliance between the Communist International and colonial liberation movements. It remained non-commital, however, on the question of forming the Communist Party in a particular country. This question was left open for those who called themselves Communists in the concerned colonies to decide in accordance with prevailing conditions. The Communist Party of India inherited both these theses, Roy’s as well as Lenin’s. Once their divergent perspectives merged together the Communists were trapped within the original paradox of Roy’s: to actively participate in the national movement led by the National Congress, to unite and further the anti-imperialist struggle and simultaneously to form an independent Communist Party and maintain its political and organisational independence at all costs. However, was it at all possible to build a Communist Party in India? The attempts to achieve this show that a Communist Party leading an alternative anti-imperialist movement could not develop.

27 28

Ibid., Thesis 10, p. 186. Ibid., Thesis 11, p. 188.

The Irrelevance of Leninism

That the whole history of the Communist Party of India was like a pendulum striking itself against these two ‘guidelines’ is tragically revealed when Adhikari writes: The Leninist guidance of combining the support to the National Liberation Movement with fight against bourgeois compromising tendency and maintaining the independence of proletarian parties and of peasants’ and workers’ movement was sometimes distorted either in the sectarian or reformist direction. It either became contra-posing proletarian hegemony to support to the national liberation struggle or merging with the latter and neglecting to develop proletarian independence and initiative to unleash the agrarian and anti-feudal revolution.29

Roy was convinced that his analysis of contemporary Indian society was accurate. On the basis of this analysis he outlined his theoretical proposition for the Indian revolution. Accordingly, he began his propagandist writings to convince Communists in India of the same. Roy’s article ‘Present Events in India’, one of the earliest articles on India and his ‘Manifesto to the Thirty-Sixth Indian National Congress’, in 1921, reflect an attempt to reconcile Lenin’s conjunctural positions with his own reading of Indian conditions. In the context of widespread unrest and momentous nationalist activity during the last few months of 1921, Roy referred to ‘a tremendous concentration of the national energy for a determined effort against the British bureaucracy’. Through the prism of Lenin’s conjunctural intervention at the Second Congress, Roy could now see the ‘nationalist revolutionary movement’ rising in India, see the masses being drawn into active participation, see the expressions of national solidarity in a national boycott of the Prince of Wales’ visit to India.30 Roy painted an almost eulogistic picture of the Indian revolutionary movement: ‘The agrarian movement, the proletarian movement and the nationalist movement are moving concertedly towards one object, national independence, under the guidance of the All-India National Congress, which is the acknowledged head today of the Indian struggle against British rule’.

29 30

Adhikari, Documents, Vol. I, p. 170. ‘Present Events in India’, Communist International, No. 3, 1921.

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He even overcame his rationalist scruples on the subject of Gandhi’s leadership and was prepared to see him in a positive light. ‘At first sight’, wrote Roy, Gandhi appears a mad prophet of peace and non-resistance. But closer examination of his utterances and tactics convinces one that he has deliberately chosen the only road open to Indian patriots under the present regime of force—the preaching of non-violent non-cooperation with the present government.31

Roy’s enthusiasm in fact led him into highly coloured descriptions of Congress activity and influence. He wrote: The Congress organization has spread itself into every small village and hamlet. Volunteers and paid organizers and propagandists infest the country preaching national solidarity, resistance by non-violent methods, such as strikes and hartals to British oppression … the propaganda had done its work and the movement was too widespread and deeply rooted to put down.

Roy gave a description of fund collections, unmindful of regional variations: ‘In a vigorous campaign organized throughout the length and breadth of India the Congress leaders appealed for contribution to the fund from all classes of the people. Sub-committees sprang up in every town, and no village was too small to contribute its quota.’32 This was an unmitigated exaggeration. The non-cooperation movement of 1921–22 (NCO) was not a uniformly spread movement. The absence of a central recruitment policy and direction led to volunteers getting concentrated in a few provinces. The Congress was unable to raise more than small groups of volunteers in scattered provinces; the volunteers were not paid professional cadres. Moreover, inter-provincial coordination was weak.33 Roy claimed that in Guntur district ‘the people are not paying any taxes to the government’ and from that he concluded: ‘They are most 31

Ibid. Ibid. 33 ‘The Non-cooperation Movement, June 1921–February 1922’. Research paper presented at the Aligarh session of the Indian History Congress, 1975 by Bhagwan S. Josh, Shashi Joshi. Gopalan Kutty, Indu Agnihotri and Ouseop Mathen, Centre for Historical Studies, JNU. 32

The Irrelevance of Leninism

assuredly prepared to fight the issue out.’34 As a matter of fact, the Congress organisation at this juncture was neither cohesive nor particularly efficient, so as to be capable of leading and implementing the Civil Disobedience Movement even in an area as militant as Guntur. It found itself in a state of confusion and crisis, incapable of carrying through the programme even after Gandhi gave them the green signal.35 A comparison between the temper of Roy’s writings in this period and that of the Congress organ, the Independent, shows, that the latter was far more cautious and realistic. Roy wrote, ‘Equally successful has been the registration of membership on the Congress rolls of ten million names, who stand pledged to support all measures passed by that body.’36 On the other hand the Independent remarked: But the mere fact that a crore of people have gotten on the Congress registers is no proof that they have faith enough in the Congress … . We know the majority of the country are sympathetic towards noncooperation, but the depth and value of this sympathy are difficult to estimate. From time to time, tasks have been laid on the nation with a view to gauging the extent of popular support for its policy … the policy has been to bring the Congress workers in close touch with the people and of testing the reality of the influence of nationalism over them.37

Roy seemed fervent in his attempt at identifying what Lenin called, a ‘nationalist revolutionary movement’ in India, and pinning all hopes on it. The exaggerated tempo he attributed to the movement was perhaps responsible for his concentrated enthusiasm over it. But both were essentially misleading. Consequently the dénouement came with equal forcefulness as the Congress enacted its ‘betrayal’ by withdrawing the Movement in early 1922. Now Roy concluded, the masses were politicised en masse and straining at the Gandhian leash which prevented mass militancy. He wrote that there was ‘an undeniable existence in India of a widespread feeling of national solidarity, of national enthusiasm and desire to end the present system of government … .’ That being the case, the masses were ready

34

Roy, ‘The Political Crisis in India’, Inprecor, Vol. II, No. 29, 2 May 1922. ‘The Non-cooperation Movement’, op. cit. 36 Roy, ‘Present Events in India’, Communist International, No. 3, 1921. 37 Ibid. (Quoted by Roy from the Independent). 35

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for a radical programme. However, the Congress had no scientific programme. ‘The great deficiency of the Congress movement today is lack of scientific understanding of the various social forces which must be dealt with.’38 Obviously, in that case, he reasoned, his duty as a Communist was to provide such a programme. The result was his Manifesto to the Ahmedabad session of the Indian National Congress. Roy was convinced that Das ‘did not fully share Gandhi’s ideas and was “new leaders were being thrown up rapidly’’’ was inspired by C.R. Das. Roy was convinced, that Das ‘did not fully share Gandhi’s ideas and was sceptical about the possibilities of non-violent non-cooperation. He might favour the alternative method of mass revolutionary struggle, if a programme of developing it was submitted for his consideration.’39 Roy’s Manifesto reveals rigid, simplistic notions of ‘consciousness’ and ways to mobilise people. He did not for a moment recognise the force of an anti-imperialist ‘consciousness’ which the Congress was rousing—slowly but surely. Roy declared: The masses of the Indian people(’s) … consciousness must be aroused first of all. And the cause for which they fight must include their immediate needs. What does the man in the street need? The only aspiration of his life is to get two meals a day … . The abstract doctrine of national self-determination leaves them passive … .40

Considering the fact that Roy was an ‘inspired’ student of Lenin and the Russian Revolution, it is inexplicable why he did not remember that this ‘abstract doctrine’ was a major force in the oppressed areas of the Tsarist empire and the recognition of this contributed significantly to Bolshevik success. Roy’s Manifesto in fact contains a near denial of the role of nationalist ideology by saying: The cause of this awakening … is to be looked for in their (masses’) age-long economic exploitation and social slavery. The mass revolt is directed against the propertied class, irrespective of nationality. It is simply deluding oneself to think that the great ferment of popular energy … is the result of the non-cooperation agitation.41

38

Ibid. M.N. Roy and E. Roy, One Year of Non-Cooperation, ACHI, JNU. 40 Adhikari, Documents, Vol. I, p. 344. 41 Ibid., p. 350. 39

The Irrelevance of Leninism

Reviewing the ‘Revolt of Labour in India’ at the beginning of 1922, Roy revealed his shallow or careless use of the term ‘consciousness’. He wrote: ‘Indian labour may be illiterate … (but) they feel in every moment the lash of the exploiters. Torture and stomach pangs are enough to awaken them to class-consciousness.’ From this type of understanding of classconsciousness and mass politicisation flowed his ‘exposure theory’— expose the leaders and win over the masses. In the same article quoted above, he claimed: Mahatma Gandhi, ‘professor of pacifitology’ has been able to become the leading figure in India today due to the masses’ confidence in him. The moment he betrays them in the attainment of their political-economic and social aspirations he will at once lose his influence over them. Beneath the political agitation is concealed the weapon of labour, which will be used at the opportune moment for the emancipation of-the masses.42

This threat of ‘using’ the weapon of labour in no way explained why the masses had confidence in Gandhi, a fact which he acknowledged. Roy’s over-eager compliments to the Non-cooperation Movement and Gandhi in the first place, and his exaggerated building up of the ‘revolutionary force of the people’, led to a quick disappointment with and denunciation of the Indian National Congress. And when the potentially ‘revolutionary’ leaders of the people, such as C.R. Das, failed to receive his programme with open arms he quickly swung into the tactic of ‘lead the people against the leadership’. It was the easiest thing in the world to slip back to his original characterisation of the ‘bourgeois led’ Indian National Movement. Roy’s brief flirtation with the idea of supporting the Indian ‘National Revolutionary’ movement began and ended with the course of the Non-Cooperation (NCO) Movement of 1921 after which he reverted to his original theme in the theses presented at the Second Congress of CI in which he had distinguished between the ‘national bourgeois leadership’ and the ‘mass movement’. Even in the Manifesto where he was seeking to win over radical elements of ‘bourgeois leadership’ he wrote: ‘The workers and peasants will continue their economic and social struggle and eventually conquer what they need. They do not need 42 Inprecor, Vol. II, No. 12, 14 February 1922, ‘Revolt of Labour in India’, by M.N. Roy. Emphasis added.

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so much the leadership of the Congress but the latter’s political success depends entirely on the conscious support of the masses.’43 Armed with this portrait of the revolutionary workers and peasants in India, who ‘are not going to give their lives for abstract theories’, Roy declared that ‘A plan of action is, therefore, being mapped so that the real revolutionary may know how to use their forces for the inevitable social and economic revolution, which is bound up with the political revolution.’44 The ‘bourgeois national movement’ having shown its timidity and propensity to ‘compromise’ with imperialism was evident in the collapse of the Non-cooperation Movement. Now, the real revolutionaries were Indian labour: ‘The beginning has been made in organizing unions in every field of labour.’ And just as glowingly as Roy had described the Non-cooperation Movement he now described the activity of the labour unions. ‘The strikes of the textile workers, coal-miners, dockyard workers, tramway conductors and motormen, plantation workers and jute millhands have been admirably carried out in many cases, and they have used this weapon no less creditably than their comrades in Europe.’45 This account of spontaneous trade union activity is then immediately confused with political awareness and class consciousness. ‘… labourers are taking a leading part in the political movement’, and … if labour is conscious of the fact that it produces all wealth and it should dictate the methods of distribution, then there can be no other way to establish the principle but the seizure of the control of the government. That is what the revolt of labour in India means.46

Without envisaging a gradual growth of political participation and organisation Roy directly jumped from economic trade unionism to the political seizure of state power. The entire vein of Roy’s articles from 1922 onwards compels one to suspect that his vision of reality in India was pre-coloured by his universalised conception of the ‘colonial bourgeoisie’ being unable to overthrow imperialism. And, of course, he identified this class with the Indian National Congress. The great success of the Non-cooperation 43

Adhikari, Documents, Vol. I, p. 351. Inprecor, Vol. I, No. 18, 20 December 1921. 45 Ibid., Vol. II, No. 12, February 1922. 46 Ibid. 44

The Irrelevance of Leninism

Movement’s boycott of the Prince of Wales’ visit was interpreted by Roy in a way which was specific to his original theses. Quoting from the English Statesman of Calcutta which confessed that 17 November 1921 had seen Calcutta under ‘Gandhi raj’, Roy exclaimed: ‘It was not only one city or one hamlet, the entire country was under the control of Gandhi and the non-cooperation …’ and from this he concluded with peculiar logic that The real situation in India is this: the movement has passed into the hands of the common people who are the backbone of society …. It is not an exaggeration to say that the movements in India are directly and indirectly controlled by the labouring masses.

Again, Roy quoted from the Amrita Bazar Patrika which had said: ‘… writ large on the hartal of Calcutta is—Revolution’ and he confidently commented that the Indian labouring masses were awakened and ‘Gandhi may come and Gandhi may go, but the revolutionaries are marching on’.47 With this kind of ‘analysis’ of the Indian movement which insisted on dividing the Indian National Movement into ‘bourgeois leaders’ as distinct from ‘revolutionary masses’ it was only logical to begin propagating a revolutionary socialist programme to the rank and file of the movement and exposing the ‘reactionary leadership’. For this purpose Roy started publishing The Vanguard of Indian Independence from Berlin. The theme basically propounded in this journal was that the bourgeoisie in the colonial countries was incapable of fulfilling its own tasks, that is, anti-imperialism and the establishment of independence. This theme had been foreshadowed in Evelyn Roy’s ‘The awakening of India’ where she wrote that the Indian movement’s inherent contradictions are becoming palpable even to its component parts’, and raised the new slogan of ‘May there soon arise … a class conscious Gandhi’.48 The Vanguard articles explored all means to convince critics of this theme, sometimes in a moralistic, sometimes in an instructional tone. Taking for granted that the Indian National Movement is a bourgeois movement, why does it not behave in a more revolutionary fashion (?); this is the constant complaint of Roy’s writings in the Vanguard. ‘Struggle 47 48

Ibid., Vol. II, No. 21, 17 March 1922. Emphasis added. Ibid., Vol. II, Nos. 32–33, 5 May 1922.

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for national freedom is a revolutionary struggle; therefore it has to be carried on by a class which is socially revolutionary.’ The bourgeoisie was counter-revolutionary for Roy because … the propertied class needs ‘law and order’, a peaceful state of society, for its development. Therefore, the aristocrats as well as the thin layer of rich middle class will always be on the side of the English in the crucial moment. So it is clear that lower middle class extremism cannot and will not go very far beyond the limits set by the moderates.49

This was Roy’s ‘theoretical basis’ for denying the bourgeoisie any role in an anti-imperialist struggle. The practical test he made was the formulation of a socially revolutionary programme. In the very first issue of Vanguard he dismissed the National Congress which, of course, was synonymous with the bourgeoisie in his view, as unworthy of leading the national struggle. But if a programme is set up which frankly forgoes all forward movement of the Indian society it is but logical that the advocates of such a programme are trying to obstruct the progress of the Indian people, and are therefore not capable of leading us in this great historical period of our national life. This was the case with the National Congress ever since it came under the influence of orthodox nationalism.50

The ‘bourgeois-led’ Indian movement was thus incapable of fighting imperialism, but no proletarian party was yet in existence. This led Roy into the most crass form of economic determinism: ‘The economic forces that are awakening them (Indian masses) out of their age-long stagnation and apathy will assert themselves, and the leadership of the political movement must conform to their imperious dictates.’ ‘The masses’, Roy said, ‘who are the backbone of the struggle for national liberation, are learning to find their own way. Bitter experience gained in hard struggle is clarifying their vision.’51 Roy’s critique of the Indian bourgeoisie, which for him was epitomised by the Indian National Congress, led him into obvious contradictions of what he had written during his brief experiment with ‘supporting 49

Vanguard, No. 3, 15 June 1922. Ibid., (editorial), No. 1, 15 May 1922. 51 Ibid. 50

The Irrelevance of Leninism

bourgeois led movements’. From being the ‘only road open to Indian patriots’52 non-violent non-cooperation now became ‘stupid’, for ‘we are of the opinion that non-violent revolution is an impossibility’.53 But the lack of visible alternatives on the Indian scene led to the recommendation that ‘non-cooperation and civil disobedience, if properly wielded, are powerful weapons in the hands of a disarmed people … .’54 A further contradiction which emerged from this was a criticism of Gandhi who ‘shrunk from putting his brilliantly conceived tactics to proper use’ and therefore betrayed the movement. In spite of all the ‘bankruptcy’ of the National Congress, it remained true that it was the only political body organised nationally and that it had many leaders ‘who often criticized and disagreed with Gandhi’. The result of this was that Roy made an attempt to give lessons in ‘Marxism’ to potentially militant leaders through the columns of the Vanguard. They were warned that ‘to dissipate and denounce mass action for the sake of the interests of the respectable middle class is the worst crime that can be committed against the freedom of the Indian people’. And do not the actions of the Congress, he asked, bring ‘upon its head the serious charge of having betrayed the nation for the interests of a small class of landlords and capitalists?’55 In a series of articles, Roy now began expounding the theoretical position which he had defended at the Second Congress of the CI that only the proletariat of the colonial countries could successfully lead the anti-imperialist struggle. Therefore it is futile, to say the least, to rely on one agency of oppression (the bourgeoisie) in order to fight the other. Such tactics only confuse the masses … . Those who resort consciously to such tactics want to replace national exploitation by class oppression.56

For Roy there were only two alternatives: either a militant (read: violent), consistently revolutionary movement (read: anti-feudal and anticapitalist) led by the National Congress willingly, or a mass confrontation with the Indian bourgeoisie epitomised by the Congress leadership. The Congress led Non-cooperation Movement did not fit the bill now that it 52

Communist International, No. 3, 1921. Vanguard (editorial), No. 1, 15 May 1922. 54 Ibid., No. 3, 15 June 1922. 55 Vanguard, No. 5, 15 July 1922. 56 Ibid., (editorial), No. 1, 15 May 1922. 53

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had petered out. Post facto, Roy negated even what he had seen, briefly, as its revolutionary role. He informed the Indian National Congress: ‘Contrary to your belief, it was not the non-cooperation slogan that brought about a gigantic popular awakening, but it was the popular awakening that made possible the idea to organise a sweeping onslaught against the government.’57 This theory of the spontaneous awakening was accompanied by a banal theory of disseminating consciousness. Roy wrote: ‘… to develop their (workers’ and peasants’) revolutionary consciousness is the burden of our programme of action.’ And how was this to be accomplished? ‘We must assume the leadership of the working class, … vigorous agitation should be carried on among the workers and peasants … to expose the sinister designs of the reformist labour leader.’58 Roy’s method of creating class consciousness therefore was twofold: an independent organisation of the working masses and the exposure of class enemies. These two tactics had been learnt by him from the political behaviour of the Bolshevik Party in Russia, and now employed them practically regardless of the colonial situation, the correlation of class forces, and relative strength or weakness of the working class or bourgeoisie in India. At the heart of this mechanical adoption of the strategy and tactics of the Bolsheviks lay M.N. Roy’s total neglect of the colonial reality of India which, objectively, imposed the main task of overthrowing imperialism. The specificity of the colonial situation was seen as neither new, nor different from the first stage of the Russian Revolution. The model of ‘1905’ necessarily entailed a perspective of Communist leadership. To establish this leadership the basic plank of political activity was not cooperation with but exposure of the bourgeoisie. Roy reduced the national movement to a bourgeois democratic revolution of the Russian type for he interpreted its content as being the same, that is, the task of solving the agrarian problem. Once this was done then followed the methods of class struggle, developed and sharpened by the Bolsheviks and their logical epitome, the Bolshevik Party. Roy not only identified the Russian working class with the Indian working class, the Russian bourgeoisie with the Indian bourgeoisie, but their mutual and respective relations with the colonial state as corresponding with the relations of Russian society of Tsarist autocracy. Was it possible to create 57 58

Vanguard, No. 5, 15 July 1922. Emphasis added. Ibid.

The Irrelevance of Leninism

a strong, organised, independent Communist Party in the colonial countries while supporting the bourgeois liberation movements? Roy thought not, in spite of the formal lip service he rendered to Lenin’s conjunctural advocacy of such support. This was his basic theme at the Second Congress and it survived consistently in all his later writings. Criticising this, the official version of the CPI’s history maintains that not only was it definitely possible to create and build such a party simultaneously with support for ‘bourgeois’ national movements but that this was ‘the initial and earliest directive’ from the Comintern towards evolving a strategy for colonial revolution. It argues: What was to be blamed for the sectarian existence of many Communist parties in the colonies (for example, India, China, Indonesia) were their tactics which contained ‘serious sectarian and reformist errors and shortcomings’ in their work.59 What, however, is never examined is the fact that the tactics they evolved grew out of the ‘Leninist’ conception of the party they sought to establish in India. Viewed from within the parameters of Lenin’s experience of the Russian Revolution, which was concretely embodied in his concepts of an independent party, strict organisation, tactical struggle against and exposure of opponents, it became essential to demarcate the Communist Party sharply from the non-working class mass represented in the antiimperialist struggle and primarily from the national movement which was seen per se as a movement of the bourgeoisie. It was not, therefore, the tactics which created difficulties but the fact that the strategy for making revolution in the colonies was appropriated from the theoretical and political experience of Lenin’s leadership of the Russian Revolution, and thus the tactics that emerged from it. In this framework, nationalism was the ideology of the bourgeoisie; and basing himself on this premise, M.N. Roy declared: ‘for all intents and purposes nationalism is a class movement’ and ‘the workers and peasants of India can no longer remain an appendage to bourgeois nationalism … .’60 Roy’s appropriation of all the formulations of Lenin on ‘bourgeois– nationalism’ in Europe lead him to the Leninist conclusion that ‘not only for its own economic emancipation, but even for the immediate object

59 60

Adhikari, Documents, Vol. I, pp. 159, 170. Adhikari, Documents, Vol. II, p. 142.

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of national freedom, the organisation of an independent working class party has become essential’.61 For a proletarian organisation to emerge within the socio-political perspectives of the Bolsheviks, it was essential for the working class to struggle against the influence of nationalism. Rather the very success of the ‘Leninist Party’ depended on the merciless and irreconcilable struggle against the ‘ideology of the bourgeoisie’—nationalism. This method of exposure against the ‘bourgeois’ National Congress was fully absorbed by the Communists in India. They, together with the Comintern, continued to practise it even when they denounced Roy after his expulsion from the Comintern. In truth, however, nationalism’s edge against imperialism gave it a revolutionary character and the category of ‘bourgeois–nationalism’ was completely inadequate to comprehend the reality of national liberation movements. The confusion that abounds in studies of the relationship between Marxism and nationalism in general, and, more specifically, on Lenin and the national liberation movements is rooted in an essentially false problem summed up as ‘the national and colonial question’. The two are not the same, though they have usually been treated as synonymous and interchangeable, thus missing the conjunctural determinations and separate conjunctural framework in which the ‘national’ and ‘colonial’ problems must be located. The attempt to go back and forth in the ‘Marxist tradition’ on this ‘question’—from Marx and Engels on Ireland or Poland to Lenin on ‘the right to self-determination’ and his ‘colonial theses’—invariably clouds a central truth of the twentieth century. The fact is that Marxist categories and concepts of ‘bourgeois nationalism’ and the ‘national question’ were chiefly, even solely, evolved in relation to the epoch of ‘bourgeois revolutions’, with the emergence of the concept of the nation-state, and the rise of bourgeois nationalism in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On the other hand, colonial national liberation movements were a new, separate and distinct phenomenon in the twentieth century. Above all, within the colonial world each colony had its own specificities and peculiarities. 61

Vanguard (editorial), Vol. 2, No. 1, 15 February 1923; Adhikari, Documents, Vol. II, p. 142.

The Irrelevance of Leninism

Lenin continued to use old Marxist categories such as ‘bourgeois democratic revolutions’ and ‘bourgeois nationalism’, in relation to the colonies. Therefore, Leninism could not help or assist those who were called upon to construct a completely new and distinct paradigm for India. The survival of the old categories of thought in the Marxist movement and their ossification because of Stalin’s deification of Leninism in the first place, and the Comintern’s lack of involvement with and serious study of colonial problems in the second, has tended to reproduce obsolete arguments and interpretations historiographically. In conclusion it bears emphasis that the ‘Royism’ that Indian Communists often tried to counterpose to ‘Leninism’ actually cohered together in their shared Marxist logic of the insurrectionary paradigm à la State and Revolution. This paradigm was only relevant for the violent overthrow of an Absolutist State. Moreover, Lenin’s formulations on imperialism were expressed purely in economic terms. They were devoid of any conception of the varied political nature and specific form of colonial states in different countries. Therefore, the Leninist paradigm had no room for evolving a political strategy and forms of effective struggle that could undermine a modern hegemonic state through peaceful mass movements. Thus Leninism was not only irrelevant in Indian conditions but also misleading.

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Chapter 3

The Non-cooperation Movement and the Birth of Workers’ and Peasants’ Parties

I

The question that was central to the Communist movement in its formative stage was that of ‘the party’. What was to be the nature and role of the party that could make an intervention in the existing situation in India and how was it to relate to the ongoing movement led by the National Congress? To examine the theoretico-ideological formation of the early Communists in India, it is necessary to examine the conceptions underlying the party that they wanted to build. The questions concerning the nature of the mass organisations and their mutual relationships, legality or illegality, and above all, their attitude towards the Indian National Congress and the Communist International form inseparable aspects of the all-embracing conception of the party. As pointed out in the preceding chapter nothing in Lenin’s colonial theses suggested the immediate formation of a Communist Party. The ‘first and foremost task’ of forming a Communist Party was posited in M.N. Roy’s supplementary theses. Accordingly, the ‘task’1 that Roy 1 M.N. Roy, ‘A Memorandum to the Conference for Organising a Working-Class Party in India’, 5 June 1923. Adhikari, Documents, Vol. II, p. 143.

The Non-cooperation Movement

continuously set before the Communists in India from 1923 onwards was to form ‘the political organ of the proletariat—a real Communist Party’ to ‘lead’ the nationalist revolutionary struggle.2 However, what came to be organised in India between 1926–28 were loose organisations within the National Congress known as the Workers’ and Peasants’ parties (hereafter referred to as WPPs), while the Communist Party remained virtually non-existent. As the Prosecution’s address by Langford James in the Meerut Conspiracy Case (hereafter MCC) concluded: ‘I cannot find that it (Communist Party) ever functioned at all during the period in review in this case.’3 Actually, the tension between the theoretical necessity of forming a Communist Party and the Indian Communists’ preoccupation with organising the WPPs in practice co-existed throughout the years from 1925 to 1928. This tension was best expressed in a letter from Philip Spratt to the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) expressing doubts on what type of organisation ought to be created, ‘whether the Church in Bombay’ as he put it, ‘should be founded upon the Methodist plan’, or whether it should ‘hold its skirts higher and be in fact like the old Y.M.’.4 Clemens Dutt of the CPGB in return complained that ‘the Methodists and the Y.M.C.A. are becoming too much two names for the same thing’.5 Why and how, therefore, were Workers’ and Peasants’ Parties formed in India between 1926 and 1928? The Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India traces the origins of an open legal mass party of the WPP type to the ideas of M.N. Roy and S.A. Dange who, independent of each other, saw the necessity of such an organisation.6 However, the History ignores the qualitative

2

The Masses, Vol. 2, Nos. 9–10, September–October 1926; Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIA, p. 109. 3 Meerut Conspiracy Case, Prosecution’s Speech, 1929, p. 25 (NMML). Photocopy in ACHI, JNU. ‘Hectic activity’ was noticed only after the ECCI letter to the All India WPP Conference at Calcutta, when a series of meetings on 27, 28 and 29 December 1928, discussed the question of immediately ‘re-organising the CP’. Manuscript records of the meetings are available in the MCC Exhibits. 4 Quoted by Langford James in his Prosecution speech, ibid. The terms ‘methodist’ and Y.M. (short for YMCA) were the code for WPP and Communist Party, respectively. 5 Williamson, India and Communism, Revised up to 1 January 1935, Chapter 13 (NAI). 6 ‘Genesis of Workers and Peasants Party of India’, Introduction, Adhikari, Documents, Vol. II, p. 98.

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difference between their ideas, thus blurring the distinct character of their respective approaches. For Dange, the WPP type party was an essential part of the process of forming ‘the party’ as an organic development of the left-wing in the Indian National Congress, with the object of radicalising the Congress movement and giving it greater mass content.7 Roy, on the other hand, functioned within a different problematic. The multiplicity of his formulations on ‘the party’—whether he spoke of a ‘People’s Party’ or a ‘WPP’—have to be seen not as shifts from one position to another,8 but as efforts to grapple with a different problem: how was the Communist Party to be formed and made to grow in Indian conditions. The ‘WPP’ that Roy spoke of in different ways tackled this situation which, as we shall see, remained unresolved. The necessity of forming a Communist Party and guaranteeing Communist control over any legal mass party that was organised (such as the WPP) remained trapped within the other necessity of linking up with the mass national movement led by the National Congress and within notions of legality and illegality. For Roy, a WPP was necessary ‘in order that the Communists and socialists are not isolated in small sects, and can take active and leading part in the mass struggle’,9 and because ‘a legal apparatus for our activities is needed’;10 thus ‘a revolutionary mass party has to be organised as a part of the Congress’.11 On the other hand, it was equally necessary that the political direction of the party should be in the hands of the Communists: ‘this party must be under the control and direction of our own party (Communist Party) which cannot but be illegal’.12 Roy, essentially, advanced the classic Communist position on legal and illegal work.13 However, Roy took no cognizance of the fact that his Communist Party would have to contend with another form of oppositional politics which was not necessarily ‘legal’, but was an open, mass organisational form of politics. This was represented by the National 7

See Chapter VI. John P. Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism in India, Princeton University Press, 1971, tends to see the various formulations which Roy advanced from time to time as an ‘evolution of his ideas’, pp. 134–35. 9 M.N. Roy to S.A. Dange, letter dated 2 November 1922, Adhikari, Documents, Vol. II, p. 98. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 595. 12 Ibid. 13 M.N. Roy to Muzaffar Ahmed, February 1923, Exhibit 35, Kanpur Conspiracy Case. 8

The Non-cooperation Movement

Congress, and it was an opposition which was proving effective against the state because of its non-violent character. Moreover, as the colonial state was not absolute in character it consciously chose to promote what it considered ‘legal’ forms of political representation. The nationalist strategy of questioning the very concept of what was legal from the point of view of civil liberties and citizen’s rights transformed the very notion of ‘legality’. It was this kind of tussle between the state and a mass, open opposition which the Communists would have to relate with—a terrain to which they were completely alien. In India, a Communist Party did not, as yet, exist. In fact, even the task of organising the working class had barely begun. In Bombay where the WPP registered its greatest success and established ‘a strong left-wing organisation’ within the National Congress, work amongst the industrial workers had just commenced. The work of political education and propaganda had also just taken off the ground with the publication of three organs of the WPP: the Kranthi (Bombay), Ganavani (Bengal) and Mehnatkash (Punjab). The ‘group’ of Communists did not have any separate organ of their own. In two provinces (U.P. and Madras) even the effort to gather a small left-wing group was peripheral and only ‘a favourable atmosphere for labour activities’ was sought to be created. The full time activity of individual Communists in a few provinces of India was to ‘have helped in the formation and growth of the workers’ and peasants’ parties that were started in various provinces’.14 Thus, in the absence of an organised working class and its party, any party built around the minimum programme of the CP, representing the interests of ‘the petty-bourgeoisie, peasantry and the proletariat’,15 would at best be a radical petty-bourgeois party. This fact tended to fracture, from the beginning, Roy’s conception of legal and illegal activity by Communists who would function through the legal WPP advocating the minimum programme of the Communists and an illegal nucleus of Communists within it.16 What was completely overlooked was the fact that the 14 The Annual Report of the EC of the CPI, May 1927, Adhikari, Documents, op. cit., Vol. IIIB, pp. 204–5. 15 M.N. Roy, Future of Indian Politics, London, 1926; Adhikari, Documents, op. cit., Vol. IIIA, p. 27. 16 As Roy put it, the WPP’s programme ‘is the programme of democratic revolution, which includes the realisation of the minimum political and economic demands of workers and peasants. The CP supports this programme as its minimum programme.’ M.N. Roy, ‘A Letter to the Indian Comrades’, MCC, Prosecution Exhibits, p. 377.

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existing political and social conditions would determine the nature of the programme to be put forward, and shape the formation of the party independent of the subjective desires of the Communists.17 The minimum programme of the Communists was to be relevant to all sections of society which could be mobilised on democratic demands. By asserting that there could be no conflict between the CPI and the WPP, Roy posited the idea that their organisations would be structurally identical. The chief organisational difference between the two parties appeared to reside in the proposal that while the Communist Party would permit only individual membership, the WPP would allow the collective affiliation of trade unions and other mass bodies.18 However, the very logic of the growth and expansion of the WPP would militate against the organisations being closely identified with each other. As various sections of society would be drawn into the WPP, transforming it into a mass party, there was bound to be a conflict between the democratically elected leadership of these sections and the illegal Communist organisation. This was to be acknowledged later, in the context of the CI’s injunction to dissolve the WPPs. If you deny the Comintern, you then deny the party. You create a dual party or no party. For if a more or less good party exists already, it is bound to conflict and sabotage the proletarian struggle which then becomes divided under dual leadership.19

The minimum programme of the Communists was, essentially, a programme of petty-bourgeois demands and reforms. A party launching itself exclusively on the basis of such a programme would inevitably be dominated by a radical petty-bourgeois leadership, given the absence of a strong working class movement and a mass Communist Party. In fact, in the Communist view, if the latter had existed, there would have been no need for a WPP in the first place. The WPP was meant, precisely, to serve as a vehicle through which the masses, including the working class, were to be mobilised politically. Consequently, as the mass base of a party such as the WPP would expand, its petty-bourgeois character would 17

Roy, The Future of Indian Politics, London, 1926. M.N. Roy, ‘A Letter to the Indian Comrades’, MCC, Prosecution Exhibits, pp. 338–407. 19 Statement by Dange before the Meerut Court, (MCC ) Photocopy, ACHI, JNU. 18

The Non-cooperation Movement

become predominant. The Communists (working on the basis of Roy’s conceptions) would then be compelled to leave such an organisation as long as their basic premise was that only a Communist Party was capable of taking the national struggle to a ‘higher level’. The moment the ‘legal apparatus’ was dominated by the radical petty-bourgeois leadership the Communist nucleus within would be pushed into choosing between two alternatives: either to leave the WPP for a separate, independent Communist Party, or to continue working within the WPP organisation, striving to extend and deepen its mass base to include the working class and poor and landless peasants. Only the latter course could enable them to steer the national movement towards successive shifts to the left, keeping in view their strength within the organisation. In the emergence of these two alternatives there was no room for ‘parallel’ or ‘dual’ organisations, both being controlled by the Communists as demanded by Roy.20 George Allison and Philip Spratt, both members of the CPGB, arrived in India in April and December 1926, respectively. After Allison’s arrest in January 1927, B.F. Bradley replaced him. They actively participated in the organisation of trade unions and the WPPs in various provinces. Spratt and Bradley ‘acted as catalytic agents’ and ‘the formation of the WPPs in the provinces and ultimately the AIWPP session in Calcutta were Spratt’s contribution’. Spratt played the role of ‘a political organiser and educator’.21 The concrete shape in which the WPP organisations began emerging in India through 1927 to 1928, coupled with the active participation and ‘guidance’ provided by the CPGB members and trade unionists who arrived in the country from April to December 1926, were perhaps the reasons for Roy’s reformulating his conception of the WPP. Throughout 1926 and 1927 Roy had embarked on the tortuous process of clearing away the ‘misunderstanding’ that his conceptions of the party had generated, and constantly defined and redefined his ideas in various ways. Nevertheless, despite all his clarifications, Roy continued to maintain a manoeuvrist conception of Communist control and leadership over this mass ‘revolutionary nationalist organisation’ for, only such control could establish the ‘unity’ of his conception of ‘dual’ organisations in the first place. The basic premise that ‘the petty-bourgeoisie 20 M.N. Roy, “Memorandum to the Lucknow Conference’, 5 June 1923, Adhikari, Documents, Vol. II, pp. 150–51. 21 P.C. Joshi and K. Damodaran, Documented History of the CPI, typed manuscript, ACHI, JNU.

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and the peasantry’ had to be united even in ‘a democratic struggle under the leadership of the proletariat … led by its own party, the Communist Party … (which) will exercise hegemony in this revolutionary struggle for democratic national freedom’22 rendered, necessarily, any conception of a ‘broad organisation’ into a manoeuvre, a strategem. Even when the WPP was not to be ‘a veiled Communist Party’ it was nevertheless a ‘broad working class party’.23 The source of the dichotomy inherent in ‘parallel organisations’ lay in the basic premise that the working class could fight for national independence only under the leadership of the Communist Party. Consequently, the logic of building the Communist Party constantly contradicted the process of initiating a coalition of classes in a ‘broad national revolutionary organisation’. For then the necessity to place the goals of ‘abolition of landlordism and the overthrow of capitalism’ before the peasantry and working class respectively and to ‘tell them that their role is to overthrow capitalism’ contradicted the necessity for evolving a ‘programme of democratic revolution’.24 Roy’s attitude was unmistakably that of ‘capturing’ the national movement’s leadership from the beginning. Referring to the programme distributed at Gaya under the signatures of Abani Mukerji and his own, Roy wrote: ‘This programme will not be accepted by the Congress.’ But in the very effort to popularise it … we will be on the high road towards the organisation of a Communist or Socialist Party, … a great political force because it will have at its disposal the legal apparatus of a mass party preparing to capture the leadership of the Congress.25

Roy’s persistent criticism of the early efforts of Communists in India, such as Singaravelu and Dange, clearly establishes his basic difference from them. They had, presumably, argued that the cause of a united national struggle against imperialism required the support of capitalists and landlords, including their ‘financial aid’. ‘Dear comrades’, he wrote

22 M.N. Roy, The Masses, Vol. 2, Nos. 9–10, September–October, 1926; Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIA, p. 109. 23 Ibid., p. 163. Emphasis added. 24 ‘A Letter to the Indian Comrades’, MCC. 25 Letter to S.A. Dange, dated 2 November 1922, Photocopy, ACHI, JNU.

The Non-cooperation Movement

back, ‘you take exception to the “abolition of landlordism” and to “agitation” against bourgeoisie. Your reasons are just those that forced Gandhi to call for the shameful retreat at Bardoli.’26 They should never forget, said Roy, that ‘it is only under the banner of the Communist Party that the masses can be organised and led into the national struggle’, and, of course, their organisation had to be around the slogans of abolition of landlordism and capitalism.27 The emerging left-wing in the National Congress ought to have no illusions: ‘with all its desire to enlist the support of the masses, and with all its virtuous schemes of uplifting the downtrodden, the Congress as a body will remain a bourgeois political organ’.28 ‘Land to the Tiller’ and the ‘overthrow of capitalism’ were the Communists’ slogans for a bourgeois democratic revolution led by the proletariat in alliance with the peasantry in Russia. These were, throughout this period, inflexible laws for the Communist movement in India as far as Roy was concerned. Logically, therefore, the role of ‘strengthening the forces of the left in the national movement’ was not conceived very differently from increasing Communist control over the movement, despite the description of the WPP as ‘an organised left-wing’ within the Congress-led movement. Consequently, the contradictions inherent in ‘his “dual organisations” proposal were to remain intact and, in fact, re-emerge in 1930–31 with his conception of a ‘National Revolutionary Party’.29 II

After 1922, the demoralisation, mainly of the Indian youth who had participated in the Non-cooperation Movement, generated radical and left tendencies that transformed the national movement ideologically. Consequently, several left groups emerged in different parts of the country. The feature common to all of these groups was that they were all part of the National Congress and their objective was to give the movement a left orientation by mobilising and organising the workers and peasants, thus making it truly representative of the masses. 26 David Petrie, Communism in India, 1924–27 (NAI), p. 111. Adhikari, Documents, Vol. II, pp. 23–24. 27 Ibid., pp. 20–21. 28 Ibid. 29 See Chapters V and VI in Vol. II.

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Just as Dange suggested the formation of an ‘Indian Socialist Labour Party of the Indian National Congress’30 so Singaravelu proposed a left-wing mass party within the Congress ‘making it the labour and kisan section of the Congress’.31 Similarly, in Bengal, the left-wing group organised the ‘Labour–Swaraj Party of the Indian National Congress’.32 The Workers’ and Peasants’ Parties that were formed between 1926–28 in Bengal, Bombay, Punjab and U.P. were constituted, almost totally, by these early organisations and their membership. Individual Communists, who participated in the formation of these early groups and the WPPs later did not conceive ‘the party’ as the vanguard of the movement of a particular class, possessed of a definite class programme, strategy and tactics aimed at acquiring ‘leadership’ and the conquest of political power à la Roy. On the contrary, their point of departure was the historically real movement produced by the anti-imperialist sentiment and activity of the masses. Consequently, their conception of ‘the party’ was of an organisation which could propel the anti-imperialist struggle towards becoming internally more united, radical and mass-based, drawing together all the anti-imperialist forces. The essential project that emerged from both Singaravelu’s and Dange’s ideas and organisational efforts was that of primarily overthrowing foreign imperialism while secondarily trying to ensure that the interests of the working masses were represented favourably in the national consolidation, and that social and political power was tilted against capitalism. As Dange put it: ‘Radical minded men of the Congress are seeking for means with which to stir the nation to its very basis and prepare it for its immediate political goal’ which was national independence.33 The party that was to be the catalyst in this attempt was not to be a working class party but was to ‘be organised on the basis of the socialist movement’ and would introduce ‘in the Congress politics an element of strong opposition to vested interests in and outside of it’.34 The party would 30 Socialist, Vol. I, No. 8, 16 September 1922; Adhikari, Documents, Vol. II, p. 64, Emphasis mine. 31 ‘Manifesto to Hindustan Labourers and Kisans for Organising a Political Party of their Own’, issued by M. Singaravelu and M.P.S. Velayudhan, 1 May 1923; Adhikari, Documents, Vol. II, p. 118. 32 Ibid., p. 671. 33 Socialist, 16 September 1922, Adhikari, Documents, Vol. II, p. 163. 34 Ibid., pp. 163–64.

The Non-cooperation Movement

work in the national movement with the ‘object (of ) the establishment of the people’s state’.35 Obviously, for them, what was on the agenda was not a Communist Party but a party that would create the conditions for its emergence. The immediate objectives emphasised by Dange were more in the nature of ideological and preparatory organisational work, such as the dissemination of socialist ideas and the unionisation of the working class.36 The party’s activities were clearly transitional, for it would ‘work for legislative and industrial changes which contribute to its final aim, (and) oppose those which tend to preserve the existing state of economic exploitation by capitalism.’37 Singaravelu advanced a similar perspective of organising workers and peasants and mobilising them in the existing movement ‘in order to make the Congress a real national body (and) for the attainment of national Swaraj’.38 ‘The party’ was not to be based on a conception of class struggle, the establishment of working class ‘hegemony’ in the national struggle and the ‘seizure’ of state power.39 The historical and real life development of the mass movement and its needs would determine the nature of its goals and programme. An absolutely minimal programme was to be propagated at the initial stages, ‘a provisional programme … changeable according to the development and needs of the producing masses of the country’.40 Singaravelu was subjected to scathing criticism by Roy for not posing the question of the working class capturing state power. He simply maintained that what was aimed at was a republic—a people’s government. What kind of a republic it would be was left open as an ‘algebraic formula’, on the realistic premise that once certain organisations of the people emerged and evolved in their struggle they would throw up new institutional forms and extend their goals. As Singaravelu clarified in the ‘General Principles of the Party’, ‘the party reserves its programme, both political and economical, (sic) including the definition of labour swaraj 35

Ibid. Ibid., p. 165. 37 Ibid., Emphasis added. 38 ‘Manifesto to Hindustan Labourers and Kisans for Organising a Political Party of their Own’. Ibid., p. 118. 39 Ibid., p. 391. 40 Ibid., p. 118. Emphasis added. 36

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for a suitable time to come and will go on working on a provisional programme as will be accepted in the Congress by its members.’41 For the present, ‘to meet the immediate needs of labour and kisans’, the party would have an ‘action programme expressing the current demands’ which was to be pursued by making ‘use of the Congress and its methods, of the new party, of the trade unions, and of the governmental institutions, etc’.42 The republic or ‘form of swaraj’ was not a rigid conception but was to be oriented towards ‘economic relief for the masses’ and ‘substantial change in the means of production and distribution’.43 By declaring that the republic would be in the interests of the working masses against those of the propertied, Singaravelu envisaged a relationship of these classes and not a concrete political institution embodying these relations in actuality. No ultimate goals could be posited from the outset, the immediate ‘duty of the Communists (was) to be vigilant enough to see that the future form of swaraj (did) not essentially become bourgeois, but substantially (became) proletarian’.44 Thus, Dange and Singaravelu outlined the project of increasing participation of the masses in the Congress-led multi-class movement already in existence. Their approach was of creating greater space for the interests of workers and peasants within it. This alone could enable them to shift the balance of class forces and gradually acquire bargaining power and political weight in the anti-imperialist national coalition. Such a project was, clearly, based upon a conception of the National Congress not being a class organisation of the bourgeoisie but one that was open to mass influence and, consequently, to its transformation. The full acceptance of ‘Gandhian’ methods of struggle, which were not considered ‘bourgeois methods’ per se, ‘including non-cooperation, passive resistance, constructive programme and civil disobedience’,45 revealed an appreciation of the Congress movement and the leadership of Gandhi that was in sharp contrast to the attitudes of Roy and the Comintern. Singaravelu, in fact, openly declared that the ‘creed’ of his party would be the achievement of ‘labour swaraj by non-violent means’.46 In his 41

Adhikari, Documents, Vol. II, p. 118. Emphasis added. Ibid., pp. 119–20. 43 Ibid., p. 118. 44 Ibid., p. 648. Emphasis added. 45 Ibid., p. 118. 46 Adhikari, ‘General Principles of the Party’ Documents, p. 118. 42

The Non-cooperation Movement

speech supporting the resolution on ‘Labour Organisation’ at the Gaya session of the National Congress, Singaravelu reiterated his acceptance of the Gandhian method of struggle: ‘I have the greatest faith in that method … we have adopted this method as a practical necessity and … I believed in that method.’47 It was Roy who argued that methods like the ‘boycott’ were ‘petty– bourgeois’ and could only be given ‘negative support’, i.e., ‘we will not sabotage it’.48 Singaravelu’s position was born of the priority that he placed before ‘the party’—‘the immediate goal of winning Swaraj’.49 And, in this context, he emphasised what he understood to be the essence of the Gandhian method: ‘To concentrate on paralysing the bureaucracy wherever possible and that and that alone.’ 50 The significance of ‘paralysing’ the bureaucracy which could only result from peaceful civil resistance and not the violent overthrow of the bureaucracy, lies in the fact that the early Communists did appear to perceive instinctively the Gandhi-led struggle as a battle for hegemony against a semi-hegemonic colonial power. In fact, this aspect emerges very strongly in Dange’s first work, Gandhi versus Lenin.51 Treating the struggle against imperialism as historically specific and not one that was equated with the struggle between labour and capital, the efficacy of non-violent resistance was acknowledged: ‘A race which is suffering from the oppression of an alien conqueror could win its freedom without any resort to force or armed violence.’52 The prime requisite of such a victory was the growth of a powerful anti-imperialist consciousness which could undermine the hegemony of colonial rule. ‘First the people must become convinced of the necessity of freedom, and that accomplished, they must decline any longer to cooperate in the administration of the foreign power.’53 An inspired description of the Gandhian method of struggle by Dange, interestingly, revealed the process of hegemony evolving within the larger context of old structures and not as a one-stroke seizure of power. The people, having refused cooperation, ‘instead must build up their own state, 47

Adhikari, Documents, Vol. I, p. 589. Roy to Singaravelu, letter dated 9 November 1922, ACHI, JNU. 49 Singaravelu to Roy, letter dated 28 November, ACHI, JNU. 50 Ibid., Emphasis in original. 51 S.A. Dange, Gandhi versus Lenin, Bombay, 1921, Photocopy, ACHI, JNU. 52 Ibid., pp. 54–55. Emphasis added. 53 Ibid. 48

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within the state of those who have arrogated the role of rulers. Before long, if the people are united, the external state must crumble to pieces as the inner state grows in fullness.’54 More importantly, a politico-ideological solution and not a military solution was posited because of two factors. On the one hand, ‘The alien government may have enormous armies, machine-guns, tanks, poison gas, aeroplanes and bombs, but even by the most remorseless use of them it could never defeat resistance of this character. It may kill, but the very dead will work for its overthrow.’55 On the other hand, an instinctive awareness of the semi-hegemonic nature of the colonial state and the success of Gandhian methods against it was equally manifest: ‘The alien state creates a moral prestige through its educational and legal institutions. If the feelings of awe and obedience created through them are destroyed, the alien Government becomes morally extinct.’56 In this kind of struggle the Gandhian method of boycott of schools, colleges and law courts was seen as very effective (even though it had achieved only ‘partial success’ in the Non-cooperation Movement) because it had ‘created the necessary feeling of considering the institutions as worthless and has destroyed the feeling of awe towards government authority’.57 Clearly, both the destruction of moral prestige, awe and authority of the state, which are a sine qua non of hegemonic control as opposed to brute force and a purely repressive government, and the essence of the Gandhian strategy, which cut into this hegemony, were appreciated by Dange in this work. Obviously, he had yet to internalise the basic premises of Roy and the CI that (a) non-violent methods of struggle were reactionary per se and that only the violent overthrow of imperialism was revolutionary, and (b) that only the working class and its party could lead the revolution and that the category of ‘people’ was unmarxist and petty-bourgeois. Actually, Dange in Gandhi versus Lenin, had described, in effect, the Gandhian strategy as the creation of a hegemonic counterstructure which had to be built by the ‘people’ through peaceful civil resistance against imperialism. He approvingly quoted Gandhi: ‘We shall continue patiently to educate them (the masses) politically till they are ready for safe action.’58 54

Ibid. Emphasis added. Ibid. Emphasis added. 56 Ibid. Emphasis added. 57 Ibid., pp. 55–56. 58 Ibid. Gandhi was quoted from Young India. 9 March 1921. 55

The Non-cooperation Movement

Ideologico-political activity, which was the crucial determinant in winning hegemony over the masses, was emphasised: ‘So our, work of building the inner state must proceed without caring for the army. It can be done by the National Congress only.’59 Of course, Gandhi had said that once the movement was reasonably confident of maintaining its nonviolent character the Congress would ‘certainly call upon the sepoy to lay down his arms and the peasantry to suspend payment of taxes’, quoted Dange. He, however, felt that nationalism was not likely to affect the army to any great extent. Therefore the building of the ‘inner state’, that is, parallel hegemony over civil society, was the main arena for political work. And the way to paralyse the government was to mobilise the workers and peasants into joining the movement of ‘non-cooperation with the government’ and to follow Gandhian methods: ‘by Satyagraha, our building the Inner State, until the outer crumbles down automatically, is to proceed without any violence or disorder’.60 In Gandhi versus Lenin, as in the columns of his journal Socialist,61 Dange’s approach was to criticise the existing anti-imperialist struggle not because of its ‘non-revolutionary’ methods but because the workers and peasants were insufficiently involved in it. While full of admiration for the Bolshevik struggle in Russia, Dange was, at this point of time, not convinced of the necessity or practicability of reproducing it in India. Rooted in the conditions then prevailing in India and conscious of the need to first revolutionise the intelligentsia, he accepted the Gandhian methods of struggle. Making an attempt to synthesise these with a conception of a radical anti-imperialist movement, he proposed the involvement of the working and peasant masses, as a lesson learnt from the Russian Revolution, within the Indian struggle which was to be carried out by means of Gandhian methods. Moreover, ‘Gandhism’ was not viewed as a reactionary ideology at the service of the bourgeoisie: Gandhism admits that all the vices from which society of our day is suffering are the vices emanating from the rule of capitalism. It also concedes that capitalism will stoop to anything to preserve its rule and a revolution or a radical change alone can redeem society.62 59

Ibid., pp. 55–56. Emphasis added. Ibid., p. 58. 61 A few copies of the Socialist edited by Dange, are available in the ACHI, JNU. 62 Ibid., pp. 30–37. 60

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In brief, Gandhi was not seen as a bourgeois leader or as representing capitalist interests, rather he was seen as an opponent of capitalism. Thus, any political organisation or programme which propagated socialist ideas was not antithetical to ‘Gandhism’. In Dange’s view the basic difference between ‘Gandhism and Bolshevism’ was in their ‘methods to work out the Revolution in society’,63 in other words, the issue of violent or nonviolent methods of struggle. And by clearly opting for the latter, Dange suggested that the socialist project could be pursued non-violently. ‘There is another method of reaching it (socialism)’, he wrote, ‘by revolution such as was resorted to by the French Communes in 1871 and Russian Bolsheviks in 1917.’ In India, however, ‘where the masses are dumb and illiterate, it is mere folly to even attempt it. Revolution can only succeed when there is consciousness in the masses brought about by suffering and education.’64 An interesting aspect of this comment was the argument that the Russian revolution had succeeded because, as Dange said, ‘The ground had been prepared by the tyranny of the czars.’65 The fact that he saw the significance of the ‘prestige’ and ‘legality’ of the British Indian state and did not see it as identical to Tsarist tyranny as yet, showed his instinctive grasp of the differences between the two states. The implicit assumption in this position was that working class leadership or a workers state were conceptions far ahead of the concrete conditions in India, the backwardness of which Dange constantly emphasised. Ideological and political education, and the development of mass consciousness were seen as the prime and immediate requirements of the Indian situation. Even to put forward the ultimate goals of a socialist state and abolition of private property it was necessary to evolve a new culture—new men—for ‘as long as this great “my” (and) “mine” are not destroyed, no Dictatorship can avail to make man hold anything of his in common good’.66 To advance such concepts without the evolution of a new ethos and social consciousness meant that the Communist plan would be ‘fraught with coercion and violence’.67 What could be propounded, therefore, at the initial stage was that national resources and wealth ‘be nationalised and 63

Ibid. The Socialist, 16 December 1923, ACHI, JNU. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., p. 41. 67 Ibid., p. 59. 64

The Non-cooperation Movement

controlled by the state’, with a ceiling imposed upon private wealth, the surplus accruing to the state.68 Likewise, the agrarian problem was not to be solved by immediately putting forward the slogan of land to the tiller and the expropriation of the landlords but by ‘breaking up the large estates into small holdings and turning them into peasant proprietorships’.69 Thus, in their conceptions of ‘the party’ and the ‘correct programme’ the Communists in India initially can be located in a framework very different from that of M.N. Roy’s. These conceptions were rooted in their experience of concrete conditions in India and their perception of its social reality. A replication of Bolshevism, as Roy would have them do, was very much outside their thinking. Singaravelu was, for example, sharply denounced by Roy for suggesting that Bolshevism was the product of the peculiarity of Russia.70 Their conception of a revolutionary mass party involving the workers and peasants, was not that of an illegal working class party or a Communist Party as the conditions for its formation were seen to be nonexistent. Dange, discussing the question of organisation made this amply clear: The tactics which the Communist Third International has laid down … are framed by men, whose psychology has been moulded and influenced by the highly–advanced conditions of European capital and proletarian organisation. The Third International tactic presupposes an organised fighting proletariat. In India … this element is absent to a great extent … . The Socialists in India have first to create an organised proletariat, through trade union and other activities … . In the present stage of the Indian proletariat, secret propaganda is not at all wanted. We have to speak to the masses openly … . So long as the proletariat is not organised and not in a fighting mood and so long as the foreign and native bourgeoisie is not actively obstructing this creation of an ideal, what need is there for secret activities?71

In a similar vein, Singaravelu wrote to Roy that it would be ‘useless’ to attend any conference in Europe which Roy was urging them to do, as even the elementary task of getting a group of like-minded people together 68

Ibid. Ibid., p. 61. 70 Roy, The Masses of India (Organ of the CPI), Paris, Vol. II, No. 3, March 1926. 71 Socialist, May–June, 1923. Adhikari, Documents, Vol. II, pp. 204–5. Emphasis added. 69

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had yet to be accomplished. There were not enough persons even to do ‘the preparatory work of getting sympathisers together’.72 Both, Dange and Singaravelu, despaired at the totally backward state of the labour movement in India. Linking the initial and massive task of organising and politicising the workers with what they obviously considered laterday questions, such as the programme and tactics for a proletarian party and Communist leadership, seemed to them a highly unreal perspective. Terming it ‘a mad venture for Indians to go hunting Communism in European Conferences’, Dange wrote to Singaravelu, ‘Moreover, there must be less talk of revolution than what Roy indulges in; when even the preliminary rights of labour are not obtained, it is a dream to talk of proletarian revolutions.’73 Roy’s persistent advice to them to form an illegal Communist Party was rejected flatly as unsuited to the prevailing conditions in India: We do not favour any secret and illegal organisations … no good can come out of such attempts in the present state of our society … a serious attempt at the education of the intelligentsia will have to be made before we can successfully bring about any organisation in the country. People are not accustomed to see things historically interpreted. They cannot have therefore any consciousness of the class element in the struggle. And no organisation is possible unless there is this consciousness. This historical perspective of things and incidents can only be given through a system of open propaganda and association. Only through this means can we approach the masses.74

The acute awareness of starting virtually from scratch is ironically revealed in the columns of the Socialist. A bulletin, titled ‘A Synopsis of Scientific Socialism’, which sought to answer elementary questions on Marxism, commented: ‘These bulletins will help in holding socialist study classes. These do not exist as yet, but … instead of a class giving birth to Bulletins we expect Bulletins to give birth to a class.’75 This was in sharp contrast to Roy who wrote to Singaravelu: 72

Singaravelu to Roy, letter dated 28 November 1922, ACHI, JNU. Dange to Singaravelu, letter dated 29 January 1923, ACHI, JNU. 74 Socialist, Vol. 2, No. 38, 24 September 1924. Adhikari, Documents, Vol. II, p. 381. Emphasis added. 75 Socialist, 14 October 1922. ‘Socialist Study Course—Bulletin No. I’. Emphasis added. 73

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True we have no following in the country, but we must secure it. The forces of national revolution are today scattered in confusion … . We need simply hoist a flag which will appeal to the imagination of those objectively revolutionary forces, that were never understood by our religious non-cooperators … . So objectively speaking, we hold that our party has a following.76

Thoroughly imbued with ‘Marxist’ determinism, Roy equated the existence of ‘objective forces’ with the task of building a Communist Party. Singaravelu was to admonish Roy on this naive and simplistic attitude: ‘Please have patience and live to learn from the progress of our movement here.’ The forces of national revolution after Bardoli seemed ‘almost dead … and it may be a decade or two before the lost momentum is attained.’77 Thus, despite the fact that Roy and the CI, on one hand, and the Communists in India, on the other, simultaneously worked towards a conception of ‘the party’, their thought processes derived inspiration from different experiences and perceptions of Indian reality. Equally, the presence of certain a priori premises in Roy’s thinking were crucial to the form in which his ideas crystallised into an overall conception of ‘the party’. These premises were that (a) non-violent methods of struggle were reactionary per se, (b) only the working class and its party could lead the national revolution, and that the category of ‘people’ was unmarxist and petty-bourgeois, (c) the unity of all classes through adjustment of class interests was impossible even in a colonial society. These premises were absent in the thinking of the Indian Communists initially. They were to absorb them later as ‘correct marxism’. It was to Roy that the formation of a WPP appeared as a clever evasion of repression by a change in signboards. For the Communists in India the WPP was the product of existing conditions. The latter were faced with the task of either forming a Communist Party which would necessarily become illegal and thus an esoteric sect, or joining the National Congress, an open mass party in the given conditions, and relying mainly on organising the peasants and workers. It was in the latter form that they understood the creation of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party within the National Congress. This was responsible for the criticism they received later from the CI, for having neglected the organisation of a Communist Party. 76 77

Roy to Singaravelu, letter dated 6 January 1923, ACHI, JNU. Singaravelu to Roy, letter dated 13 December 1923, ACHI, JNU.

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What passed for the meetings of the ‘Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party of India’, were essentially meetings of a small ‘group’ of Communists, mostly WPP activists, held after the sessions of the Indian National Congress (for example, in December 1927 and 1928). They were held to assess the current situation and discuss the steps to be taken by them in the WPPs, National Congress, etc. So much so that, in May 1928, Ghate could seriously suggest that the WPP should control the Communist Party, standing Roy’s conception of ‘dual organisations’ literally on its head.78 The choice between legal and illegal methods was, for the Indian Communists, a choice between a legal mass party, which would function as a left-wing of the Congress movement, or a Communist Party which could be neither legal nor relevant to their political environment. That they consciously chose the former is apparent from Dange’s comment in the Lokmanya that … the goal of the Socialist Party of India is one of an open and straightforward nature. The peasants and workers must be taken hold of as a helping hand in the attainment of swaraj … . The propaganda of this party is as open as that of the non-cooperation party.79

Roy, on the other hand, definitely conceived of the WPP only as the ‘mass front’ of the CP and not as a distinct organisation in itself. The WPP, for him, was a camouflage for the activities of the CP. As the government would not permit the open preaching of a Communist programme, it was to be essentially a working class party preaching a bourgeois democratic programme. It was not to be a ‘petty–bourgeois party’ as it actually tended to become in practice and for which it was criticised by the CI and ultimately disbanded.80 The Communists in India rejected the formulations put forward by Roy and the CI. Till January 1927, the joint secretaries of the ‘Communist Party’ maintained: ‘We in India have every right to contribute in our way to the cause of international Communism. The question of international affiliation comes later.’81 They also unequivocally asserted their independence from them at this stage: ‘It is immaterial to us whether 78

India and Communism, p. 129. Adhikari, Documents, Vol. I, p. 80. Emphasis added. 80 See Vol. II, Chapters V & VI of this work. 81 Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIB, p. 4. 79

The Non-cooperation Movement

the help comes from the Third International or the Communist Party of Great Britain, we owe allegiance to none excepting our own scheme of work and we look for guidance to none but ourselves.’82 The attempt to form a legal ‘Communist Party’ at Kanpur in 1925 by Satyabhakta emphasised: The Indian Communist Party is absolutely an independent body. Our relations with the Comintern is of the nature of friendship and mutual sympathy as followers of the same principle. We are not ready to tie our hands, nor do we want to take orders or instructions from others.83

Writing in 1974, G. Adhikari described the ‘First Indian Communist Conference’ at Kanpur in 1925 in terms of a principled, ideological struggle between ‘petty–bourgeois—nationalists’ and the Communists. He writes: ‘We have … put the record straight about the sharp demarcation which existed between the Indian Communist Party of Satyabhakta and the contemporary Communist groups which mustered strong at the Kanpur Conference, captured the same and made it the foundation Conference.’ 84 Contrary to this view, it has also been argued that persons like Satyabhakta were not counterposing ‘nationalist principles to communism’ but were against formal affiliation to the CI on tactical grounds so as to avoid government repression.85 As a matter of fact all those who met at this conference agreed broadly that there was no sense in seeking affiliation to the Comintern under the given conditions of colonial rule. The only point of conflict seemed to be whether to name the party Indian Communist Party or Communist Party of India. In fact the ‘pettybourgeois nationalists’ found equal representation with the ‘Communists’ on the Central Executive Committee elected at the conference, including Satyabhakta, which would not have happened if sharp political differences had existed.

82

Socialist, 24 September 1924, Adhikari, Documents, Vol. II, p. 381. Emphasis added. Satyabhakta, ‘The Future Programme of the Indian Communist Party’, 18 June 1925; Adhikari, Documents, Vol. II, pp. 631–32. 84 Marxist Miscellany, No. 4, March 1974, pp. 32–33. 85 Devendra Kaushik and L.V. Mitrokhin, Mainstream, Vol. III, Nos. 1, 2, 3, Annual Number, 1969. 83

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More significantly, at this conference, there were no differences between those who were later to be divided into Communists and non-Communists on the question of working as a left-wing within the Congress and attempting to transform it: After all the Congress is a well-established and influential institution and the best interests of the country require us to reform it and not go against it. We appeal to all members of the party (the Communist Party—SJ) to also become members and delegates of the Congress with the intention of changing it into an instrument of service to our people.86

It need hardly be emphasised that such a ‘Communist Party’ could not be distinguished, or appear to function differently, from the workers’ and peasants’ parties. The ‘CPI’, in its extended meeting in May 1927, asked its members to do exactly what the WPP members were supposed to do: ‘ … the party calls upon its members to enrol themselves as members of the Indian National Congress, and form a strong left-wing in all its organs for the purpose of wresting them from the present alien control.’ The Communists were also to form ‘a republican wing in the AICC with the cooperation of the left-wing of the Congress’. Even the much debated affiliation to the CI was postponed without any categorical intention to apply for affiliation being expressed at this meeting of Communists. The resolution on this question only declared that ‘The CPI looks up to the Communist Parties of the world as well as the International for lead and guidance in the work undertaken by this party.’87 The politics and the organisational forms of the WPPs were an organic development of left trends in the national movement. The attempt to create an image of the conscious and clearly demarcated ‘Communist Party’, in terms of an immaculate conception, denies the historical reality and experience of the Indian ‘Communists’ and ascribes to them a manoeuvrist role from the outset. As pointed out earlier, the increasing radicalisation of the national movement threw up left-wing organisations in Madras (1924), then in Bengal (1926) and Bombay (1927) to begin with. The combined efforts of Communists and left-wing Congressmen working together in the Indian National Congress led to the initiative to form the Workers 86 87

Adhikari, Documents, Vol. II, p. 638. Emphasis added. Ibid., Vol. IIIB, pp. 212–13.

The Non-cooperation Movement

and Peasants Parties. This is apparent from the fact that in Bengal it was the Labour Swaraj Party which became the Peasants and Workers Party and later changed its name to the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party in 1928.88 Similarly, in Bombay, it was the Congress Labour Party which developed into the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party of Bombay. The list of office bearers of the newly-formed WPP in Bombay, for example, shows that all of them were members of the Congress Labour Party. And, significantly, except for three out of the nine office bearers, none of the others were members of the ‘CPI’.89 In addition, WPPs were also formed in the U.P. Ajmer–Marwara and the Punjab (Kirti–Kisan Party).90 The nature of the origin of the WPPs and their composition was observed and recorded by contemporary documents. As Clemens Putt wrote in early 1928, The Workers’ and Peasants’ Party … developed during the last two years through the alliance of left-wing nationalist groups with politically— conscious working class elements (i.e., the Communists—S.J.) (and) was one of the most significant features in the history of the past year.91

The WPP movement was envisaged as the organisation of workers and peasants … to voice the demands of these classes within the national Congress, to promote the organisation of trade unions, to advance the organisation of the peasants on the basis of their economic and social requirements, and to present a determined and pertinent opposition to the government … .

To this end, a clause in the constitution adopted by the WPP (Bombay) declared that ‘membership to the Indian National Congress is considered highly recommendatory’.92

88

Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIC, pp. 1, 66. Ibid., Vol. IIIB, p. 33. 90 For a detailed discussion on the Kirti–Kisan Party of the Punjab, see Bhagwan Josh, Communist Movement in Punjab, Delhi, 1979. 91 Labour Monthly, March 1928. Clemens Dutt, ‘The Indian Struggle for Independence’; Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIB, p. 132. Emphasis added. 92 Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIB, pp. 33, 167. ‘The Workers’ and Peasants’ Party’, Document of the WPP of Bombay. 89

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Soon after its formation, one of the first things which the Bombay WPP did was to put forward a programme of action before the AICC through its members in that body, Joglekar and Nimbkar. The programme advanced the slogan of complete independence with a concrete socio-economic programme covering ‘the minimum demands of the toiling and common people of the country’.93 Three features of this programme require emphasis. First, the clear perspective of transforming the Congress was put forward. It was resolved to ‘free the Congress from the narrow shackles of class interests, and to yoke it to the task of attaining national freedom … as a step towards complete emancipation of the masses from exploitation and oppression.’ Second, the methods this programme advocated to pursue its goal were identical with those of the existing Congress movement under Gandhi’s leadership: It reiterates its faith in civil disobedience, i.e., direct action as the only effective weapon that will ultimately free the people of India from their subject position, but realises that a great general awakening will have to be brought about before this weapon of direct action can be effectively used.

Simultaneously, therefore, to ‘secure legal protection’ in the ‘elementary and initial stages’ of mobilising and organising the masses, ‘whatever advantage could be secured from existing political machinery must be utilised in the interest of the masses’. For this purpose, ‘Congressmen will go into the councils, local boards, municipalities, village organisation and occupy all points of vantage … .’ A two-pronged policy of utilising and exploiting ‘all existing Laws and Statutes and further try(ing) to introduce new Statutes’ while continuing ‘the policy of continuous, consistent and uniform obstruction to all government measures whereby the bureaucracy intends to or is likely to strengthen its position’ would be followed. ‘Means have to be devised to force the government to come to terms for the purposes of granting further immediate political reforms.’ The third and most significant aspect of the programme was for the purpose of creating ‘mass sanctions’, the organisation of trade unions, specially in the railways and post and telegraphs, was to be systematically undertaken ‘at the direct initiative of each Provincial Congress Committee and under the instructions of the All India Congress Committee’. Clearly, 93 Ibid., pp. 35, 169–72. A copy of the original programme is also filed in the AICC Papers, File G–13/1927.

The Non-cooperation Movement

the notion that the working masses could be organised and represented only through the Communist Party was absent at this point in time. More importantly, the National Congress was seen as an organisation open to the demands and influence of the workers and peasants, though it was currently dominated by ‘the big capitalists and their allies’. This domination was not, however, viewed as inherent in the nature of the National Congress, but was seen as the product of the fact that its programme and activity did not as yet involve ‘ninety-eight per cent’ of the population—a task which the WPP sought to accomplish. Thus, as Philip Spratt declared, in a speech on ‘The Congress and its Future’, the WPP’s attitude towards the Congress was that of ‘transforming’ it. The WPP ‘has put forward certain proposals, the Congress has received it favourably.’94 The WPP programme, he continued, ‘denotes a policy of nationalism to be carried out in a new manner … whereby it would represent the interests of the working class, peasantry and lower middle class of the towns’. It was also to be a movement for organising trade unions which ‘must co-operate with the Congress’ and, gradually, ‘the Congress will become transformed to some extent—more or less—into the Workers and Peasants Party’. This perspective of transforming the Congress rapidly acquired the shape of a left-bloc in the Congress movement. Members of the WPP were elected to the Provincial and All India Congress Committees. Joglekar, Nimbkar and Thengdi of the WPP (Bombay) were members of the AICC from Bombay. Three members of the WPP of Bengal were elected in 1927 to the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee and two to the AICC.95 It must be emphasised at this point that these members of the WPPs who acquired positions of influence in the Congress organisation functioned as left-Congressmen within it. When they cooperated with other left and radical persons in the Congress, who were not associated with the WPPs, they functioned as an ideological–political grouping, what we could call a left-bloc. The trend of various left-wing individuals acting in concert, from issue to issue, began with the decision taken by the AICC, on the joint initiative of Jawaharlal Nehru and the WPP member in that body, to make the Indian National Congress an associate member of the League

94 95

MCC Speeches, 1928, p. 1689 (NMML). Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIB, pp. 33, 118.

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Against Imperialism.96 The decisive influence that a left-wing grouping could exercise on national politics became apparent at the annual session of the National Congress in Madras at the end of 1927. It marked, as Clemens Dutt put it, ‘a turning point in the history of the Indian Nationalist Movement … the Madras session showed a pronounced move to the left’.97 The resolution at this session declaring complete independence as the accredited goal of the Indian National Congress was moved in the Subjects Committee by Joglekar, supported by Jawaharlal Nehru, and was passed by an overwhelming majority. In the open session Nehru moved the resolution which was supported by Joglekar and passed unanimously.98 A move towards giving concrete form to this informal cooperation of the incipient left-bloc was the holding of a ‘Republican Congress’ a day after the Congress session ended in the Congress pandal itself. Conceived as a conference of the leftist delegates who had attended the Congress session, it elected Jawaharlal Nehru, the president and Muzaffar Ahmed as one of the general secretaries.99 Jawaharlal Nehru, in his presidential address to the ‘Republican Congress’, outlined how it could become a leftist consolidation working to move the Indian National Congress as a whole towards the left. And as the official history of the Communist Party of India observes: ‘Jawaharlal Nehru’s speech, the tone of the resolutions adopted, and the composition of the executive elected at the republican conference confirm that it had the character of a leftist consolidation working inside the Indian National Congress.’100 The close cooperation between the Congress, the WPPs and the fast developing student and youth organisations that was evident in the demonstrations against the Simon Commission were a product of this new consolidation.101 A meeting called by the WPP (Bombay) to prepare for united mass action and conduct a joint campaign on 3 February 1928, when the Commission was to arrive in Bombay, was attended by thirty-six ‘sympathisers’, representing the youth leagues and trade union organisations. Amongst those who attended the meeting were Jhabvala (who consistently cooperated with the WPP on the trade union front in 96

Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., p. 118. 98 Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIB, pp. 118–19. 99 Ibid., pp. 123–25. 100 Ibid., pp. 124–25. 101 A detailed account of this is given in Chapter VII. 97

The Non-cooperation Movement

this period), members of existing trade unions led by left Congressmen, student and youth organisers like Yusuf Meherally (who was to lead the socialist youth league of Bombay in the Civil Disobedience Movement and later became an important leader of the CSP), V.H. Joshi and the Marxist intellectual and writer C.G. Shah (the last two were to join the Royist group in 1930 when the Communists alienated all sympathisers).102 The Bombay provincial Congress Committee and the WPP, ‘which were closely cooperating in the boycott campaign’, planned and executed a joint action on the appointed day.103 Similarly, in Calcutta a joint demonstration by the Bengal PCC, the WPP, Bengal Provincial TUC and other organisations of students and youth was carried out. Subhash Bose, then the leader of the BPCC, contacted the WPP on the question of jointly organising an anti-Simon Commission demonstration (and) assured it full cooperation in rendering all necessary help on behalf of the BPCC, a leader of the WPP was to recall later. The result was a massive demonstration of about two lakhs which created panic in government circles.104 Meanwhile, both the WPP and the Independence of India League led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash Bose, expressed criticism of the Nehru Report’s focusing on dominion status.105 The success that attended these efforts to give national politics a left orientation was the success of forging a left-bloc and was inextricably bound up with the process of radicalisation of the National Congress that gathered momentum in 1927–28.106 The consistent anti-imperialist and democratic left-wing trend, which was growing in the national movement at the time, and the radical left tendencies manifest in the provincial conferences of the National Congress held in preparation for the Madras session, were the basis from which the left-bloc could emerge. ‘The emergence of youth organisations in the provinces and the role they were playing in supporting the militant policy in the national freedom movement, and participating in national revolutionary activities and in 102

Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIC, p. 11. Ibid. For details see Chapter VII. 104 Dharani Goswami’s article in Parly Life, 7 October 1979, quoted in Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIC, p. 15. 105 Adhikari, Documents, IIIC, p. 78. 106 This forms the subject of Chapter VII. 103

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building the militant class organisations of workers and peasants’ was observed and recorded in the documents of the WPPs.107 The significance of all these developments lay in the fact that these emerging radical trends increasingly adopted socialist ideology. In retrospect, however, the contribution of the WPPs’ organisational form and the latent presence of Communists in them has been construed as the successful intervention of the ‘Communists functioning through the Workers and Peasants Party’ which resulted in establishing increasing left influence in the national movement.108 We would argue, on the other hand, that the effective interventions of the left in this period were the decisive result of a left-bloc having come into existence on the national plane. And this left-bloc was not ‘led’ by Communists or even the WPP but was a convergence of various left forces in the late twenties. Apropos the left trends emerging simultaneously, the Chief of Intelligence, David Petrie, concluded: ‘All these various manifestations must be regarded as so many symptoms that can be diagnosed in only one particular way.’109 Williamson, who later took over from Petrie, reviewed the situation similarly. Remarking on the ‘poor organisational success’ of Communists in India and ‘M.N. Roy’s barren record’, he argued that this could not ‘be taken to mean that communism as an ideology has no footing in India.’ The reasons cited for this conclusion were: (a) many articles in the Indian Press were alive to the power of mass action as a political weapon, (b) Saklatvala’s (CPGB) tour in early 1927 earned appreciative comments in several ‘responsible quarters’, (c) there was a clear evidence of a shift in Congress attitude towards mass organisation, and (d ) the formation of the WPPs inside the National Congress and their work among labour.110 As a matter of fact, not even the WPPs could, in any sense, be termed as being ‘led by the Communists’111—or even dominated by them. The small group of Communists, in their annual report on the work done during 1927, modestly and correctly recorded that ‘the members of the party 107

Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIC, p. 91. G. Adhikari interprets the success of the WPPs thus in his introduction to the Documents of the Communist Party of India, Vol. IIIB, p. 118. 109 Communism in India, Chapter 13. 110 Ibid. 111 Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIB, p. 106, in the introduction to the ‘Role of the Left-Wing and the WPP’. In fact, contradicting himself, Adhikari acknowledges in another place: ‘At that time these parties (WPPs) were not headed by Communists’, Vol. IIIB, p. 50. 108

The Non-cooperation Movement

have helped in the formation and growth of the Workers and Peasants Parties … .’112 A report on ‘The Workers and Peasants Parties in India’, published in the Eastern and Colonial Bulletin of the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU), simply reflected the true situation when it said: ‘With the cooperation of the Communists, left revolutionary groups have been formed in the All India National Congress and the Indian Congress of Trade Unions.’113 Clearly, the initiative to form the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party was taken by both the ‘Communists’ as well as the left-wing elements in the Indian National Congress. Consequently, the successful left intervention at this time cannot be interpreted as the victory of the left-wing ‘led by the WPP’, which was, in turn, ‘led by the Communists’.114 In actuality, it was the historical success of the politics put forward by the WPPs and the specific organisation such politics required. It was the success of what Nehru termed the ‘consolidation of a left-wing in the National Congress’ and which R.P. Dutt had then characterised as ‘the future form of the national struggle’.115 The entry of the WPP members into the various Congress committees, including the AICC, and their increasing influence and popularity were a vindication of the politics of transformation. In this paradigm they functioned as a left tendency cooperating with all other pro-left and centrist forces and not as an alternative to them. Their activities were correctly, though very briefly, seen by R.P. Dutt as the ‘first signal of the future form of the national struggle’, for they had led to the forging of a powerful left-bloc. It must be emphasised here that this new and ‘future’ form of struggle was not successful as a manoeuvre but as a different and concrete form of organisation and politics which can only be described as national revolutionary and left politics. The reality on the ground which nurtured and allowed this form of political intervention and organisation to flourish, of the left-bloc, can be seen more clearly in the general radicalisation of the Congress movement and the increasing influence of left Congressmen such as Nehru and Bose, which are described in the chapters that follow.

112

Ibid., IIIB, p. 204. Emphasis added. Ibid., pp. 89–90. Emphasis added. 114 Ibid., III-C, p. 66. 115 Labour Monthly, June, 1928, Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIB, p. 133. 113

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Chapter 4

To Be or Not to Be Communist Party or WPP?

The success achieved by the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party in organising the workers into trade unions was ‘remarkable and rapid’.1 According to David Petrie, Chief of Intelligence, ‘By April 1928, the penetration of the trade union movement was so complete that the WPPs not only secured a voice in controlling the movement but acquired a definite hold, specially in Bombay, over the workers themselves.’2 The highlight of this phenomenon was the emergence of the Girni Kamgar Union (Red Flag), ‘the largest union in Asia’, which developed during the course of the general strike in the Bombay textile industry (1928) whose workers had had no effective union till 1926.3 This striking success of left-wing intervention in the activisation of the working class in 1927–28 was basically due to two factors: (a) the abysmal conditions that prevailed in various industries, and (b) the combined efforts of various militant and left nationalist (which includes the WPP) trade union leaders. 1

MCC, 1929, Prosecution’s Speech, p. 25 (NMML). India and Communism. The prosecutor in the Meerut Conspiracy Case, Langford James, provided a long and ‘impressive’ list of unions taken over or freshly organised by the WPP leadership. 3 Report of the Whitely Commission on Labour in India, 1931 (NAI). 2

To Be or Not to Be

Given the desperate conditions of life of workers in colonial India, the capitalist offensive that sought to impose wage cuts and retrenchment on them, in the context of the approaching depression, generated a movement all over the country. ‘By 1927 it was possible to see clearly that a new wave of working class activity was rising and in 1928–29 it showed itself in an almost unprecedented number of strikes in almost all industries.’4 The textile workers were the most affected and the city of Bombay was the centre of strike activity.5 And it was in Bombay that left-wing efforts met with greatest success. What needs to be emphasised here is that as far as the economic condition of the workers was concerned, there was absolute unanimity in the opinions expressed by all the official enquirers (for example, Whitely Report), independent observers (the press), the constitutional trade unionists like N.M. Joshi, and left-wing leaders, including those of the WPP. As N.M. Joshi, president of the Bombay Textile Labour Union (BTLU), informed the Indian Textile Tariff Board, the operatives engaged in the mills in Bombay, specially, were faced by ‘starvation and ruin’.6 More importantly, so far as the textile mill workers were concerned some leading Indian capitalists were equally aware of the conditions that prevailed in the industry. G.D. Birla’s correspondence with Purshottamdas Thakurdas makes this abundantly clear. As Birla complained: ‘The mill owners … it appears have gone too far in refusing wages to labour. Their reactionary attitude in politics … has already lost them the sympathy of reasonable people and refusal of wages is the last straw.’7 The renewal of the textile strike in Bombay, in 1929, led Birla to say further that ‘Obviously, the politicans (i.e., nationalist leaders—S.J.) feel our Capitalists are out for exploitation hand in hand with the foreign capitalist… .’8 Apropos the situation in the Bombay textile industry and the attitude of the millowners, Ambalal Sarabhai, similarly, blamed the employers:

4

Meerut Record, General Statement of the eighteen accused Communists. Bombay Labour Gazette, February 1930, p. 561. 6 Whitely Report. 7 Purshottamdas Thakurdas Papers, File 81 (II), Birla to Thakurdas, 16 May 1929 (NMML). 8 Ibid., File 42 (V), 1923–34. Birla to Thakurdas, 30 July 1929. 5

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The purchasing power of the people has gone down … to a dangerously low level … it is for those who have a stake in the country to go to the rescue of the poor, if not in the interest of the poor (then) to save themselves.9

Birla again said: ‘I find it difficult to understand the stupid mentality of the mill owners who in their (own) interests are losing the sympathy of all right thinking men.’10 In fact, continued Birla, the millowners, by not adopting a ‘sympathetic view and broad outlook’ towards their employees (as an intelligent capitalist interested in bourgeois development would—S.J.), had caused the strike and were ‘undoubtedly serving Manchester’s interests rather than their own’.11 Walchand Hirachand was to express a similar view: If we look carefully into the disaffection and unrest as reflected in frequent strikes in the Bombay Textile Mills, it is clear that it is impossible to tide over the trouble by small economies here and there as the millowners seem to imagine. The fact is workers have not received any increase for some years past … . Under these circumstances, it is easy to see why workers are ready to strike—they see no hope for betterment of prospects, on the contrary they are faced with a cut and condemned as inefficient. Their whole struggle therefore today is directed to maintain the present level of wages and save them from unemployment.12

The Home Department of the GOI likewise acknowledged: ‘The conditions of labour are admittedly unsatisfactory and in the present case the mill hands have legitimate grievances.’13 The Commissioner of Police, Bombay, informed the Home Department that those who sought to organise workers … have only to get to work vigorously and they will soon find themselves in a position to paralyse trade and industry in Bombay. Today they

9

Ibid., File 42, Part VII, Ambalal Sarabhai to Thakurdas, 17 November 1930. Ibid., File 42, Part II, Birla to Thakurdas, 19 June 1929. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., File 42, Part II, Walchand Hirachand, speech delivered at the Second Quarterly General Meeting of the Maharashtra Chamber of Commerce at Bombay, 8 May 1929. Emphasis added. 13 HDP, File 18/XVI/1928 and K.W. 10

To Be or Not to Be

have succeeded in the mills; they are now hard at work on the railways and I shall not be surprised if they succeed there also.14

The Industries and Labour Department of the GOI described the situation more clearly and sharply: ‘to talk of ‘‘legitimate grievances’’ seems to be understating the position’.15 It enumerated … the salient facts in connection with the General Strike of 1928 as follows: (a) The millowners had been nibbling off wages much before the strike with some success, (b) From the workers’ point of view the strike was almost essential if they were not to be defeated piecemeal and see their old standards steadily lowered, (c) After the strike had been in progress for sometime the millowners prepared a standardised list of wages (a thing they should have done years before, commented the I and L Department) but they proposed to standardise wages at a level substantially below the general level prevailing when the strike began, (d ) A committee of enquiry had been agreed upon when the millowners demanded as a condition, the ‘previous return’ of the men to work. In effect, the conclusion was that ‘even in the complete absence of Communists the wage reductions the millowners want to secure would have produced a strike of considerable magnitude’.16

Interestingly, a note representing the views of the Home Department on Communist activities emphasised that though Communists were present in organisations like the WPPs they could as well sever themselves from such associations ‘and still continue to carry on exactly the same work through Labour Unions’. Apparently, conditions were such that a militant trade union leadership was bound to achieve greater popularity for it would see to it that ‘labour … is better organised and in a stronger position to assert its claims’.17 The trade union leaders belonging to the WPPs were seen by the authorities as militant organisers and therefore logically followed by discontented workers. The heart of the problem was located in the failure of the constitutional and ‘sane’ trade unionists who ‘remained somewhat aloof from contact

14 Ibid. Demi-official letter from Commissioner of Police, Bombay, to Home, 7 August 1928. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. Emphasis added. 17 Ibid. Note prepared by H.G. Haig and J. Cerar, 4 January 1929.

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with the worker himself, and have, therefore, not succeeded in getting under his skin’.18 On the other hand, it was felt: ‘It is doubtful, however, whether the indigenous labour agitator is a Communist at heart … . He must, nevertheless, be given credit for an energy … which is not apparent among the ranks of the “bourgeois” trade-unionists.’19 It would appear that the rapid advance that occurred in the Indian trade union movement during this time was, essentially, rooted in the very basic work of improving existing organisations and the establishment of new unions. In this task of unionisation of the working class, the WPPs working together with other militant trade unionists made a major contribution. The efforts to amalgamate the parallel unions that had come into existence and to coordinate the strength of the workers and form general unions was, similarly, a great advance for working class organisation and solidarity. The Girni Kamgar Union (GKU) was an example for other sections of the working class in the country. Mill committees were formed, regular picketing was practised, and the initiative of the rank and file worker largely influenced the conduct of the strike. The mill committees consisted of groups of rank and file workers elected from each mill. They formulated the grievances of the workers and were delegated the powers not only to negotiate with the management on behalf of the union but also to call emergency strikes without first consulting the head office of the union. From the point of view of the millowners, these committees threatened to become parallel organisations of supervision and control at the floor level.20 This type of organisation certainly contained great potential in terms of the active involvement and initiative of workers in trade union struggles. Yet it was scarcely ‘revolutionary’ even in terms of antiimperialist consciousness. The workers had only begun acquiring elementary trade union consciousness, while political education and training and, therefore, political conceptions and interventions, were embryonic. In fact, in the MCC very little attempt was made to prove the formal charge of ‘conspiracy’ against the state or show political activity by the

18 This was the view of the Secretary of State in his report on India for 1927–28, Moral and Material Progress and Condition of India, London, 1929, pp. 341–42, Photocopy, ACHI, JNU. 19 Ibid. 20 S.A. Dange, SW, Vol. 3, Bombay, pp. 190–93.

To Be or Not to Be

working class or its leaders. The entire weight of the evidence marshalled for the case was concerned mainly with trade union organisation—‘the incitement of antagonism between labour and capital’, the ‘participation in strikes’ and ‘the formation of unions’. At this stage of preparatory organisational work it was, of course, necessary for left-wing trade union leadership to preserve and even forge as much unity in the working class as was possible in their economic struggle without permitting differences of political opinion to come in the way of solidarity. Particularly, as an analysis of the ‘industrial disputes’ figures shows, the bulk of the strike actions had economic causes relating to wages and ‘personnel’, for example, the dismissal of one or more workers and their reinstatement.21 Consequently, the Bombay General Textile Strike was effectively conducted by a Joint Strike Committee which represented, equally, the left-wing combine [WPP and other radical trade unionists such as Jhabvala (Bombay Mill Workers’ Union) and the leaders of the Girni Kamgar Mahamandal] and the constitutional and liberal leaders such as N.M. Joshi of the Bombay Textile Labour Union (BTLU). The GKU (led by the WPP which had acted as part of the joint strike committee) began to function as an independent union only after the settlement of the strike.22 As Dange puts it, ‘The strike was not our (i.e., GKU’s) creation … we were the creation of the strike. An organisation had not brought about the general strike of 1928 … the strike had brought forth an organisation.’23 Dange, one of the chief leaders of the WPP and the GKU, who actively participated in the strike, declared in the Court at Meerut: We also wanted unity with the 30,000 workers who were more or less under the influence of the BTLU. Unity at that time with those confirmed Genevites and class collaborators would have strengthened the strike. Unity with them … meant a unity of one section of workers with another section … .24

This alliance between the left-wing and the constitutional trade unionists was facilitated to some extent by the fact that N.M. Joshi refused to 21

N.M. Joshi, Trade Union Movement in India, 1927. pp. 19–20. Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIC, p. 131. 23 Dange, SW, Vol. 3, p. 55. 24 Ibid., pp. 62–65. 22

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treat the left-wing in the workers movement as a threat and was willing to cooperate with it so far as the purely economic interests of workers were concerned. The tough position he adopted later, when political decisions over boycotting or cooperating with the Simon and Whitely Commissions were concerned, led to the Nagpur split in the AITUC, 1929.25 In the context of the charge made by H.W. Lee, of the Trades Union Congress’ General Council in London, that the Communists were ‘making a dead set to Bolshevise the Indian trade unions’, N.M. Joshi replied that he ‘did not see any effort on the part of Communists to Bolshevise the Indian trade union movement’. ‘As a matter of fact’, he wrote, ‘there are very few Communists in India. Even these few are … not real Communists. They are nationalists before everything else.’ Joshi expressed the opinion that ‘if newspapers in England are writing that Communists have great influence over the labour movement in India they must be either capitalist newspapers which see “red” in everything or it comes from the Communists themselves’.26 Dismissing all the warnings from England, N.M. Joshi explained that ‘the attitude of the British Trade Union Movement towards Communists’ could not be appreciated by Indians as ‘the Communists here in India have not started the trouble which they have created in Europe’. Significantly, he further clarified that ‘our movement here does not as yet distinguish between Communists and others’.27 In fact, Joshi’s position at this time was that in the formative stage of the Indian labour movement such distinctions would destroy the effort to achieve the basic and elementary organisation of the working class. As he put it, I strongly feel that we should take into our movement all the elements that are interested in labour. When the movement grows strong there will be differences of principles which we shall have to face. At the moment, what is important is the work of organisation and that of bringing about working class solidarity, which can only be achieved with the spirit of trust and goodwill among different elements of this movement.28

25

See chapter IX of this book. N.M. Joshi Papers, File 17, Part II, Joshi to Lee, 25 February 1926. 27 Ibid. File 18, Joshi to Lee, 3 June 1927, and 29 April 1927. 28 Ibid. File 19, Joshi to Mukand Lal Sarkar, 11 May 1926. 26

To Be or Not to Be

It was this spirit that was manifest in the constitution of the Joint Strike Committee which led the 1928 textile mill strike. A communique issued by it declared that ‘The Joint Strike Committee represents every shade of thought amongst the workers, has representatives of all the unions of the workers and is the only representative and competent body.’ Replying to the Millowners Association’s ‘query as to which of the members of the Committee are extremists and which moderates’, the committee informed them that ‘our committee does not recognise any distinction such as moderates and extremists so far as the prosecution of the demands sent to you is concerned’.29 Here, it is important to remember that the ‘moderate’, ‘reformists’, or what we would term the constitutional trade unionists like N.M. Joshi were the major section of the existing trade union leadership before the left-wing entered the scene. This trend in the trade union movement reflected a specific political current in national level politics in India at that time. N.M. Joshi, a leading figure among the ‘moderates’, was a pro-government liberal politician, while men like Dewan Chamanlall, V.V. Giri and Shiva Rao, though nationalists, worked in close cooperation with the International Federation of Trades Unions and the British Trade Union Congress to promote working class organisations along constitutional lines. N.M. Joshi and his colleagues in the BTLU stood for applying pressure on the government and avoiding confrontation, as far as possible. For instance, even during the general strike of 1928, N.M. Joshi met the millowners to attempt some kind of a settlement. Interestingly, the millowners themselves sought his help, when Victor Sassoon requested him to discuss matters the morning before he (Sassoon) was scheduled to attend a meeting of the Millowners Association.30 Joshi himself tried to cooperate by inviting two or three millowners to ‘informally’ meet a few representatives of the BTLU committee, which would include some spinners and weavers, ‘to explain certain details on which they (the union) had doubts’. Such a meeting, continued Joshi, was desirable for ‘I believe if you yourselves explain the scheme to our workers and show how it is feasible, it will serve a useful purpose’. 29

Ibid. File 46. Issued on 21 May 1928. Ibid. File 45. Letter from Sir Victor Sassoon’s office to N.M. Joshi, 31 July 1928. A subsequent letter from Sassoon & Co. also referred to this meeting in Sir Victor’s office. 30

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This cooperative attitude was balanced by demanding certain essential concessions for the workers and the millowners were warned that, if some compromise was not made, ‘the millowners must thank themselves if the working class population falls into the hands of extreme elements in our movement’.31 This was the position also put forward by Bakhale who was acting on behalf of N.M. Joshi at a meeting of the Bombay Mill Strike Enquiry Committee. However, this method employed by the BTLU leadership, of using their ‘good offices’ with the employers and their rapport with the government to bring about a compromise between the workers and their employers, was bound to fail at a time when the attitude of the employers was vicious, as during the Depression. Consequently, at the beginning of the strikes in individual mills, before the rapprochement between the different unions leading to the formation of the joint strike committee, daily meetings were held by the WPP at which Joshi and his party were condemned as the enemies of labour and the friends of capitalists. Gradually, however, a more ‘accommodating’ attitude was adopted and ‘Joshi was allowed to speak from the same platform (WPP’s) with his friends, refraining from recriminations. The government felt that “perhaps the Joshi-led deputation of moderates meeting the Governor has convinced them (the WPP) that the reformists must be reckoned with”.’32 Apparently, the workers influenced by the BTLU still hoped that Joshi would succeed in negotiating a settlement on their behalf. The left-wing trade union leaders realised at this stage that … a large section of workers by their own experience had yet to be convinced that our policy was the only right policy. Unity with the BTLU at that time gave us the opportunity to demonstrate the correctness of our policy and secure large contacts and financial strength … .33

The other side of the story, however, was that the WPP leaders, having won over the considerable backing of the GKM and the BMU, threatened to alienate the BTLU from a substantial section of the workers. ‘Nobody has the courage to stand up and oppose them (the WPP—S.J.) on a

31

Ibid. N.M. Joshi to the Millowners Association, 26 June 1928. HDP, File 1/1928, FR, April 1928. 33 Dange, SW, Vol. 3, pp. 62–65. 32

To Be or Not to Be

public platform’, complained the Commissioner of Police in Bombay, and though … Joshi is a constitutional labour leader (but) when this strike occurred he was afraid to dissociate himself from the Communists (the left-wing leaders, even when they were not members of the WPP were referred to as Communists—S.J.) lest he might lose whatever influence he had with labour, he was forced to join hands with them on the strike committee …34

This aspect of the situation was confirmed by the press statement issued by the Bombay Millowners Association on 10 May 1928: … At the eleventh hour attempts were made by the ‘moderate’ leaders to prevail upon men not to resort to strike… . These ‘moderates’ were hustled out of whatever little power or influence they had … by the ‘extremists’ and were finally obliged to make common cause with them.35

Logically, therefore, the methods of the constitutional trade unionists could not but weaken their influence over the mass of workers who were at this time in the throes of a struggle for survival against the offensive of the millowners. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the liberals were a very tangible current in the framework of colonial constitutionalism. Among the workers, the government encouraged and actively sought to support constitutional trade unionism, so as to direct the movement along ‘safe’ lines. Using every legal and arbitrary weapon to stamp out militant working class organisations and, particularly, to check the growing influence of the left-wing in the labour movement, it, simultaneously, sought to foster ‘economic’ organisations under ‘trusted’ constitutional trade union leaders. It must be emphasised: the specificity of constitutional trade unionism under colonial rule was that the most important single instrument in the hands of the colonial state was ‘the law’. In Britain, the law came after the unions; in the colonies it formed

34 HDP, File 18/XVI/1928 and K.W. Demi-official letter from Commissioner of Police, Bombay to Home Department, 7 August 1928. 35 N.M. Joshi Papers, File 46.

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the framework within which the unions grew. Apart from the deliberate use of the law and the machinery of administration, conscious efforts on the part of the British trade union movement and Labour Party leadership to forge close links with trade union leadership in India provided channels through which the injection of the ‘British model’ of trade unionism was effected in India.36 Constitutional trade unionism in a colonial country like India— reformism in the European context—confronted Marxists with a tough problem. The Marxism of the Third International (Leninism) could not satisfactorily explain this phenomenon. Lenin and Bukharin had studied imperialism purely in economic terms. The specific nature and form of the colonial state did not figure in their writings. Especially, the semihegemonic state form in India was completely beyond the scope of their framework. As a matter of fact, the Indian Communists did not even recognise the term. They referred only to ‘reformist labour unions’, a term born of European social democracy. In our view, it is more helpful to use the term ‘constitutionalist trade unions’. This is derived from our basic characterisation of the structure and tendency of overall politics in India as constitutional or non-constitutional. The forms of struggle and specific issues could vary, but their potential to develop the total movement would be either one or the other. That is, they would either open the door to people’s mass involvement or confine their opposition to legislatures and assemblies. It is more appropriate as it embraces ‘right reformists’ and ‘nationalist liberals’ equally in terms of the common character of their politics as constitutional. Philip Spratt, the British Communist working in India, acknowledged the problem of what he called ‘reformism’. At a meeting of the jute mill workers in Budge Budge he said that the Public Safety Act and the Trades Disputes Bill were clever moves as they would not prohibit the trade union movement altogether for that would drive it into revolutionary opposition to the government. Instead, they sought to establish their own control by involving the workers along constitutional lines and would legislate through the efforts of their own agents and offer concessions.37

36

Collected Seminar Papers on Labour Unions and Political Organisations. University of London, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, No. 3, January–May 1967. 37 MCC Speeches, Vol. 9. p. 1923 (NMML). Meeting of Jute Millworkers, BudgeBudge, 20 September 1928.

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The appointment of the Whitely Commission in July 1929 was the direct counterpart of the Meerut trial. The setting up of the Commission to enquire into labour conditions in India was done with the calculation to win the support of constitutional trade unionists and an invitation to cooperate with the government. This was, obviously, a fairly successful move in the context of the violent controversy and dissensions that it promoted in the AITUC. Thus, as long as the anti-imperialist national movement failed to mobilise the workers massively and draw in their full-fledged political support, the working class would remain a fertile soil for constitutional reformist labour leadership. The absence of widespread nationalist leadership in the working class till 1927—when the WPPs brought anti-imperialist politics to the workers—had given ample opportunity to constitutionalists of the variety of N.M. Joshi and Shiva Rao, to entrench themselves as bargainers for concessions from the colonial government. When the Communists, functioning as part of a left-bloc, entered the scene, the economic condition of the working class was so dismal that they could jointly fight for small reforms and economic concessions along with constitutional trade-unionists like N.M. Joshi. However, to transform the working class organisations from being vehicles of defensive economic struggles into becoming an active component within the anti-imperialist movement, it was essential to break its connection with the apolitical trade union leadership and tie it up with nationalist goals. The choice, all along, for Communists in the working class movement was between waging a primarily political, and therefore anti-imperialist, national struggle or getting bogged down in economism. Waging uncompromising struggles in the economic interests of workers against capitalists without the cushioning of the left-bloc in the national movement, made it easy for the State to ban their activity and arrest them. This left the field clear for constitutionalist leadership as ‘better’ bargainers for economic concessions to the class. The colonial state was categorically interested in separating what it termed ‘the genuine demands’ of workers from all political alignments and conceding as much as possible as a basis for acquiring their neutrality in the anti-imperialist struggle. Hence, a strong dose of anti-imperialist nationalism had necessarily to be injected into the class. Very often, the constitutional trade unionists could and did share the militancy of an economistic left-wing leadership which was counterposed

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to the National Congress’ advice—specially Gandhi’s—to adjust relations between Indian capitalists and workers. For instance, after 1929, when the Communists described the Congress nationalists as representatives of capitalist interests, N.M. Joshi would not disagree. As early as 1926 he was writing to the Communist, Shapurji Saklatvala: ‘I do not myself believe that either the Swarajya Party or any other political party in India cares for Indian Labour. Moreover, I also believe that most of the leaders of political parties are in the grip of Indian capitalists.’38 It was ironical that in their denunciation of nationalist political parties—chiefly the National Congress—Communists and constitutional trade unionists often coalesced, though one was willing to negotiate with the imperialists while the other called for an uncompromising struggle against imperialism. It has often been pointed out how the influence of British labour organisation was most successful in trade union organisation and legislation in India. Despite the split of 1929 in the AITUC and despite the challenge of Royist and Communist leadership in the working class in the thirties and forties, the National Trades Unions Federation maintained its position.39 Clearly, labour constitutionalism could only be challenged by a left-wing, which combined vigorous anti-imperialism with securing the interests of workers to the greatest extent possible within the framework of anti-imperialist unity of all sections of the Indian people, including the bourgeoisie. Only that could have prevented constitutional tradeunionism under colonial rule from continuing to wield influence over large sections of the working class. In other words, only a decisive challenge in the realm of politics could contain and not allow constitutional trade unionism to perpetuate itself. For, in an atmosphere of economism, a rising strike wave would adopt militant leadership—whether of Communists or non-Communist radicals. But when it receded, workers would accept and support the efforts of constitutional leaders who could successfully negotiate with the colonial government and seek government intervention and legislation. This gave birth to the twin phenomena of alternating militancy and ‘reformism’ in the Indian trade union movement. One could perhaps characterise this pattern as ‘the law of economism operating in a constitutional framework’. It invariably robs militancy of its politics and 38

N.M. Joshi Papers, File 17, Part II. Joshi to Shapurji Saklatvala, 9 April 1926. B.R. Nanda, (ed.). Socialism in India, see ‘British Labour and the Indian Left, 1919–39’ by Partha Sarathi Gupta. 39

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assigns to it the role of a pressure valve which lets out accumulated steam. Nothing could prevent the working class from succumbing to constitutional reformist blandishments unless it was imbued with militant antiimperialism and it refused to turn away from politics because of the reformist intervention of the imperialist government. The development of a militantly anti-imperialist working class was a slow, uphill task. It could be accomplished only by a revolutionary nationalism which mobilised the workers on such a large scale in the national struggle so as to give them the requisite weight and bargaining power vis-à-vis capital without providing any opening to the colonial state. A beginning, precisely in this direction, appears to have been made in the WPP period (1924–28). While establishing working class solidarity within the ambit of economic struggle, the politics of anti-imperialism and national unity were introduced into the workers’ organisation. Of course, solidarity in economic struggles also required a cooperative attitude towards the constitutionalists such as that adopted during the 1928 Bombay Mill Strike. As Dange put it in his Defence Statement at Meerut: The pressure of hunger began to be visible … here and there, small groups of people did become anxious for a settlement … . Naturally the question arose if we should still stick to an uncompromising position and risk a break up and defeat.

The decision to compromise was taken because it was necessary to save the strike. If we could secure the demands for the majority of workers but not all the demands of all the workers and if we could not hold out longer it was advantageous to try a compromise, to accept a little retreat in order to advance with double vigour.40

In 1928, the textile workers were asked to offer ‘passive resistance’ to the employers and the governmental authorities. Holding up Gandhi’s methods as worth emulating, Dange said: ‘In 1922 Gandhi launched passive resistance to break laws. You could be ready like-wise to break laws … .’41 40

Dange, SW, Vol. 3, pp. 124–25. MCC Speeches, 1928. Bombay, p. 2445. Speech by Dange at millworkers meeting on 7 June 1928 (NMML). 41

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Addressing the striking workers, S.H. Jhabvala of the BMU ‘strongly supported’ Dange’s position that, ‘the only way to success was Satyagraha. Satyagraha is of two kinds. One is passive and the other is non-passive. In non-passive Satyagraha you will be the losers.’ Passive satyagraha was thus interpreted as ‘go to the mills but do not work. Let government put us in jail.’42 When some workers of the Fort Gloster Jute Mills in Bengal ‘assaulted the Baboos and European assistants of the mills’, the WPP (Bengal) called a meeting, which was attended by 4,000 workers, at which the Party condemned this action. The workers were asked to fight through the union in a peaceful manner as violence would in no way improve the situation. On the contrary, it was pointed out that it would immediately lead to police repression and hamper their cause.43 Alwe, the worker leader of the GKM, emphasised that the colonial government was the protector of capitalists as it was ‘a foreign and not a national government and should therefore be overthrown’.44 The workers organisations rejected and refuted ‘the capitalist propaganda’ that the strikers did not have national interests at heart and that, by going on strike, they ‘were destroying the industry of the nation … . Let these mills be transferred to a national government then they will be looked upon as belonging to the nation.’45 Moreover, ‘if the millowners want to compromise they should write to the strike committee—we are not against compromise’. If the millowners were running at a loss, as they said, they should make their account books public. ‘Convince us and we will tell the labourers that this is our national industry and they should continue work on reduced salaries.’ In fact, Gandhi had ‘sent an emissary to enquire and we supplied all information. Then he sent him to the millowners and asked them to explain their case and called for their account-books.’46 The cooperative attitude of the workers and national consciousness were thus asserted and successful efforts were made to explain the situation to other sections of society. Meetings were held ‘in order to convince them (the middle class) about our movement’, and they had 42

Ibid., p. 1698. Speech by Jhabvala at a meeting of strikers on 5 July 1928. MCC Speeches, Vol. 9, p. 2223, speech by Kishorilal Ghosh, WPP, at Labour Meeting in Bauria on 15 July 1928. 44 Ibid., p. 1699, Speech by Alwe at workers meeting on 19 July 1928. 45 Ibid., p. 1701, Speech by Dange at workers meeting, 21 July 1928. 46 Ibid., p. 1704, Speech by Mirajkar, 26 July 1928. 43

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… considerably removed the mists of misunderstanding among the minds of the people … now they have begun saying that the demands of labourers are just and not irresponsible and are convinced that millowners will have to bow down before your feet if you hold on.47

It was the millowners who were now increasingly seen by people as having ‘a coalition with the British government’ by asking for government’s protection instead of ‘coming to terms with their own workers’.48 The basic political attitude expressed in a series of workers meetings was that the workers movement was a part of the movement of the rest of society. ‘This is not the movement of Communists … . It is a movement of oppressed people in which the middle class is included’, said Jhabvala, at a meeting organised to meet ‘clerks, educated people, teachers, professors and students in Colleges’ to explain to them ‘the real state of affairs’. The middle classes and intelligentsia were intensely anti-imperialist, ‘and rally around whenever they are told to attack the government’. The struggle of the workers ought not to be seen as separate but as part of the fight for Swaraj and ‘the principle of Swaraj should be understood like this, that the voice of every man who labours must reach the council and he must get full meals. This principle is embodied in the Bardoli movement and here too.’ The fight of the workers was linked to the peasant struggle in Bardoli: ‘break the class barriers and break the government’.49 The anti-imperialist fervour of the working class was emphasised repeatedly and linked to the struggle of the Congress-led movement. The movement in Bardoli is against acceptance of an unjust law and our peasant brothers are taking part in the movement. We are ready to fight shoulder to shoulder with our brother labourers … our men are willing even to go to jail. Though Patel had insulted us before, still in the end we are one.50

The priority of anti-imperialist objectives was clearly established: … there should be only one cry—no help to the government. The satyagraha movement of Bardoli has become an all-India question. All 47

Ibid., p. 1702, Speech by Mirajkar, 22 July 1928. Ibid., p. 1701, Speech by Dange, 21 July 1928. 49 Ibid., pp. 1701–2, Speeches delivered by Jhabvala and Mirajkar on 21 July 1928 and 22 July 1928 respectively. 50 Ibid., p. 1703, Speech to workers by Joglekar, 24 July 1928. 48

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the people in India will assist them. The government is using the police and military, terrorising people and sending them to jail in Bardoli. We labourers will run to Bardoli to fight the government’s army.51

Similarly, in Bengal, the WPP–left-bloc combine emphasised that the interests of all sections of Indian society were common vis-à-vis imperialism. At a meeting of dock workers under the aegis of the WPP in Calcutta, Shamsul Huda declared: It is necessary that students should come forward with labourers (sic) and make an agitation against the government in a united front, so that we may get the government … through which we can get our rights … . Liberty shall not be achieved till you Indians … don’t come together with labour.52

A policy of mutual concessions and cooperation was necessary and, when the press of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was banned by the government, the workers agitated against the action as they also wanted ‘freedom of the Press and freedom of livelihood’. On the other hand, the capitalists must also ‘give you (workers) education and give you enough food’. The basic approach ought to be that ‘We the Indians, whether capitalists or labourers … shall fight unitedly against the Englishmen until India is liberated.’ The common interests of the workers and middle classes—‘the intellectual proletariat’—were likewise stressed as a natural alliance against the colonial government by the WPP at a meeting organised to place their views before the ‘bhadralok … the clerks and quillmovers’.53 Of course, it was said, ‘many big capitalists have joined the nationalist movement’ but as against their disapproval of ‘workers’ activities and mass organisations’ the middle class educated and the workers ‘belong together’. In their poverty there was ‘no difference in kind, only of degree’, they were the oppressed masses that Gandhi spoke of, and ‘the Mahatma is so greatly honoured because he first discovered in our political agitation something genuine. That is why the British fear him so much.’ And what ‘Mahatma Gandhi taught us’ was that ‘the poor and suffering had to be worked for’.54 The Bauria Jute Workers Union invited Jawaharlal 51

Ibid., Speech by Mirajkar, 24 July 1928. MCC Speeches 1928, p. 1929 (i) (T), (NMML). 53 MCC Speeches, Vol. 9, 1929, p. 1893 (1) (T). 54 Ibid., 1928, p. 2264 (1 & 2) (T). Speech by Kishorilal Ghosh, 8 May 1928. 52

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Nehru to preside over one of its meetings. Both he and the British trade union leader from the CPGB Ben Bradley, addressed the workers on the necessity of fighting unitedly against imperialism.55 The political perspective manifest in all the speeches delivered by the leaders of the WPP was to locate the workers’ struggles within the framework of the anti-imperialist movement of all the people. They strove to influence other sections of society. At a massive meeting of striking workmen in Bombay, Mirajkar informed the audience that their committee was ‘going to the Grain Market to collect funds. The people who were against us in the beginning have also become wonderstruck seeing your courage—and their help and sympathy is coming. Our strike committee today has enough funds to feed you one month more.’56 The strike committee also organised street collections of relief money from the shopkeepers and the middle class in Bombay and elsewhere. Interestingly, and very significantly for the project of winning the support of other classes, the merchants who contributed towards the strike funds were invited to address the workers from the union’s platform. Alwe opened his speech at a strikers’ meeting by asking the workers to ‘please thank the merchant who has just spoken before you with loud cheers’.57 Raising the question of ‘why such merchants are joining us?’ he answered that it was because ‘all patriots must come forward to help and are going to come—now they are convinced that labour alone is capable of fighting so militantly and throwing out the British’. Stressing the fact that the workers movement’s political orientation was anti-imperialist, he continued: ‘The strike is not only for money but for obtaining rights alongwith money.’ The workers were conscious of the fact that ‘our abject poverty is due to the foreign government’. Public meetings had also been held by the WPP at Poona: … and many patriots there said it was their folly not to pay attention to the strike earlier … the capitalist and government had put a curtain on their eyes … and we have removed it. They promised as much help as possible. Students in colleges have become volunteers and told us to call them here for picketing if needed. They are collecting money.

55

Ibid., pp. 225–26. Ibid., p. 1704. Mirajkar, 26 July 1928. For details see Dange, SW, Vol. 3, p. 161. 57 MCC Speeches 1928, p. 1706, on 31 July 1928. ‘Loud applause’ from the audience. 56

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Our strike is just … it has convinced people. All the national leaders in India are also going to join us.58

And once the justice of the workers demands was recognised, the fact that the ‘capitalists are supported by the British’ raised doubts in regard to the employers’ anti-British bona fides in the minds of all patriots. It was this type of intervention in the politics of the working class and the national movement that became the basis of the emerging leftbloc, forging solidarity between different groups in society and generally drawing the radical currents together. And it was this left-bloc which the constitutional trade-unionists felt they were becoming hostage to, ‘necessitating’ their secession from the AITUC. The split in the AITUC was a reflection of the dead end the constitutional trade unionists had reached in their attempts to keep the workers movement apolitical. The political mobilisation of the workers in the anti-imperialist struggle was the barrier that divided them from the militant left nationalists and trade unionists whether or not they were actively involved in the WPPs.59 Thus, the division surfaced between the left-bloc and those who stood for constitutional politics for the working class. The crunch came over the resolutions on ‘boycott’ of the Simon and Whitely Commissions and against the Round Table Conference that were passed in the AITUC. The seventh session of the AITUC held in Delhi in March 1927 was the first at which the influence of the left-bloc was felt. ‘Anti-imperialism, international solidarity and militant assertion of the basic demands of the working class were the keynotes of the resolutions adopted.’ Interestingly, this session was attended by a large number of ‘moderate’ and even ‘right-wing’ persons such as Madan Mohan Malaviya, Lajpat Rai, G.D. Birla, Diwan Chamanlal, Rangaswami Iyengar, and B.F. Bharucha, who supported the resolutions.60 Shapurji Saklatvala, of the CPGB, spoke in the open session. S.V. Ghate of the WPP was elected an assistant secretary of the AITUC though there were very few WPP members present. This session marked the small entry of militant leftists into the trade union movement. Though, in retrospect, their entry has been seen as an organised intervention already 58

Ibid. See Prem Sagar Gupta. A Short History of AITUC (1920–1947), AITUC Publication, September 1980. 60 Adhikari, Documents, IIIB, p. 144. 59

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under the leadership of Communists functioning through the WPP,61 the contemporary account in the Inprecor made it quite clear that, despite a number of significant resolutions, the majority of the trade union leaders were regarded as ‘moderate’ and ‘class collaborationist’.62 Apparently, the passage of radical resolutions owed greatly to the large support they received from left nationalists who were not members of the WPP.63 Actually, it was later at the Kanpur session of the AITUC in November 1927 that for ‘the first time the members of the WPP working in trade unions were meeting on an all-India plane … .’64 It was not the selfconsciously organised group of WPP members but a coalition of leftists ranging from the trade unionists belonging to the WPP to non-WPP left trade union leaders and other left nationalists who comprised the left-wing at this session. The report on this session written by Dange, a member of the WPP and the National Congress, spoke of ‘an informal gathering’ of a variety of persons, who agreed that the policy and outlook of the AITUC ‘needed a change’ and who met to ‘lay out a plan for future work in order to foster real trade union activity amongst the workers’. Dange mentions many persons who ‘worked with us in the session’ to get left-wing resolutions passed, and, obviously, they were not members of the WPP as among the office bearers elected at this session only D.R. Thengdi and S.A. Dange belonged to the WPP of Bombay. On the other hand, out of the fourteen persons who composed the ‘council of action to organise a mass movement of workers and peasants’, only three were members of the WPP.65 One major aspect of the progress registered by the workers movement between 1927 and 1929 was the solidarity of this left-bloc which was reflected in the AITUC in two ways: (a) whereas the 1927 Kanpur Congress commanded the affiliation of 59 unions with a membership of only 1,25,000, the Nagpur session in 1929 represented 1,89,436 members, the largest number of organised workers so far in the records of the AITUC. A similar organisational advance in the position of the TUC

61

Ibid., p. 44 Inprecor, Vol. 7, No. 34, 9 June 1927. 63 See Prem Sagar Gupta, op. cit., pp. 88–94 for the resolutions passed. 64 Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIB, p. 97. 65 Ibid., pp. 95–96, 278. These three were Philip Spratt, Abdul Majid and D.R. Thengdi. 62

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was evidenced by the percentage of affiliated unions paying affiliation fees; whereas in 1926 it was only 29.9 per cent, in 1927 it rose to 50.8 per cent and in 1928 to 74.4 per cent.66 Thus, the work of elementary unionisation of the workers had achieved a tremendous leap forward as a result of cohesive action by the left-wing in the AITUC. More importantly, the left-bloc’s main concern with associating the trade union movement closely with the anti-imperialist struggle tended to rapidly reduce the constitutional trade unionists to a marginal position. This was apparent in the radical ideological trend that was reflected in the resolutions passed by the AITUC. The bloc established between the militant left-nationalists and the leftist trade union leaders created a large majority in the AITUC which stood for an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist line. The chasm between the left-bloc and the constitutionalists in the AITUC widened drastically by the time the Nagpur session was held in 1929. The clash at this session—over the membership figures of the GIP and GKU which were challenged by the Joshi group and which threatened to prevent their affiliation to the AITUC—saw the left victorious with 350 out of 938 votes, with the President, Jawaharlal Nehru’s casting vote carrying the day.67 The significance of this defeat for the constitutionalists lay in the fact that the various shades of nationalist left and militant trade unionists voted together. Karnik has interpreted the voting pattern in terms of a Communist conspiracy to acquire dominance in the AITUC and makes out as if the left nationalists were innocent pawns in the game.68 This, of course, is a complete falsification of the fact that a general radicalisation had occurred in the AITUC and that different shades of the left shared a common ground. It should also not be forgotten that the bulk of left-wing trade union leaders belonging to the WPP had been removed from the scene and were in Meerut jail at the time of the Nagpur session. The left functioning at this session consisted of an extremely small group of WPP members while the rest were left Congressmen.

66 S.D. Punnekar and S. Madhuri, Trade Union Leadership in India, p. 362, New Delhi, 1967. Also see V.B. Karnik. Strikes in India, Bombay, 1967. 67 Prem Sagar Gupta, op. cit., pp. 148–49. 68 V.B. Karnik, N.M. Joshi. Also see Sukomal Sen, Working Class of India, Calcutta, 1977, p. 301. Also see Prem Sagar Gupta, op. cit., pp. 148–57.

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As a consequence of these developments in the AITUC, the Joshiled constitutional wing decided to break off from the AITUC on the issue of majority adopted radical resolutions. It was this situation which led to N.M. Joshi declaring that the split was not on the question of ‘whether the minority should not accept the decisions adopted by the majority. The differences were fundamental … . In short, the split was an inevitable outcome of the conflict of principles diametrically opposed to each other.’69 The ‘principle’ involved was clearly politico-ideological: basing the working class movement on a left and anti-imperialist platform had acquired a majority in the AITUC. This came into conflict with the principle of constitutional trade unionism which cooperated with the colonial government. And it was in this sense that Jawaharlal Nehru also regarded the split as ‘inevitable … at this stage’.70 Nonetheless, Nehru issued a public statement, as AITUC President, criticising the constitutionalists for causing the split and for the tactics they had adopted. Nehru regretted the division on the ground that the workers movement could ill-afford disunity when it was just emerging as an organised force. After all, despite the fact that the majority of delegates to the Nagpur session were left-oriented, the seceders ( Joshi, Giri, Chamanlall, etc.) represented 30 unions with a membership of over 95,000. The AITUC was thus left with 21 unions with a membership of about 94,000. The movement had, thus, split into almost two equal halves.71 The constitutional trade unionists led by N.M. Joshi were not prepared to give in to the majority’s demand for boycott of the Simon and Whitely Commissions and in fact actively participated in the latter’s Enquiry. This division emphasised the fact that the constitutionalists were a powerful current within the ranks of the organised working class, and were capable of initiative and counter-offensive against the left nationalist bloc in the workers movement. Eventually, in 1938, when the trade union movement was reunited the leftists were compelled to work out a ‘unity formula’ and N.M. Joshi again became the General Secretary of the AITUC in 1940.72 69 V.B. Karnik, N.M. Joshi: Servant of India, quotes Joshi’s article in the Social Service Quarterly of January 1930. 70 Prem Sagar Gupta, op. cit., p. 169. Also see Sukomal Sen, op. cit., pp. 306–7. 71 Sukomal Sen, op. cit., and V.B. Karnik, N.M. Joshi. 72 V.B. Karnik. N.M. Joshi and Sukomal Sen, op. cit.

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The basic point that emerges from this account of the developments in the AITUC is that what was then experienced (and is seen by historians of the trade union movement even today) as the powerful growth of left-wing influence in it, despite the depletion of half its strength after the secession, was due to the solidarity and unity forged and preserved between all shades of left nationalism. This unity was to be destroyed at the Calcutta session of the AITUC in 1931, when the ‘Bolshevik’ Communists seceded from the AITUC to form the Red Trade Union Congress. It is true that they were a small minority; their meeting, held separately, were attended by only 12 newly formed unions which had not so far received recognition by the AITUC. While criticising the ‘sectarian political understanding’ of the Communists at this time, Sukomal Sen puts the blame on the CI because ‘most of the policy decisions of this period were made directly by the Communist International. Even the efforts to reunite the GKU in Bombay were criticised by the CI press as opportunism.’73 However, the small group of Communists fostered dissensions within the ranks of the left, with their mutual antagonisms with the Royists. The latter had, meanwhile, taken over the leadership of almost all the unions formerly led by the WPP and advocated a return to the cooperation and joint action of the left-bloc in the AITUC. The intransigence of the Bolshevik group weakened the workers movement immensely. The organised workers were now rent into three fragments, owing loyalty to three central trade union organisations. Worst of all, this generated in the workers, a tendency to stay away from all three organisations. A number of new unions henceforth made no attempt to affilate to any central body.74 In terms of politics the breaking away of the constitutionalists, who were in any case in favour of delinking the workers movement from any political involvement, was less disastrous than the break up of the left-bloc at Calcutta, 1931. Given the process of general radicalisation in the National Congress, the existence of left solidarity in the AITUC was a precondition for marginalising constitutionalism in trade union politics. This was realised in the midthirties when the ‘United Front’ in working class organisations was to some extent based upon this principle and was partially responsible for the NFTU accepting the ‘unity formula’ in 1938. 73 74

Sukomal Sen, op. cit., pp. 310, 314. Prem Sagar Gupta, op. cit., pp. 191–95.

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With the disintegration of the left-bloc the categories of ‘revolutionaries’ and ‘national reformists’ came into play. For the Communists, now, the main division in the trade unions was between ‘revolutionaries’ who stood for militant uncompromising struggle against capitalism and ‘reformists’ who were interested in negotiations and compromises. Viewed from the point of view of ‘reform versus revolution’ the perspective of left nationalists, who advocated anti-imperialist unity, appeared to Communists such as Bradley as ‘propagating the idea of suppression of the differences between the revolutionary and the reformist elements’.75 No distinction was made between those who sought cooperation with the government and those who advocated cooperation or adjustment of interests between classes against the government. After 1929, left nationalist trade unionists and the constitutionalist leaders were lumped together in the same category as ‘reformists’ and hence disruptors. Those who advocated a more gradual and less intransigent left perspective within the anti-imperialist front were now seen as identical to the constitutionalists—they were ‘both reformists and there is little or no difference between them’. Consequently, it was ‘most important that every effort should be made to expose and isolate the reformists of all shades from the open agents of imperialism, such as N.M. Joshi, Shiva Rao and Chamanlall, to the sham “left” national reformists such as Jumnadas Mehta, Bose and Ruikar’.76 It was in this background that on 14 February 1930, a general strike was declared on the GIP Railway. Bradley was the Vice-President of the GIP Railwaymen’s Union at the time. The strike failed; it was declared that the workers had been ‘betrayed by the reformists’; and on 16 April the strike was called off unconditionally. However, instead of getting ‘exposed’ and alienated from the workers due to this ‘betrayal’, the constitutionalists not only remained entrenched within the GIP union but also wiped out the divided forces of the left-bloc.77 The Communists now set out on the path of absolute isolation. Consequently, those who were to be the catalyst for revolutionising the working class movement actually helped in its depoliticisation. The antagonism within the ranks of the left could produce no other result. 75

B.F. Bradley, Trade Unionism in India, London, 1932, pp. 34, 37 (Photocopy, ACHI, JNU). This book was a part of the statement made by Bradley during the MCC. 76 Ibid., pp. 40, 64. 77 Ibid., pp. 36–37; Prem Sagar Gupta, op. cit.; Sukomal Sen, op. cit.

110 A History of the Indian Communists DISSOLUTION OF THE WPPs

As we have seen, the WPPs initially worked with the aim of forging a left-bloc inside the National Congress and mobilising the workers in the anti-imperialist national front. However, in the ‘given theory’, which the would-be Communists absorbed over a period of time, certain anomalies constantly contradicted their practice. This facilitated their finally succumbing to the superiority of a ‘Marxism’ they could not counter. The appreciation and acceptance of the Gandhian methods of struggle and the revolutionary aspects of the Congress mobilisation of the masses, which opened the doors to the active participation of workers and peasants were present in the early ideas of Dange and Singaravelu. Gradually, these gave way to an internalisation of certain ‘basic premises’ in which they were educated by M.N. Roy and the CI. These were: (a) Those who led or claimed to lead an all class national movement were essentially bourgeois and served the interests of capitalism. This, logically, led to the second premise (b) that ‘transforming’ the National Congress meant replacing the bourgeois leadership with revolutionary Communist leadership and ‘capturing’ the Congress organisation. The basic assumption which facilitated the theory of ‘capturing’ the Congress movement was, of course, premise (c) that a hiatus existed between the leaders and the led—the interests of the masses were essentially ‘economic’ while ‘national interests’ were a mere ‘ideology’ i.e., false consciousness, which was utilised by the leaders to deceive them. Consequently, came the premise (d ) that only the working class led by the Communist Party could ‘lead the national revolution to success’.

The slow absorption of these premises was responsible for the fact that some members of the WPPs sometimes put forward programmes and expressed certain attitudes that contradicted their general framework. For instance, Muzaffar Ahmed sometimes argued that the Indian National Congress was ‘the party of capitalists, merchants and zamindars’ and ‘not of the Indian masses’. What the Communists were doing inside such a party was anybody’s guess! Quoting Motilal Nehru’s statement that the National Congress was not ‘a socialist or Communist Party but an all-class national movement’, Muzaffar Ahmed remarked that it was ridiculous to suggest that ‘the Congress was to be the organisation collectively of zamindars, capitalists, peasants, workers and the lower middle class … . Not even a lunatic would ever believe that the interests of peasants and

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zamindars, of capitalists and workers are identical.’ Class interests were interpreted purely as ‘economic interests’, while the conception of an anti-imperialist all national united front was totally absent. ‘The interests of peasants and workers mean destruction for zamindars and capitalists. One belongs to the class of the exploited, the other to that of the exploiters. These two classes can never work together consciously. A conflict is inevitable … .’78 Obviously, as far as Ahmed was concerned Roy’s pedagogic efforts had not been in vain. As he had continuously hammered home the point in countless letters to India, ‘The imperious law of economic determinism is equally applicable everywhere. India is not immune from it.’79 The ‘law of economic determinism’ was a specific type of ‘Marxism’ that spelt out what constituted ‘class interest’ and its representation by political parties: … Indian society is split into various social classes—the proletariat, peasants, city’petty-bourgeoisie, landlord feudal groups—above which the British are ruling. Every class has its own special interests and has a different attitude towards imperialism. Each one of the existing political parties expresses the interests of a definite class. The leaders of the National Congress represent the interests of the possessing classes. And only in the position and interests of these classes can the policy of the various leaders be explained.80

Thus, wrote Muzaffar Ahmed, because of its class character the National Congress would not ‘sever its connection with imperialism’, and therefore ‘the workers will take the lead in this national struggle … (under) the leadership of the new party’. Significantly, this was written in 1927, when the WPPs were growing rapidly as a result of the left-bloc. And all those who are familiar with M.N. Roy’s writings from 1920–30 can see that this piece by Muzaffar Ahmed was based on them. By late 1928 the notion of the ‘betrayal of the Indian bourgeoisie’ had already been accepted by the Communists-to-be in India. The close relationship established between them and the CPGB now reinforced the pedagogic efforts of M.N. Roy. They began reflecting the changed 78 For example, see Muzaffar Ahmed’s article titled ‘The New Party’ in Ganavani, 14 April 1927, Meerut Record, p. 576, and Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIB, pp. 176–80. 79 Adhikari, Documents, Vol. II, p. 175. 80 Inprecor, Vol. 13, N. 52, 1 December 1933, p. 1181.

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formulations of the international Communist movement in their own documents. For instance, Clemens Dutt wrote in March 1928 of the ‘vacillating Indian bourgeoisie’ whose ‘object is an adjustment of relations with British imperialism’, and ‘who were more and more attracted towards union with British imperialism on the basis of the latter’s policy of economic concessions’.81 The WPP documents, included in ‘A Call to Action’, reflected this position: ‘… the essence of the policy of the bourgeoisie … is compromise with imperialism … drifts away from nationalism into a working agreement with imperialism’.82 However, the thesis of ‘bourgeois betrayal’ was not allowed to dissolve the WPPs nor break the left-bloc functioning in the National Congress. Now the bourgeoisie was seen as having left the Congress-led national movement which had become ‘a purely petty-bourgeois movement’.83 As Clemens Dutt of the CPGB and Philip Spratt in India argued ‘the National Congress was the anti-imperialist organisation of the middle classes’.84 The betrayal of the revolution in China by the Chinese bourgeoisie would not be replayed in India, they concluded, because ‘The Indian bourgeoisie, as a class, has already left the scene’. ‘This is a great advantage for the Indian movement.’ The Indian National Congress, therefore, could not be seen as the political organisation of the bourgeoisie, for the groups or parties (for example, the Liberal Party, primarily an industrialists’ party) that represented the interests of the bourgeoisie was extremely weak and ‘mainly the product of successive splits from the Congress’.85 The bourgeoisie’s disenchantment with the National Congress was seen to be the logical result of ‘the nationalist movement … undergoing a rapid change’ over the year 1927–28: ‘The nationalist movement is being rapidly transformed from a movement of the wealthy and educated to a mass movement of the workers, peasantry, and lower middle classes.’86 81

‘The Indian Struggle for Independence’, by Clemens Dutt, Labour Monthly, March, 1928. Adhikari, Documents, op. cit., Vol. IIIC, pp. 174–82. 82 These documents were adopted at the Bhatpara Conference of the WPP (Bengal) held from 31 March to 1 April 1928. See Adhikari, Documents, op. cit., Vol. IIIC, pp. 252, 258. 83 HDP, File 190/1928. ‘Role of the Workers and Peasants Party’ by Philip Spratt. 84 HDP, File 18/VII/1928, K. W. XII, Philip Spratt’s Draft of the proposed statement on ‘Labour and Swaraj’. Emphasis added. 85 ‘A Call to Action’, Documents of the WPP, Meerut Record, p. 523. Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIC, pp. 251–52. 86 Ibid., p. 269.

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As a consequence, ‘the right-wing elements, who are outside the Congress, naturally consider this … dangerous … and are alarmed’. Thus we find Sir H.S. Gour, a loyalist moderate, declaring: ‘The mentality of the Congress has been the mentality of the proletariat. It is run by those who advocate the doctrine of Bolshevism.’87 The National Congress could, obviously, not be regarded as an organisation of the bourgeoisie, for ‘the membership of the Congress has for long been predominantly petty bourgeois.’ And, increasingly, this ‘petty-bourgeois left-wing and the mass following of the Congress moved to the left … .’ This ‘lower strata of the petty-bourgeoisie are the unformed “left” of the Congress and constitute part of the ground from which the workers and peasants parties are now rising’.88 These momentous developments in the life of the national movement and in the National Congress were interpreted, however, as the process of ‘active … class differentiation’ which split the leaders from the led, as an antagonistic confrontation between the revolutionary masses and the bourgeois leadership. For, despite its intense and widespread radicalisation, ‘the Indian National Congress remains in the hands of the Indian bourgeoisie and cannot provide the leadership for a revolutionary mass struggle’. Without a new leadership ‘challenging the present bourgeois leadership’, the Indian national movement could not advance to a new stage. The leadership of the National Congress was identified with the bourgeoisie because of two basic reasons. First, the strategy of the National Congress’s leadership was seen as being the same as that of the bourgeoisie as a class and, therefore, representing its class interests. The policy … of the Indian bourgeoisie, has been one of pressing for concessions and a modus vivendi … . Swaraj and independence agitation have been a means of bringing pressure to bear and no more. The method of struggle against imperialism adopted by the leadership of the National Congress which both demanded and accepted ‘concessions’ from the government, and the fact that it withdrew the non-cooperation movement, were also seen as a strategy that was evolved to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie.89

87

Ibid., p. 179. Clemens Dutt, ‘The Indian Struggle for Independence’. Ibid., p. 253. ‘A Call to Action’; p. 178, Clemens Dutt, note 97; p. 254, ‘A Call to Action’. 89 Ibid., p. 179, Clemens Dutt; pp. 252–53, ‘A Call to Action’. 88

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Second, the ‘Gandhian ideology’ of passive resistance and non-violent action, though seen to be of petty-bourgeois origin, was viewed as being primarily and objectively in the service of the bourgeoisie. The pettybourgeoisie, which was predominant in the Congress, was ‘dominated by personal loyalty to Gandhi’ and was ‘typically peasant in its mentality’.90 Consequently, the leadership of the bourgeoisie over the National Congress was preserved through the ideology of Gandhism. Thus, for the Communists, the fruition of the ongoing process of radicalisation and transformation in the National Congress, that is, its evolution in the ‘correct’ direction hinged upon, (a) the ouster of the ‘Gandhian leadership’—which included the left-wing leaders, such as Nehru, who refused to split the Congress organisation, and (b) the replacement of the ‘Gandhian’ strategy of peaceful, non-violent mass action which was seen as essentially bourgeois and, therefore, counter revolutionary. It neither sought to alienate the constitutionalist trends in politics completely, nor, on principle, rejected any concessions or negotiations that the imperialist government offered to initiate.91 Having started from a different political perspective and practice altogether, the Communists, by the beginning of 1929, had, thus, adopted the framework of M.N. Roy. His conception, of Communists working within WPPs as part of the National Congress with the final objective of capturing its organisation and throwing out its established leadership, was now also advanced by the Comintern.92 By November 1928, Spratt was busy expounding the theory of ‘two parallel national movements’ à la Roy. Speaking at a youth meeting, he emphasised that the ‘real national movement’ was the people’s revolutionary movement which was distinct from the sham bourgeois movement. As against ‘the movement of the masses which is developing … from below’, the leadership of the National Congress espoused a nationalism whose ‘motive force was a conflict of interests between the two ruling classes—the ruling class of the outsiders and the ruling class people who are natives of the country … the root of their conflict is between the bourgeoise in India and the bourgeoisie in Britain’, and when faced by ‘a serious mass movement’ it was bound to

90

Ibid., p. 253. For a discussion of the strategy and methods followed by the Gandhi-led National Congress, see Chapters 1, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11. 92 This is discussed in Chapters 12, 13 and 14. 91

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go over to imperialism.93 This logic, naturally heralded the break-up of the left-bloc within the National Congress. Thus, the theoretical basis for the dissolution of the WPPs was present in the positions gradually adopted over time by the Communists much before they received the ECCI letter specifically directing them to disband these organisations. The WPPs that had become the organisational form and basis of forging a left-bloc in the Indian National Movement could, logically, exist only so long as the ‘right’ and ‘left’ were seen as contending for mass influence within the same organisation, i.e., the National Congress. Once this organisation was characterised as a petty-bourgeois organisation under bourgeois leadership the struggle for leadership of the petty-bourgeois masses dissolved the very rationale of the left-bloc. The polarisation of its ranks into Communists or non-Communists became imperative—for the latter would ‘objectively’ serve the bourgeoisie, regardless of all their radicalism and socialist ideology. To join the Communists became the crucial test for those who stood for a left and socialist orientation to the national movement. Thus, the leadership of the Communist Party over the Congress masses became an essential condition for leading the national movement to success. It was within this theoretical framework that ‘Jawaharlal Nehru’s Independence League … (and) many sections of the Youth Movement were now perceived as a manoeuvre of the bourgeoisie who wanted to utilise the mass movement so far as it can, for the purpose of crushing it.’ Simultaneously, Spratt acknowledged that there was no need ‘at present … to specify whether it (mass movement) is going to be a socialist movement or any other movement’. Said Spratt, ‘I quite agree with Pt. Jawaharlal that it is not proper to put forward socialist slogans or the suggestion that we should establish a Socialist State.’94 Wherein lay the difference, then, between the various constituents of the left-bloc? The crux of the matter was that Jawahar Lal ‘although he declares himself a socialist’ did not separate himself from the existing leadership of the National Congress and establish an alternative leadership, thus capturing 93

MCC Speeches 1928, p. 1915. Speech by Philip Spratt at the Youngmens’ Conference at Malda (Bengal) on 7 November 1928 (NMML). These three aspects of the Royist framework (a) the existence of two parallel national movements, (b) the movement of the masses from below and (c) conflict of interests between the ruling classes—‘elites’—have been faithfully reproduced and recycled by Ranajit Guha. See Peasant Insurgency. 94 Ibid.

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the organisation for the left. The concept of an alternative leadership, it was implicit, could only be that of the Communists. The struggle now was to font; the only ‘genuine’ party, the Communist Party, which alone could lead the national liberation movement in the first place, and move ultimately towards revolutionary socialism. This demanded an attack on all other left and socialist tendencies which did not accept certain ‘fixed’ conceptions of what denoted a ‘correct programme’ and ‘revolutionary method’. Clemens Dutt acknowledged that the Independence League of Nehru put forward ‘a most far-reaching … economic programme … (with) a decidedly socialist tinge’. This socialist tinge of the Independence League ‘largely owes its adoption to the active propaganda of Jawaharlal Nehru, who has taken every opportunity of stressing that socialism must be one of the aims of the movement’.95 But the correct programme for any ‘Marxist’ had to be the ‘abolition of capitalism’ and ‘liquidation of landlordism’, as both M.N. Roy and Clemens Dutt painstakingly explained. Clemens Dutt attacked the notion that landlordism could be abolished without the slogans of ‘complete expropriation’ and ‘no compensation’, and criticised the League’s proposal for ‘abolition of landlordism by indemnification’.96 Simultaneously, he castigated the other demands put forward by the League, such as the nationalisation of key industries and transport services, the eight hour day, unemployment benefit and other labour legislation for the industrial workers, which were all the minimum demands of the Communists in fact, as ‘champion(ing) Indian capitalist interests’ because ‘arbitration between labour and capital’ and not the overthrow of capitalism was suggested. The basic principle to be emphasised was that despite the fact that ‘national independence should be made the central point of the programme … . The antagonism of class interests … could not be bridged’. Anything short of the correct programme was rank social democracy of the European variety, while the correct programme was seen as something based on rigid ‘Marxist’ principles conceived ‘scientifically’.97 The absorption of these ‘principles’ by the end of 1928 was manifest in the political resolution prepared in advance by the WPP for its annual 95

Labour Monthly, January 1929. Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIC, pp. 705–6. Meerut Record, p. 1348 (37), Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIC, pp. 698–99, 705–7. 97 Ibid. 96

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conference. It characterised the programme advanced by the Independence for India League as ‘calculated to bring Indian industrialism into line with modern bourgeois practice, including its methods of keeping the workers under control’.98 That the programme was advanced under conditions of colonial rule and not against an independent bourgeois national state was not mentioned by any of its critics. Philip Spratt described the League as a sham organisation ‘which purports to work for socialism … and pretends to be an organisation for the preparation of masses’ while, in reality, it was a ‘fascist manoeuvre’ ‘… trying to establish the same kind of dictatorship which has been established in China, in Italy, and in so many other countries’.99 Obviously, the only proof of the left-wing being ‘genuinely socialist’ and not a ‘pretence’ to deceive the masses was to join the Communists, who alone could represent the working class and be considered a revolutionary organisation. ‘Whether you will espouse the cause from below or from above—in fact whether you will join with the masses (read Communists) or the Independence League … .’100 The choice was, clearly, between two paradigms and solidarity between them was precluded thereby. This was clearly spelt out by a now fully converted Dange: A certain section of the radical intellectuals in India … argue … Lenin was really the greatest leader of the proletariat. But then you cannot accept his principles and methods in other countries. Russia had her own ‘peculiarities’. We cannot learn lessons of the Russian Revolution because our country’s development is peculiar … as Jawaharlal and Subhash Bose would like to put it … the application (of Leninism) as suggested by the Comintern is wrong.101

The Communists’ position was further concretised in the attitude that was now expressed towards the powerful youth movement that was sweeping the country. The careful nurturing of youth cadre that was earlier advocated in WPP documents was sharply contradicted by the end of 1928: ‘A movement has to be based on differences of class and

98

Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIC, pp. 717–18. MCC Speeches 1928, p. 1915. Speech by Philip Spratt at Youngmens Conference, 7 November 1928. 100 Ibid. 101 Dange, Defence Statement, Part I, p. 246 (NMML). 99

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the function of the youth movement is therefore simply an auxiliary one … not having any original function’.102 By 1929, the antagonism of the Communists against left-wing Congressmen was openly expressed. The Bengal PCC invited the WPP (Bengal) to a joint meeting to discuss their mutual relationship. Radha Raman Mitra, a member of the National Congress and Bengal PCC, the main speaker on behalf of the WPP, declared that the WPP members had come to the meeting ‘at the summons of the Congress and to declare our views’. He sought to emphasise the point that the WPP differed from the left Congressmen and the Yough Leagues in their conception of anti-imperialist unity for, though they had assembled together, ‘all are not of the same object’. As far as we—the workers—think, our object cannot be achieved as long as the capitalists possess their power … . Subhash Babu says that if anybody can attain the independence of India it is the labour and peasants party. He wants to take work from the labourers by patting their backs and applauding their bravery … . (But) the benefit goes to the capitalist who pats their back and sends them to the battlefield. Therefore, we say that we understand your tactics and we won’t be deceived … . we will understand that until the labourer gets complete possession of it (complete independence) no good shall be done to them.103

The notion of correct, i.e., revolutionary methods, also divided the Communists from others working for socialism: ‘the hypocritical character’ of the League, declared the WPP, was ‘most definitely revealed by the fact that throughout there is not a word mentioned of the method by which the aims are to be achieved’.104 As Clemens Dutt clarified, the ‘essentially non-revolutionary character of the movement’ led by the League was clearly revealed by its Delhi political conference where it maintained that ‘the methods of seizing power were (to be) based not on 102

The document on ‘Youth’ which was placed before the conference of the WPP (Bombay) and adopted. (Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIC, pp. 269–71) can be compared to Spratts speeches at the end of 1928. See MCC Speeches 1928, p. 1916. Speech by Philip Spratt to Youngmens Conference. 8 November 1928. 103 MCC Speeches, Bengal, 1928, p. 2469 (T). Speech at meeting held jointly by WPP, Congress and others, at the Maidan, Calcutta, 19 January 1929. 104 Adhikari. Documents, Vol. IIIC. p. 718, Political Resolution, submitted to the First All India Workers and Peasants Conference, December 1928.

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violence but on peaceful organisation of workers, peasants and others’.105 Likewise, M.N. Roy lashed out at the League for its ignorance of the fact that the conquest of political power required revolutionary methods of fight, in other words, the violent overthrow of the state.106 He ridiculed the suggestion made by Jawaharlal Nehru that peaceful pressure of the organised workers, peasants and others to fully exploit the possibilities of non-cooperation ought to be the basis of struggle and that ‘the main methods of developing sanctions and of seizing power … (be) based not on violence, but peaceful organisation.’ These were sheer ‘reformist methods’, said Roy, in the best tradition of ‘the Social Democratic parties in Europe, which propose to capture power by peaceful means (and) have today become instruments of the capitalist and imperialist state’.107 Roy, of course, had consistently maintained since 1920: ‘We are of the opinion that non-violent revolution is an impossibility.’ This ‘principle’ was now put forward by the WPP. As Philip Spratt put it: … we who are Communists need not apologise, we need not be careful to disguise the brutal, bloodthirsty side of our proposals. We say these things are inevitable … . We shall also not disguise the fact that in the course of attainment of our aim … . We shall have to indulge in brutal, dictatorical methods. We shall have to indulge in Civil Wars … . If we are to overthrow the system of society, we can perfectly afford to go through a period of cruelty, oppression and misery in order to attain it.108

Once the conceptions of ‘correct methods’ and the ‘correct programme’ were accepted, the education of the Indian Communist was complete. The soil had been prepared for accepting the necessary formation of a Communist Party committed to an armed uprising, which could grow only on the basis of an attack on other left organisations: ‘Pettybourgeois movements such as that exemplified by the Independence League, start out with a great display of revolutionary fervour but quickly

105

Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIC, p. 706. ‘The Indian League for Independence’ by Clemens Dutt (Labour Monthly, January 1929). 106 Ibid., pp. 690–96. ‘Independence of India League of Bengal’ by M.N. Roy [Meerut Record, p. 1348 (37)]. 107 Ibid. 108 MCC Speeches 1928, p. 1916, 8 November 1928 (NMML).

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reveal themselves as tied to the interests of the national bourgeoisie …’109 The League, the organic representative of the National Congress’ left-wing orientation, was, according to the Communists themselves, an organisation of the radical petty-bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, it had to be smashed if the petty-bourgeois masses were to be won over to the leadership of Communists. The ECCI’s message to the WPP Conference in December 1928 emphasised that the experience of all revolutions showed that the peasantry, i.e., the rural petty-bourgeoisie, had to be led by the proletariat and its vanguard, the Communist Party.110 The acceptance of this position and hence the basis for the disintegration of the left-bloc and the disbanding of the WPPs already had a theoretical basis in the form of ‘Marxist premises’ internalised by the Communists by 1929. The strong opposition to dissolving the WPPs at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern as well as the resistance to this dissolution shown by the Communist movement in India were not expressed at the level of a polemic in ‘Marxian theory’. The empirical observation made by Clemens Dutt of the CPGB that the WPPs had played an invaluable role by ‘forming a … route through which the Communists (were) finding their way to the masses’, was not backed by any theoretical justification against the ‘Marxist’ attack on two class parties as, essentially, petty-bourgeois organisations which negated the formation of a proletarian party, a Communist Party.111 The emphasis was, mainly, laid on the WPPs having successfully played a historically concrete role (and in its success as actual leaders of mass activity both economic and political).112 There was no question of the CPGB not acknowledging the supreme necessity of forming a Communist Party. As Page Arnot complained, what was most harmful was that the Indian Communists actually regarded the WPPs as Communist parties ‘in an Indian shape’ and did not see the need for ‘the creation of a separate C.P.’113 What the British comrades insisted upon was the value of retaining the WPPs 109 “Indian League for Independence’ by Clemens Dutt. Adhikari. Documents, Vol. IIIC, p. 708. 110 ‘To the All-India Conference of Workers and Peasants Parties’, from the Executive Committee of the Communist International. Adhikari. Documents, Vol. IIIC, p. 761. 111 Inprecor, Vol. 8, No, 76, August 1928, p. 1425, Vol. 9, No. 16, April 1929, p. 318. 112 Communist International, Vol. 5, No. 14, 15 July 1928, pp. 327–30. ‘India’s Part in World Revolution’, by Clemens Dutt. 113 Inprecor, Vol. 8, 8 November 1928, p. 1473.

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as intermediate organisations under the control of the C.P., which was a repetition of the familiar Royist concept of dual organisations advanced by Roy and the CI earlier.114 The Indian delegate to the Sixth Congress, Saumyendranath Tagore, likewise, pointed to the success achieved by the WPPs through which ‘a certain crystallisation of the left forces’ had occurred in the country, and which had become the vehicle of a ‘revolutionary orientation in the Indian national movement … . and today all the left elements in the country are orientating towards these organisations’.115 In fact, he went further, and questioned the adequacy of the CI’s organisational conceptions: The petty-bourgeois elements in the country who have been proletarianised are sometimes more proletarian than the proletariat itself. The petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, the urban petty-bourgeoisie, have to play a role in the revolutionary movement in the colonies. What should be the organisational expression of the anti-imperialist front of petty-bourgeois elements? In the organisational form of WPPs we have been able to take over some trade unions from reformist leadership, to organise peasant unions, now we are told to liquidate all these WPPs. This is pure and simple professorial dogmatism against which Lenin warned us so many times.116

Nevertheless, the accusation that the CI was indulging in ‘dogmatism’ could not generate a different Marxian discourse, justifying the WPPs in the specific conditions of colonial India. The arguments pleading for the retention of the WPP organisations were not articulated on the basis of different theoretical premises which could demolish the CI’s critique of their practice. No attempt to reformulate the premises of received Marxism in the light of their own experience was made. In replying to the complaint by Lozovsky that the WPPs, appeared to be continuing well into 1929, Schubin replied that it was true … that the liquidation of the WPPs in India is taking place slower than it should … . It is a characteristic trait of worker and peasant parties that when they cease to live they refuse to die, cling to the

114

Jane Degras, The Communist International, London, 1971. Vol. 3, p. 20. Inprecor, Vol. 8, No. 76, October 1928, p. 1390. 116 Ibid. 115

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shell of their existence, hindering the development of sound forms of organisation … .117

What was there in the concrete form of such organisations which conflicted theoretically with ‘sound forms of organisation’? The answer was given in the ECCI itself: One of the reasons for the persistence of the WPPs, and of the possibility of a repetition, is that this form of organisation in the colonies does solve, … the task of Communists in the colonies, namely, the organisation of the workers and peasants alliance. Perhaps, the apparent ease of realising this alliance in the shape of workers and peasants parties constitutes the chief inducement for forming them, and the difficulty of liquidating them.118

Obviously, the solution dictated by concrete conditions in the colonies was to be sacrificed at the altar of ‘given’ theoretical conceptions on organisation. This was the fundamental reason for the Indian Communists having taken so long to be convinced of the necessity of forming and concentrating upon the Communist Party. Only a small portion of the Indian comrades perceived that the organisation of the workers and peasants bloc, based on the community of interests … in the fight against imperialism and against feudal reaction does not abolish the class differences between the workers and the peasantry, and that it does not envisage their amalgamation or formless merging into a single party.119

Consequently, despite the absorption of ‘given’ theory, and its influence over many of the formulations made by the All India WPP Conference at Calcutta, the Indian Communists did not fully accept the necessity of liquidating the WPPs. The notes made by participants in the executive meeting of the ‘CPI’ at Calcutta in December 1928, recorded that ‘possibilities of an open party were to be tested’ and the Theses of the Sixth Congress of the CI were ‘to be taken as a basis for work and 117 Inprecor, Vol. 9. No. 51. 17 September 1929, p. 1097. Tenth Plenum of the ECCI. Thirteenth Session. 118 Ibid. Emphasis added. 119 Inprecor, Vol. 9, No. 17, 15 April, 1929, p. 348. ‘Report on the Conference of the Workers and Peasants Parties in India’ by P. Schubin.

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changed according to the conditions in India’.120 Earlier, a section of the Bengal WPP, led by Dharani Goswami and Gopen Chakravarty, resisted the move to dissociate their activities from those of the National Congress. They held that the aim of the WPP being ‘development of militant labour and peasant movements for the improvement of the economic and political position of the masses and for the attainment of complete independence’, the WPP movement ‘must cooperate with the general political movement’, that is, ‘the National Congress’.121 They also emphasised that ‘the administration of Hindustan is in the hands of foreign capitalists. The foreign government is endeavouring to amass fortunes in this country … it should be the aim of this party to neutralise the effect of this foreign capitalist oppression by establishing self-government.’ And for this task the left-bloc in the National Congress was essential.122 The problem, in substance and in the last instance, was the inability of the Communists in India and their CPGB comrades to theorise their experience in a new Marxist discourse. The nature of the ‘Marxism’ that prevailed at the time in the international Communist movement was an obstacle to understanding the new and complex reality of the national movement. Their commitment to making an intervention in the real movement did not turn out to be larger than their commitment to a ‘given theory’. Confronted with an attack by the Comintern, the repository of the one and indivisible ‘genuine’ Marxism of their time, they did not, perhaps could not, establish an organic relationship between concrete historical conditions and the type of intervention which could transform them. Only by doing so could they have evolved a ‘revolutionary theory’. Abstract, universalised generalisations on the nature of organisations and the relation between different classes and parties were upheld as inflexible ‘Marxist’ principles for all times and all places. The ‘laws’ derived from past historical experience were held above the complex reality unfolding in the colonial countries. The blade of ‘given theory’, was poised aloft as something predetermined and separate from the new historical

120 Meerut Record, p. 1295, Photocopy, ACHI, JNU. Also, Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIC, p. 785. 121 Meerut Record, Notice issued in regard to the proposed WPP Conference. Photocopy, ACHI, JNU. Also see HDP, File 18/VII, KW XI (Secret), 1928. 122 Ibid.

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experiences and forms of struggle of the people. Thus effectively severing the dialectic between historical developments and production of fresh knowledge which could be approximated in theory. The surrender of many, initially original, minds to the infallibility of ‘Marxism–Leninism’ as it came to be enshrined in the Comintern is well illustrated in the instance of Dange. In his first work, Gandhi versus Lenin, where he had rejected ‘Bolshevism’ as applicable to India and opted for the ‘Gandhian’ methods and form of struggle, he had described ‘Bolshevism’ to be, unlike ‘other sciences’, a ‘science’ which did not ‘submit itself to changes due to criticism. A true Marxian or Bolshevik will admit of no change in the body of the theories of his faith. Bolshevism has come to acquire a force of religion, and all that a religion demands.’123 It was only logical, therefore, that by 1931, having declared himself to be a believer of this faith, he should accept the compulsion to conform to the following description of ‘Marxism’: If you accept Marxism thoroughly you have to logically accept Leninism, the Party and the Comintern. We stand for complete application of Leninism to the Indian conditions, unequivocal adherence to Marxism–Leninism by everyone who is a Communist and further, complete adherence to the Comintern. If you deny the Comintern, you then naturally deny the Party … . Attempts of psuedo-Socialists to separate Marxism from Leninism and contrapose them is an attempt to introduce opportunism into the Indian Communist movement. For us there can be no such thing as an independent attitude … . For us Moscow is all truth … .124

123

Dange, Gandhi versus Lenin, p. 24. MCC, Dange, Defence Statement, VoL III, Part I, pp. 253–54 (NMML). Also in Meerut Record. Photocopy, ACHI, JNU, pp. 2595–96. 124

Chapter 5

The Colonial State, Indian Capitalists and the Left State, Nation and Class

The Non-cooperation Movement had destroyed the moral authority and prestige—the hegemony—of the colonial state to an extent. Correspondingly, it bestowed on the National Congress greater confidence and determination to mobilise the masses. During the years 1926–29, a left bloc seeking to organise workers and peasants and inspired by socialism had evolved. Functioning as a left-wing consolidation inside the Congress it expressed discontent and criticism of the existing nationalist politics and leadership. It symbolised in fact the emergence of a contending hegemony of the left within the anti-imperialist movement. It had not only begun to transform the political space already occupied by the Congress movement but was now poised for a big leap forward. The prospects of this contending hegemony were clearly foreseen by the bureaucracy and it began to devise a twofold strategy—political as well as coercive—to nip this emerging threat in the bud. From now began the triangular struggle for hegemony between the colonial state, the left and the right-wing of the national movement. According to British calculations the scattered Communist groups in themselves were not a particularly serious threat in India around 1928. Policy discussions at various levels, intelligence reports and reviews, and the confidential correspondence which debated legislation like the Public

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Safety Bill, the Trades Disputes Act, and the Meerut Conspiracy Case (MCC) all reveal a well-reasoned attitude viewing Communist activity in its proper proportions.1 On the subject of the Public Safety Bill, a confidential letter from the Viceroy to the Secretary of State in London and to the various Governors of Provinces acknowledged as late as the end of 1928 that: … it would be very difficult to make out that a real emergency existed, for although I am fully alive to the background of Communism which lies behind a good many of the strikes in India today, I do not think that in the state of affairs which exists at present it can be said that legislation (against Communists) was essential.2

As we have seen, the ‘Communist Party of India’ consisted of a handful of individuals in 1927, confirmed by S.V. Ghate, the joint secretary of the Party when he wrote to Saklatvala the British Communist M.P. saying, ‘Our own party, which came into existence a year ago under the most adverse conditions, has not been able to make any headway with its programme.’3 Why then was the ‘Communist menace’ built up so assiduously by the Government of India and the bogey of Moscow blown out of all proportion? With great fanfare the Meerut Conspiracy Case (MCC) was launched, the longest and most expensive of trials in Asia. The answer was deceptively simple: to drive a wedge between the ‘Nationalists’ and the, ‘Communists’. The thrust of all the arguments advanced by the public prosecutor in the case was single-minded: to prove that the Communists were against the national movement.4 Why was it so necessary to convince people of this? Most people in the country learnt of the small Communist groups, their activities and organisation of working class struggles, only after the Meerut Conspiracy Case was splashed in the Press. It was only when day after day, the long and tedious trial filled the news columns, did hundreds of readers register the ideology that was being defended from the dock at Meerut. 1 Files of the Home Department (Pol.) (HDP), Fortnightly Reports (FR) from different provinces and intelligence reports submitted by CID. 2 Letter dated 28 September 1928 in Communism in India, Unpublished Documents 1925–1934 (ed), Subodh Roy. Calcutta, 1972. 3 Adhikari. Documents, Vol. IIIB, Introduction, p. 3. 4 Meerut Conspiracy Case, Prosecution’s Speech, NMML.

The Colonial State, Indian Capitalists and the Left 127

The warning issued in letters by two provincial officers more than a year before the case was launched, turned out to be prophetic. A letter from the Chief Commissioner, NWF Province, to the Government of India, advised: ‘A Communist worker should be quietly removed from the scene of his activities and should be deprived of any opportunity of posing in the glare of court proceedings as a popular martyr or a champion against oppression.’ A similar warning was given by the Chief Commissioner, Delhi, in a letter to the Government of India, Home Department: ‘Introduction of any new measure will give rise to as much misrepresentation as the Rowlatt Bill ten years ago. It will in fact be an advertisement for Communism which all true Communists will welcome.’5 Innumerable Communists have remarked on how the MCC provided them with the best opportunity of propagating their views through long and endless arguments and full press coverage—a thing they had never imagined possible till then.6 And yet, there was another side to the public drama of which the British government was only too apprehensively aware: The Indian Communists have been concentrating on rousing a spirit of discontent and lawlessness in the industrial labour with marked success. However, outside the industrial centres, particularly of Bombay and Calcutta, Communists wherever active show little to distinguish them from a wing of the political extremist party. There is a tendency for the political and the Communist revolutionaries to join hands, and Jawaharlal Nehru, an extreme Nationalist who is at the same time genuinely attracted by some of the Communist doctrines stands about at the meeting point. This situation contains serious potentialities of danger.7

The combined strength of the radical, left-oriented youth movement led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash Bose, the massive strike wave and mobilisation of labour whose cooperation and the expansion

5

HDP, Files 18/XVI/28; 18/XI/28. See Lester Hutchinson, Conspiracy at Meerut, 1935, Sohan Singh Josh, The Great Attack, 1979; Muzaffar Ahmed, My Self and the Communist Party of India, 1970; and Adhikari, Documents. 7 HDP, File 179/1929. Confidential letter from the Bombay Government to Home Department. 6

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of the workers’ and peasants’ parties with whom revolutionary groups had been formed in the All-India National Congress and the All-India Trade Union Congress—all seemed to coalesce into a spectre that spelt doom to the continuance of British rule. As David Petrie, the Director of Intelligence, reported, what seemed the most dangerous development was this cooperation between Communists and left-Congressmen. As he emphasised: ‘There are many clear evidences of a growing recognition on the part of the Indian National Congress, of the need to organise the labouring masses in order to associate them with the general movement for the country’s political advancement … .’8 As a potential rallying ground for all radical and militant anti-imperialist elements, the Workers’ and Peasants’ parties were extremely promising. This is not to say that there was no ideological confusion among its Communist members. For, as we have seen, some WPP documents showed an exclusive preoccupation with the question of working-class leadership in the national revolution instead of the broad vision of a left and anti-imperialist hegemonic body. However, with further development and strengthening, the WPPs need not necessarily have retained their theoretically confused character. Here we mean something different from the ‘confusion’ the WPPs were accused of in the Vlth Congress of the Third International, when they were criticised for being two-class parties. It must not be forgotten that, in practice, the would-be Communists in the WPPs were evolving along with many other shades of left and radical groups, and no one could have predicted their future role. A secret report (weekly) of the Intelligence Department spoke of ‘the growing prestige of the WPP in the Bombay Provincial Congress Committee’.9 It was a fact that the programmes of the various WPPs spoke of cooperation with other political trends in the Congress, furthering the goal of anti-imperialism and meeting the minimum demands of the working-class and peasantry. As a result, their influence among the people in general and the National Congress in particular increased. Some of the WPP members were elected to the AICC and provincial Congress Committees and within these bodies became effective spokesmen for the struggle towards complete independence. Within the Congress, the Communists allied with radical sections like the independents and Republican 8 Petrie, Communism in India. David Petrie was Director, Intelligence Bureau, Government of India. 9 F. 190/1928, Home Dept. Pol.

The Colonial State, Indian Capitalists and the Left 129

groups. The chief and immediate task of the WPP was stated to be ‘to gather together all fighting, progressive forces, from all sections’. That is, their appeal was directed towards all persons ‘who are concerned with obtaining national freedom, establishing democracy and emancipating the people generally from poverty, ignorance and social backwardness’.10 That this attitude of the WPP led to meaningful results is apparent from the fact that during the joint struggle waged by the Congress left and Communists against the Simon Commission, the manifesto issued by the WPP was widely discussed and welcomed. The WPP on its part withdrew its own draft of the independence resolution passed in the BPCC and supported Jawaharlal Nehru’s.11 This worried the Intelligence Bureau not a little, as Williamson remarked: The development of the CPI was in itself less serious than the formation of WPPs which were expressly designed to throw dust in the eyes of the thinking public … .12 The ‘bloc’ formed by this cooperation was very significant as the Independence for India League, led by Nehru and Bose, and the Youth Leagues embraced a wider section of the Congress left than did the WPPs. It is extremely important to see the success of the WPPs primarily within the national conjuncture in which for the first time the various shades of the left came together. Their unified impact became a great portent for future joint struggles. For it was precisely during the years from 1926–29 that the process towards a new path within the national movement had led to the emergence of a mass-oriented left group, whose criticism of the existing politics and leadership was widely expressed at various levels inside the Congress. As the Intelligence Bureau reported, the youth section of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party received full support from Jawaharlal Nehru in a speech delivered at the Bombay Presidency Youth Conference at Poona in 1928: ‘Such words from a prominent Congressman were unfortunately, typical of the general attitude of Congress workers of the day.’13 H.G. Haig of the Home Department promptly sounded a strong note of warning: ‘These facts (above) require most careful attention … as symptomatic 10 Documents of the WPP, compiled by K. Damodaran, ACHI, JNU. (See chapter 7 in this Volume.) 11 Ibid. 12 Williamson, India and Communism, NAI. H. Williamson was the Director, Intelligence Bureau, Government of India, 1927–35. 13 Ibid.

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of a movement which Jawaharlal Nehru in particular is endeavouring by every means to foster. It is a dangerous movement, implacably hostile and if not dealt with in its earlier stages would grow rapidly and in a year or two become really formidable.’14 What was this ‘formidable’ movement that the British government fearfully anticipated and was at great pains to circumvent? ‘The Home Department believe that there is an appreciable risk, if unwise action is taken, of forcing the Communist and the Nationalist movements into an alliance, which would strengthen both and at any rate very much strengthen the agitation against government.’15 At a meeting of the sub-committee of the Executive Council which the Viceroy attended, the Home Member J. Cerar emphasised that 1928 had ‘changed the situation completely with the emergence of an active party preaching revolution and independence and preparing itself to take steps in support of its programme’.16 The ‘nationalist revolutionary menace’ had grown to serious proportions. Some of the leaders, ‘notably Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash Bose appeared to be embarking on active organisation in support of their revolutionary views’.17 ‘Vigorous steps were already being taken to start youth movements and volunteer organisations. I think there is no doubt that Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash Bose do not mean to stop at words but are preparing for action.’18 ‘So far as the country is generally concerned, this movement is at the moment a greater danger than Communism’.19 However, what made the situation explosive was the fact that: ‘The two movements are united in their hostility to government and their desire to overthrow government by force. The resulting situation has to be regarded as a whole.’20 The method of analysis employed by the British policy-makers was revealing and significant: they analytically separated the currents of militant nationalism and communism but they did so appreciating that in reality there was no Chinese wall between them. And they emphasised the essential historical link between the two movements, that is, anti-imperialism. The combination of these forces was compelling the 14

HDP, File 179/29. Ibid. 16 HDP, File 18/XVI/28. 17 Ibid. 18 HDP, File 179/29. 19 Ibid. 20 HDP, File 18/XVI/28. 15

The Colonial State, Indian Capitalists and the Left 131

government to recognise that ‘Independence is ceasing to be an academic idea. It is being converted into a definite policy.’21 The emergence of an embryonic left-wing within the frame of the national movement was observed with acute insight by the British authorities and its future growth anticipated. It was this bloc which was pinpointed as the greatest danger and attention was focussed upon meeting it as best as possible in various ways. First of all the government squarely faced up to the fact that there was and would be a natural alliance of all militant anti-imperialist forces. ‘It is no use pretending that Communists will not connect up with the ideal of national independence.’22 ‘In the Punjab, for instance, the Communist leaders are following the policy of linking themselves with all anti-Government movements.’23 The anticipated cumulative effect of a gathering together of various shades of the left-wing finally appeared clearly to the government during the 44th session of the Indian National Congress held at Lahore: The address of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru when considered in connection with the proceedings of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha and the Kirti-Kisan Conferences, leaves little room for doubt that under his guidance the Congress programme will assume very definite socialistic and communistic shape. Its appeal in future is to be to the masses rather than to the middle classes, and it is by mass revolutionary movement that the independence is ultimately to be achieved … . Apart from the fact that Civil Disobedience must result in active disorder, the Congress as a body has approached many stages nearer to the revolutionary and youth movements. The identity of interests and personnel which for some months has characterised their activities in the Punjab, is for the rest of India merely a matter of a few months.24

While in Bengal, ‘the two movements are at present by no means distinct: on the contrary … their propaganda are (sic) common, and each movement reinforces the other’. A large concentration of English-owned industries in Bengal gave added impetus to their activities. ‘Strikes and labour disputes are eagerly seized by Communists and nationalists alike’ 21

Ibid. Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 HDP, File 18/12/1929 (Emphasis added). 22

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and the employers and government were lumped together as foreign enemies.25 The general atmosphere in any case was highly disturbing. ‘Extremist nationalist papers regularly publish pro-Communist articles.’ What was worse, ‘without considering or realising the consequences, political leaders generally agree on showing sympathy with Communists’, so much so that even ‘jurors are affected by such popular sympathy’ and in cases instituted against the Communists the jury was likely to acquit them.26 The case (MCC) if tried either in Calcutta or Bombay would be tried before a jury, and, however good the case, there could be no reasonable assurance that jury would convict. If the defence took a political line the chance would be that jury would acquit … . The influences acquired by Communists at both these places make it most undesirable … that a case of this magnitude should be tried in either Calcutta or Bombay.

In Bombay, ‘Experience has shown that, juries are disinclined to convict in cases of a “political nature” at the High Court level. The educated public who form the juries have shown from their past behaviour, and the comments of the Indian Press on M.N. Roy’s letter, on the Public Safety Bill etc. make it certain that conviction would be difficult.’ In Calcutta, … cases against labour leaders were heard by the Sessions Judge and in each case released them on bail within two days; and even after three months judgement has not been delivered. The impression created is obvious, that the leaders enjoy complete immunity … . Chief Justice made enquries and found that the Sessions Judge had forty-five such cases on his file, in which he had heard arguments but had not delivered judgement.27

Moreover, the separate fields of activity of the Communists and Congressmen now showed a tendency to run close together on similar lines. 25 HDP, File 18/XVI/1928. letter from Government of Bengal, dated 19 December 1928 to Home. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. Telegram from Viceroy to Secretary of State; Demi-official letter from Sir George Rainy, Secretary, Department of Commerce to H.G. Haig, Secretary, Home Department, dated 12 January 1929, File 18/XVI/28.

The Colonial State, Indian Capitalists and the Left 133

The Communists concentrate mainly on industrial labour, which offers them their easiest field of work. The rural masses present a different problem, on which it seems the nationalists are now more likely to concentrate. This is natural, as the land revenue system affords a good opportunity for organising rural mass movements directed against Government, and even when these movements may injure the rural ‘capitalists’ or zamindars, this is a class which the extreme nationalists do not mind injuring.28

A detailed note on the ‘Communists and the Congress’ was prepared by the Home Secretary H.G. Haig and the Home Member Cerar. This was an excellent exercise in strategic anticipation of the bloc of classes with which the government expected to contend. As they traced the course of likely developments, the bloc was perceived as an incipient alliance of the working class and the peasantry led by radical nationalists and Communists working within the Congress unitedly. Logically, therefore, the government viewed the formation of a workers and peasants type of party with great alarm and found it more dangerous than the formation of the CPI. The Government made shrewd calculations and totted up the possibilities. The Indian Communists … have been concentrating on, and that with considerable success, in rousing a spirit of discontent and lawlessness … by working on the industrial masses. Little, if any, progress has been made in stirring up the agricultural masses. However at the same time, there has been a very marked movement among the extreme nationalists to organise these masses.

The tendency for these two movements to draw close together was seen as a very real threat. For, apart from ‘general Communistic propaganda that goes on in a few unimportant Communist newspapers’, the propagation of Communist ideas though ‘in a less definite form is found in more important extreme nationalist newspapers’ such as the Forward and the Amrita Bazar Patrika. The Home Department declared, on the basis of intense research into the world Communist movement that its minions 28

HDP, File 18/XVI/28. Note on Communists and Congress, prepared by Home Department and signed by H.G. Haig and Cerar.

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were conducting, ‘it is doubtful whether there are many convinced theoretical Communists in India or that their number is likely to increase largely’. The few that existed were ‘perhaps not very clear about their ultimate objects (that is the overthrow of government and establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat) as foreign Communists propagate’. But that was poor consolation for the government, for it helped to create a broad coalition of left-wing elements without sharp ideological differences splintering its project. Creating differences between the nationalist and Communist ranks was the task the government set itself out to perform. ‘It is important to recognise the similarities and differences between the two movements, for in aiming at the overthrow of government they are closely linked.’29 Cleverly and subtly the differences were delineated and lessons from them were drawn. The overthrow of the government—the goal of the anti-imperialist struggle—was seen by the extreme nationalists ‘as the immediate object’. On the other hand, the anti-imperialism of the Communists could be made to appear as suspect, for, ‘Communists are stirring up movements which are directly aimed against employers and only indirectly against government.’ The long-term goals of the two movements, the Nationalist and Communist, must be demonstrated as deeply antagonistic. The League Against Imperialism which Jawaharlal Nehru was promoting as a common platform for the two movements was ‘an organisation that government wants to discredit’.30 As H.G. Haig impressed upon the DIB: ‘What is most important for us is to show that whatever the Communists do for national independence has the ultimate object of overthrowing not only Government but the existing social and economic order also.’31 The government ‘attach special importance to the development of propaganda to make clear to the public the real aims of the Communists’, and, ‘it is imperative that the real aims of Communist organisations should be explained to the public’. Of course, they were aware that government propaganda ‘is often ostensibly suspect among the more politically-minded classes’. But this should not deter them. It was crucial ‘to enlist the support of the classes whom the Communist programme threatens’.32 The realisation 29

Ibid. Ibid. 31 HDP, File 190/1928. Haig to DIB. 32 HDP, File 18/XVI/28. Note by Home Dept. 30

The Colonial State, Indian Capitalists and the Left 135

by the trading and land-owning classes and by the substantial peasant proprietor that ‘Communist success means their expropriation would be by far the most effective method of combating the Communists’. These classes largely followed the Indian National Congress and if the process of identification of the Communists with the national movement proceeded apace the game would be lost. Immediate efforts had to be made to break this merging of interests. Already, it was acknowledged, ‘such propaganda may be difficult and would be met with some suspicion’. Nevertheless, an attempt to enlighten and warn the propertied classes had to be made ‘before it was too late’; before, that is, it was too late to prevent the Communists and nationalists confronting the government as a solid phalanx of anti-imperialists. An essential step towards achieving a break between them was to paint the workers’ and peasants’ parties in the lurid colours of ‘Russian Conspiracy’, and as an instrument of interests which were as ‘foreign’ as the English. This would help in casting grave doubts on the motives of the WPP in cooperating so closely with the Congress movement. The WPPs had adopted and begun propagating ‘the dangerous movement … to stir up the peasantry and refuse all payment of rent’, which had first occurred ‘in the days of non-cooperation’.33 This movement was yet only a small beginning but would not remain so for long. The Communists in Bombay had already sent many of the striking millworkers back to their villages advising them ‘to “raise the red flag” there by non-payment of rent and taxes’. This appropriation of the Gandhian programme by the WPPs and their intention to pursue it militantly in the rural countryside threatened to make them indistinguishable from the Congress, even if the latter had not launched any movement itself. The example of the agitation in Bardoli was heavily underlined. ‘Bardoli has naturally excited far greater public interest than the Communists for past many months as there was an open and direct challenge from Bardoli to the authority of the government, which had to be met.’ The Communists, who had been leading mill-strikes in Bombay city ‘very successfully’ for the last four months, were linking up with the Bardoli movement showing ‘definite political sympathies’.

33 HDP, File 18/XVI/28. Report from Bihar and Orissa; Demi-official letter from Commissioner of Police, Bombay, to Home, 7 August 1928.

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References are made to the brave struggles of the Bardoli peasantry against the oppression of a foreign Capitalistic Government … . Government is accused of being a foreign government serving alien interests. This endeavour to curry favour with political parties in the country is because they realise that it is dangerous at present for Communism to fight a lone battle out here and to antagonise even those who are antagonistic to government.

These were portentous signs, for the Communists’ solidarity with the Bardoli movement ‘had its result in the visit of members of the Congress Youth League to a meeting of the strikers’. This naturally appeared as a most disheartening development in the eyes of the government. It was recalled that ‘at the time of the arrival of the Simon Commission the boycotters and “hartalists” had to rely almost entirely on the Communists for propaganda in the city’.34 Now, with the emergence and rapid growth of the youth movement a potential cadre for the left was perceived. The Youth Leagues were completely under the inspiration and guidance of the left-radicals in the Congress. And these ‘extremist leaders’ would be the natural allies of the Communists, for their aim was ‘to arouse antigovernment feeling in every way possible, organise volunteers, exploit grievances in any part of the country on the lines of Bardoli … .’35 Consequently, this alliance between the Communists and ‘extremist nationalists’ would mature into a most dangerous bloc ranged against the government. It was advised that Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash Bose needed to be prosecuted ‘in the immediate present’ to begin with, as ‘these two men are undoubtedly leaders of the new movement and their prosecution would disorganise the movement and warn others’. What was ‘new’ in this movement was the ‘natural link’ between Communists and left nationalists. Despite the speculation that perhaps ‘Mr Gandhi and Pandit Motilal Nehru are not anxious to see these developments,’ they nevertheless, viewed the situation as disquieting. After all, the ‘Congress have decided unanimously to revive non-violent non-cooperation unless the Nehru Report was accepted—and as everyone knows this condition cannot be fulfilled’. Consequently, ‘in view of the commitments they have made, they are powerless to stop them (i.e., the extremist leaders),

34 35

Ibid. HDP, File 179/29. Report by Intelligence Department.

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and the more extreme leaders have the field completely open, to prepare to launch a big mass movement’.36 Interestingly, the government at no stage subscribed to the ‘control restraint’ theory, by which the Gandhian leadership supposedly prevented the mass movement from becoming militant. (See our discussion in Chapters 9 and 10.) The method of analysis employed by the government needs to be emphasised. The developments within the mass movement were seen as an objective ‘logic’ manifesting itself consistently, irrespective of the subjective wishes of particular leaders or individuals. This situation could become further complicated; for the ‘danger exists of other prominent leaders who don’t fully agree with the Communists (i.e., Nehru and Bose and their following), yet would feel incumbent on them to challenge government’ if the latter were prosecuted.37 Nehru of course needed to be taken very seriously; of this the Home Department was convinced. Haig commented on a speech of Nehru’s as being ‘much more than a plea for socialism’. It goes further than ordinary Communist propaganda. Attacks on Imperialism are really attacks on British rule in India … . The speech in my opinion is an endeavour to rouse the audience to an approval of revolution as the only way in which changes in government can be secured.38

The only conclusion one can draw from Haig’s assessment was that Nehru was performing the Communists’ task—i.e., vigorous anti-imperialism combined with the necessity of socialism—with far greater success than ‘ordinary Communist propaganda’ was achieving. The Bombay Government categorically described the speech as a Communist one. ‘The speech bears a lot of resemblance to Spratt’s pamphlet on India and China.’ And they added, ruefully, that the ‘abuse of the Imperialism of the British and Indian governments … is a commonplace among the opponents of government today’.39 As far as the activities of the ‘extreme nationalists’ and the Communists were concerned, the constant overlapping between the two constituted 36

Ibid. Ibid. 38 HDP, File 18/XVI/1928, Demi-official letter from Government of Bombay to Home. 39 Ibid. 37

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the essence of the left bloc that had emerged within the Congress. Given such a situation and an overall atmosphere of radicalism in the country, a Bardoli-type agitation could become the rule rather than the exception. In view of the Bardoli dispute and the aims of the WPP it is necessary to make agrarian agitation an offence. The program of the WPP here is No Rent-No Taxes. Naturally this attracts the peasants and I emphasise the fact that the great bulk of the Indian-army is drawn from the smaller landholding classes.40

If this were put together with the fact that the ‘extremist nationalists would not hesitate at injuring the interests of big rural landed interests’ and with Nehru’s proclivity towards socialism, it would result in a highly threatening combination. Hence the official efforts towards breaking the bloc. Meanwhile, as long as mutual sympathy and cooperation prevailed among the ranks of the left bloc, ‘we should be very cautious in taking action against Communism which may arouse any general sympathy for Communists among the nationalists’. Any action taken against the Communists should not appear arbitrary. ‘Special measures of the kind suggested by some local governments suffer from the general disadvantage that attaches to special legislation of an arbitrary character.’41 What appeared to be the line of difference between the ‘nationalist extremists’ and Communists at this time was very thin. The best bet was to widen this ‘line’ to separate them from other elements of the left-bloc and launch a massive conspiracy case. ‘Our aim should be to do nothing which will produce an artificial union between the two movements, which if left to themselves, may tend to diverge.’ To ensure such a divergence, a necessary step was ‘to enlist the support of the classes whom the Communist programme threatens’.42 In this context the government expected that the capitalist class would become the government’s natural ally. But the government’s attitude towards this class was a complex one. On the one hand, they noted that ‘the apprehensions of the Bombay industrialists and merchants were exaggerated’; there was ‘a considerable amount of exaggeration in the accounts given by leading members of the commercial 40

HDP, File 18/XVI/28. Report from Bihar and Orissa. HDP, File 18/XVI/28. Note on Communists and Congress, prepared by Home Department. 42 Ibid. 41

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world … .’ The picture was ‘somewhat overcoloured … .’43 In other words the ‘purely Communist threat’ to their mills and industries was not considered to be serious. Besides, the Home Secretary, Haig thought that conditions of labour were generally so bad that it was necessary to separate ‘genuine grievances’ from other ‘political’ demands, and to try and neutralise the working class to the extent possible. ‘We have to be careful, in legislating against Communists, not to be thrown into a definitely anti-labour attitude. I cannot help feeling that the Bombay official and commercial opinion pays too little attention to the question.’44 A cautious attitude might also help in weaning away the radical nonCommunist element that was supporting Communist labour leaders, for ‘the propaganda of Communists is partly designed for the consumption of the lower strata of the intelligentsia and partly for workers’. Moreover, The traditional attitude of government in an industrial dispute is that of an impartial arbiter, an attitude which is of great value …. in the long run Communists would get strengthened if government were believed to have adopted a line definitely hostile to the claims of labour … the moral authority of government would be damaged.45

On the other hand, ‘the business community whether European or Indian, is united in the demand that government should … maintain law and order and restore confidence’. Therefore, the ‘government cannot relieve itself from responsibility’, for it was most important not to alienate the capitalists. ‘If we were weak in our attitude … it would at once encourage the labour agitators and would confuse and infuriate the business and other communities on whom government must always rely for the maintenance of law and order in question.’46 This reliance was expressed and conveyed to the capitalist class. Sir George Rainy, Secretary, Department of Commerce, wrote to H.G. Haig, Secretary, Home Department, that he met the Governor on 43 HDP, File 18/XVI/1928. Demi-official letter from Sir George Rainy, Secretary, Department of Commerce, to H.G. Haig, Secretary, Home Department, dated 12 January 1929. 44 Ibid. H.G. Haig, Secretary, Home Department. 45 Ibid. Letter from Government of Bengal to Home Department, dated 9 December 1928; Letter from Secretary to Government of India, Home Department to Secretary. Government of Bombay, 5 September 1928. 46 Ibid.

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his visit to Bombay and meetings of ‘prominent members of the Bombay Millowners’ Association’ were held, which Rainy and the Governor attended, to discuss the political situation and the government’s attitude. The list of members who attended the meeting included J.B. Petit (President of Millowners’ Association), Sir Victor Sassoon, Mr Stones, Mr Geddis, Mr Saklatvala, Mr Mody, Mr Sawyer and Sir Dinshaw Wacha. He also interviewed the Chairman of the Port Trust, Chairman of Bombay Chambers of Commerce, Chairman of Associated Chambers of Commerce, Sir Purshottamdas Thakurdas and Sir P. Ginwala, President of the Tariff Board, and others.47 But, the biggest obstacle to a really dependable relationship was the ‘vacillating’ support that the capitalist class gave to the government. The tone of annoyance was apparent: … so long as their own interests are not directly affected, (they) view with scepticism the apprehensions of government regarding political dangers. As soon, however, as the conflagration seems to be spreading and their own immediate interests seem to be in danger they become violently alarmed and press for immediate action of the most stringent kind … . They are illogical also in calling out for remedies to be applied in order to protect them, which they would stoutly resist if they were proposed for the protection of other people … . Government cannot relieve itself from responsibility though it can show that those who call for the internment of labour leaders would bitterly resent the internment of political leaders preaching an even more dangerous gospel.48

Their argument was clear: no compact alliance between the government and capitalists was possible till the latter were willing to categorically disown the Congress mass movement. But even if the break between the capitalists and the Congress was not imminent, the Government was willing to let it rest. For, if the left-bloc proceeded towards militant confrontation with the government, the capitalist class was not likely to go along with it. Such a development was more likely to result in a split within Congress ranks. This prospect was worth waiting for. Meanwhile, a more successful attempt could be to deflect working class militancy into reformist channels.

47

Ibid., Sir George Rainy to H.G. Haig, Secretary, Home Department. 12 January 1929. 48 Ibid.

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Apart from lessening the chances of militant trade unionism by making some concessions to labour, it was felt that these would also lead to a lessening of the support of radical nationalists to the Communists. The Home Member Mr Prentice thinks that the Youth Movement in Bengal is not purely Communist in origin, and he is doubtful of the extent of the Communist taint even in the WPP. In his opinion, the removal of ‘genuine grievances’ among the labouring class would reduce the present support the WPP movement was obtaining.49

The WPP movement was clearly seen by the government as the left-bloc (and not as, an organisation of a few Communists)—a ‘movement’ with all the possibilities of wide-ranging future growth. Thus it is important to discuss legislation like the Trades Disputes Act and the Public Safety Bill in the context of the Government’s attempt to defuse the explosive combination of various classes in society—the working class being organised by the WPPs and the middle class following of the ‘extremist nationalists’ seeking to organise the peasantry. On the other hand, the response of other classes, chiefly, the capitalist class, to legislation that was aimed at the workers and Communists specifically, affords an insight into a major aspect of anti-imperialist politics. Apparently, it was very difficult for conservative and right-wing sections within the Congress, including the capitalists, to separate elements of the left into ‘Communist’ and ‘Congress’ given their broad unity to a radical anti-imperialist platform; and they could oppose the Communist left only by opposing left Congressmen as well. THE PUBLIC SAFETY BILL—1928

This Bill, companion to other repressive measures imposed by the government—the Trades Disputes Bill and the Meerut Conspiracy Case—was brought to the Central Assembly in 1928. Intended as a method of insulating India from the outside world, it was specifically aimed at the British Communists present in India and provided for their extradition. The Bill was defeated in the Legislative Assembly but was later made into law through an ordinance issued by the Viceroy. 49 Ibid. Report on Communists and labour unrest in Bombay and Bengal by F. Isemonger of the Home Department, dated 29 August 1928.

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According to the government, Purshottamdas Thakurdas had ‘given a lame explanation’ for voting against the Public Safety Bill by maintaining that the government already had enough emergency powers to deal with Communists.50 However, if one follows the debate that took place regarding the Bill in the Legislative Assembly, it becomes easy to see how the attack on ‘Communists’ had become identified with the general attack against anti-imperialist radicalism in the country. The Bill, proclaimed as a specifically anti-Communist measure, was staunchly opposed by Congressmen and others, including the Liberals, in the Assembly, and the opposition was completely permeated with anti-imperialism. This note was struck right from the start of the debate. Placing the Bill before the house, the Home Member Cerar stressed the need to obtain support of every citizen to share the responsibility of the government in looking after people in the interests of good government. And a member called out loudly and succintly: ‘After Swaraj’.51 Motilal Nehru charged the government with manufacturing news to carry out anti-Russian and anti-Soviet propaganda. He put up a strong defence of the USSR, whether it concerned religion, education, culture or the building up of a new society. His speech was embellished with lengthy extracts from the Report of the British Labour Party on conditions in the USSR.52 Amar Nath Dutt, member from Burdwan, quoted at length from Jawaharlal’s statement on M.N. Roy’s letter where he had declared the motives of the government to be more than suspect.53 Jawaharlal Nehru had declared: ‘The Trades Disputes Bill and the socalled anti-Bolshevik measure coming at about the same time make it clear that the publication (of the letter by M.N. Roy) was designed to frighten a number of people and then facilitate the passing of the measure.’ It was apparent, concluded Dutt, that ‘whenever repressive legislation is to be brought about … they (the government) discovers bomb factories and arms and ammunition’.54 The Bill was part of government repression, said the Liberal leader, M.R. Jaykar. As he put it sarcastically, the government was unwilling to 50

HDP, File 1/1928, F.R. November 1928. Debates on the Public Safety Bill, Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. III, No. 5, p. 451 (NMML). 52 Ibid., Vol. III. No. 9 (NMML), pp. 773–75. 53 Ibid., Vol. III, No. 69. 54 Ibid., Vol. III, No. 5, p. 454. 51

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use the regulation laws as they were very crude. In the Public Safety Bill they hoped to acquire an instrument that was very sharp but noiseless.55 K.C. Neogy, member from Dacca, raised the question that if, as the government claimed, the Bill was only meant for foreign Communists who were responsible, along with the Indian Communists, for whatever they had said or done, then why was it intended to send the foreign Communists out of the country, provide them free passages and not put them on trial thus leaving Indian Communists to face the music? This was a case of Imperial Preference! Jahangir K. Munshi, member from Burma, repeated the question: if the Bill was not to be applied to Indians, then they had the right to know what government intended for the Indian Communists in their country.56 But the real heart of the matter emerged in the speech of Jumnadas Mehta, member from Bombay, who spelt out the concrete problem as it confronted the government. Hitting out hard at the imperialist government, he called the Bill ‘the latest bureaucratic effrontery to crush liberty of thought and speech’. Extra-legal powers, regulations and ordinances had been used so far in such a barbarous manner that it was preposterous that the government came forward demanding further powers. His own position on the ‘Bolshevik threat’ was put across very clearly. Quoting from M.N. Roy’s letter on ‘revolutionary struggle for freedom’, he claimed there was nothing seditious in it. Gandhi himself had repeatedly declared that every patriotic Indian must be the sworn enemy of the government and that ‘we must overthrow the government’. Apart from a difference in methods, said Jumnadas Mehta, there was nothing in Roy’s letter ‘that teaches us what we don’t already know’. The Communists ‘are prepared to work with us in the task of achieving India’s independence and we welcome that’.57 It was primarily this meeting of two currents in the wide stream of anti-imperialism, that was the target of all the measures the government was planning to push through, as we have argued earlier. The ‘failure’ of 55

Ibid., No. 9, pp. 783–87. Ibid., Vol. III, No. 10, pp. 790, 809. Neogy was a journalist from Dacca and on the panel of Chairmen, Legislative Assembly, since 1924. 57 Ibid., p. 822. Jumnadas Mehta was an MLA from 1923–29. He was President of Accountants’ Staff Union, GIP Railway Union, All India Railwaymen’s Federation and Bombay Tramway Men’s Union. President, Bombay PCC 1929–30, Member AICC 1921–31. Working Committee Member–1926. 56

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the radical Congressmen to distinguish between the Communists and their own political aspirations within the gamut of the anti-imperialist struggle was the crux of the problem, from the government point of view. Jumnadas Mehta, quoted from a document enumerating the main points of the programme of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Parties, and declared: ‘Except for slight differences ninety-eight per cent of the programme has been accepted by the Congress and other progressive parties long ago … .’ Waving the WPP document, Mehta asked the Assembly: ‘I ask every member of this House whether practically the whole programme as laid down in this book is not the programme of the Indian National Congress for many years?’58 This nationalist tendency to deny the ‘separate’ identities of the Congress and the Communists could hardly be welcomed by the government which was trying its best to heighten the differences between them, as was clear from the way the Home Member, Cerar, held forth on what Communist activities would mean to the security of the Indian social edifice.59 Nonetheless, this tendency of different shades of radical political and social currents to fade into each other was a reality. As Lala Lajpat Rai pointed out, the Bill ‘was really directed against Indians themselves, nationalists as well as labourites … all those who want economic advance and political freedom. What can prevent government from bringing Jawaharlal and Srinivas Iyengar, who advocate complese independence, under the Bill?’60 Naturally, therefore, an attempt had to be made to frighten the unwitting nationalists. ‘Nationalism’, announced Home Member, Cerar, was not ‘an easy question to handle for convinced Communists’. But, because their activities were directed not only against ‘organised society’ but also against British power, ‘it is natural that they should endeavour to find allies, in the national movement’. However, he continued, this seeming identity of interests between nationalists and Communists was an ‘apparent fraud’—the attack by Moscow was specially directed upon India—and ‘in this matter the interests of India and of Britain are identical’,61 The options available to the nationalists were clear—either they should join the imperialist government in suppressing the ‘Communists’ or join the latter to overthrow the government. Either of the two choices 58

Ibid., pp. 825–26. Ibid., Vol. III, No. 5, pp. 449–50. 60 Ibid., Vol. III, No. 7, pp. 638–39. 61 Ibid., No. 5, p. 448. 59

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could be a ‘natural alliance’ depending on whether anti-imperialism or anti-communism was the nationalists’ priority. And in this context the nationalists emerged as solidly anti-imperialist. Even more, they put up by and large a heartening defence of socialists and socialism. As a matter of fact the staunch defence of socialism and the Communists and the determined opposition to the Bill by the nationalists came to the European capitalists as a surprise. As Victor Sassoon (the representative of the Bombay Millowners’ Association, Indian Commerce), acknowledged towards the end of the debate, ‘The reception of this Bill by the Benches opposite has, I confess, somewhat confused me, but it may be that this is largely due to the number of political crosscurrents that are now in existence’.62 Sassoon was even more surprised at Purshottamdas Thakurdas’s reaction to the former’s claim that their views were identical. Sassoon had asserted in the Assembly that there would be no difference in his own and Purshottamdas’ position that a wider Bill which would also cover Indian Communists was needed. Thakurdas promptly protested: Will the Honourable Member leave me to express my own views? That there would be no differences between them was not a fact but only Sassoon’s ‘hope’, Thakurdas clarified.63 Sassoon went on to quote Trotsky on how ‘Lenin loved all the strategems of war, the throwing of sand in the enemy’s eyes and getting the better of him by ruse’. Flashing his ‘expertise’ on the subject, he claimed to have detailed knowledge of Communist documents and gave the example of how Communists wormed their way into power in trade unions and then denounced the old leaders as ‘running dogs of the imperialists and bourgeoisie’.64 His speech implied throughout that the nationalists in India were innocent and naive apart from being ignorant. Therefore, when Srinivas Iyengar put up a long defence of Soviet Russia, accused the British Government of manufacturing all the bogies against religion, culture, etc., and blamed the ignorance and lack of travel of Indians for ‘the tragic misunderstanding of the USSR’, it naturally came to Sassoon as a surprise. What evidence did the government have that Communists were preaching violence in India, asked Srinivas Iyengar. ‘I have not seen anything of the kind.’ The government had only quoted from pieces of paper stating the opinions of certain individuals, and as he himself stood 62

Ibid., Vol. III, No. 7, p. 629. Debates, Vol. I (1929), p. 482. 64 Ibid., p. 634. 63

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for freedom for expression, thought and propaganda, he saw the Bill as an assault on this fundamental right.65 And as C.S. Ranga Iyer put it, the Communist Philip Spratt was as honourable a gentleman as could be found on the opposition benches. His only crime was that he would not join in singing the ‘Rule Brittania’ and exposed the fact that ‘Britain ruled the slaves as truly as Britain ruled the waves’. It was ironic, he continued, that the Home Member should think of communism and not communalism as the urgent and diabolical problem. The Home Member spoke continuously of the landlord and capitalist—perhaps the government existed only for them. Spratt, an English socialist, was helping to show the Indian people that not all Englishmen were tarred with the same imperialist brush.66 The finishing touch to this defence of Communists was given by Amar Nath Dutt when he messianically declared: We have heard many things about the destruction of religion, of order, of property, state and society, but whenever a new doctrine comes into the world people don’t accept it easily. I believe the Communist doctrine could only be food and clothes for all and to share the goods of this world equally and with this I can have no quarrel. In history, Prophets are always persecuted, but I warn you, you cannot crush a truth.67

This oratory impelled the English capitalist Victor Sassoon to appeal to the class instincts of the opposition and remark: ‘The opposition members of the house come from a class which one would naturally assume would be in favour of this Bill.’68 The remark sounded almost identical to the kind made by Communists in 1930. But, as we discussed earlier, the nationalist representatives of the capitalist class took their cue from the Congressmen in the Assembly, and Purshottamdas Thakurdas refused to alienate himself from their anti-imperialist position. As he frankly acknowledged: I belong to that class and my constituency is one which is most interested in keeping communism and Bolshevism out of India. Yet, I’m not convinced of either the necessity or justification for a Bill of this nature. Government appear to be afraid of applying Regulation III of 65

Ibid., p. 660. Ibid., No. 5, pp. 459, 464. 67 Ibid., p. 456. 68 Ibid., Vol. III, No. 7. p. 632. 66

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1818 to anybody but Indians. Again, such a Bill if it existed already, could and I’ve no doubt would be used against Mr Vallabhai Patel in Bardoli. We have an irresponsible and irremovable government here and to vest them with such powers is to ask too much… .

The intelligent capitalist refused to be waylaid from his major preoccupation—the creation of a politico-economic environment in which his class could grow and prosper. As he concluded bitterly: ‘The Government of India prepares the soil anyway for communism … by treating India as the milch cow of England’ and thus the danger of communism would go on increasing despite any number of Bills.69 Madan Mohan Malviya put forward the same point in different and more concrete terms when he pointed out that, despite the fact that innumerable mills in Bombay had been closed down for many months, the mills that were working in India did not find a market for their goods.70 It was G.D. Birla, in fact, who gave the clearest exposition of how a nationalist member of his class was bound to react and align himself in the face of an imperialist challenge to the Indian left, so long as the latter remained a part of the general national movement led by the Congress. This was specially true in the context of the position Motilal Nehru took up in the Assembly. Citing the example of his participation in the Brussels Congress of the LAI along with socialists, nationalists and Communists from various parts of the world who had come together to fight for freedom and against imperialism, Motilal Nehru asserted that, ‘so for as that goes, socialism, nationalism and communism meet on a common platform and there is no objection in the minds of socialists or nationalists to meet and devise measures, consistent with their own principles, with the Communists to fight a common evil’. Consequently, it was only logical that Birla should declare that ‘I do not make much discrimination or much distinction between Swarajism, communism and all such other “isms” because I know that they are descended from the same stock.’ The main emphasis was, of course, on anti-imperialism, and, as Birla remarked on Sassoon’s attitude: As regards the Bombay strikes, I quite agree that law and order is at a great discount in Bombay. But I wish Sir Victor Sassoon had the courage 69 70

Ibid., pp. 669, 671. Ibid., No. 10, p. 855.

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to tell the government why that is so. It is not entirely due to the labour trouble. If only the mills had been making profits, they would in no time make a settlement with labour … because the mills are losing money, they are not very keen to come to terms with labour. And all that is due to the ruinous financial policy pursued by the government.71

Dismissing the Government’s claim that the Indian capitalists themselves had asked for such legislation as was embodied in the Trades Disputes Bill and Public Safety Act, Birla stated that ‘I don’t know anything about the Bombay Millowners’ Association but … of the twenty-nine bodies affiliated to the Federation of Indian Chambers none suggested to the government at any time to bring in such a measure before this House.’ The reason why ‘all capitalist associations’ and ‘industrial bodies’ opposed such legislation was, said Birla, because none of them wanted the government to acquire any extraordinary powers. And he hoped that the government would ‘take a lesson from this’.72 The implication of the ‘lesson’, obviously, was that the government ought to recognise that what might appear as a ‘natural’ coalescence between the interests of the capitalist class and the state in maintaining labour ‘discipline’ was apt to get frustrated by the basic confrontation on the politico-ideological plane between nationalism and colonialism. In fact, Birla used the debate on the Public Safety Bill to propagate again the demands of reverting to the 1 s. 4 d ratio and the acceptance of the Tariff Board’s recommendations on protection to the Indian textile industry. His basic position was outlined thus: ‘Let me make it very clear at the outset that I am not at all in favour of communism … ’, he began sarcastically. However, ‘I and other Indian capitalists very strongly disapprove of any principle which vests the government with a power enabling them to deport or intern or imprison people without a trial. This is my chief objection.’ It would be ‘dangerous to give any further powers of a similar nature to the present government constituted as it is, being neither responsible to the people nor removable by the people’.73 In any case, to deal with the Indian Communists ‘in an underhand manner is a thing 71

Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. I (1929), Public Safety Bill, pp. 485–90, 528. Ibid., pp. 485–90. Birla read out in the House wires from the Indian Merchants Chamber, Bombay, the Maharashtra Chamber of Commerce, the Indian Chamber of Commerce, Calcutta, etc., who declared their opposition to giving any extra powers to the government through new legislation. 73 Ibid., pp. 485–90. 72

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which I am afraid this side of the House is not prepared to agree to … . it is not fair for the government to shirk their responsibility by not facing a trial … (and) to go before the courts and get the men prosecuted.’ Fear of Communism, clearly, was not going to lead the capitalists into surrendering the principle of civil liberties for all Indians. More importantly, apropos the Public Safety Act, he continued, in spite of the deportation of all English Communists, the kind of activities the government wanted to suppress—the Home Member had mentioned the youth movements, the Calcutta procession of workers and youth led by the WPP … are bound to continue in the country … and eventually the government must come before this House with a measure similar to the one before the House to deal with Indian Communists … (and) once you agree to the principle of deporting people without a trial, the logical course for us would be to agree to any other proposal of a similar nature which comes from government and is intended to deal with Indian Communists. For this reason we have to be very cautious in accepting any such principle at this stage … . I do not believe at all that Communism is prevailing to such an extent in India as to require any drastic measure at all. But even if it were so, I do not believe in such repressive laws.74

Birla offered the examples of continuous repression in Ireland, and in India earlier, to argue that such measures were useless for ‘I am quite sure that until people get what they want, you will not have peace and goodwill in this country, and the responsibility therefore will rest on the government’, implying obviously, that only a national government could resolve the economic problems facing the people. This anti-imperialist point of departure led to a very interesting exchange between two capitalists—one European and the other Indian. T. Gavin–Jones, an industrialist from Kanpur, gave a harrowing account of trade union troubles at Kanpur; how revolutionary and dangerous the situation was. Purshottamdas Thakurdas interrupted his sorrowful tale with a question: how many office-bearers of the union concerned were Europeans? When Gavin–Jones eluded the question, Thakurdas charged him with hiding the fact that the trade union consisted only of Indians. Gavin–Jones retorted: ‘When an organisation becomes openly 74

Ibid.

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Red revolutionary it is the business of government to take steps in the matter.’ ‘Take steps against Indians?’ asked Purshottamdas.75 The entire drift of the debate revealed clearly that no section of Indian nationalists—including the politically advanced and far-sighted among the capitalists—was willing to join hands with the imperialists on this question. Consequently, they perforce defended any political current, from ‘extremist nationalists’ to ‘Communist Congressmen’—so long as that current was strengthening the forces of anti-imperialism and was not disowned by the Congress movement. To the extent the Communists in the Congress were part of the anti-imperialist movement, they were championing the cause of the whole nation and had to be defended from imperialist attacks. In other words ‘Communist–Congressmen’, even where the capitalist class was concerned, had to be publicly looked upon as Indians first and politico-ideological adversaries later. The point to be emphasised is that even in the exclusive and restricted halls of the Legislative Assembly, to take class as a point of departure within the broad anti-imperialist position was a matter of complex strategy. As fellow-industrialist Gavin–Jones remarked in puzzlement, Purshottamdas admitted the existence of a ‘serious, Red threat’, yet he was supporting the Congress position. Similarly Fazal Ibrahim Rahimtula, moved purely by narrow economic interests, observed sourly that Purshottamdas Thakurdas criticised the government for being ‘weakkneed’ and not taking action earlier but was opposing the Bill ‘on some other grounds’.76 From G.D. Birla, Madan Mohan Malaviya and Lala Lajpat Rai, Srinivas Iyengar and Jumnadas Mehta to Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhash Bose and the Communist members of the WPP, all were working within the broad frame and wide banner of the Indian National Congress. This was the wider overarching anti-imperialist bloc in the nation within which the forces of the right, left or centre co-existed. And the National Congress was slowly tilting leftwards. TRADES DISPUTES BILL—1929

The Indian Trades Disputes Act (1929) was closely modelled on the repressive provisions of the British Trade Disputes and Trade Union Act, 75

Ibid., p. 805. Debate on Public Safety Bill, Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. III. No. 7. 12 September 1928; Vol. III, No. 10, 15 September 1928, p. 833. 76

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1927. It was passed in the Indian Legislative Assembly with the declared object of making ‘certain types’ of strikes illegal. The Royal Commission on Labour was to criticise it later as an Act that was detrimental to the development of the Labour movement. The Act was, essentially, aimed at preventing the trade union movement from acquiring a political character and moving out of the ambit of purely economic goals; for example, spending of union funds for political purposes was forbidden. The discussions on and around the Trades Disputes Bill bring out certain aspects in the political behaviour of the Congress nationalists, the Indian capitalists and the colonial government fairly clearly. The European capitalist stood out separately on this issue and the government’s attitude towards him spoke of the crucial differences between the pursuit of what we term politico-economic interests and politico-ideological interests. The proposal to create ‘conciliation officers’ as part of the legislation envisaged in the Bill ‘disturbed’ the European capitalists whose evident fear was that these officers would assist the workers to formulate their grievances and focus upon them effectively. Their ‘evident desire was to maintain the absolute autocracy which prevails in important sections of industry’.77 This attitude on their part obviously met with the government’s disapproval: ‘The fear of conciliation officers—one of the best features of the Bill—does the European capitalist little credit.’ It was ‘the best feature’ because it would assist the government in creating ‘a system for getting at possible trouble in the early stages in a completely informal manner’; and it was integral to the fostering of constitutional modalities to deal with workers’ unrest. The European capitalist was obviously shortsighted in the pursuit of his politico-economic interest and confident in the superiority of imperialist power, and did not understand or want the government’s attempt ‘to substitute negotiation for dictatorship’ over the workers.78 Only an awareness of the politico-ideological influence that the colonial state had necessarily to acquire and preserve over as large sections of society as possible, could enable them to see that the long-term political interest of the government lay in negotiation and not in permitting the capitalists’ ‘autocratic control’ over factory labour. Indian capital, on the other hand, not only accepted but demanded conciliation mechanisms and intervention by conciliators in ‘the preliminary 77

HDP, File 13–5/1938-(I). Decision in Council relating to the questions of amendment of Section 16 of the Trades Disputes Act, 1929. 78 Ibid.

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stages of a dispute so as to provide in some way against needless cessation of work’. The active promotion of constitutional trade unionism by the government was whole heartedly supported: ‘unless labour is properly organised and is led by men who believe in trade unionism by the government was whole-heartedly supported: peace in the industry would fall into disuse’.79 Legislation that ensured only constitutional trade unionism was the goal of Indian capitalists, and, as they put it, there did not exist ‘any real trade unions … acceptable to the employers’. What had emerged were ‘loose organisations of a communistic type’, while what ‘the interests of all parties demanded (was) … to prevent any workers’ organisation functioning on behalf of labour which countenances direct action or encourages workers to strike work without notice’.80 This was why ‘picketing’ was a constant sore in the side of the Millowners Association, and they persistently urged the government to ban it. Before and after the passage of the Trades Disputes Bill, the millowners pressed this point of view on the government: ‘In one particular, namely, picketing, my Association considers that the proposed legislation falls short of present requirements in India … . my committee urges with all the emphasis at their command that ample provision should be made to prohibit picketing in any form whatever.’ Comparisons were drawn with the law in the United Kingdom where even peaceful picketing at or near a worker’s house was prohibited.81 The politico-economic interests of the Indian capitalists made them eager to seek government protection and they expressed their Association’s … desire to stress the need for an extension of government’s powers in the direction of declaring certain types of strikes illegal and a similar extension of local government’s power to deal effectively with persons or bodies responsible for promotion of any strike which has been declared illegal.82

79 Ibid. Letter from the Millowners Association to Labour Commissioner, Bombay, 27 September 1933. 80 Ibid. Letter from Millowners Association to Secretary to GOI, Department of Industry and Labour, 29 August 1934. 81 Ibid. Letter from Millowners Association to Director of Information and Labour, Intelligence Secretariat, 7 January 1929. 82 Ibid.

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However, here the millowners’ stand came into a clear conflict with that of the Congress nationalists in the Legislative Assembly, for the concept of illegality was one which, according to the nationalists, could not be left to the colonial government to define. Even in ‘a purely economic’ struggle, as S. Srinivas Iyengar put it, ‘the right to strike should be retained without any restriction by our working classes … .’83 Both the labour representatives in the Assembly, N.M. Joshi and Dewan Chamanlal, also objected to the Bill as a ‘class legislation’, as a measure which ‘protects capitalists against workers … and not an impartial arbiter between their interests’, and which enabled the employers ‘to secure the services of black legs and thus break the strike’. N.M. Joshi’s opposition to the Trades Disputes Act was seen to be rather unreasonable by the government which sought to convince him that it was only a step forward in the promotion of ‘healthy’ constitutional trade unionism. As A.C. McWatters (Member for Industries and Labour) admonished: ‘I believe confidently that Mr Joshi … will realise that this Bill will help him and the cause which he has at heart far more than anything else can possibly do when, in Bombay, Mr Joshi is struggling against Communist activities … and we wish to give him all the help we can.’84 But it was at the level of the politico-ideological that the nationalist opposition to the Bill, and the clauses on illegality in particular, was waged. Clauses 16, 17 and 18 of the Bill were seen as ‘patently political’ and specifically aimed at prohibiting political propaganda.85 The nationalists attacked Clause 16, which was the ‘most objectionable of all … it takes within its purview political propaganda’. It read as follows: A strike or lockout shall be illegal which (a) has any object other than the furtherance of a trade-dispute within the trade or industry in which the strikers or employers locking out are engaged; and (b) is designed or calculated to inflict severe, general and prolonged hardship upon the community and thereby compel the government to take or abstain from taking any particular course of action.

83

Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. I, Official Report, 28 February to 12 April 1929, pp. 2740–2985. 84 Ibid., Vol. III, No. 7, 4 September to 25 September 1928, p. 677. 85 Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 2740–2985.

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As Jumnadas Mehta declared: ‘… supposing we want to compel the government to take a particular course of action … . and we want as a national protest to organise workers … . against government? The government would then come down on the workers under section 16 (of the Bill) for participating in the national movement under the garb of preventing hardship to the community etc., on non-industrial causes. The political object of this Bill comes out in all vividness, in all nakedness’ for it was designed to sever and prevent the workers’ ‘association in furtherance of the movement for freedom’. The assumption by government of the power to declare strikes illegal was essentially to ‘suppress all political movements in this country … as if labour has nothing to do with politics, and as if labour does not want swaraj …’, thus reducing the workers only to struggling for wages.86 As Nilkantha Das (Member from Orissa), concluded: ‘Peculiarly circumstanced as we are … I do not know, as a matter of fact, what is not politics in this land. The basic principle of living in this land is the struggle to get free.’ Equally, it was a national duty to fight for the improvement of working class conditions even ‘at the risk of being imprisoned in that Meerut jail’.87 The Bill was seen as an act of depoliticising the workers and preventing them from acting as part of the nation, a consequence no section of nationalists could surrender to: ‘Whether we are aristocrats or middle classes, whether we are traders or industrialists, we do not require a measure like this’, said Srinivas Iyengar. And he approvingly cited the instance of G.D. Birla: ‘One of the Members of the Select Committee, himself a very eminent capitalist, says in his dissenting minute: “I do not find myself in a position to support clauses 16, 17 and 18 … relating to illegal strikes … my objection on principle remains, and I cannot give such provisions my support”.’88 It was, precisely, the grasp of the politico-ideological dimension of the confrontation between the nationalists and the government which led discerning capitalists like Birla and Purshottamdas Thakurdas into, simultaneously, supporting what A.C. McWatters (Member for Industries and Labour) termed the principle of compulsory inquiry and conciliation and speedy restoration of industrial peace, but staunchly opposing the proposals relating to illegal strikes, which McWatters complained were 86

Ibid. Ibid. 88 Ibid. 87

The Colonial State, Indian Capitalists and the Left 155

the most ‘misunderstood’ part of the Bill. Purshottamdas Thakurdas clarified: My chamber are anxious that there should be devised some method of putting an end to these labour strikes and differences … but they were anxious that such legislation will help in the prevention of such disputes and not be the cause of either repression of or injustice to the working class.

When the Indian Merchants’ Chamber had petitioned jointly with the Bombay Chamber of Commerce, which represented European capital, for legislation in this regard, continued Thakurdas, they had not known that the Bill was of this character.89 As a matter of fact, according to the testimony of Fazal Ibrahim Rahimtulla, the Indian Merchants Chamber and Bureau had asked Thakurdas to definitely move a proposal on picketing and ‘intimidation’, and the latter had actually moved it in the Select Committee. But the Committee’s records said that Thakurdas had refused to pursue the matter even after the Governor-in-Council had decided to accept it.90 In fact Thakurdas had dropped the move to press for a ban on picketing like a hot potato’, informed Chamanlal, because even the employers, who brought it forward, realised it was a matter they could not tackle, and ‘Mr Birla or Sir Purshottamdas would be the first to confess that they are not anxious about this particular clause … .’91 What the capitalists could, apparently, not tackle were the political implications of the Bill. The strong opposition to the entire piece of legislation that the nationalists put up, could not be supported by them, for their politico-economic interests pushed them towards cooperating with the government on the Bill. However, to pursue the clauses on ‘illegal strikes’ and to introduce a ban on picketing (what the government termed ‘certain other purposes’ as the aim of the Bill) was to be completely alienated from the nationalists in the Assembly and to stand out as pro-imperialists. Such a posture was precluded by the desire to

89 Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. III, Official Report, 4 September to 25 September 1928, pp. 163–64, 1205–26. 90 Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. I, Official Report, 28 February to 12 April 1929, pp. 2740–2985. 91 Ibid.

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stay on ‘ideologically’ within the camp of nationalism against imperialism. As the Textile Labour Association, Ahmedabad, which aligned itself closely to nationalist aims, put it: ‘That a compulsory Board of Enquiry and arbitration is necessary, is our view’, and the real utility of any Act would be to prevent one party impelled by its sense of power and advantage to crush the other which might be amenable to reason. If the millowners were adamant and keep out intervention because they believed they could starve the workers into submission or if the workers chose to persist unreasonably then the government should intervene. However, the government was keen to arm itself with the power to declare strikes illegal, which was a case of ‘extreme interference’, because the legislation on industrial disputes was ‘conceived more with the view to provide safeguards against certain political contingencies than to meet the requirements of industrial peace’.92 Thus, for the capitalists, it was, apparently, the need to secure economic concessions while not walking out of the orbit of nationalist positions that influenced their own positions in the Debates on the Trades Disputes Bill. Quite logically, therefore, both Birla and Thakurdas stayed away on the day the Bill was put to vote.93 The attitude and positions of different sections of the capitalist class apropos the Trades Disputes Bill and the Public Safety Act are very educative and an active deterrent to making any simplistic generalisations on their ‘basic’, or ‘unified’ ‘class interests’. They illustrate the fact that in any conception of ‘class interest’ it is crucial to understand and distinguish between the categories of economico-political and ideologico-political. At one level of argument, it can easily be seen in the Debates how their narrow economic interests pushed the Indian capitalists into unity with the European capitalists for the achievement of their common goal of maintaining ‘industrial peace’; while the politics of colonialism versus nationalism divided them sharply from the same European capitalists. In the pursuit of their economico-political interests, their united concerns and anxieties vis-à-vis the workers led them into jointly requesting the

92

HDP, File 13–5/1938 (I). Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. I, op. cit. Interestingly, members such as Motilal Nehru, Madan Mohan Malaviya and B.S. Moonje, traditionally characterised as extreme reactionaries in left historiography, voted against the Bill. 93

The Colonial State, Indian Capitalists and the Left 157

government to introduce the Trades Disputes Bill as early as possible.94 However, the political implications of such legislation, which were angrily drawn out by the nationalists in the Assembly, led not only to the European and Indian sections of the class, but also to groups within the latter, taking very different positions from each other after the Bill was introduced. In brief, the realm of the ideologico-political created political fractions within the capitalist class which were a reflection of the different ways they perceived their political goals and alignments. In the Debates, both on the Trades Disputes Bill and the Public Safety Act, the ‘contradictory’ behaviour of the Indian capitalists— acknowledging with utter frankness that their interests required such legislation, while, simultaneously, supporting the nationalists’ opposition to the government’s attempts to take on powers enabling it to declare any strike illegal and deport Communists—cannot be dismissed as the typical ‘vacillation’ of the capitalist class which in its ‘essential class interests’ ‘cooperated’ with the imperialist government. The government, on its part, observed and commented often upon this, ‘duality’ and ‘inconsistency’ in the Indian capitalists political behaviour and saw it as a stumbling block and a source of exasperation, for it prevented decisive and clear-cut government action on many issues. This led the capitalist Fazal Ibrahim Rahimtulla to accuse the government of making a compromise with ‘individual members of the Select Committee’—clearly referring to Purshottamdas Thakurdas—and not including a ban on picketing in the Bill. He elicited the following reply from Sir Mitra (Member, Industries and Labour) that without a compromise, … I am pretty sure … members of the Select Committee will confirm … we would not have got this agreed Bill. The question was whether by accepting a compromise, I should have a rose with certain thorns, or by not accepting that compromise, I should try to have another rose and risk the rose and thorn which I might have otherwise got.95

This duality in the behaviour of Indian capitalists is invariably interpreted in popular left writing as the expression of the ‘essential’ class interests of the bourgeoisie, while all opposition to imperialism is seen 94 Ibid., Vol. III, 4 September to 25 September 1928. Interventions by Purshottamdas and McWatters (Member, Industries and Labour), pp. 1205–26. 95 Ibid., Vol. I, 28 February to 12 April 1929, pp. 2740–2985.

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as peripheral or non-essential. In truth, however, as a reading of capitalist positions on legislation categorically aimed against the working class and the Communists shows, the definite pattern of the capitalist class’ politico-ideological behaviour was that of antagonism to imperialism. The debates do show fairly well that the coincidence of the Indian capitalists’ positions with those of the colonial government or with foreign capitalists was purely on narrow economic issues and not on broader political perspectives. Therefore, perhaps, it would be more fruitful to dispense with the concept of ‘dual’ character altogether and argue at a different level. The only basis on which the political behaviour of the capitalist class can be understood clearly centres upon conceptualising the popular notion of ‘class interest’ differently, by distinguishing between its short run economico-political interests and its long-term ideologicopolitical objectives. The dynamic of class behaviour is, however, not split and janus-faced but a three-dimensional picture. The angle from which the categories of economic and ideological interest are viewed are constantly coloured and conditioned by the dimension of the ‘political’. The ‘political’ here denotes the superior reality of colonial domination (‘superior’ because it is a historically given and established reality), which linked the fate of the Indian capitalist class to that of all other sections of the Indian people, as an overall ‘national perspective’. In this national perspective, there was no room for political collaboration even when the immediate and short-run exigencies of capitalist functioning impelled them to request government intervention in the sphere of economic relations.

Chapter 6

Nehru’s Paradigm

As we have seen, the single-minded goal of the government was to prevent any close cooperation between the Communists and extreme nationalists. In the pursuit of its aims the government was, ironically and unwittingly, helped by the Communists walking out of the organically emerging left-bloc after the Meerut Conspiracy Case was launched. The self-confessed Communist ‘sectarianism’ of 1929–34, when not only the Congress-led national movement but the activities of left radicals like Nehru and Bose came in for the worst form of abuse, threw the left-bloc in shambles. Though the absence of ‘sectarianism’ would have mitigated the consequences of, what we term the counterposing of the Communist paradigm to the existing national movement, it could not erase the theoretical premises embedded in such a counter positioning. Had the organic unity of the national and socialist perspectives been posited and programmatic conceptions based on such a theorisation, there may have been a possible chance of breaking through to a politically decisive and meaningful intervention in the history of India. This, however, did not happen. The construction of a new paradigm demanded confrontation with the anomalies that surfaced between the theoretical heritage and living practice of the Communist movement.1 It also demanded that the 1 Some of these theoretical anomalies and contradictions are discussed in chapters 2, 3, 4, 12, 13, 14.

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Indian Communists reject ‘Leninism’ and function as socialists inspired by Marxism. The discussion of Nehru’s paradigm in this chapter, is an attempt to show that an alternative approach towards a socialist perspective in India was evolved by him. Nehru’s paradigm required the participation and active organisational efforts of the entire left, for it to have had any real chance of success. The working out of the political platform and organisational form, that such a paradigm required also demanded a meaningful exchange and cooperation between them. And the success of Nehru’s paradigm could only have meant the creation of more favourable conditions for the socialist–oriented movement to develop and hegemonise Indian political life over a period of time. In this sense, the failure of Nehru’s paradigm has been the failure of the left and socialist movement to embed itself deeply into the socio-political and cultural soil of India. CONFLICT OF PARADIGMS

Various evaluations of Nehru’s role in the Indian national movement clearly reveal a popular assumption that is shared by both Marxist and non-Marxist historians—that there were two, mutually exclusive, political perspectives and programmes to advance the anti-imperialist movement. The first was offered by Gandhi, and the second was put forward by the Communists in India during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Taking this assumption as a base, Nehru’s views appear to be an eclectic amalgam of the two counterposed programmes and perspectives. Consequently, Nehru’s politics is seen as the vacillation of a ‘dilettante’,2 between the two poles constituted by Gandhi’s leadership and the group of Communists. It is also taken for granted that Nehru did not have an independent political perspective which could be seen as an alternative to both, Gandhi and the Communists. M.N. Roy, while recognising Nehru’s catalytic role in nurturing a revolutionary youth, contemptuously dismissed his ideological efforts as reactionary:

2

He was often characterised in these terms by M.N. Roy. See M.N. Roy, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru, An Enigma or a Tragedy’, in A.B. Shah, ed., Jawaharlal Nehru: A Critical Tribute, Bombay. 1965, pp. 33–41.

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After Civil Disobedience in 1931, younger elements in the Congress who had been influenced by Nehru’s leftism, revolted against the top leaders. At that juncture, Nehru confused issues by associating nationalism with vaguely conceived socialist ideals. He was instrumental in arresting the process of differentiation between the forces of progress and conservatism … . Conservative nationalism was rationalised as the means to social revolution.3

For Michael Brecher, the real Nehru was the one who admitted that despite strong disagreement he was usually talked into going along with the Congress and Gandhi. His speech as President of the AITUC in 1929 was dismissed by Brecher as ‘filled with socialist jargon’,4 who concludes, ‘his primary loyalty was to Indian national interests. In case of conflict his attachment to socialism and internationalism was invariably expendable.’5 This is a view bordering close on the Communist position that Nehru was not a socialist or internationalist, but merely a superficial phrasemonger. And it is no concern of Brecher’s to examine Nehru’s conception of how socialism was to be brought to India or his conviction that national independence was a prerequisite for true internationalist practice. S. Gopal, recognising the sincere efforts of Nehru to tilt the Congress towards the left, has however remarked that Nehru was the best shield of the Congress against left-wing groups.6 Though this does not imply support of Communist attacks on Nehru and the Congress it does seem to suggest that were it not for Nehru, the Communists (who were the only left-wing group outside the Congress) could have waged their battle more successfully against the Congress. Bipan Chandra emphasises the weakness of the Communists, and ascribes the failure of the Communist Party in carrying Nehru along as ‘the popular head of a left-front’ to their embryonic condition in which they could not play an ‘independent’ role.7 However, this is a wrong reading of the actual position of the Communists. In actuality, the Communist preoccupation was with ‘independent’ politics. That is, the politics of domination and not of hegemony, and with ‘leading’ 3

M.N. Roy, Ibid. Michael Brecher, Nehru: A Political Biography, London, 1959, p. 141. 5 Ibid. p. 145. 6 Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, Delhi, 1976, Vol. I, p. 137. 7 Bipan Chandra, Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India, New Delhi, 1979, p. 144. 4

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all the revolutionary forces in the country, in place of intervening as a part of a broad left-front. This was decisive in their inability to perceive Nehru’s position. The result was that they attacked him bitterly during 1929–34 as the most ‘despicable betrayer and beheader of the revolutionary movement’.8 However, if we follow Nehru’s political thought and mediated political positions consistently and independently of the Gandhian or Communist barometers to gauge his revolutionary fervour, we are confronted with a separate and new problematique. For Nehru’s paradigm subsumed their mutually exclusive perspectives, not in an eclectic fashion but by establishing their fundamental unity.9 Nehru himself summed up his problem thus: I have mentioned the two ways that have moved me, and I take it that they move also in varying degrees many of my countrymen. These are: nationalism and political freedom as represented by the Congress and social freedom as represented by Socialism … . To continue these two outlooks and make them an organic whole is the problem of the Indian Socialist.10

It was precisely this nexus between nationalism and socialism which distinguished Nehru from the Gandhians on the one hand, and the Communists on the other. For the Communists, who tended to reduce the entire problem to the single question: Which class is the nation? Nehru’s position was vague and inconclusive. In fact it was rather tragic that anti-Communists along with many orthodox Congressmen saw Nehru as a clever manoeuvrist acting on behalf of the Communists. In Masani’s words, Nehru’s ambivalence was tailored to ‘retain the support of staunch democrats while doing everything possible to help those who opposed them within and outside the Congress’, that is the Communists.11 8 See Workers’ Weekly, Nos. 7, 8, 9, 10, Archives of Contemporary History of India, JNU (ACHI, JNU). 9 For a characterisation of paradigmatic breaks, see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, 1970; and Paul M. Sweezy, ‘A Crisis in Marxian Theory’, Monthly Review, June 1979, Vol. 31 (2). 10 Jawaharlal Nehru, Message to the All India Congress Socialist Conference at Meerut, 13 January 1936, Selected Works, Vol. 7, pp. 60–61. 11 This charge was made by Minoo Masani in Bliss Was it in That Dawn, London, 1977.

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Ironically, the contradictory charges of being a ‘full-fledged Marxist’ and ‘clever, hypocritical deceiver of the masses’ were levelled against him at the same time, by the right and left, respectively. Nehru’s seminal contribution lies in the fact that he struggled to transcend the mutually exclusive paradigms as defined by the Gandhians and Communists. He was the first and only national leader in the movement who clearly defined the project of leading a united struggle of all antiimperialists while simultaneously orientating it towards socialism. Jawaharlal Nehru attended the Brussels Congress of the League Against Imperialism12 as a delegate of the Indian National Congress. The League was a very imaginative and essential forum. It could have played a vital role in the world-wide ideological struggle between capitalism and socialism for influence over anti-imperialist movements. Nehru characterised it as ‘very representative both of countries being exploited and oppressed by others and of workers’ organisations’.13 It was clear that the League was not an organisation opposing capitalism alone. As Nehru emphasised, the Brussels Congress was by no means ‘purely Communist’. There were important labour leaders included in it, who openly opposed communism and the Third International. Of course, there was a strong undercurrent of sympathy with Russia among the delegates. As one delegate from Africa put it, his people did not know much about communism but they felt that Soviet Russia brought a message of hope to the downtrodden and oppressed. Of this Nehru himself felt convinced, for he repeated exactly the same words in his many speeches on his return to India.14 Nehru was decisively influenced by the contemporary international situation, the socialist ideas and world view and the various shades of progressive thought that he encountered in Europe through his participation at the Congress. Reporting home, that the entire ‘bourgeois press’ gave little or no publicity to it, he expressed the view that the Brussels Congress ‘was an event of first class importance’.15 12 The League Against Imperialism was formed during the Brussels Conference, called the Congress of Oppressed Nationalities and held from 10–15 February 1927. The Comintern, the CPGB and the Indian radical V. Chattopadhyaya played an important role in organising it. 13 Jawaharlal Nehru, Selected Works, Vol. 2, p. 278. Report on the Brussels Congress. 14 See Presidential Address at the AH India Trade Union Congress, SW, Vol. 4, p. 49, Nagpur, 30 November 1929. 15 Report on Brussels Congress.

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Nehru wrote that he had been privileged to be associated with the League since its formation. He had welcomed its formation because: … it supplied a common platform for the two great movements of revolt against the existing conditions which we have in the world today, the struggle of labour against the entrenched citadel of capital and the nationalist movements in countries under alien domination. (Unless both were) harmonised and made to work together for the common good, there can be no permanent solution of the problems of the day.16

Nehru concentrated on the link between socialism and nationalism which he saw epitomised in the LAI, and advanced his new vision of an organic relationship between the two within the framework of the national movement in India. He wrote: In oppressed countries … nationalism automatically and rightly takes precedence … . This is recognised even by socialists. But in such countries nationalism might be given a broader basis more in consonance with the tendencies of the age; it might derive its strength from and work specially for the masses, the peasants and other workers. Personally, I agree with the contention because I accept in its fundamentals the socialist theory of the state.17

Furthermore, he added, ‘In so far as we are up against British imperialism, we must recognise that Soviet Russia is also very much against it.’ The theoretical premises embedded in Nehru’s paradigm were: (a) Nationalism pitted against imperialism was the main contradiction that gripped colonial society. (b) Socialism was not in contradiction with nationalism, but complemented it. (c) A class orientation towards peasants and workers was the necessary link between nationalism and socialism. This could be ensured by taking the nationalist movement to the peasants and workers and increasingly broadening its base and by the coming together of all the revolutionary and left-wing elements in a bloc within the framework of INC. (d ) An international alliance of all anti-imperialist forces would find its natural ally in the USSR. 16

SW, Vol. 3, p. 152. A1CC Files, League Against Imperialism Documents, FD-22, 1929–31 and FO–12, 1928. Also see Report on the Brussels Congress, Selected Works, Vol. 2, pp. 287, 289. 17

Nehru’s Paradigm 165

These premises were in striking contrast to those underlying the position of the Communists in India: (a) nationalism was a bourgeois ideology; (b) consequently, ‘bourgeois nationalism’ and ‘bourgeois-led national movements’ on the one hand and working class, peasant and socialist movements on the other were mutually opposed; (c) the antiimperialist movement had to be based upon the working class whose ‘representative’ the Communist Party would then ally with the peasantry; and (d ) as Communists it was essential to be a section of the Third International led by the Soviet Union. The significance of the way Nehru formulated it lay in the fact that the forces against imperialism were not equated ideologically and organisationally with the forces fighting capitalism. They were two distinct forces. What united them against the common enemy was the orientation of the former towards the latter. It was this theoretical insight which allowed Nehru, unlike the Indian Communists, specially M.N. Roy, to see anti-imperialist Indian nationalism and socialism as a continuum instead of politically hostile, if not mutually exclusive, and counterposed to each other. This insight prevented Nehru from the theoretical mistake of M.N. Roy, of fusing the struggle against imperialism and capitalism into one. And, as a consequence, putting them ideologically and organisationally on the same footing. Here, a distinction must be made between the programme and ideological spirit of an orientation towards the workers and peasants, and a programme and organisation that bases itself upon these classes alone, from the beginning. In the conception of ‘orientation’ the entire leftbloc within the nation, in successive stages, strives to identify itself with the struggles of workers and peasants. Hence, initially the workers and peasants are not the basis of the bloc; they are its object and goal. It was from this that Nehru derived a new vision of the national revolution between 1927–29. NEHRU AND THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS

During the period 1927–29, Nehru’s practical activities were guided by the theoretical perspective outlined above. At the same time the tempo and orientation of political activities in the country were giving concrete shape to the contours of his perspective. A symbiosis occurred between his thought and political reality.

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Nehru had a powerful sense of history. He saw the Indian National Congress as the historically evolved representative of the anti-imperialist movement. His consciousness of inheriting a ‘glorious legacy’ impelled him to recognise that the Congress had been, and was, the most advanced organisation in India, just as it was the most powerful. Its revolutionary potential was not likely to be exhausted ‘till the nationalist urge gave place to a social one’. Moreover, the urge for social revolution, even when it became a generalised phenomenon in Indian society, was not to be opposed to the Congress-led national movement. A significant factor in Nehru’s political formation was his perception of the Congress as a multi-class organisation which represented a movement of all classes. ‘To desert the Congress seemed to me thus to cut oneself adrift from the vital urge of the nation, to blunt the most powerful weapon we had, and perhaps to waste energy in ineffective adventurism.’18 The ‘other avenues’ that could be used were all explored by him. Presiding over the Republican Congress in 1927, close cooperation with Communists in the Workers’ and Peasants’ parties till they were disbanded, the presidentship of the AITUC, the consistent injecting of socialist ideas into the youth movement, and the formation of the Independence for India League affiliated to the League Against Imperialism—all these were attempts to link the social revolution to the national movement and to tilt the latter left-wards. Apart from its historical tradition and weight, the Congress was a crucial and necessary link for the left if they confronted the truth that: ‘The problem of today in India is the problem of peasantry.’ Industrial labour was only a small part of India, although it was rapidly becoming a force that could not be ignored. However, the biggest problem in India which cried loudly for a solution was that of the peasantry.19 ‘It is likely that sometime in the future the usual problem of city versus village and industrial worker versus peasant will arise in India also.’ But this was a problem of the future according to Nehru. He saw quite clearly that ‘as yet even urban India … the new industrial India has the impress of the peasant upon her’, that is, a modern proletariat was yet to crystallise. The immediate and most urgent task was to find ways of relating to the peasant and thus to the Congress, whose workers ‘have spread all over the rural areas and, in the ordinary course, the Congress must develop 18 19

Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, London, 1945, pp. 365, 368. Presidential Speech, Lahore Congress, 1929.

Nehru’s Paradigm 167

into a vast peasant organisation’.20 This demanded active participation and intervention in Congress politics. Flowing from this conception of relating to the Congress was the relationship with Gandhi. Gandhi, in Nehru’s view, was an organic leader representing the peasant masses of India. And India being a predominantly peasant country, Gandhi’s feel and knowledge of the country merited his greatest respect. Gandhi had to be taken along on the ‘road towards the left’ for ‘if we could convince him, we felt that we could also convert these masses’. Certainly Nehru realised that there were unbridgeable differences between him and Gandhi in many areas. As he put it himself, there were ‘basic differences between Gandhi’s ideals and the socialist objective’. Ideologically he was sometimes amazingly backward, and yet in action he had been the greatest revolutionary of recent times in India. (But) because he was a revolutionary at bottom and was pledged to political independence for India, he was bound to play an uncompromising role till that independence was achieved. And in this very process he would release tremendous mass energies and would himself, I half-hoped, advance step by step towards the social goal.21

The quintessence of the task facing the left in Nehru’s paradigm was, how to move millions along. As Nehru put it: It is easy enough to take up a theoretically correct attitude which has little effect on anybody. We have to do something much more important and difficult, and that is to move large numbers of people, to make them act, and to do all this without breaking up the Congress.22 THE LEFT-BLOC: CONTENT AND FORM

In 1928–29 Nehru spoke of his disagreement with Communist methods and doubted how far India was developed enough for communism. He emphasised the unsuitability of the model of the Russian Revolution being transferred to Indian conditions.23 20

An Autobiography, pp. 254, 365. Ibid., pp. 255, 256, 365. 22 Nehru to Krishna Menon, 28 September 1936. Quoted in S. Gopal, op. cit., p. 218. 23 Jawaharlal Nehru, Selected Works (hereafter SW ), Vol. 4, p. 7. 21

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The Communists’ attack on the Indian National Congress and the national movement, Nehru felt, was far removed from a grasp of the reality. In support he quoted Lenin: He who denies the sharp tasks of today, in the name of dreams about soft tasks of the future becomes an opportunist. Theoretically it means to fail to base oneself on the developments now going on in real life, to detach oneself from them in the name of dreams.

Socialists and Communists in India, continued Nehru, were largely nurtured on literature dealing with the industrial proletariat. In his view however, Nationalism and rural economy are the dominating considerations, and European socialism seldom deals with these. Pre-war conditions in Russia were a much nearer approach to India, but there again the most extraordinary and unusual occurrences took place, and it is absurd to expect a repetition of these anywhere else. I do believe that the philosophy of communism helps us to understand and analyse existing conditions in any country, and further indicates the road to future progress. But it is doing violence and injustice to that philosophy to apply it blindfold and without due regard to facts and conditions.24

Nehru’s own conception of the nature of problems that India faced was multi-dimensional, which we shall come to a little later. Also, he viewed the conjuncture at that time as demanding a period of ideological preparation. Of course, as a socialist inspired by Marxism he held that ‘without social freedom and a socialistic structure of society and state, neither the country nor the individual could develop much’. However, ‘the immediate task’ as Nehru saw it, was ‘to train and prepare our country’ for the great changes occurring in the world and especially in Soviet Russia which ‘seemed to hold forth a message of hope to the world’. In sum, ‘the preparation was largely an ideological one’.25 At the outset, however, it is necessary to say that if Marxian inspiration meant acceptance of the concept of capitalist and imperialist exploitation as a system; the historical existence of class struggle; a conception of socialism as a classless society; and overthrow of capitalism and establishment of a socialist order as the ultimate goal of the forces marching 24 25

An Autobiography, p. 407. Ibid., p. 166.

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towards socialism, then Nehru can certainly be termed as good a Marxian socialist as any in India at that time. As E.M.S. Namboodiripad writes: ‘The impact of socialism was felt inside the Congress mainly through Nehru … Nehru’s Presidential address at the Lahore session of the Congress in 1929, made it unmistakably clear that he stood for a programme of building a socialist India.’26 However, he separated this ideal from the question of which path and what stages would lead to it and what organisational forms would develop and be adopted. He rejected the slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat. He considered unreal the project of making a Soviet style socialist revolution in India. On the contrary his main emphasis was on the tremendous task of organising and training the people before one could pose the question of a social revolution. Speaking to trade union workers he stressed: ‘The movement is weak and the work that has been done is exceedingly little.’ In other words, ‘None of us can call our trade-union movement today strong or ready for successful battle.’27 This did not imply, he said, the indefinite postponement of social transformation. The need was to get on to the task of training and organising on a vast and serious footing. On the question of class struggle as a matter of fact, Nehru’s position was initially based on an explicit criticism of Gandhi who dismissed the Communists as fomenting class conflict. Placing himself squarely in the same rank as the Communists he said: ‘We are often accused of preaching the class war and of widening the distance between the classes. The distance is wide enough, thanks to capitalism, and nothing can beat the record of capitalism in that respect. The class war … is the creation of capitalism and so long as capitalism endures it will endure.’ The critical slant against Gandhi’s notions of trusteeship was apparent when Nehru continued: ‘For those who are on the top it is easy to ignore it (i.e., class struggle) and to preach moderation and goodwill. But the goodwill does not induce these self-proclaimed well-wishers of ours to get off our backs and shoulders.’28 It was much later, after the Civil Disobedience Movement and his own experience in organising the peasants in U.P., that Gandhi’s conception of ‘class adjustment’ began to make a little sense to Nehru. 26 E.M.S. Namboodiripad, Economics and Politics of India’s Socialist Pattern, New Delhi, 1966. 27 Presidential Address at the All India Trade Union Congress, Tenth Session, Nagpur, 30 November 1929, SW, Vol. 4, pp. 48–50. 28 Ibid.

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He was too much of a Marxist till the mid-thirties to modify the notion of class struggle. If, however, being a Marxist meant subscribing to the idea of organisational affiliation to the Third International then Nehru was in disagreement with that: ‘It is largely a gesture because under the present circumstances it is not easy for us, with various government restrictions, to develop contact with the Communist International.’ Even more important was his opposition to an unquestioning acceptance of the International’s conceptions and policies on the solution to Indian problems and what would be correct politics at that time. ‘The history of the past few years in China and elsewhere has shown that these methods have failed and often brought reaction in their train.’29 Nehru was obviously trying to learn his own lessons from China. As early as 1927, returning from the Brussels Congress, he had opined that the Chinese Republic could not be … fashioned wholly on the lines laid down by Marx. Even Soviet Russia, owing to the presence of the peasantry, has had to give up part of its communism, and in China where the small peasant is the deciding factor, the departure from pure communism will be all the greater.30

Apparently, Nehru was looking at the New Economic Policy in Russia more historically than many Indian Communists for whom it was a part of the successful Russian Revolution.31 After the bloody ‘Shanghai massacre’ of Communists in 1927, Nehru was even more sceptical of the Communist International’s grasp of colonial problems. To affiliate with the Communist International would mean accepting its conceptions of strategy and tactics in India and this he thought was undesirable. ‘This of course does not mean that we should not develop contacts with them whenever desirable.’32 In other words, for Nehru, relations with the Third International meant accepting those of its positions which created a world organisation like the League Against Imperialism. Through such an organisation one could maintain a constant link with the Russian Revolution but could also restrain the tendency of emulating the Russian model uncritically. Internationalism, Nehru held, meant expressing solidarity with the proletarian movement throughout the world but not 29

Ibid., p. 54. Cited in S. Gopal, op. cit. 31 B. Josh, Communist Movement in Punjab, 1926–47, New Delhi, 1979, pp. 96–97. 32 Nehru, SW, Vol. 4, p. 54. 30

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being organised as a section of the Comintern. At a time when the great battle for the masses was on between the Second and Third Internationals, Nehru ranged himself solidly behind the latter in terms of its general position in the world. He castigated the Second International as a bunch of ‘Labour Imperialists’ whose ‘main preoccupation’ was ‘no longer the fight against capitalism but the fight against communism’. Affiliating with it ‘would be disastrous to our cause’.33 Of the Third International however, he would demand the right and freedom to be a creative revolutionary in accordance with the peculiarities of his own country, and evolve his own programmatic and organisational conceptions. Nehru viewed the struggle for socialism in India, as an organic evolution from national independence to social transformation. They were to be seen as distinct, yet, not as rival movements, strengthening each other. The ideal of abolishing classes ‘we must ever keep before us; and we must try to get our national movement also to adopt it’. It was possible that ‘before we can attain our full ideal we may be able to gain somewhat better conditions for labour and more opportunities for organising them’.34 Clearly, national independence was seen as the possible first step that would help the working class to approach its ultimate goal. Those ‘better conditions’ were to be welcomed even if they only brought ‘some little relief ’. ‘But we cannot refuse anything that brings some comfort to the unhappy worker.’ Though, in the ultimate analysis ‘the objective can only be a new order under which the worker will have true freedom and opportunity for growth’.35 Undoubtedly, the people’s ‘immediate problem and mine is to gain political freedom for our country, but this is only a part of the problem facing us’. This was because ‘national freedom is good, but it does not take us very far if the great majority of our countrymen are unable to participate in it and are denied all opportunities for advancement by an economic and social order which enslaves them’.36 The aim therefore had to be ‘the destruction of all imperialism and the reconstruction of society on another basis’. That basis had to be, and could only be, socialism. ‘Our national ideal must, 33

Ibid. Ibid., p. 51. 35 Ibid. 36 Presidential address at the Bombay Presidency Youth Conference, 12 December 1928, SW, Vol. 3, p. 206; and Message to Lahore Students Union, October 1928, SW, Vol. 3, pp. 200, 206. 34

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therefore, be the establishment of a cooperative socialist Commonwealth and our international ideal a world federation of socialist states.’ It was necessary, therefore, to take an effective part in evolving a new social order, which would bring freedom to the nation as well as to the millions of individuals who comprise the nation.37 But through what process could that be achieved? The tasks were interrelated and not counterposed. Nehru maintained that the struggle had to transcend narrow nationalism and gradually be transformed into anti-capitalism internationally. The ‘international character of industrialism … had broken down national boundaries. The world has become internationalised.’38 However, this was only a preview of what the future might hold for the colonial countries though it had to be kept in mind. For the moment, however in an oppressed country like India, ‘nationalism and rural economy are the dominating considerations’.39 Consequently, the struggle against capitalism in the above context, was not to be fought by the slogan ‘Down with Capitalism’, or by putting forward an anti-capitalist programme formulated by the Communists of advanced countries. This paradox, to fight against capitalism and yet not put forward an anti-capitalist programme immediately, was the crux of the problem for Nehru, and this distanced him from the Communists in India.40 A programme for all-round democracy was put forward by Nehru in all his speeches, in his addresses to the youth, and in the programme he drafted for the Independence for India League. It is also manifest in the positions he took vis-à-vis various classes in Indian society. However, in an attempt to extend and widen this necessary struggle for democracy he strove to give his programme a socialist orientation.41 Significantly, Nehru refused to look upon the Congress as a mere political party, consistently referring to it as a historic organisation—‘an institution’—which was ‘not made of mere resolutions. The Congress is greater than all its leaders.’42 Because it was a movement and not a ‘party’ it was not counterposed to, or destructive of, the aspirations of socialists within it. ‘It is obvious that, 37

SW, Vol. 3, pp. 200, 206. Presidential Address at Punjab Provincial Conference, April 1928, SW, Vol. 3, p. 220. 39 An Autobiography, op. cit., p. 407. 40 SW, Vol. 3, p. 77. 41 To Jahangir Vakil, 6 December 1929. SW, Vol. 4, p. 575. 42 SW, Vol. 4. p. 16. 38

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Congress being a multi-class organisation, cannot be an instrument for establishing a socialist state. But under the impact of powerful forces it can be given a new orientation ….’43 Acknowledging that the Congress ‘as a whole was ignorant of socialism’, for the creation of ‘powerful forces’, therefore, the way to proceed was to strive to influence the masses. Once the masses were behind them, a massive movement could be built up as a sanction for their goal.44 Of course, the possibility of conflict with other tendencies within the Congress was conceivable and quite likely. In that case any responsible office in the Congress should not be accepted. However, nothing could stop one ‘from being a member of the Congress and putting forward one’s views there’. Indeed the new ‘organisation’ should try to convert the Congress to its views.45 Linking the struggle for democracy in India with a perspective of socialism, Nehru approached the question of democracy in a completely novel way. Nehru began with the proposition that it was essential for nationalists in India to take a principled stand on the struggle for republicanism or democracy. As the conditions in the world were no longer those which gave rise to European republics, they would have to answer the question: what kind of Republic did they want in India, of the old type or the new?46 Was it to be based on the exploitation of one group by another or did India wish to remove exploitation and its causes so that equality between all members of the Republic could be established? The world situation had been changed, with the Russian Revolution in particular, and India had to ‘understand what was happening in the world’.47 Later, he was to put the same position in more ‘Marxist’ language: ‘We have become part of international capitalism and we suffer the pains and crises which afflict this decaying system.’48 The conception of ‘Swaraj’ or Republic had to be clarified. According to him the new type of organisation that was needed in the country was precisely to establish 43 Jawaharlal Nehru quoted in Acharya Narendra Dev, Socialism and the National Revolution, Bombay, 1946. 44 SW, Vol. 3. p. 193. 45 To Jahangir Vakil, 5 April 1928. SW, Vol. 3, p. 183. The reference is to the newly organised Independence for India League. 46 SW, Vol. 3. p. 8. 47 Ibid. 48 SW, Vol. 7. pp. 170–95.

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this new ideal of democracy or republicanism interpreted as: a republic wedded to a non-exploitative society. Curiously, the perspective put forward by the West European Communist parties in the last two decades, the Italian Communists in particular, is almost identical to many of the formulations of Nehru. Recalling Togliatti’s elaboration of the prospect of a ‘democracy of a new type’, Napolitano, a leading spokesman of the Italian Communist Party, holds that this was the most important concept in dissolving … the false dilemma of whether the objective of the struggle against fascism (in India’s case, read imperialism) was to restore bourgeois democracy or to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. This false dilemma had paralysed all efforts to unify … and especially the left.

The ‘democracy of a new type’ was a perspective which transcended this dilemma, that is … to create a democratic regime of a new type, which overcomes the limits and the fundamental defects of ‘bourgeois–democracy’ and which is open to the possibility of successive developments and profound transformations in a socialist sense … what Togliatti called ‘a regime of progressive democracy’.

When Nehru insisted that the relationship between socialism and democracy was organic, and that ‘the rejection of democracy does not or should not come from the socialist side but from the other’, he was anticipatory by thirty years Togliatti’s declaration: ‘From democracy we want to take nothing; we want to add to it many things.’49 Within the Marxist tradition this linkage between democracy and socialism, found its most sophisticated and complex treatment in the works of Gramsci. Antonio Gramsci, who was perhaps not surprisingly a contemporary of the Nehru that we have studied, conceptualised and theoretically established this dialectic between democracy and socialism at a far higher level than any Marxist thinker. He was able to make significant theoretical breaks with the ‘Leninist’ orthodoxy in his concepts of culture, legitimacy and hegemony. A vital role in this advance was played 49 For Togliatti’s formulations, Interview, in Eric Hobsbawm with G. Napolitano, The Italian Road to Socialism, London, 1977. The quotation from Nehru is in A Bunch of Old Letters, Bombay, 1958.

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by his capacity to support and defend the Russian Revolution, and yet conceptualise alternative forms of politics more suited to West European conditions where the task of consolidating already won civil liberties and democratic forms made Russian style insurrections problematical.50 It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Gramsci’s thought has become a major catalyst for all critical questioning and advance in Marxist theory today. And one of the central preoccupations of Marxists the world over, as also the Euro-Communists till recently, is precisely to sketch the contours of, and infuse life into, the concept of the ‘democratic road to socialism’. As Poulantzas put it: ‘… socialism will be democratic or it will not be at all.’51 In retrospect, this self-critique of Marxism appears to have been moving towards the dénouement of Soviet and East European socialism and the emergence of Gorbachev. Gradually, Nehru formed clear ideas on what kind of a new organisation was required and what ideology it would propagate. The new organisation ‘The Independence for India League’ should be a bloc of all the left-wing elements in the country but as part of the Congress movement. It could not be a rival to the Congress, for the goal was to move the Congress, as a whole, left-wards. Its specific goal would be the ‘reconstruction of Indian society on a basis of social and economic equality’, that is ‘on a non-exploitative basis’.52 Though the League shared the objective of Indian independence with the whole organisation of the Congress, this specific goal was in advance of the existing Congress programme. Consequently, despite the hope of carrying the Congress majority with it, or rather to enable the work of converting the majority, the League ‘should have a separate existence’ ideologically.53 Without adhering to any separate socialist or Communist organisation, the League could strive to become the spearhead of broad transformatory socialist forces in the country. In brief, it should act within the Congress, as a lever for action, with a clear-cut programme of its own. The ‘great national organisation’ of the Congress, ‘by reason of its very bigness … (was) unwieldy’. The League, aspiring towards ‘being

50

Chantal Mouffe, ch. 1. Nicos Poulantzas, State Power, Socialism, London, 1978. 52 Interview to the Press, given on 16 November 1928, SW, Vol. 3, p. 77. 53 Ibid. ‘Separate existence’ here obviously defines an ideological and programmatic separation and not an organisational one. 51

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a disciplined and well-knit body and consisting of people more or less agreed about the aims and methods’ would have no difficulty in having a ‘programme of action’. This programme, necessarily, would consist of the minimum consensus within the left, for as Nehru said: ‘I hope it will draw into its ranks all the left-wing elements in the country.’54 As Nehru explained, the Communists and moderate socialists would have equal right in it but a non-socialist would not find a place in the League.55 He felt that socialism could be considered ‘a vague term which covers many theories’, thus, ideologico-theoretical differences within the left were not being ignored or wished away. However, it was ‘needless to enter into them at this stage’.56 In a detailed and explanatory circular Nehru held that the bloc of all leftist forces had to first function on a common platform with a consensual minimum. A transitional stage of the struggle in which ground had to be prepared for a move towards socialism was a necessary stage for the Indian people’s struggle. And such a transitional stage could be effectively guided within the parameters of left politics only by a wide ranging left-bloc. Such a perspective would have to be an open-ended one, there could be no guarantee that it would develop inevitably towards socialism. The specific dangers that were bound to arise, for example, (a) on the level of action for reforms and a new political economy, and (b) on the question of modifications in, or creation of, the institutional sector necessary to tilt the balance leftwards, certainly required deep insights and hard preventive thinking. But this could only develop in the course of the growth and strengthening of the left-bloc, with constant interaction and debate between the various left tendencies.57 This point needs to be underscored heavily. Nehru, while refusing to accept the Communists’ total adherence to an already fixed and given theory, and an already worked out strategy for making revolution in India, made no claim to possessing a chalked-out programme of his own. Within his paradigm, the entire left had to educate itself concretely and precisely, but together and not against each other. A consensual minimum could be worked out to begin with.

54

Ibid. To Jahangir Vakil, Letter dated 5 April 1928, SW, Vol. 3, p. 183. 56 Circular Letter to Congress, 5 April 1928, SW, Vol. 3, p. 184. 57 An Appeal to Youth, 18 March 1928, and Circular Letter to Congress, 5 April 1928, SW, Vol. 3, pp. 181–83. 55

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Within the broad category of socialism Nehru refused to distinguish between its various shades.58 The left had to first function on a common platform with a minimum programme. This minimum programme was described as a consensus on ‘nationalisation of means of production and distribution so that the whole state may benefit from it and individuals may not amass fortunes by exploitation and impoverishment of others’. In other words, ‘organisation of the state on a vast cooperative basis’, However, ‘the immediate programme may be a limited one’, that is, transitional steps could be worked out, but the final goal of socialism was always to be kept in view. This was bound to ‘raise questions of labour versus capital and landlord versus tenant’ and the solution of these could not be shirked. The minimum programme had to be worked out keeping these issues in mind.59 NEHRU ON THE WORKING CLASS AND THE NATIONAL MOVEMENT

We have earlier referred to the theoretical premises embedded in Nehru’s paradigm. The first, with its overarching reach, nationally as well as internationally, was the premise of anti-imperialism being the primary contradiction in the colonial countries. Thus, it was only through the prism of the anti-imperialist national movement that Nehru viewed and discussed the role of various classes in society. Apropos Nehru’s basic point of departure (which he imbibed from the League Against Imperialism) that the working class in the West had to fight imperialism necessarily and help the nationalist movements of oppressed countries, the role of the Indian working class was its logical extension. The working class in the oppressed countries was, therefore, duty bound to fight this most essential and immediate battle. But, for how many workers did this immediacy become conscious political activity? ‘Our country today is under the domination of another and the sentiment of nationalism is strong. It is natural that the best and bravest in the country should strive for national freedom, but to how many of our workers does this make appeal?’ The conditions of life of the colonial working class, Nehru thought, were too unbearable for them to think of ‘larger issues’ as against ‘the 58

Ibid. Reply to Address of All Bengal Students Association, September 1928, SW, Vol. 3, pp. 198–99. 59

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smaller field of wages and hours of work and standards of living’. And, ‘so long as imperialism continues and capital has full freedom to exploit the weak and unorganised labour of colonial countries’ this state of affairs was likely to continue. Logically, therefore, ‘the independence of colonial countries is very necessary’ and it was ‘the duty of the European working class to combat imperialism and to help the nationalist movement of oppressed countries’.60 Nehru fully grasped the fact that the colonial working class’ conditions of life did not automatically instill into this section of society, the spirit of nationalism. ‘Ground down by poverty and by forces which seem to be unconquerable, the fear born of slavery that possesses (them) and makes it difficult to organise (them) with the daily struggle for wages and bread ever before us, how can we think of larger issues?’61 Here, Nehru repeated the central premise of Lenin’s What is to be done? That is, in itself the struggles of the working class for improving their conditions of life only produce trade union consciousness. Even this low level consciousness was made impotent by the existence of the imperialist state. He even recognised the possibility of the national movement successfully overthrowing imperialism without the full and effective participation of the working class becoming a reality—not to speak of the working class leading the movement, as the Communists constantly asserted. ‘It is possible’, he said, … that the nationalist movement in a country under foreign domination may succeed in gaining independence without the support of labour … it will result in creating a new capitalist state, nominally independent, but with little freedom for the worker. That will not bring peace any nearer or solve any of our problems.62

These were prophetic words. The Indian Communists asserted that the working class would, because of its class nature, be at the head of the national movement. Contrarily, for Nehru, the involvement of the working class in the national movement was the conscious act of the revolutionary and nationalism had to be consciously injected into the working class. This conception should not be understood to mean that 60

SW, Vol. 4, p. 50; Vol. 3, p. 153. Ibid. 62 Ibid. 61

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no worker was capable of grasping this link between nationalism and his own trade union struggle. It simply meant that the mass of backward workers ‘ground down by poverty’ would find it very difficult in themselves to grasp this basic link. The extent to which the working class was permeated with nationalist ideas was, for Nehru, the crucial point with which its own political future was intimately tied. The working class could not ‘afford to ignore’ the struggle for national freedom in existence in the country, for its ‘future is intimately bound up with them’.63 In this context, the role of the middle class in carrying nationalist consciousness to the workers and peasants was emphasised: ‘it is only from the middle class intellectuals that revolutionary leadership comes’.64 However, it had to be a two-way process—the working class would become the backbone of the movement only to the extent that ‘the masses realise what Swaraj means for them. Therefore it is essential that we must clearly lay down an economic programme, must have an ultimate ideal in view and must also provide for the immediate steps to be taken to bring them relief’.65 The inevitable middle class leadership must look more and more towards the working and peasant masses and draw sustenance from them. The social content of the national movement, therefore, had to be filled in by the working masses. As Nehru put it, ‘… the peasants and the industrial workers’ were undoubtedly, ‘the people who must form the armies or forces to fight the battle of India’s freedom’.66 Why was nationalism the first priority? Because, only freedom from imperialist control would create the prerequisites for changing ‘the very structure (of society) under which the worker is exploited’.67 It had to be grasped clearly that, in India, the coercive instruments of state power which constantly thrust themselves between labour and capital for the protection of the latter were not controlled by Indian capitalists. Therefore the dismantling of the state apparatus of imperialism was the first priority for all revolutionary forces, above all, for the working class. The fact that Indian capitalists sought and received the protection of the 63

Ibid., Vol. 4, p. 50. Presidential Speech at the Lucknow Congress, 1936, SW, Vol. 7, pp. 170–95. 65 Presidential Address at the Punjab Provincial Congress, April 1928, SW, Vol. 3, p. 225. 66 Ibid., p. 198. 67 SW, Vol. 4, p. 54. 64

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imperialist government against the workers did not lead to the equation of the state representing the capitalist class. Nehru fully grasped the relative ‘dependence as well as structural contradiction of the Indian capitalist class vis-à-vis the colonial state’. Though in certain conjunctures, like the Communists, he almost saw them as allies of imperialism, he never ruled out the possibility of their crossing over to a vigorous and strong antiimperialist movement, ‘these capitalists will themselves come down from their places of privilege and join us’. ‘I know that if we spread socialist ideas we are bound to come into conflict with the capitalists. But this should not deter us … .’ What was necessary was to ‘organise the workers and create a mass consciousness among the people. If they are organised we will have the real sanction of the people behind us.’68 NEW IDEOLOGY FOR YOUTH

Nehru’s priority was clearly stated—unity against the imperialists. The other dimensions the left could foster in the movement would depend greatly on the strength and organisation of workers and peasants mobilised in the movement. This task, in its turn, could be performed only with the united efforts of various groups of the left-wing intelligentsia, chiefly the educated youth working within such a perspective, and conducting intense politico-ideological activity. The logical result of this was Nehru’s concentration on the youth.69 First of all, a revolutionary temper had to be promoted. Only a spirit of revolt could create a generation of youth with sensitivity to the broader issues of exploitation—of man by man, nation by nation and class by class. Before one could preach with what to replace the present system it had to be preceded by the spirit of utter disgust and revolt against an antiquated system. Nehru attacked the notion of revolution as an act of destruction and posited it as the creation of ‘the well-being of the vast majority of the people’.70 He did not have an iota of doubt that only a youth gripped by a revolutionary spirit and ideas would be capable of building a new nation. It was the function of youth to supply this dynamic 68

‘Socialism and Communism,’ Speech at Lahore, 8 February 1929, SW, Vol. 4, p. 3. See LAI documents, AICC Files, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML). 70 Presidential Address at the Bombay Presidency Youth Conference, 12 December 1928, SW, Vol. 3, p. 203. The two revolutions he constantly referred to were the French and Russian revolutions, see SW, Vols. 3 and 4. 69

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element in society; to be the standard bearers of revolt against all that was evil and to prevent older people from suppressing all social progress and movement by the mere weight of their inertia. ‘The spirit that was infused in the youth of Europe after the Great War, and especially by the Russian Revolution, should be kindled in every Indian youth.’71 Drawing inspiration from the Russian Revolution, however, did not mean expounding the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat’. The struggle against imperialism and for a new social order had to be accompanied by a regeneration of cultural forces which would develop legitimacy in everyday life for new and revolutionary ideas and institutions and undermine old notions and beliefs. Nehru was able to see clearly that imperialism and social reaction as an ideology based itself on the firm foundation of feudal authoritarianism and paternalism, including its manifestation in family life. Inculcating the spirit of revolt by the youth would pave the way for revolt against both imperialist and socially reactionary ideas.72 Nehru’s great emphasis on this cultural and ideological transformation differentiated him from the Communists who largely concentrated on delineating the economic interests of capital and labour. He saw the movement against imperialism and for social transformation as a cultural movement. He did not believe that the magic of economic interest would automatically dissolve the dead-weight of antiquated and reactionary ideologies and custom even within the working class. For instance, the Communist Joglekar, was a member of a communal organisation till he was censured. The worker delegate in the CPI, Kasle, was simultaneously active in the non-Brahmin association in Bombay. A meeting of the Executive Committee of the CPI, at Madras, 29 and 30 December 1927, at which Dange presided and the secretary made a verbal report, is cited by P.C. Joshi. The meeting considered the position of members who were also members of communal organisations. Joglekar was asked to resign from the Brahmin Sabha of which he was a member. Hasrat Mohani ‘was dealt with’ for being a member of the Muslim League and making aggressive communal speeches. S.D. Hasan was ‘dropped’ for working and writing in a communal paper.73

71

Speech at Delhi, 5 February 1929. SW, Vol. 4, p. 2. See SW, Vol. 3, p. 185. 73 P.C. Joshi, A Documented History of the Communist Party of India, Preliminary Notes to Vol. II, typed manuscript, ACHI, JNU. 72

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These examples illustrate the problem of the splintered consciousness which Nehru spoke about. It was therefore vital to launch a frontal attack on all such elements among the youth and intelligentsia who were to organise the workers and peasants and link themselves with these classes. However, in the hundreds of speeches that Communist members of the WPP made during various strikes between 1927–29 and which were presented as evidence in the Meerut Conspiracy Case, there was no effort at taking caste and religious loyalties as a serious obstacle to the growth of working class consciousness. On the contrary, one comes across a speech made by Mirajkar (a Communist) during the Bombay Millworkers’ strike of 1928 in which he informed the workers that the city corporation was going to ‘engage a Brahmin cook who would cook rice and curry’ and this would be distributed to the striking workers.74 Joglekar, another Communist, went even further to demand uncooked food as strike relief for, You know that there are some ‘bhaiyas’, i.e., up-country men who do not eat food prepared by the others, and we also do not eat food prepared by the people of other castes. Therefore, they should give only rice and we shall cook it in our own way.75

Even if in the middle of the strike the Communist leaders felt the pressure to conform to the caste prejudices of the workers, this experience ought to have revealed the urgent necessity to fight such elements in the future. However, there is no evidence, even later, of any serious effort to fight such manifestations of political and social divisiveness instead of concentrating only on economic issues and demands. Nehru put forward a minimum programme for building the ‘New Youth’ ideology and movement. The fundamental planks of a cultural revolution had to be anti-caste, anti-communal, and anti-feudal striving for equality and an egalitarian order.76 These were the essential mediations which would take the youth towards acceptance of a socialist ideology. Only when the youth was imbued with a holistic conception of politics, aware of all forms of oppression and inequality whether between classes and groups, or men and women, would they be ready to march 74

Meerut Conspiracy Case, Speeches, 1928, (MCC), p. 1700, 21 July 1928. MCC, p. 1703, 24 July 1928. 76 He asked for agreement on these ‘general principles’. SW, Vol. 3, pp. 180–81. 75

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forward in the battle for socialism. Until the degrading notions of caste, religious community and false cultural pride were purged out, the vision of a new society could not take root.77 Once the inertia of the past was broken down, the ideology of socialism would not be the rootless and sterile abstraction it became when addressed to persons still submerged in communal and caste-loyalties. Only a radicalised youth could stand on the threshold of absorbing socialism and become the bearer of new ideas of social organisation. No one who believed in the caste system or communal ideas ‘could possibly accept’ the removal of class inequality or emancipation of political, economic and social questions from religion. Without a radical change in the whole fabric of society, the ideas of doing away with the landlord, and disposing off the capitalists might be acceptable to the intellectual few, but would not inspire courage and sacrifice in larger numbers. The general backwardness of the people in the country, especially the peasants gave the radical and scientific intelligentsia a vital role to play.78 But, the closer they related themselves to the mass of working people the steadier would be their pulse on reality, and the more live would be their programme with the sanction of the masses behind it. ‘Above all ally yourself to the masses of the country.’79 But apart from indicating the broad class positions and alliances, what was to be the precise programme for socialism in India? Reasoning that it was necessary to have stages leading towards putting forward a socialist programme, what would be the ‘lesser immediate programme’? To these and all other questions there could only be a single answer: study; for, socialism was a complex subject, and though at a popular level it moved the minds of both the masses and the intelligentsia, it could not be a mere war cry. Socialism had to be studied and practised critically, seriously and thoughtfully.80 It was for the youth of the country to think out the solution and work for it, to study the real state of affairs in other countries 77 Presidential Address at the All Bengal Students Conference, Calcutta, 22 September 1928, SW, Vol. 3, pp. 191, 207. 78 SW, Vol. 3, pp. 179–82, 198, 212, 376; Vol. 4, pp. 1–23. 79 Presidential Address at Bombay Presidency Youth Conference. December 1928, SW, Vol. 3, pp. 203–10. Presideniial Address at the U.P. Provincial Conference, October 1928, SW, Vol. 3, p. 258; also see p. 205. 80 Presidential Address at Socialist Youth Conference, SW, Vol. 3, p. 213. Presidential Address to All Bengal Students Conference. September 1928, Ibid., Vol. 3, pp. 192–93.

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and to discover the truth about the great revolutionary experiment being carried out in Russia.81 The spirit of intellectual revolt, which he had advocated earlier, should now be followed by intellectual enquiry. ‘Each revolution is preceded by a process of evolution and preparation.’82 What the country needed was ‘a clash of ideas leading to clear thinking and ultimately its translation into action’. Argument and debate would help to clarify one’s vision, and then one could act with a proper perspective of one’s ideal.83 The main purpose of youth organisations should be to discuss social, political and economic problems in the search for truth.84 The average student knew ‘precious little about communism or socialism’. And it was essential for the youth to try and understand it. The various youth leagues would have as their principal object, self-education by discussions and by developing contacts with the masses. They would be the necessary training ground for future active work by the youth, once they acquired clarity on what to do and how to do it. The process of rational comprehension and discourse would be developed over time; till then the youth leagues could not be committed to only one point of view. ‘The object should … be the training and knowledge that the work gives.’85 The youth leagues ‘should consist of earnest young men of every way of thinking. They should be tied to no creed or dogma.’ Communists and socialists would be welcome to join the leagues—but these should be utilised as centres of politico-intellectual activity. This would ensure that those who joined the ranks of the socialist or Communist movement would do so as conscious, rational and scientifically convinced minds, aware of the debates within the left and prepared to take up a position without dogmatism or blind adherence to ill-digested formulae.86 Nehru’s impatience and dismay at the doctrinairism and dogmatism of many Communist positions led him to repeatedly quote Lenin against the Leninists: ‘Nothing is final: we must always learn from circumstances.’ And again: ‘In no sense do we regard the Marxist theory as complete and unassailable. On the contrary, we are convinced that theory is only the 81

Message to Lahore Students Union, SW, Vol. 3, p. 200, see pp. 193–94, 202. Presidential Address at Bombay Presidency Youth Conference. It was, almost, as if he was echoing Gramsci: ‘Every revolution is preceded by an intense intellectual activity.’ 83 Speech at the Bombay Youth League, December 1928, SW, Vol. 3, p. 211. 84 Address to Allahabad Youth League, August 1929, SW, Vol. 4, p. 16. 85 Letter to Bhagwat Dayal, AICC File, File G–39/1928, NMML. 86 Ibid. 82

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cornerstone of that science which socialists must advance in all directions if they do not wish to fall behind life.’ In general, his position could be summed up as that of a libertarian Marxist: ‘Marx’s theory of history was … of an ever-changing and advancing society. There is no fixity in it. It was a dynamic conception.’ That was why ‘it was the essential freedom from dogma and the scientific outlook of Marxism that appealed to me’.87 Thus we see that in all his addresses and messages to the youth, Jawaharlal Nehru focused on two major themes. First, that India was a nation in the making—‘a tremendous country which comprised various provincial groups with different ideas … (and) Hindus, Christians, Jains and Mahomedans expressing their respective views’.88 Consequently, a cultural revolution against all divisive and fragmented consciousness had to be waged. Second, they must simultaneously raise the question: what kind of nation would they strive for? Here he held up the necessity to grasp socialist ideas and to work out a programmatic unity of the left on this basis. Given the nature of Indian problems as he had outlined them in the first theme, ‘Socialist fights in the country were going to be a stiff fight, but they would have to fight against a number of prejudices courageously.’ But, on the other hand, they could more successfully ‘remove the communal spirit … (and) work for the unification of different groups in the provinces’ as socialists.89 Within this framework he consistently brought before them the need to link up with the peasantry and working class, initiating an ideological process in which social and economic awareness would be created. The youth could see for itself how the whole of India was convulsed in labour struggles. Lockouts, strikes and shootings followed one after another. A system which produced such poverty and misery had to be changed.90 The Public Safety Bill, the Trades Disputes Act, and the Meerut Conspiracy Case were constantly brought before the youth as examples of how the fate of the imperialist government was closely linked to capitalist exploitation. The great example of a successful socialist revolution—Russia—Nehru defended and upheld unfailingly. There the organised peasant and labour 87 Nehru, An Autobiography, pp. 592–93; Eighteen Months in India, Allahabad, 1938, p. 39; Glimpses of World History, p. 547. 88 Presidential Address at Socialist Youth Congress. 89 Ibid. 90 Presidential Address at All Bengal Students Conference. SW, Vol. 3, p. 206.

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forces had succeeded in uprooting Tsarism and feudalism, substituting for them a government by the real people. And in spite of many mistakes, Russia stood as the greatest opponent of imperialism. The equality and internationalism held up by Russia were inspiring as was communism, as an ideal of society. These were the only ideals ‘worthy of the fine temper of youth’. Internationalism, of course, could be practised ‘only through national independence’. But there was no Chinese wall between them; the struggle for socialism would provide the link.91 UNITY AND STRUGGLE—GANDHI AND NEHRU

In view of the celebrated conception that Nehru blindly adhered to Gandhi’s leadership, it is relevant to see how Nehru located himself visà-vis Gandhi in this period. He was not necessarily correct in his evaluation of Gandhi’s programmes and tactics. Nevertheless, he was no blind follower. In the course of his project of ideologically preparing the youth, Nehru repeatedly rejected and criticised Gandhi’s antipathy to class struggle and his ‘trusteeship’ notions. Certainly, he neither attacked him by name nor slandered him as a reactionary betrayer, as the Communists were wont to do, especially from 1928 to 1934. Nehru considered Gandhi’s views as representative of an ideological current in the anti-imperialist struggle not meriting individual attack. The task was to build a critique of such ideas and educate the people towards overcoming their limitations. On the contrary, we have seen how, within his own perspective, he related to the Congress-led movement as a movement of all classes, and to Gandhi, its universally recognised leader, as a great anti-imperialist. Nonetheless, he differentiated himself ideologically from the known ideas of Gandhi and his followers, as early as 1927–28. Privately, in letters to Gandhi, he mercilessly criticised his views at many levels and expressed his own disagreement with them.92 Reading through his public speeches and statements it becomes clear that he forcefully conveyed his own views to the people specially at Peasant Conferences, Trade Union Congress and Youth League meetings. Informing Gandhi that he felt dissatisfied with his ‘miracle’ like projection of khadi being the key to future politics and the road to Indian freedom, he demanded alternative politics. And 91 92

Ibid. SW, Vol. 3, pp. 10–15, 18–20. An earlier letter was destroyed by Gandhi after reading.

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from the public platform he began outlining precisely this alternative politics by expounding his conception of the nexus between socialism and nationalism. Expressing his total disagreement with Gandhi’s statement that there was no necessary conflict between capital and labour, he wrote to him of his own conviction that ‘under the capitalist system this conflict is inevitable’.93 Pointing out the limitations of Gandhi’s advocating the claims of the poor in India, Nehru characterised ‘the semi-feudal zamindari system which prevails in a great part of India’ and ‘the capitalist exploitation of both the workers and the consumers’, as ‘fundamental causes of Indian poverty’.94 Criticising Gandhi’s blanket denunciation of western civilisation, Nehru announced that he neither thought ‘the so-called Rama Raj was very good in the past, nor do I want it back’.95 Counteracting such beliefs he exhorted the people to abandon harkening back to the mythical values of the Vedas and the Koran. Instead, he impressed upon them the need to learn and assimilate the best ‘thoughts and ideas that were revolutionising life in the western countries and thus equip India for occupying her rightful place in the modern world’.96 In this fashion, Nehru fought an ideological battle against Gandhi, taking up various aspects of what he considered ideological backwardness and subjected them to a radical critique. Nehru picked up Gandhi’s idiom and infused a new spirit into old concepts. For example, ‘the conception of Dharma changes from age to age … greater than any man is the idea … the avatars of today are great ideals … and the ideal of the day is social equality’.97 But this did not prevent him from seeing Gandhi’s role in the antiimperialist struggle as having wrought revolutionary changes. The noncooperation movement led by Gandhi was seen by Nehru as follows: poverty and long autocratic rule with its inevitable atmosphere of fear and coercion had thoroughly demoralised the people. Non-cooperation and civil disobedience led to self-respect, self-reliance, cooperative action, and resistance to oppression; it widened the outlook and thought of 93

Ibid., pp. 13, 15. Address at All Bengal Students’ Conference. 95 Letter to Gandhi, 11 January 1928, SW, Vol. 3, pp. 14, 15. 96 Address at the Champaran District Political Conference, November 1928, SW, Vol. 3, p. 263. 97 SW, Vol. 3, p. 196. 94

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India as a whole. ‘It was a remarkable transformation and the Congress, under Gandhi’s leadership, must have the credit for it.’98 It was in this sense that in the eyes of Nehru, Gandhi was ‘greater’ than all his ‘little books’.99 And thus, despite major disagreements and ‘conflicts on some points’ Nehru ‘presumed there would be considerable ground for common action’. After all, when the general anti-imperialist ‘struggle comes, it takes place on one or two particular issues and we can well cooperate with others on these issues. Meanwhile we carry on our work specially amongst the workers and peasants.’100 On his total relationship with Gandhi by this time (1929) one could say: Nehru had worked out the basic assumptions of this relationship as those of unity and struggle—consistent ideological struggle—while maintaining not only political but also organisational unity against imperialism. THE WARRING LEFT—THE COMMUNISTS AND NEHRU

As we have said at the beginning, Nehru strove to construct a paradigm distinct from the positions of both Gandhi and the Communists. But the Communists at this time gave him no quarter. Once the phase of cooperation characteristic of the WPP period was abandoned, it is extremely educative to see the level at which they attacked him during 1929–34, and the issues they picked to ideologically distinguish themselves from him. ‘Leninism’ triumphed over creativity, and the Indian ‘Bolshevik group’ was born. The ‘Bolshevik’ Indian Communists now held: The WPP movement, in its basic fundamental theoretical principles was a Congress movement. It did not advocate the hegemony and leadership of the working class in the Indian national struggle. It carried on its criticisms on the basis of a Congress platform. It took part in the Congress apparatus. Its organisational structure was based on the Congress principles. Its programme was not a Communist programme. It reflected the petty-bourgeois socialism of the Indian petty-bourgeoisie.

Further, it was maintained that, cooperation with left radicals like Nehru and his colleagues was a manifestation of the fact that the WPP 98

Letter to Lord Lothian, 1936, A Bunch of Old Letters, Bombay, 1958. Letter to Gandhi, SW, Vol. 3, p. 13. 100 Letter to K.L. Ganguly, 5 March 1929, SW, Vol. 3, p. 284. 99

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‘always criticised the Congress policy merely as the most radical wing of the Congress. Genuine Communists are different.’101 After 1929, the national reformists and their ‘most dangerous “left” variety’, like Nehru, could be shown up for what they were: ‘assistants of British imperialism’. Ironically, just when Nehru was devoting his time and attention towards the creation of a left-bloc, an all-out war was declared upon him by the ‘new and genuine CPI’.102 Scathingly dismissed as the Kerensky and Chiang Kai-shek of India, it was said of him in 1930: ‘The speeches delivered by Jawaharlal Nehru often to Indian workers and youth remind one of the Russian Mensheviki who invariably made use of big revolutionary words.’103 This, despite the striking success of Nehru’s perspective and political interventions as was apparent in their own observation: ‘In the Civil Disobedience Movement hundreds of persons, mostly young men and women, have been arrested every week, and all Congress demonstrations broken up by increasingly brutal lathi charges of the police.’ It is only fair to assume that the repression was in direct proportion to the new militancy the Movement had acquired with the participation of the radical youth mobilised by Nehru. More significantly, the youth had not stopped at pure militancy in their confrontations with the imperialist power: After the arrest of the older leaders the Youth Leagues have acquired an important position in the shaping of Congress policy … demanding that the Congress should adopt an economic programme, based upon the immediate minimum needs of the workers and peasants, and that the workers and peasants should be drawn into the Congress organisation.104

But what was the conclusion that was drawn from these developments? That of perfidy and betrayal: ‘The present policy of Congress is to become a Kuomintang, with the object of establishing an Indian Nanking with the blood of the workers and peasants.’ And Jawaharlal Nehru was the 101

Workers Weekly, No. 8, 20 March 1930, p. 1, ‘Significance of the Meerut Trial’, No. 3, 9 February 1930, p. 4. 102 Open Letter from the Young Communist International to the All-India Youth Congress, Inprecor, Vol. 9, No. 17, 5 April 1929. 103 Inprecor, No. 50, November 1930. ‘Experiences of the October Revolution and Emancipation Struggle of Colonies’. ‘The Indian National Congress Against Revolutionary Development,’ by V. Chattopadhyaya. 104 Ibid.

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executor of this ‘heinous’ policy. ‘He now says everywhere that he stands for socialism and independence. Mr Nehru’s policy, as a matter of fact, is directed against the independence of the country and against socialism.’ Why was Nehru’s policy destructive of these goals? Fundamentally because, … Mr Nehru accepts non-violence in theory and in practice. And one of the main principles of Gandhist treacherous policy is propagation of non-violence—aimed at disarming the toiling masses and preserving the slavish, submissive mentality … . This is sufficient for us to state that Mr Nehru is a reformist and does not stand for independence.105

This red herring of violence versus non-violence runs like a continuous thread in Communist Party documents throughout the course of the anti-imperialist movement. In 1923, M.N. Roy had explained ‘the social reason behind this theory of non-violence’ as merely ‘the anxiety for the vested interests of the native upper class and the apprehension of losing the problematical support of the rich’. In 1930, Communists were again reminding themselves that they had to work independent of the Congress party for the ‘violent overthrow of British rule’.106 If Gandhi made a fetish of non-violence as the Communists charged, they themselves obsessively upheld violence as the only ‘revolutionary’ means of struggle. Jawaharlal Nehru, and Bhagat Singh in his last years, were the only two nationally known freedom fighters and socialists who formulated the problem differently. They approached the complex question of violence and non-violence as intellectuals who believed that violence was historically produced by a repressive state and society, and yet they saw non-violence as the best form of struggle for a mass movement. For Nehru, the way the question of violence and non-violence had been debated in the country, almost from the ‘religious point’ of view, was ‘absurd’. Undoubtedly, violence was counter-productive, but the chief grievance of socialists against capitalism was precisely that it developed violence and war. It was 105 Inprecor, Vol. 14, No. 17, 16 March 1934. Also see R. Page Arnot, ‘Whither Nehru?’ Quoted by S. Gopal, op. cit., p. 126. 106 M.N. Roy, Political Letter, March 1923. Reproduced in G. Adhikari, Documents, Vol. 2; and ‘Draft Platform of Action of the CP of India’, Inprecor, Vol. 10, No. 58, 18 December 1930, p. 1218.

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… perfectly true that organised violence rules the world today … (but) the great majority of us, I take it, judge the issue not on moral but on practical grounds, and if we reject the way of violence, it is because it promises no substantial results.

If the nation at any time came to the conclusion that a violent movement was possible and fruitful he would not hesitate on abstract moral grounds. ‘Violence is bad but slavery is far worse.’107 What were the historical circumstances which made non-violence ‘practically’ suitable? The modern development of warfare had made organised states terribly powerful. It was almost impossible to combat the government by violence. Indians had neither the material basis nor the training for organised violence. Besides, citing the example of the European socialist movement, he said that their main methods of developing sanction and seizing power were based not on violence but the peaceful organisation of workers, peasants and others.108 Nehru refused to confuse the complex machinery of repression of the colonial state in India with Tsarist Russia, and obviously saw greater proximity between the organised power of the British Indian state and the capitalist states of Europe. This position was in sharp contrast to the Communists’ characterisation of the British–Indian state: ‘The imperialist domination in India bears the character of an absolutist state, under which there are no democratic rights, such as freedom of press, speech and association.’109 But above all, the most significant theoretical formulation of Nehru’s juxtaposed with the Communists’ emphasis on violence as a method was: ‘Any great movement for liberation today must necessarily be a mass movement, and mass movements must essentially be peaceful, except in times of organised revolt. Whether we have the non-cooperation of a decade ago or the modern industrial weapon of the general strike, the basis is peaceful organisation and peaceful action.’110 Bhagat Singh put forward a similar view: The revolutionaries know better than anybody else that the socialist society cannot be brought about by violent means, but that it should 107

SW, Vol. 3, pp. 245, 253; Vol. 4, p. 195. SW, Vol. 3, p. 253. 109 Abridged Draft of Political Theses of the CC of CP of India, Inprecor, No. 40, 1930, pp. 1024–34 (Xeroxed copy, ACHI). 110 SW, Vol. 4, p. 195. 108

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grow and evolve from within … . But, the present government here or, as a matter of fact, all the capitalist governments are not only not going to help any such effort, but on the contrary suppress it mercilessly.111

However, revolutionaries ought to adopt violence only ‘as a matter of terrible necessity’. Summing up his position Bhagat Smgh put it in the form of a brief and brilliant thesis: ‘Use of force justifiable when resorted to as a matter of terrible necessity: non-violence as a policy indispensable for all mass movements.’112 To return to the Communists’ indictment of Nehru’s policies, his attitude towards Gandhi was the touchstone, for ‘this is one of the fundamental questions that divides a revolutionary from a reformist’. And ‘Mr Nehru continues to claim that Gandhism represents a revolutionary force … which shows he is against the independence of the country’.113 But as Nehru said, he used ‘the word “revolutionary” in its proper sense without any necessary connection with violence’. In his view, Gandhi, had, non-violently, done great violence to British-made ‘laws’ and ‘legality’, by putting forward ‘a programme of open and defiant action’ and this ‘had worked an amazing change in the masses’.114 The Communists on the other hand repudiated Gandhi’s role in rousing anti-imperialist consciousness; on the contrary, they drew a vivid picture of an ‘independently developed revolutionary mass movement which the Congress leadership, headed by Gandhi, did its best to disorganise’.115 The basis for imagining an alternative ‘revolutionary mass movement’ were the Moplah rebellion and the ‘Bombay disturbances’ at the time of the Prince of Wales’ visit, which were certainly spontaneous outbursts of mass resentment, but were by no stretch of the imagination an alternative ‘mass movement developing new and higher forms of struggle’.116 The Communists vehemently denounced Nehru for his acceptance of the ‘method of non-violent non-cooperation’. As they themselves recorded, Gandhi made a public statement that ‘Congressmen should offer complete cooperation to socialists in agitating for workers’ and 111 Bhagat Singh, Why I am an Atheist, pamphlet published by Shahid Bhagat Singh Research Committee, Delhi, 1979. 112 Ibid., p. 12. 113 ‘Whither Nehru?’ 114 SW, Vol. 3, p. 225. 115 ‘Whither Nehru?’ 116 Ibid.

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peasants’ demands’ but should vigorously oppose preaching against the fundamental principle of the Congress creed which was ‘non-violent non-cooperation’.117 Having accepted that the mass movement should proceed on a non-violent basis, Nehru found no contradiction in stating that the socialists’ work and movement ‘must be related to the Congress struggle’. For the Communists this was incomprehensible: Nehru and his socialist friends are putting forward a programme of ‘subordination of the working class and peasantry to the political leadership of the bourgeoisie, represented by the National Congress’, wrote R.P. Dutt.’118 In this formulation the conflicting perspectives and premises of Nehru and the Communists are manifestly clear. Not only was the Congress seen as a class party of the bourgeoisie, but the co-existence and cooperation between the socialist and Congress-led movements were inadmissible. ‘Nehru calls for a cessation of criticism of the Congress in vain’, continued Dutt, ‘because the victory of independence struggle demands clear demarcation between revolutionary forces against reformist forces and it demands the annihilation of Congress influence among the toiling masses’.119 Given this understanding of the Congress as a bourgeois party and of Nehru ‘faithfully carrying out the instructions of landlords and capitalists’, it was of course impossible that Nehru’s conception of a ‘left-bloc’ within the Congress would be intelligible to the Communists. And anyway, it was apparent to them that Nehru ‘was actually opposed to socialism’, as he had himself said: ‘I do not approve of many things that have taken place in Russia, nor am I a Communist in the accepted sense of the term … .’120 In this matter the Communists were in full agreement with Nehru—he was far from being a Communist when even ‘the ABC of socialism’ was not included in his programme. For he neither put forward the goal of dictatorship of the proletariat nor the necessity of an independent political party of the working class—the essence of ‘Leninism’.121 And this was enough to blot out his socialist credentials forever. In such a context Nehru’s vision could only appear as a petty-bourgeois fool’s utopia when it was not being denounced as the 117

R.P. Dutt, ‘Congress Socialism—A Contradiction in Terms,’ Ganashakti, Vol. I, No. 1, September 1934, File 1934–57, ACHI, JNU. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid. 120 ‘Whither Nehru?’ 121 Ibid.

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‘Machiavellianism of a social–fascist’.122 What emerges powerfully in a juxtaposition of the complex positions of Nehru and the simplistic sloganeering of the Communists at this time is the nature of Marxism that prevailed in India. ‘Here, Marxism first spread as a political programme rather than as a new world view or cultural movement.’123 Nehru’s emphasis on the creation of a new culture acquires significance when compared to the role of a whole generation of Communists as activists, which overshadowed their role as intellectuals.

122 123

1980.

Workers’ Weekly, February 1930. P.C. Joshi in K.N. Panikkar, (ed.). National and Left Movements in India, New Delhi,

Chapter 7

Towards Left Hegemony Molecular Changes in Mass Ideology

We have seen how the left-bloc existed, how formidable the logic of its further development appeared in the eyes of the government, and the ways it consequently devised to cause a split.1 Meanwhile, the radicalisation of the National Congress proceeded and new forms of organisation and ideology were constantly being thrown up in the national movement. Throughout 1927, efforts, however small, were being made in different provinces to revive non-cooperation and satyagraha.2 On his return from Brussels, Jawaharlal’s efforts to influence the Indian National Congress towards the left gradually began to permeate the ranks. His reports on the League Against Imperialism and his associating the Congress with it resulted in a substantial impact. In the leavening of this widespread and growing sentiment of radicalisation, the formation of workers’ and peasants’ parties and the Communist British M.P. Saklatvala’s campaign in India under the auspices of the National Congress, played their own part. Saklatvala, who attended the seventh session of the AITUC at Delhi in March 1927, laid special stress on the need for youth and mass movements and for the formation of a workers’ and peasants’ party; and wherever he went he was given an enthusiastic response by the youth, much to the 1 2

See chapters III and IV of this volume. HDP, File 32/27, Fortnightly Reports for the year 1927.

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chagrin of the government.3 The government was aghast to find that he was being welcomed and feted everywhere, even officially, by the Congress PCCs and leaders such as Shaukat Ali, B.G. Horniman and S.A. Brelvi.4 On his arrival at Ahmedabad, he was received by Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel, president of the Gujarat Provincial Congress Committeee, at the railway station. A huge mass rally was organised at Ahmedabad by the Congress Committee, at which Saklatvala struck the right tone with the mass of Indian radicals. Calling himself a ‘Tilakite extremist’, he referred to ‘Comrade Gandhi’s inspiring call’ which needed now to be pursued and extended more widely and radically. And for this task, he said, it was invaluable to secure the goodwill and help of ‘esteemed friends and leaders like Comrades Iyengar, Nehru, Gandhi, Sarojni Naidu, Anusuyabai, Mohammad Ali, Shaukat Ali and several others’.5 The pressure by the workers’ and peasants’ Parties helped many Provincial Congress Committees to draw closer to labour, hitherto the preserve of constitutionalist trade-union leaders. Bombay of course was the best illustration of this, where members of the workers’ and peasants’ parties had joined the Provincial Congress.6 All over the country, a general restiveness was observed among Congressmen in various provinces throughout 1927. Small, local campaigns began to receive an influx of young and militant volunteers from the mofussil; and ‘a new group of firebrands’ took charge in various provinces gradually changing the character of the movement by the holding of daily meetings and rendition of strong speeches. By the end of the year the appointment of the Simon Commission was announced which promptly catalysed simmering rebelliousness. Against the backdrop of a general outcry against the appointment, the AITUC, which had a good number of radical nationalists in it, passed an angry resolution against it at its Kanpur session, as did every Provincial Congress Committee.7 And then arrived the Madras session of the Indian

3

Fortnightly Report for the month of March 1927. File 32/27, Home Department, Political. 4 Free Press of India, 19 January 1927. See Panchanan Saha, Shapurji Saklatvala: A Short Biography, New Delhi, 1970, p. 25. 5 Home Poll. 32/27, FR March 1927. Also, Forward, 25 January 1927. 6 Fortnightly Report for the first half of June 1927, File No. 32/27, Home Department, Political. 7 Fortnightly Reports for the month of November 1927.

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National Congress, at which the left-bloc that developed so meteorically in the country during this conjuncture was born. A resolution on the aim of the Congress being complete national independence of India was discussed and formulated by the Communists Joglekar and Nimbkar in cooperation with Jawaharlal Nehru who introduced it at the session; and the resolution was passed.8 The presidential address delivered by Dr Ansari at this session referred to the international solidarity with the oppressed peoples of other countries fighting imperialism. The sum of resolutions passed at this Congress was a great advance over the barren political stretch between 1922 and 1927. The resolutions approved of the official participation of the National Congress in the Brussels Congress against imperialism; expressed deep resentment at the Indian troops being sent by the government to further their imperialist designs in China and demanded the withdrawal of Indian troops and police forces from China, Messo-potamia, Persia and from British colonies and foreign countries. On the ‘war danger’ they declared it to be the duty of the Indian people to refuse participation and any kind of cooperation in a war that furthered the imperialist aims of the British government. These were symptomatic of a widening of horizons, and a foretaste of more to come.9 The significance of the Madras session lies not in the number of deeply committed delegates who grasped the resolutions that were passed, but in the sudden fresh air that was released into the political atmosphere and the new climate it helped generate over the next two years. By 1929, this ‘atmosphere’ had taken root as ‘a vital and irrepressible urge on the part of the Congress’.10 Meanwhile, throughout the country, events were moving at a rapid pace. By April 1928, a Youth Conference under the presidentship of Jawaharlal Nehru at Amritsar had passed a unanimous resolution recommending a change in the creed of the Congress so as to make ‘complete independence’ more explicit by changing it into ‘complete independence without the British empire’, and to substitute ‘by all possible means’ in place of ‘by peaceful and legitimate means’.11 Surveying the deliberations of the Amritsar Conference in an article, ‘The Writing on the Wall’, 8

FR December 1927. Also see Sohan Singh Josh, The Great Attack, New Delhi, 1979. See Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIB, Introduction. Also, Prem Sagar Gupta, op. cit. 10 Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, p. 167. 11 Bhagwan Josh, Communist Movement in the Punjab 1926–47, Delhi, 1979, pp. 79–80. 9

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Lala Lajpat Rai wrote: ‘The fact that in December 1927, the Congress at Madras should have adopted complete independence as its goal and at Amritsar in April 1928, only four months after, a Provincial Conference should have gone further to remove all restrictions on means also has its own significance. It shows which way the wind is blowing.’12 The Madras session of the Congress was a landmark in more ways than one. First of all, it was the first open manifestation of a radical tendency that had existed within the Congress for quite some time. Contradicting Gandhi’s characterisation of the independence resolution as ‘hastily conceived and thoughtlessly passed’, Nehru pointed out that ‘the country has discussed and considered this question for years past … . I have personally thought over it, discussed it, spoken about it in meetings, written about it and generally been full of it for the last five years or more’.13 Again, in a statement to the press he underscored the same point. ‘The subject has been discussed at length in the country for some years and has repeatedly come up before the Congress in various forms. Several Provincial Congress Committees have adopted it in the past.’14 Nehru already had two such resolutions before him in the file he received when taking over as Secretary of the AICC at the Madras session.15 The first was a copy of the resolution passed at the Third Kerala Provincial Conference, which was sent to the secretary, AICC, as early as April 1927. Apart from interpreting ‘swaraj’ as complete independence, a clear left-wing orientation characterised the resolutions.16 A resolution ‘urged the appointment of a committee by the AICC to consider a programme within three months, which could lead the country by stages to the culminating stage of mass civil disobedience’. Another, strongly advocated ‘the better organisation of the peasants and workers, and their due representation in the Congress’. The Conference also called upon the working committee of the AICC to immediately take the necessary steps, by appointing a workers’ and peasants’ organisation committee which could undertake the tasks

12

The People, 3 May 1928. Emphasis added. Letter from Nehru to Gandhi, dated 11 January 1928. Nehru, Selected Works, Vol. 3, p. 11. 14 Statement to the Press, Ibid., p. 16. Emphasis added. 15 AICC Papers, Correspondence regarding next AICC meeting, File G-13/1927 (NMML). 16 Ibid. 13

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without delay. Another resolution, prepared by the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party, was passed at the Bombay Provincial Congress Committee, and introduced at the full meeting of the AICC. It also resolved that ‘to attain general awakening with the least possible delay, a programme based upon the organisation and minimum demands of the working class and peasantry be adopted’. The resolutions were signed by the Communists K.N. Joglekar and R.S. Nimbkar. Both of them were members and office bearers of the BPCC.17 The Madras session of the Congress thus crystallised the already developing radical tendency within the Congress. By formally enunciating the ‘true’ meaning of swaraj, it also brought to a head the massive influx into the Congress of a completely new generation of young men and women. ‘It was often said that we wanted freedom, swaraj, terms which were not intelligible to everybody. The Independence resolution made clear, so far as the Congress was concerned, what sort of freedom we wanted.’18 This was the signal the youth of the country was waiting for, and there was an upsurge of youth associations all over the country. Youth Leagues have sprung up in all parts of the country and individual young men and women, weary of the continual and barren strife of many of their elders, are groping for a path which might lead them to a fuller realisation of themselves, a better and more prosperous India and a happier India.19

By acting as the catalyst which brought to life a completely new and radical departure in Congress politics, Nehru became the cynosure of all youthful eyes. As an ardent follower wrote to Nehru: ‘The whole youth found itself a follower of Jawaharlal after the Independence resolution at the Madras Congress.’20 Here, what is of crucial significance and must be emphasised is the fact that when we speak of the radicalisation of the Congress through 1928 to 1929 it was primarily the young members of the Congress who 17

Ibid. Nehru’s speech at Allahabad, Selected Works, Vol. 3, p. 8. 19 An Appeal to Youth, by Jawaharlal Nehru, AICC, File No. 12/1928, pp. 325–27. Selected Works, Vol. 3, p. 179. 20 M.L.N. Iyengar to Nehru, 19 February 1929, AICC Papers, File No. G-39/1928. Letter from Chandra Bhal Johri to Nehru, 1927. Nehru Papers, Part I, Vol. XXXVII (NMML). 18

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dominated the political scene. As we show in chapters 8 and 9, the next wave of the national struggle, the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930–31 was carried on the backs of the youth in the country. This was the logical result of the increasing radicalisation of the Congress in 1928 and 1929 by the youth who had taken over the stage from the ‘old and tired’, though tried and tested leaders of the Indian National Congress. A significant feature of the political life of the country was the interpenetration between the Youth Leagues, Seva Dals and the volunteer movements. The young were flooding all these organisations and most often were members of two of these bodies simultaneously. Archival sources show that the activities of the Congress in 1929 were synonymous with the activities of the Congress youth movement. The Congress was registering the vigorous impact of the fresh and new blood of the youth apart from the definite tilt political activities were receiving from the various left-wing elements in the country. This was the later-day left-wing of the Congress (CSP), which first acquired form at the time of the Simon boycott, and soon started to function on a better and integrated level throughout 1929 and after. However, the youthful Congress-left, though increasing in number, envisioned a radical change not synonymous with any schema. What was sensed in the air was a national revolutionary sentiment oriented towards the masses without any strict programmatic model. The most alarming feature of all these developments for the government, was the crystallisation of the anticipated left-bloc. The movement of the youth formed not only the soil for, but was an active component of the emerging left-bloc in the country. It was the leaders of the youth movement—the ‘extremist nationalists’—constantly referred to by the government as the ‘new’ and ‘dangerous’ phenomenon in Indian politics. The most advanced section of this category was based at Bombay where it was most receptive to socialist ideas and the influence of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party. Bombay with its large working class facilitated a closer relationship between radical Congressmen, Communist and other left leaders of the workers and the bourgeoning youth movement. The protest demonstrations against the Simon Commission contributed towards a further strengthening of this bloc. The planned boycott of the Simon Commission had captured, the imagination of the people, especially of the youth. Boycott meetings, at least two a day, and propaganda work had begun. Hartals and picketing

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of witnesses appearing before the Commission were undertaken. Most districts reported hectic activities and youth volunteers were always in the forefront.21 In Bombay, by the beginning of January 1928, the most militant preparations to organise the Simon boycott were in progress.22 Twenty members of the Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee (henceforth BPCC), which included the Communist/WPP leaders, formed a Propaganda Sub-Committee and the Communist Nimbkar took charge as its Secretary. The sub-committee launched an energetic campaign against the appointment and arrival of the Simon Commission, concentrating chiefly on mobilising students and the working class. The British Communist Philip Spratt, who was one of the active spirits in the organisation of the WPPs, formulated detailed suggestions for students on organising demonstrations and these were printed and distributed as Congress (BPCC) leaflets. The leaflets pointed out how it was the students duty to assume the leadership of the workers’ processions being planned, and to maintain order and discipline in them. Under the presidentship of the nationalist and trade union leader Jhabvala, the GIP and BB & CI railwaymen met at Parel, and planned a monster procession of railway workmen carrying red and black placards and flags. Congressmen like K.F. Nariman and the trade union leader Ginwalla attended this meeting of railwaymen which passed a boycott resolution, and another expressing admiration and gratitude for the services of Saklatvala, the visiting British Communist M.P. The municipal workers of Bombay, also led by Jhabvala, resolved on a hartal to boycott Simon’s arrival on 3rd February. The WPP which was very active in the mill areas organised a public meeting of mill-workers who decided to join the hartal as opposed to the decision of the Bombay Millowners’ Association not to support the boycott. In an effort to effect a compromise and ensure the closure of all mills the President of the Mill Workers’ Association met some mill managers and suggested the closure of all mills on 3rd February in return for which the workers would come to work on the following Sunday. Though this arrangement did not come through as the millowners refused to cooperate, this move was of the greatest political significance.23 21

File 1/1928, Fortnightly Report for January, second half. Fortnightly Report (Bombay), January, first half, 1928; and January, second half, 1928. 23 Ibid. 22

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On par with the preparations of the workers was the activity of the youth and students. The first session of the Bombay Presidency Youth Conference, with K.F. Nariman as its president, was convened in the middle of January. It not only passed a boycott resolution against Simon, but sought to radicalise the students and to create greater political and social awareness. Apart from resolutions on general political issues like Hindu–Muslim unity and the abolition of communal electorates, great emphasis was laid on resolutions for the abolition of all antiquated social and religious customs, on social reform and full support to the Age of Consent Bill which was being discussed in the Legislative Assembly at that time.24 Of immense importance was the fact that the League of Youth, Bombay Presidency, invited Communist leaders like Spratt, Nimbkar and Joglekar to address the students.25 As a matter of fact, Spratt and Nariman, the president of the Youth Conference, jointly addressed a number of student meetings under the aegis of the Bombay Youth League, which was led by Yusuf Meherally who maintained regular contact with Jawaharlal Nehru.26 Yusuf Meherally’s correspondence with Nehru and his active involvement with the Youth League movement show him to be a radical, keen to work and cooperate with the Communists in Bombay. The propaganda sub-committee formed for the organisation of the Simon boycott, and commonly referred to as the Nimbkar Committee, recorded big successes within a period of two weeks. As a result of its propaganda, the Mulji Jetha Cloth Market, the Piecegoods Merchants Association, the Grain Merchants Association, the Mahajan Association, the Cotton Brokers’ Association, the Indian Merchants’ Chamber, and the Municipal Markets Stallholders’ Association, amongst others, decided to remain closed on the day of Simon’s arrival.27 The most active role was planned for the students. Besides picketing schools and colleges, they were to march in processions and persuade traders and shopkeepers to close down their places of work. Another group of students would join the GIP and BB & CI workers and help them to stop railway traffic, while student volunteers would be present at all local railway stations. The proposals were so elaborate that the Commissioner of Police felt certain not enough

24

Ibid. Bombay Chronicle, 1 February 1928 (NMML). 26 Ibid. 27 Fortnightly Report, January, second half, 1928. 25

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students and workers would be found to implement them, a hope that was belied, however, on the appointed day.28 The Simon Commission landed at the port of Bombay on 3 February 1928. Newspaper reports enthusiastically hailed the people’s response to its arrival. The editorial of the Bombay Chronicle, for example, said: ‘The national hartal and boycott demonstrations were a magnificent success. This agitational scale has not been seen since non-cooperation.’29 Other papers like The Times of India and The Tribune spoke of complete hartal in a large number of places, specially at Delhi, Bombay, Madras, Peshawar and the Central Provinces. Public meetings of protest and demonstrations, chiefly by the youth, were held in every province.30 The government reports, on the contrary, treated boycott day as a damp squib: ‘The much advertised hartal was more or less a failure.’ And again: ‘The visit of Simon to Calcutta was a great success … the boycott failed noticeably.’ Bombay and Madras which were the scenes of massive protest, as were Lucknow and Kanpur in U.P., were shrugged off as ‘half-hearted’ and ‘partial’ successes.31 The government charged the newspapers with exaggerating the success of the boycott. However, it is amply clear from the government files of this period that, wherever the boycott made a significant impact, it was the youth entirely which was responsible, combined with the working class in industrial areas like Bombay or Kanpur.32 It was the first time the youth took upon itself the task of mobilising its ranks in the national movement as a group and not as individuals as in the non-cooperation days. The first youth leagues and associations had been formed, though, as yet, no all-India organisation or contacts existed. But, within months, all this was achieved as our account of the Youth League movement later would show, and as history bears out their concerted role in the Civil Disobedience Movement that followed. What appears to have fooled the authorities, temporarily was the fact that they expected a replay of the main features of the Non-cooperation Movement—withdrawals from schools and colleges, mass resignations from courts and government services, etc. However, no Gandhi-style 28

Ibid. Bombay Chronicle, 6 February 1928. 30 The Times of India, 6 February, 1928; The Tribune, 7 February, 1928. See S.R. Bakshi, Simon Commission and Indian Nationalism, 1976, who has narrated the events fully and whose account is largely based upon newspaper reports. Also see Bombay Chronicle, 6 February 1928; Home Poll. F. 1/1928. 31 Home Poll. F. 1/1928, Fortnightly Reports for February. 32 See the Home Political Files and Fortnightly Reports for February to November 1928. 29

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agitation on the pattern of the Non-cooperation Movement emerged before the government’s eyes to disturb them: ‘no foreign cloth bonfires’; ‘foreign goods are selling in the markets’; ‘no picketing etc.’—remarked each provincial officer, reporting to the Home Department, in relief. ‘They haven’t been very successful, thank the Lord! The boycott practically began and ended with the meetings and the resolutions. In the market and other places there is no picketing and British goods are being freely sold as before.’33 There were ‘meetings and oratory, but no cloth bonfires etc.’ The running thread in all the accounts, however, was that the youth and students were occupying the empty political space and were in the forefront of all demonstrations and protests. Despite government attempts to minimise their importance it was nonetheless necessary to call for section 144 CPC to be imposed and to prohibit meetings, processions, demonstrations and propaganda after 3 February.34 On the 3rd, monster meetings were held in U.P., specially, Allahabad where the youth were spirited and daring.35 The students of Bengal were very volatile—including schoolboys and girls who went on strike. Punjab, a late starter, achieved an impressive mobilisation of youth and students by March. Everywhere, the youth made up the core of the demonstrations whether the hartal was total or partial, whether the processions were of eight thousand as in Poona, or ten to twenty thousand in Karachi and Peshawar, or even forty thousand as was claimed in Delhi, or only meetings but no processions as reported by Calcutta.36 The youth leagues and associations of university and even school students were becoming active everywhere. From areas as far-flung as Assam and Delhi, the NWF Province and CP and Berar, came reports that there were processions of youth and youth league meetings and demonstrations. In some places like Assam, only the youth was ‘most active … adult members generally took no part’.37 The youth in Bombay had been as ‘adversely affected’ as in other parts of the country—they were restless, disorderly, consistently rebellious and in ferment. Their political debut was effected on 3 February. 33

Home Poll. 1/1928, Fortnightly Report for February, second half. F.R., February, first half, 1928. 35 Bombay Chronicle, 7 February 1928. 36 FR, February, second half, 1928; March and April, 1928. 37 Home Poll., 1/1928, February, first half. 34

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The students were the first to be out in the morning, in an imposing procession, with black flags and stirring slogans … . Despite heavy rain at least one thousand students lined the sidewalks leading to the Pier enclosure. They were determined and without care for consequences.

As the ‘Nimbkar Committee’ had pre-planned, the working class was to march in a separate procession. With business at a standstill—the share market, the bullion, cotton-seeds and piece-goods markets were all closed for the day—and the shop fronts bolted and barred, the hartal was complete. On the empty streets the cotton mill-workers came out in a procession led by Philip Spratt among others. They were joined by the workers of the GIP Matunga and BB & CI Workshops. At Foras Road, a labour meeting was held and the effigies of Stanley Baldwin, Lord Birkenhead, John Simon and Ramsay Macdonald burnt. A meeting of students presided over by K.F. Nariman and organised by the youth league was equally militant.38 The immediate reaction of the government was to underplay the whole show, dismissing the students as a ‘small gathering’ and estimating the workers demonstrations as ‘only 1,500’. No explanation was given for the lack of attendance in colleges and all the mills closing down despite the millowners’ decision to stay open. The newspapers reported: ‘Like the students, the working class response was equally magnificent. A procession of 30,000 peaceful and orderly columns marched through the streets.’39 Quoting the denigrating remarks made by the Evening News that ‘only callow youths and ignorant workmen participated’, the editorial of the Bombay Chronicle retorted that certainly it was the youth and workers who had played an important part. ‘They were self-inspired and selforganised’, it added, ‘which is a great honour to them and their response to the country’s crisis’. And in a more eloquent tone: ‘The youths and working class of Bombay were those who made history on the memorable day.’40 After their separate meetings the processions converged upon Chaupatti to join the public meeting: fifty thousand marched, ‘waving black flags

38 Home Poll. 1/1928, February, first half; Bombay Chronicle, 6 February, 1928. ‘Impressions of Friday’s Hartal’, by an Observer. The Times of India, 6 February 1928. Also see S.R. Bakshi, op. cit. 39 Bombay Chronicle, 6 February 1928. 40 Ibid. ‘Impressions of Friday’s Hartal’ by an Observer.

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and banners … and held a monster meeting’ on the sands.41 The list of speakers included Pheroze Sethna, Manmohandas Ramji, Bhulabhai Desai, K.F. Nariman, B.G. Horniman, Sarojini Naidu and Shaukat Ali, with C. Setalvad in the chair. From February to October the tempo of political propaganda and mobilisation, primarily among youth but also in some areas among peasants (U.P. and Punjab) and workers (Bombay textiles and railways) quickened. By June, radical Congressmen were touring around ‘appealing to youth to enlist as volunteers and to collect funds for the boycott of Simon’s second arrival and for the Bardoli movement now in progress’.42 The Bardoli satyagraha against increased land revenue rapidly acquired the status of a national challenge to the government. June 12 was chosen for countrywide celebrations as ‘Bardoli Day’. The Bombay Youth League, which had been clamouring for fresh activity since the Simon boycott, plunged into fund collection drives and the organisation of public meetings to commemorate the day. In the Punjab, continuous agrarian agitation held up the Bardoli satyagraha as an example of ‘successful organised resistance’. The political atmosphere in Madras was veering towards ‘nationalists extremism’ among the students.43 The ‘Independence resolution’ had become a popular aspiration in Bengal and the youth welcomed Nehru’s speeches as a ‘clarion call to revolt’.44 A rash of ‘political’ and ‘youth’ conferences broke out in the United Provinces concentrating especially on the mobilisation of kisans and emphasising agrarian issues.45 Intensive propaganda and mobilisation of youth, from the Central Provinces to Karachi characterised the summer of 1928. This was the general atmosphere and trend of political activities till October, when the Simon Commission was to return from its Burma tour. By November, the police was confronted with ‘large, aggressive demonstrations’, which received ‘sensational reports’ in the newspapers. The police ‘dispersed’ these demonstrations and charged: ‘Jawaharlal Nehru is the moving spirit in inciting people, specially the youth, to defy the police in Lucknow.’46 41

The Times of India, 6 February 1928. FR, June, second half. 43 FRs., August to October. 44 FRs., August, September, and December. 45 FRs., June to October. 46 Home Political, File 1/1928, Fortnightly Reports for November. 42

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On the second arrival of the Commission in October 1928, when Ansari officially gave a call for ‘complete boycott’ of the government, at Lucknow, Jawaharlal Nehru and G.B. Pant, led a procession of ten thousand which was dominated largely by students.47 The government noted the presence of youth as an explosive factor: The Lucknow demonstrators defied police order to take licence for processions, and clashes occurred with police for two days before arrival. University students very emotionally roused. Earlier ‘practice demonstrations’ perhaps should not be allowed as they work up feeling. Display of elaborate precautions and force actually incites further to clashes, but U.P. experience makes it necessary. In Kanpur, the demonstrators pressed on to the cars and the members of the Commission and abused, and there was some stone-throwing.

Nehru, himself, affirmed the leading role played by the youth in the anti-Simon demonstrations in his statement to the Press, though, he refuted the charge that they were unruly: ‘The students of Lucknow University who took a leading part in the procession … were largely responsible for the discipline and orderliness, … (and) practically the whole day processions of students were seen in the city and they held meetings.’48 This was true of almost all parts of the country, specially the major cities which reverberated with processions, demonstrations, public meetings and revolutionary cries on Simon’s re-arrival. And the ranks of the marchers and slogan-shouters consisted, chiefly, of the youth. Black flag processions ranging from eight to forty thousand students were taken out in Bombay, Poona, Karachi, Delhi, Peshawar and Calcutta. Large meetings and a successful ‘total hartal’ were reported from Madras, while large mass demonstrations were held jointly by the National Congress, the All-Parties boycott committee and the Youth Leagues in C.P. and Berar.49

47

Both Pant and Nehru, were injured in the attack on the demonstrators by the police, Tribune, 5 December 1928. 48 Home Political, File, 21/XII/1929, Express Telegram dated 9 December 1928, from Home Department to all Provinces, Tribune, 5 December 1928. 49 This information is based on the reports given in The Times of India, and the Bombav Chronicle, 23 October 1928.

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A very clear movement towards radicalisation in the Congress, was visible in large parts of the country. And the major contribution towards this was made by the youth. Lahore city resounded with cries of ‘Simon Go Back’, days before his second arrival. As several thousands marched to the Lahore railway station, the government clamped prohibitory orders and erected barbed wire barricades all around. It was here that the wellknown assault on the demonstrators in which Lala Lajpat Rai was injured took place.50 The strength of the marchers was constituted by the youth. Lajpat Rai, in his speech outside the station, repeatedly referred to the ‘young men’ and thanked them for observing peace and not retaliating against provocations by the police.51 The death of Jatin Das behind prison bars was the signal for the seething revolt and restlessness of the youth to spill out into the streets. It was a time of ‘historic excitement and extreme emotional tension’ in Bengal. Large processions formed ‘spontaneously’ and there were ‘great crowds in the streets’. ‘Unruly crowds of impassioned youth’ filled the open spaces at Bombay and Delhi and nightly meetings of protest were organised by the Anjuman–i–Naujawan in the far NWFP. A major feature of the week that followed was a total strike in schools and colleges with the students holding meetings round the clock.52 By the end of 1929 the youth movement was at its zenith and government reporters were weary with listing the new branches of the All India Youth League which were springing up almost everywhere in the country, whether it was Moga in Ferozepur district, South Sylhet in Assam, Moradabad, Baroda, Mysore, or Utmanzai, the home village of Ghaffar Khan in the North West Frontier Province.53 Resolutions on complete Independence were passed with mounting excitement by the Youth Leagues and recorded with boring repetitiveness in the provincial reports. The cry for new politics and radical change in the Congress had reached a crescendo in the youth movement. The nationalist press could speak of nothing but the approaching Lahore session of the Congress which, given the tempo the youth movement had built up, was ‘to all expectations going 50

Tribune, 23 October 1928; Home Political File 1/1928, November, second half. S.R. Bakshi, op. cit. After Lala Lajpat Rai’s death there was a complete hartal in Punjab for the first time since the arrival of the Simon Commission. 52 FR, September 1929. 53 Ibid., September, and October. The Youth League started by Ghaffar Khan had enrolled large numbers into the Congress and were sending delegates to the All India Youth Conference to be held in Lahore in December 1929. 51

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to be a momentous one’.54 As A.K. Gopalan bears eloquent testimony, by 1929 he felt like thousands of young men all over the country, ‘in the midst of a mighty revolutionary wind blowing throughout India. Youth Leagues, workers’ unions, revolutionary organisations, the activities of revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh, strikes—all these evoked sympathetic reverberations in my heart.’55 IDEOLOGY OF YOUTH MOVEMENT

The success of the October Revolution in Russia and the valiant struggle of the infant Soviet state against its encirclement by hostile powers had had on India, as on other parts of the colonial world, a major impact in terms of socialist ideology and thinking. In the early twenties the nationalist press and several nationalist leaders refuted the official anti-Bolshevik propaganda and hailed the Russian Revolution as a great historical event, a progressive advance for all humanity and a source of immense encouragement and inspiration for the colonial liberation movements. The Revolution, and the life, thought and work of Lenin, aroused great interest and attracted a large number of people in India, and this was reflected in the number of books on Lenin and the Russian Revolution that appeared in India throughout the twenties. In the three years between 1921 and 1924, eight books on Lenin and the Russian Revolution had appeared in India apart from Dange’s Gandhi versus Lenin.56

54

Ibid., December. A.K. Gopalan, In the Cause of the People, Bombay, 1973. p. 13. 56 They were: (1) Nicolai Lenin: His Life and Work, by G.V. Krishna Rao (English, Madras, 1921), (2) Bolshevik Jadugar (Lenin) by Ramashankar Awasthi (Hindi, Calcutta, 1921), (3) Socialism by Vinayak Sitaram Sarawate (Marathi, Poona, 1921), (4) Russiatil Bolshevism by Dr. Laxman Narayan Joshi (Marathi, Poona, 1921), (5) Nicolai Lenin, by R.G. Bhide (Marathi, Poona, 1921), (6) Lenin and the Russian Revolution by Aziz Bhopali (Urdu, Lahore, 1922), (7) The Liberator of the Poor in Russia—Nicolai Lenin by Gorakh (Kannada, Hubli, 1923), (8) Biplab Pathe Russiar Rupantar by Amul Chandra Sen (Bengali, 1924). For a description and exhaustive documentation of the impact of the Russian Revolution on Indian national and political life see P.C. Joshi’s essay ‘Lenin—Contemporary Indian Image—A Documentary’ in P.C. Joshi and others, Lenin and the Contemporary Indian Press (Delhi, 1970); also see, S.G. Sardesai, India and Russian Revolution (New Delhi, 1967); Devendra Kaushik and Leonid Mitrokhin, Lenin, His Image in India (Delhi, 1970); and Gautam Chattopadhyay, Communism and Bengal’s Freedom Movement (Delhi, 1970). For reference on Dange, see Chapter III. 55

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The mood of the Indian intelligentsia and the prevailing climate thus, were wide open to socialist ideas and practice and these gave antiimperialism a revolutionary and militant edge. The youth movement, which in its embryonic form had begun by 1927, was exposed to this ideological orientation from its inception. In the formation of a radical and militant anti-imperialist ideology an inspiring role was also played by the revolutionary terrorist groups and individuals. Moreover, some of these individuals under the impact of the Russian Revolution, studied Marxist literature and socialism and gradually arrived at a general socialist understanding of the state, society, and revolution. Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev, for example, upheld the Soviet Union as their ideal and under their leadership the Naujawan Bharat Sabha (NBS) publicly took up socialist positions at about the same time as the emergence of a strong and widespread youth movement.57 The adoption by the revolutionary terrorists of socialism, and antiimperialism, and their recognition of the need to organise the working class, were a product of their grasping the link between capitalist economic exploitation and the enslavement of nations.58 However, their goal of spreading socialist consciousness in the ranks of the youth, the goal that was proclaimed by the HSRA, did not achieve much success. Their huge, popular following all over the country remained largely unaware of their deep commitment to socialist ideology. For most of the period of the national movement they were lionised, mainly, as great freedom fighters even by the Communists. Consequently, their real and significant success occurred in arousing anti-imperialist consciousness on a large scale, specially, among the youth. Nevertheless, the youth movement in 1928–29 was exposed to, and absorbed, socialist ideas on a much larger scale and wider area than the limited public political activity of the HSRA could have made possible or that which the very small ambit of Communist contacts could achieve. Jawaharlal Nehru’s writings and public pronouncements on socialism during this period provided an important channel through which the youth were inspired and educated. As we have noted elsewhere, 57 See Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee, In Search of Freedom (Calcutta, 1967); Yashpal, Sinhavalocan (Hindi), (Lucknow, 1951). 58 See Bhagat Singh and Dutt’s statement of 6 June 1929, The Philosophy of the Bomb; and the Last Message of Bhagat Singh in Vishwanath Vaishampayan, Amar Shahid Chandrashekhar Azad (Hindi, Parts 2–3, Banaras, 1967).

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according to E.M.S. Namboodripad, the popularisation of socialist ideas on a nationwide plane occurred through the political speeches and writings of Nehru and young radicals like himself came into contact with socialism through this channel rather than the Communists of whom little was known outside of the few centres where their groups functioned.59 Similarly, in Telengana area of Hyderabad State the organic evolution of the youth from anti-imperialism roused by Gandhi, to socialist ideas disseminated by Nehru, to finally joining the Communist movement, is faithfully recorded by Ravi Narayan Reddy. One could not speak of a single nationwide programme for the youth movement up to 1929. Most of the youth associations were as yet local in character, and new ones were being formed each day. Regular dissemination of its ideals, upon which the success of every movement depends, had just begun, while efforts to tie up organisationally at the all-India level were being made.60 Nor did a uniform and evenly spread ideology exist as yet in the various segments of the youth movement despite a commonly shared emotion and impatience to plunge into militant activity. Nevertheless, despite the uneven development of the youth movement, in terms of its organisational strength and sweep or its depth of ideological understanding and commitment, it revealed a definite pattern. Passing through an initial period of confusion, the youth movement all over the country groped towards new ideas and political ideologies. With active participation in popular demonstrations and mass campaigns such as the ‘Simon Boycott’, it gradually became radicalised and increasingly adopted one shade or another within the spectrum of left ideologies. With the entry of the youth in large numbers into the national movement new strains of transformation began to develop within it. In a span of less than a year in 1928 alone, there were about thirty new Congress youth leagues or groups bringing out journals or writing 59 See E.M.S. Namboodripad, How I became a Communist, pp. 110–11; also see, Ravi Narayan Reddy, Heroic Telengana Struggle, CPI Publication, 1973. 60 AICC Papers, C-39/1928 (NMML). All the references in this section are from this file unless otherwise indicated. See, Nehru to Kanhaiyalal ‘Yuvak Sudhar Sangh’, 31 March 1928; Yusuf Meherally to Nehru, 24 June 1928; Nehru to Meherally, 22 February 1929; Meherally to Nehru, 26 February 1929; Bhagwat Dayal to Nehru, 29 March 1929; Bhageshwar Singh Sharma to Nehru, 17 September 1928; D.L.A. Rao to Nehru, 30 June 1929. The Young Liberator, Vol. I, No. 8, April 1929; Programme of the Lucknow Youth League; Programme of All-Bengal Students Conference; ‘Appeal to Youth’, issued by Third Madras Youth Conference. Also see, Home Poll, File 179/29, Intelligence Bureau.

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to Nehru for directions. For the newly politicised forces of youth the period of 1927–29 was a time of widening horizons and the release of tremendous political energy. A new vision of radical change crystallised rapidly. Consequently, the political life of the country was charged with a national revolutionary sentiment increasingly oriented towards work among the masses. This process was occurring on a national scale, howsoever unevenly. It was also the process of formation of a new cadre, a whole new generation came to manhood, which would undertake the responsibility of organisation and mass mobilisation during the coming Civil Disobedience Movement. This cadre sought channels to approach the working class and peasantry in order to mobilise it actively in the national movement, and generally, to take the youth movement into closer contact with these classes. A new, organic blend of the ideologies of patriotic nationalism, secularism and democracy tinged with socialist ideals was being forged by the greater participation of the people in political life. In retrospect, an artificial division of these new forces rapidly undergoing transformation into exclusive, self-contained ideological currents such as ‘liberals’, ‘Gandhites’, ‘extremist nationalists’, ‘socialists’ and ‘Communists’, committed to strict programmatic conceptions and strategies, is to impose an a priori, schematic model of politics on actual historical developments. The real life unfolding of the process of radicalisation and transformation in the Congress movement (which was further extended during the CDM) belies the sterile description of these molecular changes in the mass character and ideology of the movement as the imposition of nationalist ideology by the chosen few at the top on the masses at the base of a pyramid. The failure of Communists in grasping this real life process culminated in their alienation from the mass Civil Disobedience Movement. And so we arrive at the Lahore Congress, the finale to the phase of radicalisation that had begun with a few ripples in early 1927 and grown into a whirlpool of discontent by December 1929. Jawaharlal Nehru’s presidential speech at Lahore was a befitting end to the period of political and ideological turmoil that had preceded it. Standing in the midst of ‘a dissolving period of history’ when ‘every people is in the melting pot’,61 he raised issues and gave answers which had not 61

Nehru, Presidential Address, Lahore, 29 December 1929. SW, Vol. IV, pp. 184–98.

Towards Left Hegemony 213

been delivered from a Congress platform in the past. Having introduced himself as a socialist, he outlined a completely new perspective for the Congress in the future. Denouncing the predatory methods of capitalism, he acknowledged, however, that a full-fledged anti-capitalist programme would have to wait, given the colonial situation of the country, and till the time the Congress was transformed into a more revolutionary body. Implicit in this was the conception of anti-imperialism being the first stage of revolution. The constructive programme of the Congress was valuable, continued Nehru, in the sense of bringing it in closer touch with the masses, but the future struggle had to take the shape of non-payment of taxes by the peasants and general strikes by the workers. Once in contact with the masses, the ideological orientation their future struggles were to be given would be within the new perspective he had outlined.62 Clearly referring to the Meerut Conspiracy Case, Nehru proclaimed the beginning of ‘an open conspiracy’ which the entire country was invited to join. The confidential reports on the Lahore session made a calm appraisal of the observable tendencies emerging in the Congress movement and the implications they were likely to have. The Congress as a body was stages nearer to the revolutionary and youth movements … mainly because they regard the extension of Congress influence to the rural and industrial masses as essential. Subsidiary conferences of an avowedly revolutionary nature have been held before large audiences in the Congress camp and with every facility from the Congress organisers.

This development meant that the Congress, as formerly constituted, had ‘committed political suicide’ but had ‘given the revolutionary movement tremendous encouragement’.63 The revolutionaries were ‘elated’ and the logical consequence of their success would be that they would ‘take up vigorously any activities which Gandhi may initiate, which are capable of being conducted in revolutionary channels, … and any attempt which Gandhi may make to launch “civil disobedience” will be immediately taken out of his hands by the revolutionaries and Communists.’64 Though the entire leadership of the Communists was in jail at this time, the general left-ward swing of the Congress movement gave rise to these fears. 62

Ibid. Home Poll. File 17, December 1929. 64 Ibid. 63

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The results of the Lahore Congress were summarised by the government of Punjab as marking a definite break with the past many years: The goal of independence has been unequivocally adopted; the Nehru Report has been dropped … . Its appeal in future is to be to the masses rather than to the middle classes and it is by mass revolutionary movement that independence is ultimately to be achieved … . The enemy as the Congress leaders and their supporters must now openly be called … has declared itself to be irreconcilable; it has banged the door in the way of a peaceful settlement; it has pronounced against an advance by constitutional means and it has flung a wanton and clear challenge to orderly government.65

This verdict on the Congress was echoed by the more perceptive members of the capitalist class. As J.K. Mehta, the then secretary to the Indian Merchants Chamber, wrote to Purshottamdas Thakurdas: … Congress is fast becoming a party organisation. As constituted formerly it had room in it for men of all shades of political opinion and economic views. Rightly or wrongly it is becoming a labour organisation. We need not attack the Congress or try to undermine its position, but we must now recognise that the Congress is also a party organisation and its policies and principles need not be deemed as above criticism.

G.D. Birla, similarly, looked into the future with alarm; he wrote to Purshottarndas Thakurdas: ‘The Indian merchants will find great difficulties in dealing with Jawaharlal and that is another point which causes anxiety to the Indian merchants.’ Obviously, Nehru in the President’s chair, was only one of the anxious moments that the National Congress was giving the capitalists. In the eyes of the capitalist class, the programme resolved upon at Lahore was ‘not conducive to the interests of India … .’66 Thus, the generalised political radicalism and the new point of departure for Congress politics in the future, which was generated chiefly by the upsurge of the youth, combined with the young people’s openness towards socialist ideas and goals, provided the ideal environment for 65

Ibid. Purshottamdas Thakurdas Papers, J.K. Mehta to Purshottamdas Thakurdas, 3 February 1930, File 42, VH/1923–34, Birla to Purshottamdas, 28 June 1932. File 107/1931, Purshottamdas to Gandhi, 30 January 1930, File 96/1930. NMML. 66

Towards Left Hegemony 215

dedicated leftists to disseminate revolutionary ideas of social change, place themselves in the midst of the ferment and strengthen the nexus between socialism and nationalism. The role of political radicals of Nehru’s type is to be located as the product of three years of organic development in the movement and as extending a favourable political climate for the left to intervene in a decisive way. Conditions were ripe for intervention not by any single individual, an impossibility anyway, but by the left and radical bloc. The necessity to do so had a powerful logic even for the successful politicisation of the working class and linking it with peasant struggles, a task which had already begun receiving the attention of Congress radicals and was to become the object of increasing concentration in the thirties. THE LEFT-BLOC AND THE WORKING CLASS

Characteristic of the development of the radical youth movement was an increasing sense of solidarity with labour—the major test for which was provided by the Meerut arrests. In Bombay, Bengal and the United Provinces, political meetings were organised and an articulate protest was registered against the repression of the working class and the ‘Meerut Comrades’.67 Of course, the differences in the nature of radicalisation that had occurred in different parts of the country conditioned the relationship that had formed between the Congress intelligentsia and youth movement and working-class and Communist leaders. Bombay was generally more oriented towards the working class, and socialist ideas were vigorously defended from the platforms of the youth. While Bengal tended to glorify individual sacrifice and bravery more and the tendency of pure militancy bordered dangerously close on terrorism. In Bengal, despite the fact that the Communists won over many terrorists who joined their group in the early and mid-twenties, almost all of them went back to terrorism after Muzaffar Ahmed and others were arrested, first in the Kanpur and later in the Meerut Conspiracy cases. On being questioned on why they had returned to their former activities he replied: ‘I cannot explain why they went back to terrorism.’68 67

Fortnightly Report from Bombay, March 1929, File 17/1929. Interview with Muzaffar Ahmed, conducted by P.C. Joshi, Calcutta, 1967, ACHI, JNU. 68

216 A History of the Indian Communists

As pointed out earlier, within the working class there had developed two tendencies with logically different politics. The reformists were the major influence in the AITUC till 1927, with A.A. Purcell of the British Trade Union Congress being able to make a strong defence of what immense good British imperialism had brought to India in his speech at the Kanpur session.69 Resolutions introduced by a small group of WPP members, for example those condemning the encirclement of the USSR by imperialists, expressing sympathy for the work of the Pan-Pacific Conference of Canton, and expressing solidarity with the aims and objects of the League Against Imperialism—an organisation to which the Indian National Congress was affiliated by Nehru—were rejected or not even allowed to be introduced.70 In Madras Presidency where this constitutional variety of labour leaders were fairly well entrenched, it was Shiva Rao, the constitutional trade unionist, who had ‘some standing in Labour unions’ and who mooted the setting up of a Labour Investigation Bureau.71 The ‘reformists’ were also busy putting up candidates for municipal elections successfully since mid-1927. Singaravellu Chettiar, on the other hand, remained the lone Communist in Madras and despite his sincere and passionate appeals to workers was not taken seriously even by the police who dismissed him as ‘a ridiculous visionary … rather wasted as there is nobody to help him’.72 As late as 1928, his attempts to organise May Day meetings under the WPP banner bore poor results, with two hundred workers at one meeting and only twenty at another. Though railway workers all over India acquired anti-imperialist consciousness with far greater ease than any other section of the working class, the reformists retained a firm hold over the Madras and South Mahratta Railway workers and successfully marginalised Chettiar as an ‘irresponsible’ person leading them astray.73

69 Prem Sagar Gupta. A Short History of All-India Trade Union Congress (1920–47), AITUC Publication, September 1980, p. 109. See Chapter 5 of this volume for details. 70 Ibid. 71 Home Poll, File 32/27, September 1927. Shiva Rao was the main negotiator on behalf of the workers in the Coimbatore Strike, 1927. 72 FR, April 1927, second half. 73 Home Poll, File 32/27, November 1927. For the level of anti-imperialist consciousness shown by the railway working class, see Lajpat Jagga, ‘Colonial Railwaymen and British Rule: A Probe into Railway Labour Agitation in India. 1919–22,’ in The Indian Left: Critical Appraisals, New Delhi, 1983.

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Singaravellu was reduced to making an appeal to Srinivasa Ayyangar, the Congress President, to save the workers from reformist leadership. However, extreme isolation bred sectarian attitudes, and Singaravellu Chettiar, who had advocated working within the Congress earlier, now gave short shrift to the efforts of Ayyangar to organise labour within the Congress through a conference of labour leaders and the formation of a labour committee. Chettiar refused to have anything to do with the Congress as, according to him, it stood for ‘landlordism, capitalism, private ownership etc. and its interests are opposed to labour’. During the general strike on the South Indian Railway in 1928, Bradley and Joglekar, the Communists who had successfully intervened in the Bengal–Nagpur Railway disputes, dashed down to Madras. Their suggestions to turn the strike into an all-India railway hartal were squashed by N.M. Joshi and Shiva Rao despite the favourable political climate created by the Tamil nationalist press, which openly supported the grievances of workers and condemned the government’s policy of repression, and in spite of Congress workers agitating all along the South Indian Railway ‘making inflammatory speeches’. The reformists held informal discussions on excluding Communists from the labour movement in India but concluded that their own position was not yet strong enough to do so.74 What was necessary for the defeat of the reformists here was a left-bloc and united action by Communists and Congress radicals. Such a bloc existed in Bombay Presidency, and constituted the second tendency for working class politics. Here, non-Communists like Jhabwala, Ruikar and Ginwalla had been working in close concert with the WPP, linking up the strikes of both the Bombay textile mills and railway workers of the GIP and BB&CI unions, with the boycott of Simon Commission. The point to be emphasised is that when the Communists functioned as part of a left-bloc the situation became paradoxical for the government. For instance, the case for arresting two members of the GIP railway union known to be WPP men doing active Communist work was discussed by the government before the Meerut Conspiracy Case was launched. It concluded that their arrest would be regarded by the nationalist and other trade union members as vindictive and aimed against the whole union. The two members concerned were Pendse, who succeeded Joglekar as Secretary of the GIP Railway Union, was prominent 74

FRs, February 1927. June 1927, August and September 1928.

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in the WPP of Bombay and a leading agitator during the Bombay mill strike, and Kulkarni, an Assistant Station Master on the GIP Railway known to be a member of the WPP.75 However, such solidarity did not exist as a generalised phenomenon. Thus, at a time when the entire country was in upsurge during the visits of the Simon and Whitely Commissions, the jute workers in Bengal, who had waged a year long economic struggle under Communist leadership, went back to work willing to accept small concessions, and did not connect with the powerful youth movement in Bengal. The East India Railway Union even published a booklet on their grievances for placing before the Whitely Commission. Similarly, in Madras, where Shiva Rao built a case for cooperation with the government stressing the advantages that would follow the Royal Commission on Labour’s enquiry and urging trade unionism on ‘western lines’, the Madras and Southern Maharatta railway employees and Madras labour unions prepared their cases for the Whitely Commission.76 However, the growth of the left-bloc was producing positive results and showed the potential of becoming a powerful and decisive intervention. At the Calcutta session of the Congress in 1928, 30,000 workers led by the WPP and other left-wingers entered the Congress pandal and were welcomed by Nehru who presided over the meeting they then held.77 Again, when the AITUC split at Nagpur 1929, the Communists, were a small group left outside jail after the MCC. The left appeared such a threat to the reformists who hurriedly seceded because the left-wing militant nationalists could not be distinguished from the Communists on the basically anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist perspective which emerged from their resolutions. Subhash Bose, who had been elected the new President at Nagpur, issued a statement after the split which made this quite clear. Apropos the affiliation of the GKU to the AITUC, which was carried by the President’s, i.e., Nehru’s casting vote, Bose said: I am aware that the misunderstanding started when recognition was granted to the Girni Kamgar Union with a membership of 40,000. The right-wingers felt that as a result of this recognition, the strength of 75

HDP, File 10/1929. Home Poll., File 17/1929, Fortnightly report for September. 77 Adhikari, Documents, Vol. III-C, 1928 (ed.), Dilip Bose. Also Sukomal Sen, Working Class of India, Calcutta, 1977, p. 289. 76

Towards Left Hegemony 219

the left-wing had been considerably increased all of a sudden and they were dissatisfied. Nobody can blame the left-wingers for obtaining this recognition; because by themselves they would never have been able to carry the proposition in the Executive Council. The proposition was carried simply because several members voted for it … . I have been told by several non-Communist trade unionists who voted for the Girni Kamgar Union that they did so because that union had been undergoing a great deal of oppression from the authorities and deserved support.78

This potential solidarity, unfortunately, did not develop into an effective, united challenge to both the colonial state and constitutionalism in the labour movement. The Communist International’s injunction to dissolve the WPP and the Meerut arrests dealt it twin blows—while the small group of Communists left outside got bogged down in continuous trade union militancy, exhausting the working class and allowing the youth upsurge and emergence of radicalism to pass them by. The working class, by 1929, entered a period of passivity all over the country and particularly in Bombay with the mill strike virtually ending without being withdrawn as mill after mill resumed work with the steadily increasing attendance of the workers. Instead of learning a few lessons from the mood of the workers, the Communists’ tendency towards sectarianism hardened further with their defeat. The GKU under their leadership passed a resolution: It has become regretfully necessary to withdraw the union pickets from the mills … . This does not mean, however, that the union accepts the report of the Court of Inquiry either partially or entirely, or that the union gives up any of its demands.

As the Intelligence Report commented: ‘The Union was “defeated not daunted”. Ironically, the defeat had been imposed upon them by the combined efforts of the employers and the government, yet they turned a dauntless face towards the working class itself.’79 For this, they soon paid the price—their biggest workers organisation, the GKU, rapidly disintegrated. Worse was the price paid by the working class—its selfconfidence arrested, its potential for unified struggles fragmented, and the rising curve of its activities suspended. 78 79

Prem Sagar Gupta, op. cit., pp. 148–79. File 17/1929, FR, September.

Chapter 8

Salt and the Steelframe Contending Hegemonies

ON THE EVE

How did the policy-makers of the government view the political situation in the country on the eve of Civil Disobedience? Master strategists that they were, every element in the body politic was separated and its logical course of development, its possibilities and consequences for the overall authority of the government were examined by them. If anything, this exercise revealed the hegemonic nature of the struggle between the colonial government and the Indian National Movement in which both sides were compelled to consider, with narrowed eyes, the political geography of India. It was true, that the Communists had been largely paralysed after the Meerut Conspiracy Case; but developments like the general radicalisation of the Congress and the powerful surge of the youth movement caused the government enough moments of anxiety. These forces showed all the signs of snowballing into a mass movement, if allowed to pursue their goals. This was in contrast to the situation that had existed before 1927: ‘Our general line in the past has been to ignore a great deal of theoretical sedition … and the idea of independence we expected would be generally recognised as either visionary or dangerous.’ However, the Congress Party was no longer the same:

Salt and the Steelframe 221

I think there is no doubt that Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash Bose do not mean to stop at words but are preparing for action … . We are now faced with a party who, it would seem, mean to translate it [independence] into a definite policy and to organise themselves with a view to attaining their object by force.1

In any political battle, the divisions in the enemy camp are exploited, the consent or neutralisation of different segments worked for and the isolation of the primary and most dangerous contender ensured as far as possible: In the past it has been hoped that a movement of this kind would die down from its own inherent weaknesses, … that differences of opinion would develop and hamper its progress, … that more moderate elements in the country would range themselves effectively against it.

However, they felt that such anticipations should not lead to disastrous inaction, for the present movement revealed an explosive potential and demanded immediate handling: ‘… government inactivity persuades people to think that government are afraid to act and nothing gives a movement stronger impetus than this belief.’2 But, surely the government felt that differences of opinion between the nationalist leaders existed and would circumvent the threat, at least in the immediate future. That was possible, but, equally, the danger existed of prominent leaders, who disagreed with Nehru or Bose, acting on the assumption that ‘it was incumbent upon them to challenge government by similar utterances’ if the two were prosectued.3 Nevertheless, came the counter argument, it would be far better to prosecute the ‘extremist’ nationalists even though that might ‘lead to some local disorder and isolated acts of violence’. That was preferable by far ‘to large mass movements disturbing the minds of the people in general …’—the likely consequence, if the government did not act promptly.4 Did this imply that prompt action against the youth movement and the intelligentsia, beginning with the prosecution of its leaders Nehru and Bose, could avert the threat of Civil Disobedience 1

HDP, File 179/1929. Comments by Home Member H.G. Haig on the Notes of the Intelligence Bureau. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. ‘Particularly, Mr Gandhi and Mr Motilal Nehru’ the officials fell, would adopt such an attitude. 4 Ibid.

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being launched? So it appeared to the Home Department for a while, as they saw that ‘little progress has been made in preparing the country for a big mass movement’, and that apart from the already emphasised youth movement and unemployed intelligentsia there was no ‘general or widespread movement’ among the masses. As a matter of fact, ‘the threat of launching Civil Disobedience on 1 January 1930 seems to be proving an embarrassment … and it is doubtful to what extent the older men in the Congress Party would be prepared to follow such a lead, if given.’5 Nevertheless, it would not do to be too sanguine; on the one hand the instruments of rule—the bureaucracy and army—had to be in a state of preparedness. On the other, the strength of the enemy’s hand had to be gauged in time to plan strategic action. Of prime significance in any crisis, of course, was the loyalty of the army and the police. Though, it was ‘not necessary to take a serious view at this stage’, H.W. Emerson who had taken over as Home Secretary, examined the situation in detail. It was recalled that during the Non-cooperation Movement of 1920, strenuous efforts were made to subvert the services which were reinforced by religious declarations by Muslims that service in the army was haram.6 With Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs more or less united in the cause of non-cooperation, the danger of a considerable response to the appeal was at that time a real one, and it was very ‘gratifying’ that so few were guilty of disloyalty. David Petrie, Chief of Intelligence, on his part, struck a note of caution: ‘our experiences immediately preceding the Great War were not so fortunate … not a few units and individuals succumbed to hostile propaganda … we must not too readily assume that the loyalty of the army cannot be undermined.’7 The attempt to persuade the police and members of other government services to resign their posts, continued Emerson, would not succeed ‘with the three communities divided, as they are at present, on the question of Civil Disobedience … the danger is distinctly less than it was in 1921.’ Earlier, the Home Department had remarked happily on ‘the pronounced hostility of the Muslims and Sikhs to the Nehru Report’. In fact, concluded Emerson,

5

Ibid. Report on the political situation. Home Department to all local governments, 24 June 1929. 6 HDP, File 231/1929, & KW. 7 Ibid.

Salt and the Steelframe 223

I doubt whether the feature of Non-Cooperation regarding government services generally will be repeated, for it would be very unpopular in some provinces, for it will be realised that the resignation of Hindus from government service is likely to result in their places being taken by Muslims. In so far as the police force is concerned the political agitator has yet to appreciate the embarrassment he might cause to government, if instead of reviling the police on every possible occasion he made a serious attempt to conciliate them. The police are so exasperated by continuous abuse that there would be more difficulty in preventing their reprisals on the nationalists than in keeping them loyal.8

It is extremely interesting to observe that the composition and politics of the Non-cooperation Movement which had made an impact on the minds of most people, including the government, conditioned their outlook and they looked for the same groupings and issues and political style in the rising Civil Disobedience Movement. However, a note prepared by P.C. Bamford, of the Intelligence Bureau, commenting on Emerson’s views showed a fine grasp of the slow process by which an ideological hegemony matures. It was his feeling that Emerson: … had minimised the danger of disaffection among government servants generally. The continuous propaganda to which we have been subjected during and since the non-cooperation movement has affected even European officials, for we now regard as normal things that would have made us ‘see red’ ten years ago. How much more must this propaganda have affected Indians?9

Emerson had pointed out that strenuous efforts had been made in this direction during the last non-cooperation with slight results but, said Bamford, … what is not realised is, that seeds were sown and new ideas were introduced into the minds of everyone. Those have been steadily nourished by continuous propaganda and a feeling certainly exists among loyal Indians that government failed, or were unable to protect them from harassment during the movement. This state of mind is not conducive to stimulating their powers of resistance to another attack on their morale. Similarly, the Police—can it stand up to such campaigns keeping in view that changed circumstances resulting from the possibilities of 8 9

Ibid., also see HDP, File 179/1929. Ibid. Note prepared in D.I.B’s office, signed P.C. Bamford.

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reforms, might deliver them into the hands of their erstwhile enemies? The example of Ireland is before them. There are already ex-state prisoners among their legislators.10

Bamford brilliantly took to its conclusion the logic of wielding power by maintaining hegemony through a process of constitutional reforms. One had to make an allowance for the growth of counter hegemony by the national movement, unless one renounced the hegemonic principle altogether and opted for rule by the army and police alone. As Bamford remarked on Emerson’s almost gleeful observation of the anger of policemen against the nationalists: ‘it cuts both ways’, for the government was equally concerned about ‘the feeling of resentment against government if it fails to protect them [the nationalists]’.11 Having discussed the bureaucracy and services, what about the different social groups and classes? What were the political divisions and tensions in Indian society that could be utilised against the mass movement? And what was the state of its leadership with which the government would have to contend? The political landscape in 1929, just before the Civil Disobedience Movement, was in sharp contrast to the period preceding the Non-cooperation Movement of 1920. Now, Gandhi’s politics did not occupy the centre of the stage. Nor was the spotlight turned only upon him. He moved and functioned more within inner party fluctuations and debates than on the public amphitheatre. Preventing the polarisation of two groups, who had recently been joint signatories to the Delhi manifesto, occupied his energies. Between the group of leaders, who supported Tej Bahadur Sapru’s plea for moderation and the group of ‘extremists’ who were for rejecting any compromise, Gandhi, according to government reports, was inclined towards the latter as he was not convinced of any ‘change of heart’ on the part of the government. Ultimately, after prolonged discussions, Gandhi acquiesced to Sapru’s suggestions for ‘the time being’.12 The temporary nature of all decisions at this time including his signing the Delhi manifesto was emphasised by Nehru in a letter to Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, 26 November 1929. ‘The end of the year will see a big offensive on our part, I do not wish to create any difficulties in the way 10

Ibid. Emphasis added. Ibid. 12 HDP, File 17/1929. 11

Salt and the Steelframe 225

of this offensive at present. It is only a question of three or four weeks now.’13 Most Congress members seemed to be marking time till the Lahore session scheduled for December 1929. Whether the Congress would move to the left or right was ‘difficult to forecast’ said the government reports as late as November. They had recorded with increasing trepidation the forging of a left-wing bloc and the radicalisation of the Congress and youth movement, but much would depend ‘on events during the next three weeks’.14 The Lahore Congress made it obvious that the movement was developing a left orientation, and the immediate reports were full of alarm and foreboding as we have already seen. In the Punjab, where the Congress movement was not very strong, ‘the Congress programme has caused disquietude not only amongst the active supporters of government but also among those whose vested interests depend on the stability of government but who are usually apathetic’.15 The reception and effects of the Lahore Congress resolutions were reported as follows: The effect on trade and industry is very depressing. Merchants are heard openly blaming government for allowing such a state of affairs. The cloth market, the yarn market and the share bazar have been severely affected. The effect on trade is likely to be even worse when the Congress issues concrete proposals for working out the Independence programme.16

From the higher echelon of the national leadership came the news of Ansari’s ‘retirement’ from the Congress executive due to differences with the policy and programme adopted at the Lahore session. The stated differences were: Congress should have utilised fully the Viceroy’s peace offer; it should not have closed the door to further negotiations by changing the Congress creed; and it should not have declared war by calling upon the country to launch mass civil disobedience.17 The 13

AICC Papers, F.D. 1, 1929, NMML, HDP. File 17/1929. HDP, File 17/1929. 15 HDP, FR, 18-II/1930, January 1930. 16 Ibid. 17 Statement of Ansari, Delhi, 1930. Mushirul Hasan, (ed.), Muslims and the Congress, Selected Correspondence of Dr M.A. Ansari 1912–1935, Delhi, 1979, p. 114. 14

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apparent differences between the young radicals and Gandhi revived the government’s constant hope that it would lead to a split in the Congress sooner or later. Meanwhile, the government congratulated itself on the existing political equilibrium in which Independence day celebrations on 26 January 1930 evoked ‘little real enthusiasm’ among sections the government was keen to nurture and detach further from the national movement. The Muslims kept aloof or were ‘definitely hostile’ in many provinces; the attitude of the Sikhs was ‘still doubtful’, for, though ‘a number of Akalis’ were going over to the other side, the ‘rural Sikhs, except in parts of Lahore, Amritsar and Hoshiarpur districts, seem to be very little affected at present.’18 That the Congress movement had failed to mobilise the Muslims was acknowledged by Motilal Nehru. As for its constitutional and liberal wing, ‘the resignations are not so numerous … as to upset the government.’19 In the countryside there was ‘no indication of any serious agitation in the direction of civil disobedience’ save the one in Bandabilla against payment of Union Board taxes, but ‘it has no Muslim support’.20 The alienation of the politicised section of Muslims, by and large, from the Civil Disobedience Movement was reflected in Muhammad Ali’s speech, at a mass meeting of 5,000 Muslims at Bombay on 23 April 1930, when he declared that the Non-cooperation Movement inaugurated by Gandhi ten years earlier was a genuine movement to get Swaraj but he was convinced that the present Civil Disobedience Movement was aimed at the establishment of ‘Hindu Raj’ in India. Consequently, he continued, Muslim representatives would go to the Round Table Conference for British arbitration was in their interest, and only if the government did not concede Muslim demands would they need to fight against it in the company of the Hindus.21 The working class, on the other hand, had become apathetic and though strikes on the GIP Railway were reported, the reformists and moderate unions were ‘strongly represented’ on the enquiry committee appointed to go into these disputes. The government was quite sanguine about solving labour problems with the help of necessary legislation and reformist trade unionists. ‘The situation is not generally unsatisfactory’, 18

Fortnightly Reports for the month of January 1930, Home Pol. File 18-II/1930. Letter dated 17 February 1930, Muslims and the Congress, p. 102. 20 FR HPD, File 18-II/1930. 21 Ibid. 19

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it concluded;22 unless, of course, the potential alternative, that is, the left-bloc and its leadership crystallised and swept over the country. This also the government had anticipated in lengthy discussions as we have already seen, and it had taken determined steps to prevent it from materialising. The Meerut Conspiracy Case, the Public Safety Bill and the Trades Disputes Act were, as discussed earlier, facets of the government’s strategy against precisely such an eventuality. However, the success of such a policy, specifically vis-à-vis the working class, the middle class intelligentsia and youth movements, might have been rather difficult with the steady growth of the left-bloc forged before 1929 when liberal and right-wing trade unionists had been or, at least, were increasingly being marginalised. But the left-wing in the country, faced as it was with determined interference by the government and the hardened and defensive attitude of the labour reformists, (as is clear from the way the Nagpur split was brought about by them) needed such a bloc more than ever to orchestrate their activities. The Communists unfortunately turned their backs on such an alliance and fell prey to the government’s strategy, howsoever unconsciously, by aiming their sharpest shafts at the growing non-Communist left in the country. Their own political maturity and real experience were precluded thereby, for the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930 was the first chance given to them to plunge into the midst of a mass upsurge; and it was a movement in which the left and militant wings of the Congress played the predominant role. Dr. Gangadhar Adhikari, a leading Communist, was to acknowledge much later his failure to understand the significance of Gandhian movements. During the Non-cooperation Movement, he ridiculed Gandhi’s notion of defeating the British ‘with soul force’. Years later he remarked in this context: I could not then understand the tremendous impact of Noncooperation saying ‘No’ to British power and giving courage to the masses to say ‘no’ to this power … . Later I understood Gandhi’s call—a plan to galvanise the masses and rouse the people who had no arms. Gandhi’s mass movement was a significant mass expression of the national liberation movement that went to the village level. ‘Stand up and don’t cooperate’—that was a revolutionary idea of passive resistance.23 22 23

Ibid. G. Adhikari, Oral History Transcript, ACC. 378, NMML.

228 A History of the Indian Communists ON THE MORROW

The year 1930 dawned in a haze of political uncertainty. In the days after the Lahore session no one knew exactly what would be forthcoming. Would a major mass political campaign succeed or would the differences among various sections in the country prevent any clear-cut call from being given? The provincial governments were impatient and unhappy; some, like the Punjab, more so than the others. As Emerson complained to Haig, ‘the prestige of the government, for a variety of reasons, is lower than it has been for many years’. Of course, there were ‘likely to be many classes and interests hostile to the programme of the Congress’ and it was time to separate the sheep from the wolves. The friends of the government were badly organised, or timid and slow to react, others were uncertain or confused about the government’s intentions and all these were ‘inevitable incidents of a policy of conciliation’. The ‘power of government (was) fettered by the desire to obtain a peaceful solution’. The harm done to ‘the masses’ by this situation was the spread of a ‘fairly general feeling that the arm of the Sirkar was neither so long nor so strong as it used to be. The existence of this feeling is significant and if allowed to spread may have very grave consequences.’ Thus there was no need to demur from repressive action any longer as rejection by Congress of the government’s overtures had ‘clarified the issues … and Congress (was) openly antagonistic. The time has passed to consider whether a firm policy will offend or alienate this or that section of the public.’24 But the situation was not so simple. The government’s proclaimed ‘desire for a peaceful solution’ could be seen another way, as the dilemma created for the authorities in the face of Gandhi’s ‘peaceful noncooperation’ which necessitated abjuring the use of naked force as long as possible. Of this the Indian government was constantly reminded by London: ‘You should carry moderate opinion with you as far as possible in enforcing the law.’25 The Home Department was quick to send back a reassuring reply: Our policy in general is for the present to avoid any dramatic departure from the existing methods. The policy of conciliation towards those willing will continue … . The movement for independence may fall

24 25

HDP, File 98/1930. Emerson to Haig, Secretary, Government of India (HDP). Ibid. S.D.S., London, to G.O.I.

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quite flat in some parts of the country at any rate. The Congress are not, it is believed, in possession of any large funds, and without these they must to a great extent rely on the voluntary efforts of members of the Youth Leagues and similar organisations.26

Likewise, Haig spelt out his assessment in a letter to the local governments: The year 1929 has been spent by the advanced elements in the Congress in preparing for struggle … numbers of young men of the educated middle class have been worked up into a state of great patriotic excitement and corresponding hatred of an alien government … . These are the elements which have in effect obtained control of the Congress and it may be anticipated that they will provide a force which will drive the followers of the Congress doctrine more and more rapidly to extreme courses.

It was true that the Communists had suffered a setback, with the launching of the Meerut Conspiracy Case; however, ‘the adoption of the Communists’ language by the nationalist revolutionaries’ had replicated the problem. In any case, a tight-lipped policy could continue as in the vast countryside ‘the masses at the moment are generally unaffected’.27 On the other side of the political divide, the Congress as it was constituted seemed to be in disarray and lacked all cohesion in the beginning of 1930. There was absolutely no unanimity on the question of launching civil disobedience, and the schism opened on the issue of constitutionalism versus non-constitutionalism once again. In Madras, differences in the Congress were sought to be exploited by the pro-government Justice Party.28 In Maharashtra and Bombay, similarly, the decision to boycott the Councils created a definite cleavage in Congress ranks and bitterness amongst Congress workers. U.P. publicly ridiculed the council boycott programme, Assam thought that Lahore was ‘premature’. In Bengal and Madras those who differed in their attitude were likely to seek reelection on another ticket.29 26

Ibid. Home to S.O.S. This contradicts the popular left notion that the capitalists financed the Congress campaigns. 27 Ibid. 28 HDP, File 18-II, 1930. FR January (i), (ii). 29 Ibid.

230 A History of the Indian Communists

In this context of uncertainty Gandhi appeared genuinely hesitant and doubtful of what course to adopt: ‘With the present temper of many Congressmen, with our internal dissensions, with the communal tension, it is difficult to discover an effective and innocent formula.’30 He was sure that ‘a time must come when there may be a fight to the finish with one’s back to the wall’, but that would require extensive preparation. The government was sanguine that there was ‘no serious movement in the rural areas’ and that the Congress was primarily rooted in the urban centres. Gandhi knew that work in the rural areas was too insignificant for any over-confident challenges to be thrown at the government: ‘The more the progress of the constructive programme, the greater is there a chance for civil disobedience’, he reiterated.31 As the government was to conclude a few years later, Gandhi’s ‘rural reconstruction programme’ was ‘a very subtle and astute attempt to work up, in course of time, a civil disobedience campaign on a much larger scale than anything we have had hitherto’.32 For the moment, however, all Gandhi could stress upon was that the ‘Congress had perforce to remain non-violent if it were to represent, as it claimed, all communities … .’33 A violent struggle by a divided movement could certainly lead to disaster specially under the hawk-eyed watch of officials keen to encourage the smallest rift. What clearly emerges from any reading of early 1930 is that both Gandhi and the government were dealing with old digits of analysis, old experiences, and were not certain of future developments. Gandhi was only gradually convinced of the movement’s potential being greater than he imagined; and he showed himself willing to throw in his hand with the ‘Lahore hopefuls’. And as the news steadily came in from the provinces that the urban masses at any rate were raring to begin the struggle—had begun the struggle from 26 January as a matter of fact—it became clear that the constitutional wing could no longer throw a spanner in the works by slowing down the tempo of the Congress. The government was dismayed, banking as they had been on the numbers of ‘unhappy older Congressmen’, the ‘liberals’, the ‘moderates’ and the ‘minorities’. 30

HDP, File 18-II, FR January (i). Ibid. FR for 1929 and 1930; January (i). In his discussions with Nehru certainly, Gandhi would have underlined the tremendous task of mobilising the peasantry and Nehru devoted himself almost totally to rural tours from January onwards. 32 HDP, File 3/16/34 & K.W. 33 HDP, File 18-II, 1930, FR January (i). 31

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New digits now appeared on the scene. Two consecutive meetings of the Madras Liberal Federation were disrupted by the Congress Youth Leagues which, as the liberals hurriedly abandoned the hall, took over the meeting and passed resolutions on ‘complete Independence’. The nationalist and language newspapers were ‘all for Lahore’ and ‘reported the rout of the liberals enthusiastically. In Bombay, similarly, a meeting of the Western India National Liberal Association was dissolved with the entry of one thousand Youth League members led by Yusuf Meherally.34 However, the significance of the old digits would have decreased over time to the extent that the new elements proved strong and capable of sustaining the movement. This only the course of the actual movement could show. As a prelude to the launching of civil disobedience, 26 January was slated for all-India celebrations of Independence day. While the political adversaries watched each other’s moves carefully, the government of India formulated its policy and despatched instructions to all local governments: The design of the Congress is presumably to create the following dilemma. If on the one hand, government prohibit meetings or processions the result is likely to be a physical clash which would greatly embitter feeling; or again if government embarked on a general prohibition of propaganda for independence, this would give extremists easy opportunity for defying orders, and for rousing sympathy on the cry of persecution of opinion. If on the other hand, government take no action; Congress would hope to gain prestige arising from open defiance of government and to produce corresponding depression among moderate and loyal elements.

Therefore, the best policy was deemed to be one of allowing the processions but promptly picking up and prosecuting all the important speakers who spoke at public meetings. It was unwise, said the home department, ‘to base action on the general proposition that the advocacy of independence is seditious or that it must be prevented’.35 The connotations of what was legitimate, and how far, had shifted considerably since earlier years.

34 35

Ibid. January (ii). FR February (i). HDP, File 88/30. From Home Department, 11 January 1930.

232 A History of the Indian Communists

The events of the 26th showed two clear strands of the political scene which needed to be dealt with by those who led the movement or those whose job it was to suppress it. In the first place, it was clear, that the government’s confidence in regard to the rural areas was not unwarranted. Each province in turn reported minimal ‘disorders’ in the villages reassuringly to the Centre. For example in the Punjab, while the urban areas resounded with ‘revolutionary cries’ and the crowds with banners had ‘an increasingly violent temper’ and the celebrations were on a ‘large scale all over the province’, ‘in the villages there were very few, except central Punjab where the Akalis are the chief promoters’.36 At Lahore and Amritsar the ‘crowds were very large’ and threatening. In Delhi estimates of the crowds at flag hoisting ceremonies and evening meetings varied between 8,000 to 50,000. A good deal of public sympathy with the demonstrators was shown and the ‘loyalists’ failed to understand why the government tolerated it and were correspondingly depressed.37 Towns all over Bombay province and the city itself woke early with flags being ‘hoisted at nearly all the wards in the morning before crowds ranging from 50 (in the smaller wards) to 2,000’ in the bigger ones. The evening processions consisted ‘of about 10,000 persons’ who marched through the ‘streets lined with spectators’ to the Chaupatti sands where ‘the public meeting was attended by 25 to 30 thousand people’. Besides the famous banner, inscribed with the slogan ‘Up, up with the National Flag; Down, down with the Union Jack’, others read ‘British rule means poverty, hunger, exploitation’, ‘Long Live Revolution’, ‘Liberty or Death’ and many other ‘revolutionary slogans’. It was at this meeting that the Communists leading a procession of 1,000 mill-workers were said to have ‘invaded’ the platform and brought the meeting to an abrupt end.38 Likewise in Bengal, flags were hoisted at all the public squares, while Khadi-uniformed volunteers, some mounted on horses and a few on motorcycles, accompanied by a band of drums and buglers paraded through the city. The same pattern was present but to a lesser extent in Bihar, Madras and the Central Provinces. The second major strand to be observed in the Congress activities on this occasion was that the organisers, mobilisers, activists and 36

Ibid. Emerson to Haig, Secy., Home Department. Ibid. 38 Ibid. Files 88/1930; File 18-II, January (i), 1930. 37

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processionists were all young students. The youth organisations were spearheading the movement and were rapidly merging together. The police at every point came face to face with young boys. The youth was ‘preponderant’ (Bombay), ‘consisted chiefly of students’ (Delhi), ‘mostly immature lads’ (Bombay), ‘particularly the youthful element so largely enlisted’ (Poona), ‘confined to students and schoolboys of tender years’ (Calcutta), ‘mainly the undisciplined student class’ (U.P.), ‘filled by students and boys of the Youth Leagues’ (Central Provinces)—this was the general verdict.39 As Emerson wrote in a note, specially prepared to review the political situation, the development of the entire youth movement in India was a cause for deep perturbation and wherever youth organisations existed, they were coalescing with the ‘dangerous and communistic Nau Jawan Bharat Sabha (NBS)’. Though many new organisations adopted the name of the NBS they were not the prototypes of the Punjab Nau Jawan Bharat Sabha. Moreover, it was difficult to distinguish between the Congress and the NBS which ‘joined forces as far as anti-government activities are concerned’.40 The towns and cities had surprised the government despite their earlier calculations. The villages however appeared calm, so there was no cause for serious concern. However, once its own organisation was accomplished, the youth movement was turning its attention towards the peasantry. ‘The probability of future disorders’ even in the villages was very real, as the spread of ‘infection may be rapid’. In the N.W.F. Province, Ghaffar Khan had taken charge of the youth movement and was directing it towards the organisation of the villages. In the United Provinces, two districts had already been selected for a no-rent campaign and the students would provide enough activists to make it successful.41 Jawaharlal Nehru was already exhorting them to take up work among the peasantry and the landlords were alarmed.42 The villages around Delhi also had become important centres for conducting propaganda by the Youth League and Seva Dal. The Seva Dal at Delhi was conducting propaganda not only in the villages but also among factory workers, trying to bring them all into the Mazdur Sabha.43 39

HDP File 18-II, 1930, January (i) and (ii); File 88/1930. Ibid., File 130 and K.W./1930. 41 HDP, File 88/1930. 42 HDP, File 18-II/1930, January (i). 43 Ibid. 40

234 A History of the Indian Communists

The youth movement therefore was not a single, isolated ‘political evil’ for it was only a matter of time before the pattern of forging links with the peasants grew to all-India proportions. The peasants’ quietude, by and large, in 1930 was no guarantee of its remaining unchanged in the years to come, and the work of organising the countryside had just begun. The ‘Ides of March’ signalled the formal beginning of Gandhi’s salt satyagraha. But in February the disobedience campaign in the cities had already begun. The propagandist and organisational activities turned into large meetings of ‘defiance’ and processions in ‘hostile towns’.44 The first phase of Civil Disobedience between April 1930 and March 1931 was variously described by the bureaucracy as ‘a very vigorous and intense movement’, showing, ‘great militancy’, ‘hooliganism and indiscipline’, as was clear from ‘the growing proportions of the crowds’; and, at one point, another Chauri Chaura was held to be imminent. The forms and instances of political activity through the course of the movement were wide-ranging: beginning with the manufacture and sale of salt, conducting salt marches, street corner meetings and larger public meetings, hartals, demonstrations and processions, picketing and flag hoisting, political action gradually moved on to revolutionary sloganeering and pamphleteering, violent clashes either due to forcible dispersals of the crowds or attacks on the police and government servants on the initiative of the civil resisters themselves, organised raids on various salt works, obstruction of traffic and movement on roads, and general rioting. The resignations of village officers and complete social boycott of those who refused to join the Movement were, of course, a constant feature of political organisation and mobilisation, begun in Gujarat by Gandhi himself.45 And within a few months, by August 1930, a major thrust of the Movement was to set up satyagraha centres in the rural areas with increasing concentration on the villages through systematic tours by volunteers and beginning the work of mobilising the urban workers.46 Bombay Presidency was the area to be ‘worst affected’, breaking out in a rash of salt marches all over the province in emulation of Gandhi. A large number of resignations poured in from village officers and the extremely successful social boycott of loyalists created ‘an excitable and difficult situation’. In the city the major force of ‘indiscipline and hoolinganism’ was 44

HDP, File 18-IV, 1930. February (ii). HDP, FR for 1930 and 1931. 46 HDP, Files 18-X and 18-XII of 1930. FRS for September–November. 45

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the Youth League, ‘offering satyagraha’, going in batches to all localities and holding street corner meetings, often stopping traffic for hours by assembling large crowds at the junctions of busy roads. Frequent clashes with the police led to arrests and at the subsequent trials the courts were packed with Youth League members shouting revolutionary slogans.47 From the beginning the police charges on the processions were very aggressive and the lists of injured youths began to feature in the daily news.48 Sympathetic action in support of the G.I.P. workers on strike increased the toll of the lathi charges.49 The effectiveness of the outposts of volunteers established to secure the resignations and achieve total boycott was acknowledged by the Collectors of Surat and Nadiad who demanded that these be outlawed and put in requests for additional police to ‘completely smash the organisation of volunteers’.50 The suspension of many local bodies was also advised as they were providing ‘sympathy and encouragement’ to Civil Disobedience. The cultivators of Bardoli, on the other hand, defied the administration by declaring they would not pay revenue ‘even if our fields and life be destroyed’ until ordered to do so by Gandhi or Patel.51 Gandhi and followers were concentrating on the boycott of government servants, picketing and the no-revenue agitation. The severity of the boycott was exemplified in the ‘increasing resignations of Patels and other officers’, the result of which was to increase the ranks of rural volunteers and the mushrooming of ‘Gandhi ashrams’.52 These ashrams were not as innocuous as believed and, as the Collector of Surat complained, their ostensibly laudable objects and aims were a camouflage for their actual goal which was ‘to establish a progressive form of parallel government, educating the masses to disregard law and authority with a view to ultimately overthrow

47

HDP, File 18-III, 1930. FR March (ii). Bombay Chronicle, February to December 1930. 49 Ibid. The Congress Working Committee had officially supported the strike in February. HDP, FR March (i). Emerson’s noie on the political situation emphasised the problem of repeated confrontations with youths in Bombay requiring ‘many police charges before they disperse’. HDP, File 483/1930. 50 HDP, File 483/1930, Viceroy to S.O.S. London, 17 March 1930. File 214/1930. File 247/1930. 51 Ibid. 52 HDP, File 18-V, 1930, FR April (ii). 48

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the present established order and administration.’53 The ‘no-revenue’ agitation had spread correspondingly. In Bengal, though the Movement was slow to begin because of the infighting in the Congress ranks, with Bose and Sengupta ranged against each other, by the end of March the salt satyagrahis dotted the province. An interesting observation by the bureaucracy was that the volunteers would increase phenomenally once the examinations were over. By April the spark was lit and the campaign was in full swing and ‘disturbed the whole province’. The bulk of the militants were the youth and women; but the streets were spilling over with ‘hostile crowds’ making Calcutta ‘very difficult’ to handle.54 Meetings and processions had to be prohibited or else not a day would pass without pitched battles. For the youth organisations were re-enacting the scenes Bombay had witnessed sometime earlier. In fact, the existence of a number of terrorist organisations made the situation even more volatile and the arrests of Jawaharlal Nehru and Sengupta resulted in rioting and burning of trams. The Chittagong Armoury Raid at this juncture led to panic amongst Bengal government circles, while the towns grew more explosive with 8,000 workers downing tools and street battles in which police and excise officials were fiercely attacked. The only saving grace of the moment seemed to be that the 1,200 workers of the Bengal–Nagpur railway on strike were pursuing ‘a purely economic’ goal and were not getting involved with the ‘political’ movement.55 The ‘intensity of the satyagraha campaign showed no signs of abating’, in the Central Provinces, Bihar and Orissa.56 The towns of Punjab had become ‘utterly lawless’; the youth movement in Assam was the worst offender and was creating ‘great disturbance’; in U.P. the ‘rioting’ students tried the patience of the police in Agra, Cawnpore, Banares, Allahabad, Lucknow, Meerut, Rae Bareli, Farrukhabad, Etawah, Ballia and Mainpuri. Marches, demonstrations, and daily confrontations with the police were equally characteristic of Delhi, Madras and the N.W.F. Province. The injured in Delhi were carried in processions to public meetings.57 Madras city observed a total 53

HDP, File 247/IV/1930. HDP, File 18-IV, 1930, FR March (ii). April (i). 55 Ibid., April (ii). 56 Ibid., March (ii). There were over eleven meetings in a period of fifteen days, April (ii). 57 Ibid., April (i). 54

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hartal on Nehru’s arrest, held a meeting of 10,000 persons the same evening and clashed with the police just the morning after. The mounted police charged into the crowds beating them with their rifle butts and concluded that ‘this method was better than arrests’ for it frightened the volunteers. The N.W.F.P. however threw a grim challenge to such tactics with the Peshawar ‘uprising’, and the refusal of the two platoons of the Garhwali regiment to fire on the people. Ghaffar Khan’s arrest provoked the most serious rioting the government had faced thus far.58 The district authorities ‘lost control of Peshawar city’.59 Surveying the political situation in the Frontier Province since 1928 the Home Department saw ‘in the narrative of events and in the kaleidoscopic fashion in which Congress, Khilafat and the Nau Jawan Bharat Sabha, with their committees and volunteers, blend and sever, differ and unite, dissolve and are resuscitated, a proof that there is no real question of principle at stake, except that of opposition to Government’. In this scenario ‘The Congress is the villain of the piece, but whether it is Congress alone, or whether it is connected with the Bolsheviks, does not appear.’60 As Emerson clarified, the references to communism were ‘intended to refer only to the general activities of the Congress and Nau Jawan Bharat Sabha organisations’.61 The Congress and N.B.S. were ‘fomenting open, violent rebellion here’ and the fact that ‘the N.B.S. published revolutionary papers bearing the emblem of the “Hammer and sickle” and displayed revolutionary Communist slogans’ made it appear that Communists were instigating it while actually it was not so. The ‘spread of communistic doctrines in the villages of Peshawar district’ had led the government to its culprits, ‘the Congress and Youth Movements’, and they had therefore been arrested. For example, the ‘Red Shirt’ organisation, a parallel growth to the Youth League, founded by Ghaffar Khan, also adopted the symbol of hammer and sickle in the beginning though it was discarded later on. ‘On the Independence celebrations of 26th January, 1930, they flew the Communist flag alongside the “national” flag.’ It was not surprising therefore that ‘all this led government to believe that the Red Shirts were a Communist organisation’. However, on examination it 58

Ibid., April (ii). Ibid., May (i). 60 HDP, File 206/1930. 61 HDP, File 11/3/1920. 59

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was found that the use of the symbol and ideas such as ‘anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, and struggle through youth and organisations of workers and peasants … probably reflect the Communist tendencies of the founder and the imitative faculty of the followers rather than the formal adoption of the Communist creed.’62 There was ‘absolutely no proof of any Bolshevik connection or even of any local Communists working there’, and no reason at all ‘to suppose that Communists are instigating disorder in the Civil Disobedience Movement’. The process of growth and hegemony of new ideas and its relationship to the Movement was brought out excellently: ‘however, the spread of Communist ideas during the last few years in India has had influence in creating conditions in which disorders have occurred’.63 And what was most ‘communistic’ about it all, in the eyes of the government, was the development in the NWFP of a militant and radical anti-imperialism alongside the ‘remarkable unity achieved by all the different organisations amongst Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, all being brought into the Congress fold’.64 The catalytic agent of this situation was the Frontier Youth League. From the outset of the ongoing campaign a close watch on the rural areas had been kept by the administrators and prompt action taken wherever there was any danger of peasant unrest being linked with civil disobedience.65 They encouraged granting some concessions to tenants by the landlords, certain of the fact it ‘would take the wind out of Congress’ and reduce agrarian agitation. In the U.P., Jawaharlal Nehru had been addressing a series of peasant conferences on non-payment of rent and urging Krishan Datt Paliwal into organising kisan sabhas, two of which had already been created in Rae Bareli and Agra districts.66 Here, the government encouraged the landlords into forming anti-Congress associations while they were already filling in the vacuum created by Congress resignations in the assembly. In the Punjab, local loyalists had been ‘well organised to offer stiff opposition’ to attempts to lead ‘jathas’ on foot through the villages. Though ‘salt marches’ from town 62

Ibid. Ibid. Extract from notes on DIB’s File No. 6/Bol/1930./HDP. File 11/3/1930. 64 HDP, File 206/1930. That Muslims were part of the Civil Disobedience Movement here was too horrifying a thought for the bureaucracy; File 11/3/193. 65 HDP, File 18-II, 1930. FR January (i). Equal care was taken to note that ‘Muslims are not participating’. 66 HDP, File 18-III, 1930. FR February (ii); February (i). 63

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to town were ‘doing much harm to villages’ in U.P., ‘the general feeling of Commissioners’, who held a conference with the Governor and his Executive Council, was that ‘in the rural areas Government’s authority is unshaken’.67 Nonetheless, by the time Gandhi was arrested at the beginning of May, the explosion in the cities and towns showed all the signs of a fallout on the villages. The DIB reported that the general feeling of people had in any case been of growing momentum: ‘If government arrests Gandhi victory is ours, if not then even greater victory’—this was the attitude of those in the Movement.68 The towns could not contain militant nationalism any more; its cadres were beginning the trek to the villages. The Movement was developing a pattern of sending ‘jathas’ to all parts of a particular province from town to town ‘covering the villages en route and holding mass meetings’. Satyagraha centres, the chief vehicle for rural work, were ‘rapidly increasing’ and a large number of rural Congress committees were formed in Bengal. This tilt towards the villages was clearly reflected in the increased number of confrontations between villagers and the police in June and July.69 In itself, the urban ‘May explosion’ was an equally serious affair. The middle and lower middle class urban masses were fully politicised and inspired, reaching new heights of militancy. Bombay had perfected its volunteers organisation; ‘volunteers of the non-violent army, or “Ironsides … regular drill” and the hartals on Gandhi’s arrest were totally organised by these ‘‘young men’’’. Military troops were posted ‘extensively’ at Bombay and Ahmedabad and arrests were made en masse to cope with the ‘hot May’.70 Similarly at Poona large crowds battled with the police on the day Jawaharlal Nehru was arrested and repeated baton charges left ‘many injured’ including the City Magistrate and police officials. The salt satyagraha ‘took a serious turn’ with raids and attacks on salt works in every part of the province. With the Sholapur ‘uprising’ resulting in the ‘city being lost’, the cup of the government of Bombay was full to the brim.71 67

Ibid., February (ii). File 18-IV, 1930. FR March (ii). File 18-V, 1930. FR April (ii). 68 HDP, File 18-V, 1930. FR April (ii). 69 HDP, File 18-VI, 1930. FR May (i), (ii); 18-V, 1930, FR April (ii). 70 Ibid., May (i). 71 Ibid.

240 A History of the Indian Communists

The official account of the ‘outbreak of mob violence’ at Sholapur was a highly exaggerated account as the government was to acknowledge later.72 It was triggered off by the arrest of Gandhi and by Congress volunteers following the Congress programme. The ‘insurrection’ mainly consisted of cutting down toddy trees and raiding toddy booths and liquor shops. As both Emerson and Haig noted on the Sholapur file much later, ‘several of the sentences passed by the military courts were undoubtedly excessive’.73 Even this was an understatement for R.S. Rajwade, the editor of a liberal newspaper, Karmayogi, had characterised as ‘totally false’ the many charges levied against those arrested, of which ‘exaggerated and false accounts had appeared in The Times of India’. For example, the burning of several policemen, setting the Sessions Court on fire, burning of chowkies ‘were freely circulated rumours … without foundation’. On the other hand, the police had indulged in ‘indiscriminate firing on the 8th in many localities where not the least rioting had occurred’.74 Even an incomplete enquiry conducted by the then district magistrate of Sholapur had admitted that policemen fired indiscriminately and people had died standing in verandas on their terraces. Only ‘a couple of stray instances of “childish rowdism” had occurred’ and the declaration of martial law was ‘utterly unjustified’. Rajwade was ultimately released along with many others.75 Sholapur has invariably been cited as the expression of the people’s revolutionary struggle as opposed to the ‘passive’ and ‘lacklustre’ Gandhian campaigns. Exaggerated as an ‘insurrection’ of the people, the events at Sholapur were in actuality the result of provocation caused by the police, later turning into a massacre of unarmed people. Certainly, anti-imperialist sentiment was widely prevalent among its populace and yet, it was not Sholapur that revealed an organised political assault on government authority. A far more disciplined and well-organised threat to the government was posed by the inauguration of raids on the various Salt Works by militant volunteers. Moreover, the panic-stricken military reaction that Sholapur provoked could not and did not produce the kind of political consciousness that was being consistently generated by activities like the salt raids which sapped the morale of the authority. 72

HDP, File 512/1930. HDP, File 512/11/1930. Noted on 3 December 1931. 74 Ibid. This, and the ‘deliberately false’ charge that the rioting was taking a communal turn, was admitted by the Director of Information. Bombay. 75 Ibid. 73

Salt and the Steelframe 241

Before the ripples created by the Sholapur events had been calmed the Presidency was rocked by repeated assaults on salt factories, ‘the direct consequence of Gandhi’s inflammatory speeches’ in which he ‘threatened’ thousands of volunteers would follow him and ‘invited the government to use any force they liked against them’.76 The two major targets of these raids were the Wadala and the Dharasna Salt Works and, at the latter specially, the ‘situation was critical’ requiring the use of troops to ‘save’ it. ‘Thousands were delivering massed attacks on Dharasna …’ as more and more volunteers trooped in from Bombay, Bardoli, Bulsar, etc. The element of the spectacular was created by the fact that a raiding party of 3,000 volunteers would be followed and surrounded by ‘a crowd of several thousand sightseers’, a barrier of humanity floating between the volunteers and the police. Repeated lathi charges would be made while the 3/19th Hyderabad and the 5/11th Sikh regiments were ranged around in a massive display of strength. The wire-fencing of the ‘Worli Temporary Prison’ (created to cope with the daily influx of arrested volunteers) was broken down by the prisoners ‘intending to join the attack on the Wadala Salt Depot’. When military detachments arrived to repair the fencing ‘the neighbouring chawl women and mill-workers obstructed it and threw stones’ while large crowds stood around shouting ‘encouragement’. The area surrounding the prison was occupied by working class tenements and lathi charges ‘drove the people back’ while the Hyderabad Regiment stood waiting.77 The frequent lathi charges leaving the injured on the ground provided an opportunity to the volunteers to dupe the police, and many wore Red Cross badges to freely enter the main arena of confrontation, and then switched to regular volunteer badges to face the police.78 In Bombay city, large processions of youth protesting against government repression lay down on the roads, stopping all traffic. The final straw was added by the demonstrations on ‘Peshawar Martyrs’ Day’, with Muslims joining the Congress organisation in numbers larger than ever before.79 Of all the major Indian cities, Bombay presented the most grim visage to the government:

76

HDP, File 247/1930. Ibid. 78 HDP, File 18-VII/1930. June (i). 79 Ibid. 77

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The reserves of the Congress Party are daily growing pari passu with the growing contempt for government, our reserves are all in the front lines and, moreover, the police have been enervated by two months of constant strain … (and) once the belief gains currency that the government is in process of disestablishment, the policeman becomes invertebrate and lacking in authority, he loses confidence in himself and his morale is broken.80

The large, well-organised processions were the ‘most disquieting demonstration of the power and organisation of the Congress’, and ‘presumably it makes the same impression on the population of Bombay as a whole’.81 This included the Europeans who like everybody else in Bombay (were) much impressed by the strength and success of the Movement, and many of them are inclined to ask whether it will not be necessary to make terms with this strong nationalist feeling … . The Bombay Chamber of Commerce … want to know whether something cannot be done to meet the other side. On the side of the Congress the degree of cohesion was growing greater for ‘the arrest of few individuals composing a war council (and now they are names that do not convey much to the general public and are capable of being replaced by others of about the same ability) does not produce much impression on the public’.82 Delhi in May became the premier ‘city of processions’—‘enormous processions’ that reached a strength of one and a half lakhs on the 6th, composed entirely to the members of the Congress Volunteer Corps, the NBS, the Youth and Students’ League, the Seva Dal and Women’s processions. While the police firing at the Sisganj Gurudwara took its own toll and touched Sikh sentiments all over the country, after the Peshawar events more than twenty per cent of Muslims in Delhi were said to have ‘gone over to Congress’.83 Delhi was all but lost, and though it was desirable from ‘the civil point of view’ that a display of force be minimal, ‘from a purely military point of view much might yet be considered as necessary to be done in order to drive the lesson home and to establish control of the city in the fullest sense’.84

80

HDP, File 257/1930. Ibid. File 247/IV/1930; File 257/V/1930. 82 Ibid. 83 HDP, File 18-VI, 1930. May (i). 84 HDP, File 203/1930; File 256/1930. 81

Salt and the Steelframe 243

In U.P. ‘widespread tension’ was making the atmosphere so ‘explosive’ and the ‘danger of violence’ so real that ‘full military precautions’ had to be taken. They did not remain ‘precautions’ for long as processions multiplied in the face of the ban imposed on them and policemen were attacked in every town so that the military swung into action almost immediately. The ‘disquieting’ number of women on the streets did not deter the troops from issuing frequent orders to shoot into the crowd, and outside the Aminabad Chowki at Lucknow there was ‘firing on a considerable scale’ according to the official record itself.85 Calcutta in May was like a seething cauldron fitted with a tight lid and a special ‘Security Scheme’ was devised with patrols on the main streets round the clock, massive additions of special constables to the police force, troops ‘on the ready’ and a display of armoured cars.86 The ‘methods adopted by the police’ restored a degree of ‘surface calm’; however, below the surface there was unbroken ‘nervous tension … (and) a widespread, almost universal anti-government feeling.’ The ‘carters’ riot led by a Communist and organised almost single-handedly, which resulted in the paralysis of the city’s transport was not seen by the authorities as separate from the Civil Disobedience Movement, for ‘Congress preach and advocate communism quite openly’. Obviously, whenever the antiimperialist sentiments of different sections of society converged, the threat to the government burgeoned fiercely. It appeared that ‘the police reigns but the Congress rules in Calcutta’.87 ‘The most anxious period’ in a long time descended upon Punjab authorities with constant demonstrations on Gandhi’s arrest, in the memory of Peshawar and as a reaction to the Sisganj firing, while an Akali jatha started its long march towards Peshawar.88 Assam reported that the arrests of ‘unknown names in Assam … like Mrs Naidu and Abbas Tyabji’ produced immediate and effective hartals. Village officers could not be relied upon to check rural agitation. The towns of Bihar and Orissa were perpetually on strike. Armed police was used to break up some of the processions as resignations from the regular police force began coming in.89 ‘Violent clashes with the police’ were rife all over the 85

HDP, File 18-VI, May (i); May (ii). Ibid., May (i) and (ii). 87 HDP, File 248-II/1930. 88 HDP, File 18-VI, 1930, May (i). 89 Ibid., May (i). 86

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Central Provinces and Berar with Raipur becoming uncontrollable as government servants were openiy attacked and ‘the police complained of social boycott and inconvenience and the deliberate hampering of investigations’. The station house officers found it extremely difficult to procure rations while on tour. ‘The crowds move around … the city day and night.’ 90 And to cap it all the large tribal population of both C.P. and Bihar was joining the Movement increasingly. In the Hazaribagh and Manbhum districts, particularly, their involvement had assumed ‘dangerous proportions’.91 The bitter fireworks of May gave way to a scorching June. The rural thrust of the Congress movement would certainly take some time to mature but with the first signs of the villages’ ‘awakening’ the flash-point was reached as far as the government was concerned. Province after province signalled its alarm: it was time to give the Congress a crushing answer. The painstakingly nurtured recruiting base of the Punjab was one of the first to panic. While making a plea for a ‘stern policy’ on an all-India basis the provincial government was already beginning to come down with a heavy hand. The Criminal Law Amendment Act was used promptly against the NBS, the War Councils and the Satyagraha Committees.92 Additional police and military forces were deployed in the ‘worst affected’ villages while protection and support to loyalist activities succeeded in pushing back the Congress in some areas. For the government, the negative features of the situation, however, bore greater emphasis: ‘The police are constantly abused, family conditions are difficult because of the social boycott’; it was on the whole a period of great strain because ‘it takes one month to get government sanction to arrest seditious speakers, and then the man frequently gets off because of some flaw in the evidence, or because the magistrate is a sympathiser of the Congress’. Consequently, Congressmen with flags ‘freely insult I.O.’s, N.C.O’s, etc. at railway stations and the termini; troops drawing pay at the bank have been seditiously insulted by cashiers … (and) made to shout “Gandhi ki jai”.’93 The ‘moral’ climate was getting too uncomfortable under the collar as the ‘popular attitude towards the police and Europeans has definitely become more hostile and the 90

HDP, File 253/1930. HDP, File 18-VI, 1930, FR May (ii). 92 HDP, File 18-VII, 1930, FR June (i). 93 HDP, File 250/I/1930. 91

Salt and the Steelframe 245

prestige of the white man’s rule is lessening’. The province chaffed under the restraint imposed by ‘civil rule’ and ‘every police officer … feels their action is unduly restricted and indeed thwarted by the fact that too much is placed on the law by superior government authority’.94 This sentiment was shared by the United Provinces with equal zeal when the village headmen, the chaukidars and lambardars of two districts resigned en masse, and the rent and revenue payments were withheld. Almost immediately the AICC and the Naujawan Bharat Sabha were declared ‘unlawful’. The villages of Assam had become impenetrable by the police who could get no information from them.95 As the tempo of the Congress movement beat faster it appeared ridiculous to lean against old bargaining counters like the ‘moderates’ who were ‘giving no support to government’, complained the government for Bihar and Orissa. The Congress camp at Bihpur in North Bhagalpur had experienced a violent confrontation with the police, with lathis wielded on both sides, and the nationalist leaders Rajendra Prasad and Abdul Bari ‘made no attempt to restrain the crowd and were also injured’.96 In the Santal agitation in Hazaribagh, the arrested tribals ‘boldly walked up to the armed police with swaraj flags’. The Peninsular Tobacco Co. was almost forced to close down as a consequence of the agitation against foreign cigarettes while the total loss of revenue to excise shops was estimated at three lakhs or more for the month of May.97 The villages of the Guntur and Kistna districts were swarming with volunteers as the rural populace received them enthusiastically and the forest satyagraha achieved ever widening support. The Criminal Law Amendment Act and other repressive measures soon followed. The social boycott of those serving in the police and army in the Central Provinces was so well-organised and effective that it was ‘making the policemen and troops disloyal’, while the ‘enemy’s ranks swelled with Ruikar’s working class following joining the Movement against the government’.98

94

Ibid. HDP, File 18-VI, 1930. FR June (i). It was small consolation thai the low prices of the depression ‘had also contributed’ towards creating this situation, apart from the Congress’, June (ii). 96 Ibid., June (i). 97 Ibid., June (ii). 98 Ibid., June (i) and (ii). 95

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In Bombay, city events were dominant as Motilal Nehru drew a crowd of 15,000. His arrest brought ‘peace’ to the city as the markets shut down in strike and the mill-workers stopped work.99 By June, as the reports came in from Bengal, the picture of panic was fully presented. Congress volunteers repeatedly attacked the police, subinspectors were ‘murdered’, constables had ‘disappeared’. Thousands of villagers refused to retreat even in the face of ‘continuous firing’. The Assam Frontier Rifles and the Eastern Frontier Rifles raided and broke up Congress volunteer centres, ‘for here villagers are organised’. Many villagers armed with lathis and axes attacked the police and were shot.100 The incidence of policemen resigning or refusing duty, as a result, was increasing. The events bespoke not of individual terrorism but of a wider, grass-root movement. The areas that were ‘totally out of control’ were so because ‘they get free supplies of money and food from the villages around’. The operations against terrorism were easily used to destroy this kind of emerging rural solidarity. The brutal treatment and torture meted out to the peasants was borne out by the Report of the Contai Enquiry Committee.101 In Midnapore certainly the target of the ‘severe lesson’ was not the terrorist but the peasant, as the letter from the I.G.P. of Bengal made clear: ‘The whole area is thoroughly impregnated with the seeds of Civil Disobedience and we can root out this evil only by arresting every single volunteer. I had no idea the Congress organisation could enlist the sympathy and support of such ignorant and uncultivated people,’ but they had and the organisation was ‘extraordinarily good’.102 The conflagration was spreading. Close on the heels of these developments in Bengal followed reports of similar battles from Bihar, Madura in Madras, and Etah in the U.P. Large bands of villagers attacked small police parties and such incidents were ‘continually occurring’.103 It was a time of reckoning. Undoubtedly, a review of both the Movement and government’s policy was called for. It was in this context that the Viceroy wrote to the Secretary of State, London, at the beginning of

99

Ibid. Ibid., June (i). 101 HDP, File 248/II/1930. 102 HDP, File 200/V/1930; File 248/II/1930. 103 HDP, File 483/1930. 100

Salt and the Steelframe 247

June: ‘It would be a great mistake to conclude that the agitation is not the expression of something both more substantial and more permanent.’104 The policy of using the liberals and the moderates as a foil and of ignoring the Congress altogether was totally ineffective. ‘All thinking Indians … want substantial advance which will give them power to manage their own affairs. However much they may deplore the Civil Disobedience Movement, they feel … it is likely to make British opinion more elastic by exposing the various disadvantages of a system which does not carry consent.’ It was worth noting, however, that through the course of the Civil Disobedience Movement there had been a ‘general absence of communal clashes’. The true measure of the Congress movement thus had to be sought and it was quite clear that ‘the influence of Gandhi’s name … is powerful, and a man like Patel … in popular view (he) figures as a hero who has courageously stood up to the British government.’ In the ultimate analysis ‘We think every European and Indian would tell you that he was surprised at the dimensions the movement has assumed, and we should delude ourselves if we sought to underrate it.’ An extremely interesting ‘appraisement of the constitutent factors’ of the political situation in the country was provided by the Viceroy: Communist and Revolutionary Gandhi and declared and sincere Congress adherents General nationalist sympathisers, ignorant masses and hireling volunteers Commercial and economic discontent

: : :

5 per cent 30 per cent 50 per cent

:

15 per cent105

The Viceroy was reasonably impressed. It was apparent that he was ready for a truce. And yet, the ground swell of official feeling was thoroughly against such a move. Regional variations apart, in terms of space and time the course of the Civil Disobedience Movement showed a uniform accretion of strength. However, ‘this strength, though deeply disturbing to the government, could not be a source of its collapse. There was no question of being forced 104 105

Ibid. Viceroy to S.O.S., 2 June 1930. Ibid.

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to retreat. As far as most provincial governments were concerned, they saw the existing situation as encouraged by the government’s ‘leniency’ and refusal to hit with the ‘mailed fist’. The limitations of the Movement were apparent, it lacked the full mobilisation of the peasantry and had only the partial participation of the working class. Once ‘ordinance rule’ began in July, the effects were ‘heartening’ and consequently the persistent plea of the provincial governments was not to slacken or give any concessions to the enemy. A hard-hitting policy would show how easily the Congress could be beaten and made to surrender. As early as January 1930, most provinces had opposed allowing processions, and suggested a ban on revolutionary banners for they were usually seen as a ‘victory’ over government authority.106 However, Haig, secretary to the government, had warned: the result of prohibitory bans could only be to provoke numerous conflicts with the police and the troops which would rouse even greater sympathy for the Congress and would help them to act in an atmosphere nearer their own choice. ‘Congress wants to create a dilemma for government’, Haig had declared.107 The dilemma had been created and had now to be resolved one way or another, argued the provinces, throwing all their weight on the side of a military solution. For example, the Inspector General of Police in U.P. reported that discussions with various Commissioners, Collectors and SPs had been very ‘optimistic … tempered only by one fear that there may be unnecessary and ill-timed conciliation from above, which would give an impetus to the movement and weaken the position of those who have opposed it.’ It was their considered opinion, he continued, ‘that if the government now remain firm and do not grant concessions … the blow will be decisive. On the other hand should the Congress be able to claim any vestige of victory they would probably have no difficulty in raising a far greater wave in two years time when a reformed system of government is introduced.’108 The Punjab was equally vehement in opposing ‘the long rope policy’ by June 1930. Nationalist hegemony was manifest in the villages: The fate of the old soldier and other loyalists in many villages is deplorable … they cannot worship except in Khaddar clothing … . 106

This picture emerges from all the archival files on the movement put together. HDP, File 454/1930. 108 Ibid., File 249/1930. 107

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Their labourers are cleared off by Congress agents. Their family cannot leave their houses without molestation … . They are not allowed to draw water at the village wells, nor will the Congress agents allow the village banias to supply them. They are insulted at every turn and generally life is a burden.

The Brigadier writing this report was incredulous: ‘Why they remain loyal is a mystery to me!’ Apart from these social repercussions their economic position was affected because ‘water does not reach their fields, owing either to Congressmen pinching their supply, or … the Hindu element in the Canal Department see that the water is switched off to disloyal landowners … In some of the villages loyal men go armed, with escorts …’ These conditions were certainly not general but ‘a straw shows which way the wind is blowing’, though the troops are loyal and staunch. The Congress propaganda was unceasing, in the bazars, on the road, in their homes. Men going on leave and finding these conditions, ‘are bound to be contaminated, unless government shows itself out to break Congress’.109 ‘Large forces and stern action are promptly required’ said the Bengal government. ‘We can immediately prepare a good striking force.’110 According to the Bombay government: ‘There is a feeling that sooner or later the whole of this movement may end in another triumph for the Congress.’ The Bombay government was plagued with the uncertainty ‘as to how far this movement was really to be fought with the weapons at our command and beaten, or whether it was all going to end in a compromise’. It was necessary that the government strip itself of all illusions; that the lack of a wider rural base was a permanent handicap for the Congress: ‘The success of the movement, the wide and intense support it is receiving … have created the belief that a national movement has started which will prove irresistable,’ and ‘a vivid impression of the power and the success of the Congress movement’. This was as vivid a description as any of the growth of Congress hegemony. And it called forth the imperialists’ wrath: ‘I am sure we do no good by treating the Congress challenge with half measures. Nothing gives less chance for reasonable opinion to assert itself than the belief that 109

HDP, File 250/I/1930. HDP, File 248/II/1930. Letter from Hopkyns (W.S.), Chief Secretary, Government of Bengal to Home Department. 110

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Congress are going to win,’ pronounced Haig. ‘The forfeiture of Congress House, its occupation by troops and police, its possible conversion into a police headquarters would produce a real effect on the public mind, which is what we want to influence.’ The open production and sale of the Congress daily bulletins did ‘the most damage to government’ and the failure to print the required declaration ‘leaves government helpless’. The most effective thing to do was to use ‘the power to occupy and forfeit and if necessary destroy, the Ashram buildings which are the centres from which the whole movement is organised and directed’. On the other hand, ‘Gandhi’s preachings’ created a real problem, for ‘the volunteers remain mostly non-violent … (and) their obstinacy makes them very difficult to deal with, while their non-violence renders forcible measures against them extremely unpleasant to those engaged in them.’111 The dilemma, of which the government had been aware all along, was clearly reflected here; it was essential to check and control all acts of defiance immediately or ‘the prestige of the enemy’, viz., Congress hegemony, was bound to grow. But a policy of nipping every little protest in the bud was blatantly repressive and likely to fan antagonism at a rapid rate. The attempt to obtain a moral edge over the opponent and do everything except sit on their bayonets was a mature political strategy symptomatic of an intelligent ruling class and its state apparatus. The Gandhian strategy of struggle often appeared to the government as the most shrewd and difficult type of politics to counter. ‘In the present temper of these people’, warned the government of Bombay, … the prohibition of processions would certainly provoke defiance … . Before long the police would be unable to stop them and the military would have to be called in. Shooting on a large scale would be inevitable, and elements of the population (now quiet) would join in sympathy. Peace would only be restored after serious riots.112

Yes, acknowledged Haig, Home Secretary, this was the crux of the problem: Government was not disposed to interfere with them because they were non-violent … (however) the very astute persons we are up against have deliberately calculated that they can do more harm to government by 111 112

HDP, File 257/V/1930. Ibid.

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non-violent than by violent methods and I have no doubt they are right. I confess I have been getting the impression during the last week or two from various parts of India that in spite of all that has been done government may not be retaining that essential moral superiority, which is perhaps the most important factor in this struggle.113

Thus, by July, the twin policy of a weak smile and a ferocious snarl was exhibited on the government’s face. Repression there had to be, as the provinces had argued the case, and by the first half of August fresh ordinances had been issued in all parts of the country. However, the ‘mass defiance of the law extending over months and affecting at one time or another practically every part of India’ had convinced the Viceroy that the government could ‘not solve the real problem merely by repressive action and it (was) necessary to examine possibilities of constructive action’.114 From the latter end the ball was set rolling by the Viceroy’s address which ‘relieved’ at least some moderates who saw the Viceroy’s speech ‘as providing a door to enter into negotiations’.115 Messrs. Sapru and Jayakar ‘the so-called ‘peacemakers’ began shuttling between the Viceroy and the Congress leaders, though their efforts brought no immediate results. On the other hand, Vallabhai Patel addressed a mass meeting of 50,000 people at the Esplanade Maidan, Bombay, and urged all nationalists ‘not to be misguided by talk of conciliation and not to relax their activities’.116 He was ‘very critical’ of Sapru and Jayakar and dismissed the notion of any talks unless a general amnesty was declared, all prisoners released and the Emergency Ordinances annulled. Consequently, the countrywide ordinances multiplied and the ‘crackdown’ began in right earnest. The raison d’être for this was officially found in the resolutions of the Working Committee. Just as any mass movement, even in the face of repression, grinds to a halt only gradually, the Civil Disobedience Movement was beaten down into an uneasy silence over the months of July and August. Certain districts continued to ‘show restlessness’ while the government sought to subdue the ‘underlying spirit of lawlessness’. Nonetheless, provincial governments began 113

Ibid. Emphasis added. HDP, File 483/1930. 115 HDP, File 18-VIII, 1930. FR July (i). The Viceroy, Lord Irwin, issued his Declaration of 31 October that sought to assure the Congress, that ‘the natural issue of India’s constitutional progress … is the attainment of Dominion Status.’ 116 Ibid. 114

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reporting a ‘definite improvement’ and the process of ‘decline’ of the Movement as they launched the ‘offensive’.117 To treat these months in terms of ‘a lull’ in political activity is highly misplaced.118 The ‘slackening of Civil Disobedience’ was due more to ‘the vigorous action by the authorities than to the voluntary abandonment by its adherents’. Everywhere, the rounding up of all activists, action under the Criminal Law Amendment Act and the promulgation of new ordinances began ‘breaking up the movement’.119 The government executed ‘energetic and systematic action in the districts’ imposing total bans and adding massively to their armed force. Troops surrounded all the ‘recalcitrant villages’ and collected the revenue at gun point. ‘Strong action under the Unlawful Instigation Ordinance’ put a stop to the no-tax campaign in the rural areas. ‘Armed guards’ and ‘punitive police’ mopped up all vestiges of resistance. As Patel delivered ‘one of the worst speeches even he has ever made … inciting and mischievous’ assuring the people they would have no truck with negotiations, Ansari declared he was finally all supportive for the Movement after seeing the victims of police brutality at the Congress Hospital.120 The application of Ordinance IX and the CLA Act declaring all Congress organisations unlawful was a foregone conclusion; by August, all buildings used by the Congress were seized, the Youth Leagues were scattered and the ‘crackdown’ was complete. ‘Full arrangements have been made … including the posting of troops.’121 The inevitable followed: a pattern of decline was visible everywhere, variations in time and space notwithstanding. Sporadic outbursts of spontaneous resistance took place: an incident of ‘mass hysteria’ when ‘wanton looting of government forests’ occurred; a violent confrontation between a group from the Gond tribe and the police; an attack on the railway station at Saugar—an action ‘which had damaged government property to the tune of 20,000 rupees’. However, the government knew how to quell this kind of outbreak: the villages concerned were immediately notified under section 15 (i) of the Police Act, and the destruction of property was promptly dealt with merciless whippings, and ‘therefore … things are much better’. Similarly, a

117

Ibid. Though inside the jails the prisoners went on a riot. D.B. Low, Congress and the Raj, pp. 165–91. 119 HDP, File 483/1930. Weekly political situation up to end of July 1930. 120 HDP, File 18-VIII, 1930; FR July (ii), August (i). 121 Ibid. 118

Salt and the Steelframe 253

… systematic attack, stamped out the no-tax campaigns in Kaira, Surat and Broach while an attack by 2,000 villagers armed with swords and bill-hooks was met by a shooting spree. Whole villages in the Deccan were hounded out by the troops and had to flee to the surrounding hills.122

As the month of August drew to a close ‘the sting had gone from the atmosphere’, and in many provinces ‘people were getting tired’.123 However, the source spring of the government’s confidence, the ‘quiescent’ peasantry, had begun showing ominous signs since August. Certainly, the authorities had come down harshly upon the first signs of unrest wherever they appeared, and yet, given the size of the country and the scattered nature of its peasant population, rural ‘disturbances’ figured too regularly in the provincial reports for their comfort. With the ‘decline’ in urban agitation a ‘major shift to the rural areas’ was observed.124 As an aspect of conscious policy pursued by the Congress this was of course true only in a few selected areas, chiefly in the U.P., Bombay Presidency and Bihar. Nevertheless, in other places the ‘spontaneous’ activity of peasants gave the ferment in the countryside a definite pattern. The term ‘spontaneous’ is often identified with independent ‘peasant activity in’ areas where no previous record of ‘active mobilisation’ by the Congress existed. In our view the absence of Congress workers, specifically organising peasants, does not render the area concerned innocent of Congress influence nor does it suggest an ‘independent stream of polities’. (We discuss this in chapter 10.) In the U.P. the bulk of the Congress volunteers in the rural areas were being recruited from ‘out-of-work tenants and low status villagers’, with ‘defiance of authority increasing’. Similarly, in Bihar, ‘the villagers shelter the Congress volunteers … . while the local police cannot investigate because of the severe social boycott.’ The really bad areas were Saran and Gorakhpur districts and were ‘being dealt with by military marches’.125 The Santals of Orissa were not to be trifled with and were ‘battling with the police with stones and lathis’ in one incident, while they ‘rescued 122 Ibid., also File 18/X/1930, FR September (i). File 18/IX/1930, FR August (i) and (ii). 123 Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, 1962, p. 232. HDP. File 18/X/1930, FR September (i). 124 HDP, File 18-XII, 1930. FR November (i) and (ii). 125 HDP, File 18-X, 1930. FR September (i), and (ii); File 18-XIII, 1930. FR December (i) and (ii).

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a civil disobedience prisoner from the hands of the police’ in another. The military operations reduced the resistance though Saran remained a thorn in their side for some time with ‘hostile villagers, lathis in hand’ launching a ‘premeditated attack on the mounted police’.126 Both, Saran and Champaran showed to the government that ‘violent crowds can be easily collected to attack and resist the authorities’. Despite firing ‘27 rounds of ball and buckshot’, the police were forced to retreat to the thana and await reinforcements in Saran. The government was haunted by memories of the Chauri Chaura police station as the battalions were asked to march in. The Bengal government advised stepping up the use of ammunition while being complacent of handling their own problems: ‘The disturbances over the no-tax campaign have been dealt with appropriately … and the Commissioner of Burdwan says there are good grounds for believing that Congress will find it very difficult to regain its influence and to stir the cultivators to any enthusiasm.’ A ‘very good sign’ accounting for this confidence was the fact that the Congress volunteers were being ‘ejected from many places by the house owners’.127 In the Central Provinces a ‘mass peasant outbreak in Buldand district’ was seen as the direct result of ‘no-tax campaign agitators wandering around in the interior’, while ‘the contamination of the tribals’ had erupted in the Chattisgarh division with ‘Gonds cutting through telegraph wires’ which were surely seen as the lifeline of government’s brute force. Likewise in Assam, the tribals of the north were ‘defying forest laws and assaulting the police under the influence of a Congress lady’, and, therefore, ‘a platoon or two of the Assam Rifles will march through to frighten them’.128 In the mofussils of Bombay Presidency the ‘vigorous preparations’ to squash the no-tax campaign were already ‘creating nervousness among the large cultivators’, while the poorer ‘elements involved in the forest satyagraha’ in the Deccan area were ‘falling off after the measures government has taken’. The ‘August forecast’ by Petrie that the Movement would be ‘crushed successfully’ was vindicated. And the G.O.C.-in-Charge, Eastern Command, General Shea’s prescription that ‘in the areas where disaffection has most rudely reared its head (it) 126

HDP, File 18-XII, 1930. FR November (i). November (ii). HDP, File 18-XIII, 1930. FR December (i). December (ii). 128 Ibid. 127

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shows that vigorous offensive action invariably succeeds’, was borne out by January 1931.129 In the heartland of Congress influence, rural Gujarat, Congress Ashrams were seized, and the ‘chhavnis’ of the Congress scattered. Open mass resistance dissolved, the villages were silent and deserted, though most peasants crossed over the boundary into Baroda State and put up their huts ‘pretending to have migrated’.130 When questioned on their flight the peasants offered various reasons, some said that fear made them do so, others because they had no money to pay the government, still others because their leaders, Gandhi and Patel, were in prison. Ultimately, the deserted villages bore mute testimony to the aggressive policy of the government; at the same time the demeanour of the villagers was not angry or ‘violent’ but ‘disheartened’.

129 130

HDP, File 18-X, 1930, FR September, October. File 504/1930. File 6/11/1931. HDP, File 18/XI, 1930. FR October (ii).

Chapter 9

‘Sarkar Hargai’

In the process of building its overall hegemony, the Gandhi–Irwin1 Pact could be seen for the Congress as a halt en route, a breathing space, a marking of time, when the released prisoners came back to tumultuous welcome and the resolve of extending and consolidating their work in the rural areas. As it became immediately clear to the government: ‘Generally the truce is considered a great victory and the released prisoners return as victors.’ A series of reports received ‘show that the general opinion is that the government have sustained a defeat’.2 There was a widespread spirit of jubiliation specially where the concessions given as regards salt manufacture and the assurance that the additional costs of reinforcements would not be compensated from the people marked ‘a signal victory for civil disobedience’. The people felt that as they had achieved their objective (for which they defied law and were beaten up) the struggle had been worth its while. ‘The enhanced prestige which the Congress had undoubtedly acquired’ had kindled the hope that ‘enhanced gains would certainly follow’.3 In this atmosphere of ‘suspended hostilities’ the ‘loyalists who formerly had no dealings with the Congress’ were

1 For details see S. Gopal, The Viceroyalty of Lord Irwin, 1926–31, London. 1957; and B. Pattabhi Sitaramayya, The Hisiory of the Indian National Congress, New Delhi. 1969. 2 HDP, File 18/3/1931. Fortnightly Report (FR) March (i). 3 Ibid.

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now making their peace with it and subscribing to their funds.4 The Congress continued to consolidate its position ever since the Pact and the Delhi Agreement was seen as ‘merely the drop curtain between the acts of a tragedy and the stage is being set behind for further and more serious trouble’.5 However, despite the overall political prestige that appeared to accrue to the Congress movement, the Congress youth and left-wing had reacted bitterly to the Pact. The youth leagues were on the whole ‘sceptical’ of Gandhi’s settlement with the government; they ‘seem to think that the Congress has not come out of the whole affair very creditably’, and in any case consider the ‘settlement useless unless an amnesty is obtained for all political prisoners including revolutionaries and the Bengal detenus’.6 On the whole, noted the government, the youth is ‘denouncing the Pact’, and this rebellion led to very ‘encouraging’ speculations of a final split in the Congress. As the Secretary of State wrote to the Government of India, ‘If Civil Disobedience is renewed, the best hope would be a split in the Congress, … with one party abstaining from Civil Disobedience … .’7 The hostile reception of Gandhi as he arrived at Malir station for the Karachi Congress, with groups of students shouting slogans against him, reinforced the government hopes. The fulfilment of its expectations, however, failed to materialise as ‘day by day’ Gandhi’s ‘ascendancy’ increased and the ‘final triumph’ was achieved when the peace settlement was endorsed ‘practically unanimously’ and he was appointed ‘Dictator’ to represent the Congress at the Round Table Conference.8 It is the observation of this sequence of developments in the Congress which led to the contemporaneous Communist charge against Gandhi of having betrayed the mass movement.9 The youth, however, soon overcame its initial frustration and was convinced that a renewal of Civil Disobedience was imminent. Consequently, a fresh ‘enrollment drive’ resulted in the volunteer movement being reorganised on more disciplined lines: ‘an army of 6,000 volunteers’.10 4

HDP, File 18/4/1931. FR April (i) and (ii). HDP, File 18/5/1931. FR May (i). 6 HDP, File 18/3/1931. FR March (i). The reference to ‘revolutionaries’ is obviously to the terrorists in Bengal and Punjab. 7 HDP, File 14/12/1931. 8 HDP, File 18/3/1931. FR March (ii). 9 We discuss the question a little later. 10 HDP, File 18/4/1931, FR April (i) and (ii). File 18/10/1931, FR October (i). All units were being asked to raise and train their ‘quota of Sainiks’. 5

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There were ‘distinct indications’ of Congress preparations ‘for a resumption of the Civil Disobedience Movement’. And the tone of all ‘recent speeches’ was: ‘war is approaching—get ready!’11 As we have remarked earlier, the provincial bureaucracy had despaired of any settlement with Gandhi long before the Pact was signed, and it certainly did not desire to lift the pressure on Civil Disobedience participants while the militants of the Congress were equally loath to let their activities fizzle out. It was not surprising, therefore, that both sides immediately began accusing each other of not honouring the settlement. Drastic action by the government, under constant pressure from the provinces, appeared inevitable now. Having stayed the provinces’ plea for ‘no-talks at all’ the government would now not open itself to the charge of talking too softly. The negotiations on specific issues after the Pact had to be conducted on ‘hard lines’. As the Home Department cautioned the Viceroy, they had to ‘at all cost avoid placing ourselves in the position of a suppliant to the Congress’ and had to convince the ‘public’ that government was not prepared to retreat any further. So far as the amnesty was concerned there were certain ‘essentials’ which had to be observed, specially in view of Gandhi’s refusal to give any assurance on the renewal of Civil Disobedience. It was necessary, therefore, to take a firm stand on some things and refuse to be shifted from them. Amnesty could be granted only to non-violent satyagrahis or else the effect on the police would be disastrous: ‘We could damage the morale of the police’ and it would be senseless to call upon them ‘when their enthusiasm has got cold and stiff, to fight again’. There should be, therefore, ‘no question’ of releasing the ‘violence prisoners’.12 As for the enquiry on police excesses demanded by Gandhi there was to be only a blunt refusal: ‘No enquiry, unless, Congress disowns publicly all demonstrations made hitherto in sympathy with violence—for example, its ‘‘Garhwal and Sholapur Days’’ and the like—and expresses publicly regret for all violence done to police and others.’ In any case, ‘the government can never agree to “police excesses”’. Finally the release of large numbers of persons convicted for Civil Disobedience would not only be ‘administratively impractible’ it would damage the prestige of the government with ‘the spectacular release celebrated as Congress victory’. The number of civil resisters in prison by the end of 1930 was as 11 12

Ibid. HDP, File 5/45/1931 and K.W.

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large as 23,513 of which the largest number came from the provinces of Bombay, Bihar, Orissa, U.P. and Bengal, and therefore it was essential that they be released only in batches.13 It was thus clear that Gandhi’s agenda of pushing through a general amnesty had no chance from the start. The government refused to even consider for a moment the first four points he raised in the discussions: (a) General amnesty, (b) Sholapur prisoners, (c) Meerut prisoners and (d ) Bengal detenus.14 The hard core of the government’s position and its anxiety over ‘police morale’ rested, as they declared, on ‘two firm decisions’: (a) not to allow any enquiry into ‘excesses’ and (b) not to commute the sentences on Bhagat Singh, etc. Any weakness here would have ‘disastrous effects’.15 A colonial government, it would appear to us, was not likely to give way on these issues. Some concessions or a liberal attitude towards property or the propertied was part of the policy of any government desiring greater consent for its rule as opposed to openly military conditions. However, any attack on its police and military apparatus would never be countenanced. For Gandhi, refusing to negotiate with the government on the basis that these questions were open would have meant rejecting the path of negotiation altogether. Such a decision was neither a part of the overall strategy of the Congress movement nor viable politics in the given conditions, as we discuss a little later. The government had approved in principle ‘a programme of action … promulgation of Emergency Powers Ordinance, extension of period of detention, seizure of funds and the Press Ordinance.’ The provinces, meanwhile, stepped up their recriminations against the centre for allowing the Congress time and space to extend their planned mobilisation of the countryside: ‘We simply cannot afford to allow the movement to gain force in the rural areas by waiting to watch results.’16 The notion that the Gandhi–Irwin Pact nipped the militancy of the mass movement—specially the peasant upsurge—is incorrect on two counts. In the first place, there was no independent peasant movement building up to a final assault on the imperialist government. Second, the no-tax, no-rent movements, in existence in various regions, contin13

Ibid. Ibid. 15 HDP, 18/3/1931. FR March (i). 16 HDP, File 14/12/1931. l4

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ued even after the settlement under the guise of delinking the political movement from the economic struggle. Both in Gujarat and the U.P., campaigns carried on throughout 1931. The government complained that in U.P., while discussions between the Congress and the local governments were still in progress, the Provincial Congress Committee authorised a no-rent campaign which was pursued vigorously in the latter half of 1931.17 Jawaharlal had got authorisation for the Provincial Congress Committee to start a ‘defensive satyagraha’ in regard to rents. As a result the landlords were unable in 1931 to make any ‘preliminary collections of part of their rent’ as they had in some areas in 1930. In the North West Frontier Province, the ‘Red Shirt’ movement and all the bodies controlled by Ghaffar Khan were recruiting ‘large numbers of volunteers from the villages … increasing and intensifying the campaign’, so much so, that the collection of revenue had completely ceased in many parts of the province.18 The crushing of mass militancy was accomplished by the government itself, finally, by ordinances, moving in the police and setting up the landlords’ opposition wherever they could. Local landlords were being persuaded and encouraged to counteract Congress propaganda rather effectively, thought the government.19 That there were differences inside the Congress on how to conduct activities during this ‘truce’ was very clear from the meeting of the Working Committee of the Congress held in October at Bombay. The ‘main feature’ of this meeting was the ‘conflict between Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru’.20 Patel had emphasised the necessity of preserving a peaceful atmosphere while the Round Table Conference was in progress. Patel moderated his stand somewhat, apparently, when he declared in a public speech in November, that everyone now knew that Gandhi would get nothing from London, but the main object of the Congress ought to be to ‘prepare for the fight’. Nehru, meanwhile, was said to be coordinating efforts to link the planned no-rent campaign in Bihar with the 17

Ibid. We discuss such notions in the following chapter. HDP, File 18/11/1931. FR November (i); File 18/5/1931. FR May (i); File 14/12/1931; File 18/10/1931; FR October (i), and (ii). 19 HDP, File 18/7/1931, FR July (i). File 14/12/1931. The ordinances were (a) Unlawful Instigation Ordinance, (b) Unlawful Associations Ordinance and (c) Prevention of Molestation and Boycotting Ordinance. 20 HDP, File 18/10/1931. FR October (ii). 18

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movement in U.P., while his ‘emissaries’, Kamladevi and Hardikar, toured around the Central Provinces urging better preparation and coordination between all wings of the anti-imperialist movement for the next phase of the ‘war’.21 A meeting, attended by ten to fifteen thousand persons, was addressed by Jawaharlal Nehru and Patel in the beginning of December 1931, at Bombay. Giving due recognition to the importance of Patel and Gujarat in the overall strategy of the Congress movement against imperialism, Nehru declared that he was not attempting to establish the rule of peasants in U.P., but was working for rule in which the peasants had an effective voice without expropriating the zamindars. This question was raised because after his rapid tour of U.P. he had got the U.P. Congress Committee to grant permission to Rae Bareli, Unnao, Kanpur and Etawah to start a no-rent campaign openly. The difference between U.P. and Bihar was also apparent in the fact that Rajendra Prasad, while making ‘non-commital speeches’, was not organising any definite norent campaign.22 The battle in the countryside was, however, essentially between the Congress and the government, and Nehru’s advice to refuse rent was in the context of the government implementing its own ‘revised’ rent collections. The government observed that the reductions in revenue it had made had ‘a good effect’ and by July the situation even in U.P. was ‘better’ after the commissioner also persuaded ‘some leading talukadars … to make considerable reductions in rents.’ The government’s decision to give relief to individual cultivators in the Central Provinces, ‘eased the situation considerably’. Following a demand for the reduction of the revenue by the government, rents were revised accordingly. Very often, the rents were collected along with the revenue by the government and then handed over to the landlords.23 The combined effect of the remissions granted by the government and the ordinances, and police operations in the countryside contributed largely to the second phase of Civil Disobedience remaining an extensively urban affair. Added to this, of course, was the significant fact that the 21 HDP, File 18/11/1931. FR November (i). The Congress workers here held up the U.P. no-rent campaign as a model to the peasants in this province. See FR December (i) also. 22 HDP, 18/12/1931. FR December (i). The meeting of the UPCC was held on 5 December 1931 at Lucknow. 23 HDP, File 18/4/1931, FR April (i) and (ii); File 18/7/1931. FR July (i); File 18/12/1931, FR December (i) and (ii).

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efforts of radical Congress workers to develop roots in the countryside were yet to develop fully. It is very clear from all accounts of the Civil Disobedience Movement that in terms of political prestige and authority, i.e., in terms of ‘hegemony’, the Gandhi–Irwin Pact was seen by all—the government, the Congress volunteers released from jail and the people who welcomed them back jubiliantly—as a victory for the Movement. As the Chief Commissioner of Delhi noted: ‘The effects of the release of members of the Working Committee I should assess as follows: In India the view is Sarkar hargai—government has sustained a defeat. The reasons given in the Viceroy’s announcement are ignored … . Events have compelled a climb-down.’24 The hegemonic impact that resulted from the Gandhi–Irwin agreement was seen even by R.P. Dutt who was extremely critical of the signing of the Pact: The fact that the British Government had been compelled to sign a public treaty with the leader of the National Congress, which it had previously declared an unlawful association and sought to smash, was undoubtedly a tremendous demonstration of the strength of the national movement.25

The strength of the movement lay, obviously, in the massive social support it had acquired and the consequent weakening of government’s authority and could not be sought in any list of ‘immediate gains’. The dismay and anger of Gandhi’s most ardent ‘disciple’, Jawaharlal Nehru, over the Pact is well-known. However, his own explanation for the ‘impasse’ which he felt the Congress had entered into suggests the realism of an active political worker. The sum of his argument was that as no mass movement could be kept alive indefinitely it was ‘natural’ that it should become stale, need reinvigoration and, therefore, a period of respite. On the other hand, the ‘organic’ development of the movement among the rural masses that was necessary for its revitalisation had not thus far occurred evenly or uniformly in most provinces, except in U.P.26 Although the already organised sections of the Indian people had shown 24

HDP, File 5/45/31 and K.W. R.P. Dutt, India Today, Bombay, 1947, p. 307. 26 An Autobiography, p. 238. 25

‘Sarkar Hargai’ 263

great passion and militancy in the Civil Disobedience Movement, a far greater effort in politicising and organising the countryside was essential for another qualitatively different upsurge. This could be accomplished only by the left-wing extending and strengthening its work in the rural areas—a task that had just begun in most provinces. The Communists’ indictment of the left-wing of the Congress movement, specially of Jawaharlal Nehru, for failing to split the national movement at this juncture and agreeing to go along with the Pact was rather removed from reality.27 The growing left-wing in the country with the exception of the mutually quarrelling Communist groups of the time, appeared to be well aware of the tremendous work of organising the peasants that lay before them, and without the accomplishment of which it was impossible to drive a hard bargain with the government. Though ignoring the political logic which led to the Pact, E.M.S. Namboodripad has recorded: There was, however, a widespread feeling that the Gandhi–lrwin Pact would give only a temporary respite. We knew that before long the Congress would be compelled to launch another and more powerful struggle, and it would be the duty of students like us actively to participate in it. That was what actually followed.28

Viewed through the polarities of ‘reform’ versus ‘revolution’ every attempt by the National Congress to negotiate or compromise with the authorities was seen by the Communists as proof of the ‘vacillating’ antiimperialism of the ‘bourgeois’ Congress. The colonial government, on the other hand, was soon convinced that its decision to negotiate with Gandhi demoralised their ‘allies’ and strengthened the impression that the ultimate victory of the Congress was only a matter of time. The uncompromising stiffness manifest in the government’s refusal to meet Gandhi in July 1934 was in stark contrast to Irwin’s decision to initiate negotiations in 1931. The realisation that any settlement with the Congress led to greater accretion of strength for the latter was clearly spelt out by the Home Member, Haig, in a letter drafted in April 1932: ‘But while the movement is still active, we must, I feel, definitely avoid 27 See our discussion of the Communist positions and criticisms in the following chapter. 28 E.M.S. Namboodripad, How I became a Communist, Trivandrum, 1976, p. 114.

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conversations with Gandhi which will inevitably be interpreted as negotiations and will on that account weaken our position very seriously.’29 Likewise, Willingdon wired to London on 25 June 1932: ‘Anything that looks like negotiation will seriously upset those who support us and we simply cannot afford to shake the confidence of the army and the police.’30 Thus, the ideological influence of Congress nationalism through the course of the Civil Disobedience Movement showed ever so clearly that the impact of the Gandhi–Irwin settlement (which suspended the Movement) was a hegemonic victory for the Congress movement in its long-term objective of displacing British control and influence in India. Perceptive members of the colonial bureaucracy did not measure the political effectiveness of the Congress-led mass movement purely by the criteria of the number of convictions, hartals, demonstrations, picketing, etc. As P.C. Tallents, Secretary to the Government of Bihar and Orissa in 1932, argued, despite the fact … that the movement is definitely collapsing, … the influence of the Congress is not yet negligible, … while the Congress organisation has been broken up we may have underestimated the extent to which its teaching has permeated the masses, and their readiness to follow any new leader that may arise.

The settlement with the Congress was interpreted as definitely undermining the credibility of and confidence in the government: … the landholding class is clearly timid and while as anxious as government to check this Congress teaching, are unwilling to come into the open against it or to be publically identified with government in any way in this connection. They fear in particular that they may provoke a concerted withholding of rent. They hold the view that though government have the tactical advantage and political initiative for the moment, the next turn of fortune’s wheel is uncertain and there may be more pacts, armistices or a measure of reform accompanied by an amnesty which will release those now in jail and possibly put them into positions of influence and power.31

29

HDP, File 14/8/1932. Willingdon to Hoare, quoted in D.A. Low, (ed.), Congress and the Raj, p. 178. 31 HDP, File 18/3/1932. Emphasis added. 30

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Emerson’s fears that the Pact could seriously erode British hegemony by ‘firstly, the defection from the government to the Congress of a large body of the former’s supporters … and secondly, the creation of the belief that the ultimate success of Congress is inevitable and the government are prepared to retreat from one position to another’32 appeared to come true, and demanded a sharp reversal of policy. As the government of Bengal summed up the impact of the settlement on its supporters and the police: … those who supported government in the last movement feel … that the fruits of their resistance (to the Congress—S.J.) … have been thrown away by the truce … . Nothing short of a declaration in the most unequivocal terms, followed by equally unequivocal occular proof, that government is determined to assert itself and to crush the subversive movement of which Congress is the sponsor, will change this attitude.33

The government’s experience had shown that any settlement with the Congress was of advantage to the latter and thus there was to be no repetition of the Gandhi–Irwin Pact. Gandhi’s offers to renew negotiation in 1933 after his release from prison, were ignored precisely because, in the given political conditions, it was the clear-cut policy of repression that had served the state better than any settlement: Civil Disobedience as a result of the policy adopted and maintained by government since January 1932 has now manifestly failed and has practically ceased to function; in ‘suspending’ it, therefore, Gandhi is doing little more than pressure of circumstances had done independently of him, and is demanding in return that government should in effect confer unfettered liberty upon those who initiated the movement to build up influence again with the object of renewing it or some similar activities as soon as they feel strong enough. This was precisely what happened in 1931.34

Apparently, the strength of the Congress lay in winning a position of compromise, while, at this juncture, the government could preserve its hegemony only by rejecting all negotiations. Repressive measures were 32

HDP, File 5/45/1931 and K.W. Emerson’s note dated 12 February 1931. HDP, File 13/8/1931. 34 HDP, File 44/57/1933. 33

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justified at this ‘supreme crisis of India’s history’ for what was at stake was the very ‘principle of constitutionalism’, i.e., the form in which the colonial state was perpetuating its hegemony. The propertied classes were warned that the battle for constitutionalism was not in the interest of the colonial state alone but of all future governments who would confront the threat of mass movements: It (Civil Disobedience Movement) is opposed to all constitutional principles and if it achieved its object, it would make any form of government impossible. In using their full resources against it the government of India are, therefore, fighting the battle, not only of the present government but of the governments of the future. It is particularly incumbent upon them at the present juncture to oppose with their full power a movement which would make constitutional advance impossible … . It (Congress) has twice rejected the offer and has twice chosen to follow the path of destruction rather than of constructive effort.35

The effort of the government in making the settlement had been to convince and persuade the National Congress that … the conflict is no longer between Indian nationalism and the authority of parliament … (that) the struggle from now onwards lies between those who believe that India’s aspirations can be realised most satisfactorily and most rapidly by the road of argument and persuasion and who still desire to tread the arid bypath of agitation and civil disobedience.36

The result of the Pact, however, was to further the hegemony of the Gandhi-led movement. This was how Sir Harry Haig comprehended Gandhi’s hegemonic style of politics: … It has always been Gandhi’s policy to attack the government violently and at the same time to maintain certain contacts … . Thereby, he secures a strong position for himself with his followers as an opponent of government and at the same time creates considerable depression in the ranks of government supporters who feel that government are afraid to treat him as, what he proclaims himself, an enemy. 35

HDP, File 13/14/1932 and K.W. Notification Political Statement, 4 January 1932. 36 HDP, File 5/45/1931 and K.W. Speech by Sir George Rainy on 5 February 1931 in the Legislative Assembly.

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Therefore, no pacts, no truce and no quarter for the enemy became the watchwords of the new policy: ‘The strength of our policy in the last few years has been that we have declined this half and half position, and Gandhi has to be either a friend or an enemy and not both at the same time.’37 The essence of Gandhi’s hegemony was in his ability to play this dual role while, the strength of the bureaucracy was now recognised to lie in, precisely, denying him his manoeuvrability and thus preventing the ascendancy of Congress influence. Nonetheless, the theory of the Gandhi–Irwin Pact being a ‘betrayal’ of the people’s struggle survives till today in the left historiography.38 Ironically, British officials in the provincial bureaucracy at the time of the Pact also considered it a ‘betrayal’, but of the ‘loyalist’ and of imperial interests in general.39 Recently, the theory of betrayal has also been employed to show that rich peasants were also let down by the Pact.40 The most detailed evaluation and interpretation of the first phase of Civil Disobedience and the Gandhi–Irwin Pact in which it culminated has been made by Sumit Sarkar.41 It is necessary, therefore, that we take up his argument at some length. The basic point that he makes is that Gandhi cut short the spontaneous upsurge of the people by deciding to negotiate with the government and thus furthered bourgeois interests, whose object naturally was to utilise the pressure of the mass movement to extract concessions from the colonial state.42 Sumit Sarkar, himself, rejects any oversimplification that would treat Gandhi as a ‘mere bourgeois tool in any simplistic or mechanical 37

HDP, File 169/1933. That is the conclusion of Sumit Sarkar, ‘The Logic of Gandhian Nationalism’. The theory of ‘betrayal’ has also been adopted by exponents of general ‘radicalism’ whose work does not reveal any explicit Marxist premises. See, for example, Gyanendra Pandey, The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh 1926–34. Delhi, 1978, and D.N. Dhanagare, Peasant Movements. Pandey specifically sees the Pact as one of the best examples of the Congress policy of ‘restraining’ and ‘controlling’ the mass movement. 39 See our discussion in the chapters that follow. 40 David Hardiman in Congress and the Raj, p. 68. According to Hardiman, the Pact broke the morale of the patidars who considered it a betrayal of their struggles, and that it left Vallabhai Patel in fear of losing his base. 41 Sumit Sarkar, ‘The Logic of Gandhian Nationalism’. 42 Ibid., p. 117. He writes: ‘the peasantry … remained politically subordinate, as the bourgeoisie proved skilful enough to cash in on popular discontent and yet retain ultimate control over it.’ 38

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sense.’ He suggests instead ‘an occasional significant coincidence of (Gandhi’s) subjective attitudes and inhibitions with bourgeois interests’. This implies that Gandhi was a bourgeois political leader and ideologue of bourgeois interests in the best possible way as far as the bourgeoisie was concerned—by being a national and people’s leader. ‘Gandhian leadership’ manifested, Sarkar says, ‘a certain coincidence of aims with Indian business interests at specific points’.43 One of the specific points of coincidence was the Gandhi–Irwin Pact. We would argue on the contrary, that the Gandhi–Irwin Pact was a negotiated settlement dictated by the long-term requirements of a strategy of movement—truce—movement that was intrinsic to a peaceful, nonviolent mass struggle like that of the Congress. No mass political activity can be sustained indefinitely in a state of ‘upsurge’. The exigencies of mass involvement, as a consciously organised force led by integrated leaders responsible to the Congress organisation, would certainly necessitate an organisational reconnaissance and reassembling of the fighting forces, whether the national or local involvement was left-wing or reactionary, or bourgeois, in ideological terms. Second, the force of government repression would demand an equally careful examination of ranks if it were not to be a suicidal venture. To characterise negotiation as a surrender to the pressure of the fears of capital or rural conservatism,44 is to seek an oversimple and ‘determined’ solution. It cannot explain at all why Gandhi should have called for resuming Civil Disobedience after the collapse of the second Round Table Conference and why the Congress should have ‘permitted’ Jawaharlal Nehru to continue the no-rent campaign in U.P. almost throughout the period of ‘truce’. Either, the insistence of the Congress rank and file militants—‘pressure from below’—was responsible for this (which would be proof of the Congress being open more to their pressure than that of the capitalists or landlords) or, Gandhi was perfectly confident of being able to put a ‘brake’ on the movement again whenever he so desired to and, in the meanwhile, sought to gain more concessions for the bourgeoisie. This explanation, however, would view Gandhi either as a marionette or a ‘super-leader’ confident to the point of omnipotence. 43

Ibid., p. 117. Sumit Sarkar emphasises how Gandhi did not want zamindars to be alienated and appealed to them to support the Congress, implying thereby a coincidence of Gandhi’s attitudes with ‘feudal’ interests as well. See ‘The Logic of Gandhian Nationalism’. 44

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The real problem with Sumit Sarkar’s treatment of the Gandhian movement is his failure to discuss the overall strategy and character of the Congress movement. He begins by accepting that Bipan Chandra has provided a ‘useful model’ to understand the national movement. In this model, the pressure of the bourgeoisie leads it to compromise and thus the whole movement becomes a bourgeois movement serving the interests of a particular class. Sumit Sarkar quotes ‘letters of pressure’ from Indian businessmen and remarks on the significance of their dates coinciding with Gandhi’s decision to negotiate with Irwin. His chronology of ‘business pressures’ reads somewhat like an account of playing with a jigsaw puzzle in which pieces whose shapes manage to fit in are used, regardless that the picture that finally emerges is incoherent. How else can one overlook that Gandhi in July 1930—before sections of the peasantry had become a source of disquiet for the government and become ‘uncontrolled’ and thereby a ‘threat’ to the Gandhian movement, and a whole eight months before the quoted business pressures were applied—Gandhi told Jayakar that ‘he thought the time was ripe for negotiation and that he could persuade his colleagues of this’.45 In this manner, Sarkar turns full circle and goes back to R.P. Dutt, while his presentation becomes a refinement of the same premise that underlay Dutt’s formulations. The root of this reduction of the strategy of a political movement to the strategy of a class lies in the fact that Sumit Sarkar believes the standard left critique of ‘bourgeois betrayal’ suffers only from ‘crudities’ but that the premises and theoretical conceptions on which it is based are essentially correct.46 In our view, on the other hand, the very premises of the theory of ‘bourgeois betrayal’ are fundamentally erroneous, and it is to that we must now turn our attention. In our view, the Gandhi–Irwin Pact was a move integral to the overall strategy of the Congress movement of building nationalist counterhegemony. Even the withdrawal of the Non-cooperation Movement of 1920 on the issue of Chauri Chaura, which fell within Gandhi’s moral position on violence, was essentially part of a long-term perspective which eschewed the politics of total confrontation and in which compromise and negotiation were inevitable. In contrast, despite the aggressive thrust 45

Judith Brown in Congress and the Raj, p. 137. For letters quoted by Sarkar see his ‘Logic of Gandhian Nationalism’. 46 Sumit Sarkar, ‘Popular Movements and National Leadership 1945–47’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XVII, 1982.

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of the Civil Disobedience Movement on the whole and the many incidents of violence that occurred during it—which would have been far greater had the government not immediately repressed them—Gandhi did not demur on this issue.47 Thus, the Gandhi–Irwin Pact, which was negotiated without Gandhi declaiming against violence, basically formed part of the overall strategy of a movement that envisaged a continuously spiralling ascent towards political freedom and was contrary to any ‘seizure of power’ strategy. Certainly, violence could not be encouraged, as Nehru explained in the context of the Garhwali soldiers who ‘mutinied’ at Peshawar. The Movement could never give a call for such action as its consequences for the soldiers were bound to be severe and the Congress could hardly mitigate them unless it was to seize power. If compromises were to be accepted periodically there was no way the Congress could bargain with the government on what the latter would term ‘subversion’ and ‘mutiny’ in the army.48 Negotiation and compromise were therefore inherent in such a movement. Obviously, any strategy that includes compromise is not, therefore, a ‘bourgeois’ strategy. The Gandhi-led struggle against the British in India was ‘a war of position’ as characterised by Gramsci, and such a movement which eschewed ‘insurrection’ and ‘seizure of power’ was bound to adopt a tactic of ‘changing tack, or offering conciliation and compromise in order to take evasive action in a patently disadvantageous battle’.49 The criticism by the Communists in India of the ‘compromise’ settlement between Gandhi and Irwin was largely coloured by the attitude that any negotiation with the government was a betrayal, for only a struggle for the seizure of power by total confrontation with the state could be termed revolutionary. Such a confrontation had to be in the form of a violent overthrow of the government as there could be no other successful method of ridding the country of imperialist rule. These were the given dogmas in the Communist movement of the time, and therefore a movement such as the Gandhi-led struggle automatically became a 47 The Home Department prepared a large number of files on ‘violent incidents’ which largely consisted of mass confrontations with the police resulting naturally from the ‘dispersal’ of crowds engaged in picketing, forest satyagrahas, etc. HDP. File 14/13/1931, 14/14/1931, 14/17/1931, 14/18/1931, 14/19/1931 and 14/20/1931. 48 Nehru, An Autobiography. 49 V.I. Lenin, C.W., Vol. 31, p. 77.

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reactionary movement which could not represent the revolutionary aspirations of the masses and at best served the interests of the bourgeoisie. The ‘principles’ or premises that were the basis of the political formulations of the Communists had an apparent though, as we argue, erroneous ‘logic’ that ran as follows: (a) nationalism was a bourgeois ideology; (b) the Congress-led national movement, therefore, was bourgeois in character; (c) as a class, the bourgeoisie was vacillating and compromising by nature; (d ) all compromises entered into by the Congress were thus to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie and out of fear of the revolutionary masses; and (e) the masses were revolutionary because they did not subscribe to the belief in non-violence and participated in many violent, activities and incidents. There are two levels at which the question of the ‘bourgeois character of the Congress-led national movement’ can be discussed. At the first level, it has been argued that The Comintern leaders completely underestimated the relative autonomy of the Indian bourgeoisie … (it) was not a compradore bourgeoisie and even in the heyday of the Raj enjoyed a certain independence … . So, the Indian Communists confronted a unique economic and political structure which they never succeeded in analysing properly.50

Implicit in the above level of criticism is the idea that the wrong estimation or evaluation of the Indian bourgeoisie led the Indian Communists into not forging a correct relationship with the Congress-led national movement. The second level, at which we would locate the heart of the problem is the equation consistently made by the Communists between the national bourgeoisie and the Indian National Congress. As we have pointed out, the Communists identified the Congress movement as a movement of the bourgeoisie. This was a fundamental error produced by their adherence to theoretical dogma which blinded them to empirical reality and prevented their appreciation of the process of transformation in the Congress-led national movement.

50 K. Damodaran, New Left Review, September–October 1975, No. 93. The relative economic independence of the Indian bourgeoisie has been discussed by Bipan Chandra in ‘The Indian Capitalist Class and Imperialism before 1947’ in Nationalism and Colonialism.

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In fact, one of the major characteristics of the Congress movement was its continuous programmatic and organisational transformation over a period of time. Starting its life as a small organisation of the Indian intelligentsia it was transformed into a mass movement under Gandhi’s leadership. Its political programme progressively forged ahead from demanding small reforms and concessions to dominion status to complete independence. Beginning without any radical socioeconomic internal programme, though it had started with a radical economic programme vis-à-vis colonialism, it came to pass a resolution on fundamental rights at Karachi and an agrarian programme at Faizpur. We have already discussed its ideological transformation in terms of growing radicalism and the influence of socialist ideas. Thus the Congress movement extended and widened not only its political horizon but also its social basis and gradually opened itself up to the influence of all classes in society. The Communists were unable to grasp the fact that in a colonial country the interests of ‘bourgeois development’ and the perspective of ‘national development’, and progress and freedom from the imperialist hold on the economy coincide and overlap to a great extent. This coincidence is the basis for the bourgeoisie’s opposition to imperialism and its support to national liberation movements. Precisely for this reason in a country like India the bourgeoisie had perforce to support mass movements which often appeared to them as opposed to their own security and interests. The Gandhi-led mass movements were clearly, seen by the capitalists as containing a dangerous inner duality—they could be a helpful source of pressure on the colonial government in the capitalists’ fight against imperialist constraints on their growth, but the mass movements were equally, open to being ‘used’ by other classes opposed to their interests. Apropos the Non-cooperation Movement, Thakurdas wrote to Birla: … we have not the men nor the public interest to do any constructive work in regard to matters commercial and industrial. I put the majority of blame for this at the door of the Non-cooperation Movement, which has given the masses a very dreary and dangerous satisfaction of resting content only with destructive work. If Non-Cooperation has brought an awakening in the masses it has also brought about this undesirable inclination, and I think we are paying for it now.51 (Letter dated 11 December 1923). 51

P. Thakurdas Papers, File 42, Part III.

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Similarly, in the context of the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930, Thakurdas wrote to Ambalal Sarabhai in reply to the latter’s query of whether he considered the Movement unconstitutional or not: The Civil Disobedience Movement may not be unconstitutional, but it certainly is a very dangerous weapon in the hands of a population, the majority of whom are illiterate. In fact this is one of the reasons why I have been against the movement since last March, and I have all along felt from the very start that this sort of Civil Disobedience may be suitable to us at the moment, but might teach the people an extremely dangerous lesson, which may greatly inconvenience even a Swaraj Government.52

Thus, the bourgeoisie’s whole-hearted support to the Congress movement was given, only during the phases of constitutional politics, while during phases of mass movements and upsurge it was alarmed and, in sections, even hostile. At no stage did the bourgeoisie consider the Congress as their own class party. In fact, in 1929, they seriously debated the formation of an independent party that would represent their class interests as opposed to the Congress which was seen as more representative of other classes as it rapidly shifted to the left. A letter on behalf of Tata (22 May 1929) informed P. Thakurdas that Dorabji Tata had been very perturbed of late over the labour troubles in Bombay and elsewhere and considered that the ‘politicians’, i.e., the nationalists, had ‘failed to safeguard the essential economic interests of the country, … have failed to stand up against the Red leaders of disruption’; therefore, the capitalists had to take such action as they deemed best to protect themselves. The most ‘sound and necessary’ step was to form a new organisation of capitalists. Neither the Bombay Chamber of Commerce nor the millowners’ association were capable of performing ‘the work that the new organisation has set itself to do’. Only a ‘class party’ could successfully perform the function of political representation of capitalist interests and to this end Dorabji Tata proposed the formation of a ‘new organisation’ to ‘seek and influence and create the necessary political support in furtherance of the industrial interests of the country’. Another letter from Dorabji Tata (23 July 1929) emphasised the necessity of a strong capitalist organisation which would forge a solid class unity 52

Ibid., (Letter dated 18 November 1930). F. 42. Part VII.

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and would include English commercial and industrial interests if it was to fight ‘Bolshevism and Communism’. This attitude of Tata’s was only the articulation of the inner fears and reaction of most capitalists in the country. It was mainly the persuasion of G.D. Birla, who spoke as what he defined as a ‘reasonable and advanced type’ of capitalist, which prevented the capitalists from taking the step of dissociating themselves from the National Congress and organising themselves as a separate party. As Birla put it, in his letter to Thakurdas dated 30 July 1929, ‘a capitalists’ party’ was a ‘frail weapon’ with which to fight communism. I have not the least doubt in my mind that a purely capitalistic organisation is the last body to put up an effective fight against Communism … . The salvation of the capitalist does not lie in joining hands with the reactionary element … (but in) cooperat(ing) with those who through constitutional means want to change the government for a national one.53

The Communists, caught in a theoretical bind, in some form of finalism and inevitability, because of their notion of nationalism being a bourgeois ideology and all representations of national unity being a bourgeois fraud perpetrated on the masses, failed to see the national movement as an arena for contending hegemonies. Consequently, those aspects of the movement that ‘appeared’ to serve bourgeois interests—in the sense that they were structured by the need to break the hold of an alien bourgeoisie on the Indian economy and were bound to immediately benefit the indigenous bourgeoisie if it were successfully broken—were seen as the essence and the only truth of the Congress-led struggle. For example, a popular argument used to demonstrate the bourgeois character of the Congress was that the famous ‘Eleven Point’ proposal made by Gandhi on the eve of Civil Disobedience was a charter of bourgeois demands.54 What is absolutely neglected in this argument is the fact that the eleven points were ‘national demands’ vis-à-vis a colonial economy and as demands falling in the field of direct antogonism with imperialism, could not be treated as bourgeois demands per se. Moreover, demands of the ‘Eleven Points’ variety were conditioned by the government’s readiness to make concessions to indigenous bourgeois interests. Such 53

Ibid., File 42, Parts I and V. R.P. Dutt, India Today. Communist publications of the time consistently made this charge. See, Inprecor, Communist, etc. 54

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concessions were in the nature of things, as the British Indian state was a bourgeois–colonial state often basing itself on a policy of concessions to the propertied and ‘substantial’ elements of society and it was certainly interested in acquiring their support and goodwill. If in the long run it could not do so, it was not because of a lack of effort but because of the fundamental contradiction between the imperialist and Indian bourgeoisie. In this context, any anti-imperialist strategy which conceived of a slow but steady undermining of colonial power would incorporate demands that ate into the vitals of imperialist control. Above all, an extremely important aspect of the Indian situation was the fact that the bourgeoisie’s participation in, or general support to, the national movement was one area where the government often manifested a sense of helplessness. Archival sources fully corroborate the conclusion that the government looked upon the Indian bourgeoisie as an immediately threatening opponent. It tried to reconcile with it as it did with other classes ranged against it in the anti-imperialist struggle. The government’s discussions on policy which are recorded in the files of the Home Department debated constantly on the content and form of concessions that could or ought to be granted to Indian workers or peasants and on the nature of legislation that should accordingly follow. Specially among the peasantry, the ‘substantial’ holders must be pacified if the Congress was to be controlled and counteracted against—this was the consensus in the bureaucracy.55 Consequently, the ‘genuine’ economic grievances of peasants and workers were consistently sought to be separated from ‘polities’. On the other hand, there was a general deprecation of economic ‘boycotts’ practised by the merchants and Indian capitalists, which hit British interests immediately and severely, as pure ‘politics’56—for, they embodied a competitive bourgeoisie’s challenge to an alien, controlling bourgeois power. And it was difficult to separate the purely ‘economic’ threads from the bourgeoisie’s basic demand for political independence which would enable it to grow. In the realm of anti-imperialist politics, the support of the bourgeoisie to the national movement, apart from being necessary to its own long-term interests, was also a valuable asset for the national movement. Thus, a concrete analysis of the Indian National Movement and the role of various classes in it vis-à-vis the imperialist state would have shown 55 56

HDP, Files for the years 1930, 1931, 1932. 1933, 1934. HDP, File 14/2/1932.

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the Communists a great deal of complexity which could not be captured by any rigid or doctrinaire formulae. A new way of understanding the national movement and its relationship to different classes was necessary. This work has not been taken up seriously even in historical writing till today, and though the earlier crude version of R.P. Dutt presenting the Gandhian movement as the ‘mascot of the bourgeoisie’ has been rejected by some historians the emphasis has shifted to the clever pressures of a mature Indian bourgeoisie and the supineness of the Congress which submitted to them.57 From being a ‘mirror image’ of the bourgeoisie the Congress has graduated to being a ‘reflection’ of the interests of the bourgeoisie. However, the erroneous conceptions of the Communists, and their rigid, dogma-ridden attitude towards the Congress movement that prevented their strengthening and securing the radical and left-wing shifts in the national movement, have never been raised as a central issue. The historical failure of the Communist movement lay in the fact that the Congress movement was identified with the bourgeoisie when actually it was open to the influence of all classes—as the ‘WPP period’ and the later day CSP–Communist presence in the Congress clearly showed. The historians’ failure to construct the dynamics between the histories of the Congress and left movements and their relationship lies in the fact that they are not seen as two components of the same totality, each moving in to occupy ideological space left vacant by the other. Rather, they are treated as mutually exclusive entities—the trajectory of the Communist movement is traced to the Communist ‘party’s’ failure to establish ‘hegemony’ because of theoretical and practical ‘mistakes’, while the path of the Congress ‘party’ is chalked out as a linear, uninterrupted bourgeois movement which occasionally assumed a radical facade to absorb petty-bourgeois leftists and to contain the revolutionary movement of the people. At the heart of this historiographical approach, of course, lies the unquestioned premise of two parallel movements, and the resultant counterposing of the ‘national’ and ‘class’ struggles, which question is discussed in the following chapters. Viewing the Congress movement as a terrain for contending hegemonies would also change the characterisations of politics and personalities in the movement. If individual capitalists like Purshottamdas 57

Sumit Sarkar, The Logic of Gandhian Nationalism.

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Thakurdas or G.D. Birla attempted to influence the Congress movement or Gandhi towards a path that was closer to their own interests, it is they who were the bourgeois ‘class politicians’ and not Gandhi. Berating the cleverness or manipulation of the bourgeoisie was no solution for the Communists then or for historians now. In other words, in India left politicians had to exist who were capable of influencing and applying pressure on a movement that comprised almost all classes in society. This task could only be accomplished by those who grasped the specific relations between different classes in the general struggle and the specific features in the objective development of the anti-imperialist movement. Regional variations apart, in terms of space and time, the course of the Civil Disobedience Movement showed a uniform accretion of strength. However, the limitations of the Movement were equally apparent; it lacked the full mobilisation of the peasantry and had only the partial participation of the working class. Nevertheless, the struggle of contending hegemonies is the struggle for winning over the minds of the people. The CDM was apparently, directed not towards creating an insurrectionary situation or the armed seizure of political power from the colonial state but towards permeating the minds of the various sections of the population with anti-imperialist consciousness. The underlying assumption was, clearly, that once an increasing majority of the people of such a vast subcontinent were involved in an expanding and deepening process of politicisation the colonial government would be compelled to either gradually loosen its hold on power or to rule purely by military force without the consent or active help of any section of the people—which was an impossibility. All Gandhi-led mass movements in general, and the Civil Disobedience Movement in particular, were directed towards the creation of a situation of ‘crisis’ embracing the whole nation—both the Indian people and their foreign oppressors—when the ‘underdogs’ no longer wanted and tolerated the old order and the ‘top dog’ could no longer maintain it. There exists a mythical conception of Gandhi-led mass movements in left historiography. To begin with, they are supposed to be absolutely non-violent and rigidly controlled from the ‘top’. Then they gather their own momentum and rise to the height of insurrectionary proportions threatening to go ‘out of the control’ of Gandhi and the National Congress. The ‘independent’ and ‘popular’ stream of nationalism comes to a head and then, with incredible sense of timing, it is precisely at this

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moment that Gandhi, the great initiator who roused the people to revolt, applies the brakes to the further ‘development’ (i.e., nation-wide insurrection) of the movement. As we have traced the actual reality of the Movement, however, we see that violent confrontations occurred with regularity from almost the beginning of the civil disobedience campaign in the urban areas with the youth movement giving the lead. The militant and violent clashes between the youth and the police, which were a constant feature of the Movement, were not ‘separate’ or ‘independent’ of the general Congress movement. In fact, they were part and parcel of the civil disobedience organised and led by ‘civil resisters’ and were caused by either the arrests of national leaders like Gandhi, Jawaharlal and Ghaffar Khan, or were the result of police assaults on the satyagrahis. More importantly, the Civil Disobedience movement saw the creation of ‘Congress Thanas’ and ‘Congress Panchayats’: ‘A feature of Congress activities in the rural areas is the attempt to form parallel institutions in several provinces … even parallel courts are functioning in a number of police station areas ….’ To term such activity as ‘independent’ of Congress initiative or knowledge is not credible. Gandhi, in fact, called for such parallel institutions with the proviso that people must not feel forced into getting their cases tried by the Congress courts as that could alienate them. In other words, the people ought to come to these institutions of their volition, be ‘hegemonised’ and not ‘dominated’ into succumbing to Congress authority.58 Sholapur, Peshawar, and the revolt of the Garhwali soldiers have been isolated and built up into insurrectionary incidents in left historiography. Our account shows that these explosions of violent conflict with the authorities were not ‘alternative’ politics of any kind, counterposed to the Congress movement or its leadership, but in fact were a product of these. And as we have seen, even after intense, militant and violent clashes between the people and the police, neither Gandhi nor Patel were willing to accept a compromise and the CWC passed resolutions to continue the Movement. Naturally, therefore, the government did not see the mass participation and clashes with the police as ‘independent’ or ‘self-organised’ activities by the people and treated the National Congress as its main enemy. 58

HDP, File 14/18/1931.

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In the areas where the process of the ideological transformation of the Congress movement was fairly well advanced, such as Bombay Presidency and the NWFP, radical anti-imperialism was logically leading to what the government characterised as ‘Communist tendencies’ without the actual presence of Communist activists or organisations. In most cases anyway no distinction was made between the Congress movement and the activities of individual Communists as the authorities had come to believe that ‘the Congress preach and advocate communism quite openly’, that is, the ‘overthrow of government’. By and large, no economic issues touching upon the internal contradictions within the camp of the people were taken up (except ‘fair rent’ movements such as the ones in Kerala or in U.P.). However, the economic programme opposed to the colonial state which consisted of nonpayment of land revenue, chowkidari taxes and the defiance of forest laws, was vigorously pursued. Villages were sought to be united as so many ‘ditches’ from which ‘positional war’ was being fought to lower the prestige of the colonial government and to break the morale of its administration. Only by adjusting their internal socioeconomic conflicts within the overarching primary contradiction with the government could the villages direct all their strength and energy against the colonial authority. The first phase of the civil disobedience saw mass satyagraha on a broader scale than the 1920s with the increasing participation of workers and peasants. This phase, in which the first RTC was boycotted by the Congress, ended with heavy-handed repression. The second phase of the movement, which was highlighted by Ghaffar Khan’s mobilising peasants to resist British terror and Jawaharlal Nehru’s launching the no-tax campaign of the U.P. peasantry, also saw ‘spontaneous’ mass resistance at Peshawar and Sholapur. The latter certainly marked the growth of heroic resistance in mass activity—but were ‘heroic’ precisely because they were manifestations of spontaneous anger and could be dealt with clearer vision on the part of the government and with greater brutality by the imposition of martial law. The great significance of the Civil Disobedience movement, despite its repression, was that the masses who participated in it became the basis of the big shift towards the left that culminated in the Lucknow session of the Congress in 1936. The joint growth of the Congress Socialist Party and the Communists was largely possible as the cumulative result of

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the different levels of mass politicisation and radicalisation that ensued through the course of the Civil Disobedience movement. On the other hand, the Communists it cannot be forgotton, became a structured party and came into contact with real mass organisations and activity only in 1936 for the first time when they joined the CSP. And this expansion of left influence is inseparable from the Civil Disobedience movement which preceded it, politicising and mobilising millions for the first time and bringing the nationalist intelligentsia in touch with them.

Chapter 10 Of Strategies and Methods of Struggle

It is not correct to say that the Gandhi–Irwin Pact was concluded at the height of struggle while a vigorous movement was ongoing and for that reason it amounted to a great betrayal of the people. This scenario was first sketched out by R.P. Dutt and in one form or another has remained an implicit assumption of those who do not seriously question it. Our reading of the evidence suggests that both sides in this struggle were hesitant, for their own reasons to prolong the fighting at this stage. The Home Department’s assessment of the position by the end of 1930, based on detailed reports from the provinces was that ‘the Congress are by no means confident of their ability to carry on Civil Disobedience’, at least not for very much longer.1 By the middle of January 1931, the Movement was seen to be definitely in the process of disintegration and though temporary stimuli were provided by released leaders from time to time, the effect was not expected to endure.2 The government, therefore, was not compelled to negotiate by the existence of any insurrectionary situation in the country. On the contrary, from a purely military point of view it was confident of the hardware at its command and, as an imperialist power, was determined to use it if need be. However, the limited 1

HDP, File 5/45/1931 and K.W. Ibid. That was why the oft-repeated plea of the provinces to the government was that it should not relax its stiff attitude towards the Movement. 2

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constitutional character of the colonial state in India, dictated the necessity of some measure of consent. While seeking to extend it through the modalities of colonial hegemony, the government was consistently wary of the possibility of ‘spontaneous’, widespread and ‘violent uprisings’ despite its capacity to crush them ruthlessly. On the side of the Congress, the limitations of the Civil Disobedience Movement had become all too clear. Apart from the conventional divisions such as the hardening of the attitudes of a large number of politicised Muslims as exemplified in Shaukat Ali’s position, or the growing following of Ambedkar beginning to range itself in opposition, the major weakness of the Movement was the absence of the generalised support of the peasantry which was not as yet fully mobilised and the partial participation of the organised sections of the working class. The government presented the twin policy of offering negotiation while executing military operations and openly discussing the introduction of emergency powers. For the Congress movement the problem was simply posed: what was better, to negotiate or to buckle under limitless repression?3 As we know, the NWF Province was bombed four times during 1929–30 (which includes the first year of Civil Disobedience). In each, case they were forced to accept the government’s terms. The determination of the government to crush any violent challenge to its authority and to deal with all such contigencies militarily is apparent from the detailed discussions conducted (and plans chalked out) on the use of naval and royal Indian marines to assist the civil powers, the various types of ships and cruisers which could carry out bombardment and the amount of armaments required.4 The state did provide an opportunity for a mass movement to develop and grow but only within terms that were not easily denied or repressed. A non-violent peaceful mass movement was one such method as the arena of confrontation was direct and immediate: ‘it is more difficult to take action against the Communists than the Congress, whose law-breaking activities are overt and not surreptitious’, was the government’s finding.5 Such an ‘overt’ movement could ill-afford to be wiped out on the charge of violence before it even began to look like a mass movement, and a 3

See our remarks in the Introduction. HDP, File 16/27/1931; File 55/1930. 5 Ibid., File 7/II/1934; File 512/1930. 4

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movement of such ‘tidal proportions’ to boot, as the Civil Disobedience Movement was characterised by those officials who were impressed by its potential. Once a measure of strength was achieved, as the accretion of popular support from 1920 to 1930 to 1942 shows, the Movement could spiral to higher levels of mass involvement. In fact, 1942 was possible to a great extent because the anti-imperialist struggle had exhausted the potential elasticity of colonial constitutionalism, and destroyed the state’s hegemonic influence over the minds of almost the majority of the population. The colonial state in India was one which permitted even Communists to function in their ‘own constituency’ of the working class, and watched them organise it for ‘in the stages before law and order are definitely and immediately threatened, the activities of Communists are not in themselves an offence’. The length, expense and melodrama of the Meerut Conspiracy Case would not have been necessary otherwise. The Governor of Bombay complained to the Secretary of State in London: ‘There is no way of preventing these people [the Communists] from regaining their liberty and from getting to work again.’6 The question of using emergency powers was not so simple, as it could well boomerang: ‘the government would [be] … liable to place itself in a false position vis-à-vis labour disputes, by action tending to break the strike’, when it had ‘the knowledge that the workers had certain legitimate grievances’. Very often, ‘it was thought necessary to test their (workers) wishes by allowing the strike to run … .’7 It was ironical that the Communists consistently identified the colonial government with the Tsarist state where deportation and exile was the rule, whereas here the government could not keep them in prison long enough for its own comfort. They were certainly imprisoned often enough—legality could be made to cloak repression—however, it was not the same thing as naked military rule where the very survival of Communists was impossible.8 This colonial infrastructure of ‘legality’ and ‘legitimacy’, had to be tackled by its opponents’ strategy, as Gandhi sought to do. When the 6

Ibid., File 7/II/1934. Ibid. 8 For a discussion of the structure and character of absolutist states, see Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, London, 1974. Specially, see ‘The Absolutist State in the East’, p. 195 and ‘Russia’, p. 328. 7

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Governor of Bombay asked the Viceroy whether, ‘from a legal point of view, would an association advocating or organising non-payment be an “unlawful association”’, the legal advisor L. Graham answered: ‘Any or every association advocating or organising non-payment cannot in advance be declared unlawful’, because everything would depend ‘on the methods employed’. Of course, the primacy of preserving imperialist power meant that legal niceties could be, and were, circumvented. As Graham continued: ‘However it could be reasonably easy to prove interference with the administration of law under the Bombay Land Revenue Code, or upsetting the maintenance of law and order.’ The Bardoli satyagraha could be ‘justifiably’ declared an ‘unlawful association’ as they were doing three things for which they could be charged legally: (a) they were preventing landholders from paying revenue due from them, (b) preventing the execution of coercive processes such as the seizure of movable property and (c) preventing cultivation by the new owners of the lands which had been forfeited for failure to pay land revenue.9 The Secretary of State ruefully remarked in a letter to the Viceroy: We … pride ourselves on allowing political agitators plenty of rope to hang themselves, but I very much wonder whether among ignorant and credulous people it is wise … where government is remote, troops are never seen in the greater part of the country and where the police … are feared as private enemies rather than instruments of government … .10

The rapid growth of the Gandhian movement roused the apprehension that such a continent was perhaps not the best field for experimenting with the apparatus of colonial hegemony, severely restricted though it was by the paramount interests of British imperialism and colonial harshness. Interestingly, the government did not misunderstand or treat lightly the other Gandhian method of picking one taluka, viz., Bardoli, to launch a campaign, for it was in the nature of such movements to have political chain effects. As the Viceroy warned all governors in the provinces, Bardoli would involve ‘a long process of attrition during which feelings might be roused against the government all over the country’. It was a question of the logic of such a primarily political challenge that Bardoli 9

HDP, File 197/1928, Discussions on the ‘lessons of Bardoli agitation of 1928’. Ibid.

10

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would not remain the first and ‘the last incident, for we have had many threatenings in other parts’.11 ‘Passive Civil Disobedience’ was also not treated by the government as politically ridiculous (as the Communists tended to treat it) but was seen to contain potential threat. The government recalled: ‘Gandhi always held that one of the strongest cards which he can play against government is this non-violent civil disobedience by means of non-payment of taxes …’ and agreed that ‘there is no easier way in which they can embarrass government than by organising this passive civil disobedience of nonpayment of taxes’.12 The no-revenue, no-tax campaign combined with the resignation of village officers and the establishment of political influence over local bodies was the focus of Gandhi’s personal participation throughout the Civil Disobedience Movement. The latter aspect of his programme was assailed equally by the bureaucracy as corrosive of British hegemony. In fact the existence of local government bodies that gave support or assistance to the Civil Disobedience Movement was admitted as ‘a widespread problem’ and the ‘necessity of issuing an Ordinance to deal with it’ was emphasised by a conference of provincial governors in the middle of 1930. Several governors declared that it was ‘a matter of great urgency’, and in the case of U.P. a most ‘damaging’ picture of near total support by local bodies to the Movement emerged, ‘lowering the authority of government greatly’.13 As a matter of fact, wrote Emerson in a note prepared in August 1930, it was in the eyes of all loyalists ‘subversion internally’, for all District Boards (which were dominated by the Swarajists and gave assistance to the Civil Disobedience Movement) ‘in popular opinion are a government agency’, and therefore people saw Congress as the government. ‘For instance’, wrote Malcolm Haily, the Governor of U.P., to Lord Irwin: it was ‘a popular thing for local bodies to require all schools to exhibit independence flags, (and) schoolmasters and pupils wear Khaddar’, and they ‘used the teachers for anti-government propaganda’. It was, of course,

11 Ibid. The example of Alibag district was cited where in 1928 the penal clauses of the Land Revenue Code had to be used before all the taxes could be collected. For details on the Bardoli satyagraha see David Hardiman, Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat, Delhi, OUP, 1981; Ghanshyam Shah, ‘Traditional Society and Political Mobilisation: The experience of Bardoli Satyagraha’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 8, 1974, pp. 89–107. 12 Ibid. 13 HDP, File 447/1930 and K.W. I and II.

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no use acting against all the teachers as they only followed the Swarajist chairman of education committees.14 Thus it can be seen how even the constitutional wing of the Congress movement could play a role in the consolidation of nationalist hegemony and the spread of Congress influence. It could also cushion the imperialist attack on Communists, so long as the latter did not dissociate themselves completely from the Congress. Apparently, the fight against the colonial government was far more complex than the Communists understood it to be. When the politics of a hegemonic conflict are not grasped in a holistic manner, then superficial observations regarding the Congress’ involvement in institutional politics during the constitutional phases of the Movement spring to mind. From Anil Seal’s description of the Indian National Congress as a ‘cockpit’ of ‘elites’ whose politics could be reduced to ‘efforts to conserve or improve the position of their own prescriptive group’, to Gyanendra Pandey’s characterisation of Congress ‘rivalries’ as a ‘striving for a larger share of loaves and fishes’ which, suggests to him the imagery of a ‘constitutional cock-fight’, there lies an unbroken tradition.15 Indian nationalism is also seen as ‘the economic response of an agrarian hinterland of the empire to the crises of world capitalism’ and ‘the true score of the nationalist movement’ is read in terms of growing class conflict.16 Economic determinism, a method of analysis which is unfortunate, frequently bolsters the imperialists’ negation of the ideological dimension of nationalism which binds entire peoples together. Whether 14

Ibid. Other activities the District Boards were indulging in were listed as (a) printing seditious articles in the Board’s Gazettes, (b) hanging portraits of Gandhi in schools, (c) closing schools and offices on arrests of leaders, (d ) using schools for Congress meetings, and (e) electing Congress leaders as Chairmen of Municipal and District Boards and of Education Committees. 15 Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism, London, 1971, p. 342. Gyanendra Pandey, The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, 1978, p. 210. Also see Judith Brown, Gandhi and Civil Disobedience, London, 1977. When Brown is not busy describing the builder’s paradise where abound ‘clients’ and, ‘associates’, ‘intermediaries’ and ‘sub-contractors’, she speaks of the Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience Movements as ‘local and particularist movements … welded … to attaining power in the constitutional structures.’ This is seen as the reality behind the ‘challenge in the name of nationalism’ (p. xiii). 16 Pandey, The Ascendancy, pp. 210–11.

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one locates the wellsprings of nationalism in the ‘educated elite’ or in the economic interest of ‘dominant groups’, the final result is to deny that the mass of the people were moved by national, anti-imperialist sentiment. Rather, they are seen outside the movement and as being manoeuvred by self-seeking, middle class politicians as in imperialist apologias or by the ideologues of dominant classes as in simplistic left writing. The fallacy and contradictions of economic determinism should be obvious when we see the same crisis of world capitalism being summoned to explain both, the quiescent and passive condition of the working class17 and the militant upsurge of the peasantry during the depression of the early thirties.18 Such an exercise does not yield the inner dynamic of political movements. Certainly, it is never fruitful to derive any direct equations between an economic crisis and a historical movement like the anti-imperialist struggle, for economic hardship or well-being is only as Gramsci says, ‘a partial aspect of the question’ and ‘it may be ruled out that immediate economic crises of themselves produce fundamental historical events’.19 Essentially, there are two veins of argument in the critique of the Gandhian movement in general and the Civil Disobedience Movement in particular, whether they are found in historical research work or in the popular writings of the left. (a) That the method and form of struggle, that is, ‘non-violent’ and ‘peaceful’ mass movement, and the issues around which agitations were conducted were non-revolutionary, middle class and basically in the interest of the bourgeoisie and were for all these reasons ineffectual in successfully endangering British power in India. (b) The Congress movement did not want the participation of the masses of poor peasants and workers because it was a bourgeois movement and any large-scale involvement of these classes could threaten it, which is why the issues raised by it were invariably middle class and non-revolutionary. However, such issues could not mobilise the peasants and the workers at all. The earliest proponents of this criticism, in different ways, were M.N. Roy and R.P. Dutt in all their writings. In a slightly different version, 17 Chitra Joshi, Kanpur Textile Labour: Some Structural Characteristics of the Labour Force, and Aspects of the Labour Movement (1919–1939), JNU, 1981 (unpublished). 18 Pandey, The Ascendancy. 19 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (ed.), Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, International Publishers, New York, 1971, p. 184.

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Sumit Sarkar subscribes to the same interpretation. He writes: ‘Certain forms of struggle (were) more definitely in the control of the bourgoisie or its dependent allies (for example, the urban boycott or the no-tax movement of Patidars in Gujarat).’20 There are two levels to these arguments that need to be separated first of all: (a) That the methods of struggle and the issues around which it was waged were unsuccessful and ineffective in waging an anti-imperialist struggle and were therefore non-revolutionary. (b) That they were bourgeois in scope and character, consequently they failed to draw in the masses, for the poor could not be mobilised, at least fully, around such issues and therefore the movement was non-revolutionary. As far as the effectiveness of the non-violent and peaceful character of the movement is concerned, we have already shown that the government found it more frustrating to tackle ‘obstinate’ but ‘peaceful’ satyagrahis than to meet stones with bullets. To recall H.G. Haig’s comment: ‘the very astute persons we are up against have deliberately calculated that they can do more harm to government by non-violent than by violent methods, and I have no doubt they are right’.21 The notion of the Congress-led national movement restraining and controlling the masses owes its origin to Communist historiography: It was undoubtedly true that the national bourgeois leadership did not want a revolutionary anti-imperialist struggle. They wanted a controlled mass movement, for which it was their policy to keep it within the confines of a non-violent struggle so as to be able to come to terms with imperialism in a manner that would safeguard their class interests.22

The equation between ‘revolutionary’ and ‘violent’ or between ‘bourgeois’ and ‘non-violent’ is apparent in this formulation. This Communist critique of the national movement has been adopted by various studies. The appeals for non-violence are seen as the garb under which Gandhi sought to ‘restrain’ and ‘control’ mass militancy and even 20 See M.N. Roy, India in Transition, Bombay, 1971, and The Future of Indian Politics, London, 1926; R.P. Dutt, India Today; Sumit Sarkar, ‘The Logic of Gandhian Nationalism’, Indian Historical Review, Vol. 3, No. 1, and ‘Popular Movements and National Leadership 1935–47’, EPW, Vol. XVII, Annual Number, 1982, p. 27. Also see, his Modern India, 1885–1947, Delhi, 1983. 21 HDP, File 257/V/1930. 22 S.G. Sardesai, Seventh Congress of the Comintern and India’s Struggle for Democracy and Freedom, Communist Party Publication, 1966, p. 9.

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mass participation. An account of the Civil Disobedience in Bengal, for example, shows the bold participation of peasants which, to our mind, reveals the depth and extent of politicisation in the Bengal countryside and its strong anti-imperialist attitude. For the author, however, ‘The high point in grass root resistance’ is invariably seen in violent clashes and destruction of property. ‘Gandhian restraints on violence’ are viewed as the chief barrier to the ‘wider participation’ of the peasantry and as having ‘inhibited a further broadening and deepening of the movement’.23 Clearly, an equation is made between ‘violence’ and the ‘revolutionary’ activity of the masses, without any reference to the overall strategy of the Congress movement which appears ‘reactionary’ precisely because of its advocacy of non-violence. Thus, at the heart of the ‘restraint–control theory’ lies a particular conception of what denotes a revolutionary movement. And this conception reveals itself to be inextricably tied up with ‘violent confrontations’ and mass violence. Equally, it is based on a notion of mass militancy being necessarily and inevitably violent; the masses, specially the poorer sections, being incapable of conducting a peaceful, non-violent struggle while a violent struggle was the only type of movement which could mobilise them fully. From what theoretical basis this conception is born, is hard to decipher. If the basic strata of society, the peasantry and working classes were to challenge the colonial state then it would be imperative that they eschew the ‘military model’ as a strategy, for ‘a class which has to work fixed hours every day cannot have permanent and specialised assault organisations’.24 In British India, the constraints on the administrative machinery were more evident in the Home Department’s discussions on how to deal with Civil Disobedience ‘resisters’ than in its clear-cut orders to the military to roll in their armoured cars. The provinces were directed, under the pressure of a non-violent movement, to see that minimum force was used 23

Tanika Sarkar, ‘The First Phase of Civil Disobedience in Bengal, 1930–31’, The Indian Historical Review, Vol. 4, No. 1, July 1977, pp. 75–95. Also see her Bengal, 1928–1934: The Politics of Protest, Delhi, 1987. Variations of this ‘control–restraint’ theory can be found in, D.N. Dhanagare, Agrarian Movements and Gandhian Politics. Agra, 1975; Gyanendra Pandey, The Ascendancy; David Hardiman, Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat: Kheda District 1917–1934, Delhi, 1981; Arvind N. Das, ‘Agrarian Movements in India: Studies on Twentieth Century Bihar’. The Journal of Peasant Studies (Special Issue), Vol. 9, No. 3, April 1982, and Agrarian Movements in India: Studies on Twentieth Century Bihar, London, Frank Cass, 1982; Sumit Sarkar, ‘The Logic of Gandhian Nationalism’, and ‘Popular Movements and National Leadership 1945–47’. 24 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 232.

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by the police and that unless a crowd exhibited a very ‘violent’ temper, ‘arrests should be the ordinary procedure and not dispersal by force’. The original conception of a ‘jail bharo’ agitation was successful enough for the government to order that the majority of sentences awarded should be for three months or less ‘or else you will find your jails blocked and have on your hands a large number of prisoners’.25 Forcible dispersals and blocked jails, nonetheless, became a common feature of the Civil Disobedience campaign because of its intensity. That did not, however, detract from the fact that it was very difficult to devise a correct official policy to counter such a movement. The constant traffic in and out of jails and the large turnover of political prisoners played its own part in increasing the political prestige of the movement in the eyes of the masses. The resultant ‘bedlam’ in the civilian populace drove not a few British Generals into making frantic pleas against such an overt struggle that preached ‘blatant and open defiance of government’ to every man, woman or child.26 This generalised defiance was surely possible chiefly because it was a peaceful mass movement. Calling for an ‘offensive’ on the part of the government, General Shea advised that it was far better ‘to drive seditious activities underground’ than put up with this state of affairs which caused ‘the simple countryman and the sepoy to ask whether, after all, it is not true that the Great British Raj is waning’. The refusal of the Garhwali soldiers to fire on the civil population was surely influenced by the fact of facing an unarmed crowd of all ages. General Shea was ‘deeply concerned about the effect being produced in the minds of Indian soldiers by current events’, and he was convinced that the loyalty of the Garhwalis at Lansdowne and of the Kumaonis was undermined. The point to be emphasised here is that the effectiveness of the method of non-violent peaceful struggle cannot be discussed outside the terms of reference dictated by the nature of the state and the overall strategy of the Congress-led national movement.27 25

HDP, File 213/1930 and K.W. HDP, File 11/6/1931. Note by J.S.M. Shea, General, G.O.C.-in-Command, 14 June 1930. 27 Ibid. Jawaharlal Nehru was probably correct when he wrote ‘The Garhwalis probably did so (in common with some other regiments elsewhere whose disobedience did not receive publicity) because of a mistaken notion that the British power was collapsing. Only when such an idea takes possession of the soldier does he dare to act according to his own sympathies and inclinations.’ Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, p. 214. 26

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As for the success or otherwise of the issues that were raised, for instance the salt monopoly of the government or forms of activity like boycott or picketing, it would be worth our while to look at how the government reacted to them, certainly an important indicator of their value. The ‘salt campaign’ was contemporaneously ridiculed by the Communists,28 while in recent times it has been described as ‘the most limited and harmless form of civil disobedience’.29 In 1888, Dufferin had scoffed at the elite interests of politically articulate Indians by saying that, If the voice of the ‘people’ of India was to determine the question, there is no doubt they would vote for decoupling the income tax rather than a pie should be added to the price of salt; but all the native members of the Supreme Council, while accepting an increase of the salt duty, showed a strong dislike to the income tax … . and the Congress itself has passed a resolution in favour of curtailing its incidence.30

The very same Congress now, speaking in ‘the voice of the “people”’, questioned the duty on salt. The Collector of Salt Revenue, Bombay, reported that, by May 1930, salt sales showed a decrease of 1,21,649 maunds as compared to the sales in 1929.31 However, it was not the financial losses which worried the government, locked as it was in a political battle with the Congress. ‘The success of the salt campaign must be measured’, said the Home Department, ‘not by its effect on salt revenue but by the extent to which it produces contempt for law and order among the masses and creates a soil suitable for sowing revolutionary ideas’.32 In other words, it was to be seen as an act of politicisation in arousing anti-imperialist consciousness further. As the provincial report from U.P. added, ‘The violation of the Salt Act must be regarded merely as the opening stage of a general attack on law and order.’ An intercepted letter from a local Congress worker to Jawaharlal ‘frankly admitted that breaches of the Salt Act were to be seen as a preparation for the no-rent campaign’.33 28

See the last two chapters for Communist positions. Sukomal Sen, Working Class of India, Calcutta, 1977. 30 Quoted in Bipan Chandra, Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India, op. cit., p. 276. 31 HDP, File 247/IV/1930. Letter dated 19 May 1930 to Secretary, Central Board of Revenue. 32 HDP, File 249/1930 and K.W. 33 Ibid. 29

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‘Salt mobilisation’ was a route that gave access to the further organisation of the peasantry. The politicisation of wider layers of the peasantry during the Civil Disobedience Movement in turn created the basis for the successes of the left-wing in the late thirties, for the militant kisan organisations of later day were not a one-day miracle. As for the boycott of foreign goods, a few sample letters from the European segments of the trade reveal the extent of ‘damage’ the Movement had achieved. The office of His Majesty’s Trade Commissioner in India reported to the Department of Overseas Trade, London, that the ‘most anxious conditions’ existed in Bombay and Bengal Presidencies, and though the government’s policy had been to ‘hit hard and keep hitting’ in Bengal, picketing by Congress volunteers was such a success that the trade was in a bad way. The Imperial Tobacco Company was severely affected and the boycott was ‘so serious in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, and Assam that they have decided to close down their factory at Monghyr’. Picketing was most efficiently carried on ‘throughout the area by students and chokras’ and large stocks held by dealers were often burnt by Congress picketers.34 From Bombay, came a lament by E.D. Sassoon and Co. that the boycott and picketing were so complete that almost all the European mills had accepted the Congress offer to be included in the list of Swadeshi mills in return for an undertaking that no foreign piece-goods would be imported (apart from the old terms as Rupee capital) and that the ban on the use of foreign yarn for borders, etc., would be obeyed. Sassoons, themselves, had closed down their piece-goods import department as early as February 1930, as it was ‘unprofitable’, though they resisted giving any undertaking to the Congress.35 The boycott had obviously started not in the market but at home for the buyers were not coming. The government, in this matter too, reacted with greater alacrity to the political repercussions of these developments rather than to the woes of the capitalists even when they were British. Sassoon tested government reaction by adding that he had been told by government officials in Bombay that ‘our acceptance of such terms from the Congress would be an 34 HDP, File 201/40/1930, Letter from Calcutta to London, 7 July 1930. Letter from R.B. Wilmot from the Office of H.M. Trade Commissioner in India to H.M. Senior Trade Commissioner, 28 May 1930, Calcutta. 35 Ibid. Letter from E.D. Sassoon and Co. to Sir George Rainy, Department of Commerce, 14 August 1930.

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untold disaster for the local governments and the Government of India’. George Rainy, in his note filed along with Sassoon’s letter, underscored precisely this point: ‘The fact that Congress is in a position to impose a ban upon the European mills and to enforce it does in fact amount to an attempt to establish a parallel government and of course strengthens the case for taking very firm action against the Congress.’36 The Northern India Chamber of Commerce indulged in a bout of breast-beating because of the ‘very grave situation facing shippers and importers as a result of the general repudiation of contracts by dealer’s in India in consequence of the boycott movement, enforced by picketing and the resultant total stoppage of trade’.37 In spite of tough measures, conditions continued to deteriorate and ‘trade today is nearly at a standstill. The business community thus … finds itself faced with a crisis exceeding in seriousness even that of 1920–21 and in consequence hundreds of firms in India are threatened with ruin or disastrous losses.’ This state of affairs had resulted in ‘the credit of India’ suffering a rude setback and ‘confidence in the government’s ability (to) effectively protect businessmen and uphold their rights has been profoundly shaken’.38 The cry for help was undisguised. The ‘vacillating nature’ of the Indian bourgeoisie revealed itself fully as the government was not slow to point out: ‘Government has received little cooperation from the business community as a whole in combating civil disobedience … . a large proportion of businessmen have acquiesced in the actions of the Congress.’39 The accussing finger of the government was undoubtedly pointed at the largely Indian business community of Bombay, where ‘the stranglehold obtained by the Congress on business of every sort seems to be complete … and their ban has been sufficient … to bring Bombay to a standstill.’40 David Petrie, Chief of Intelligence, observed with great consternation that,

36

Ibid. HDP, File 201/40/1930. Letter from Secretary, The Northern India Chamber of Commerce to Chief Secretary, Government of Punjab, Simla, 16 August 1930. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. Letter from Chief Secretary to Government, Punjab, Simla, to Northern India Chamber of Commerce. 40 HDP, File 504/1930, David Petrie, Intelligence Bureau, to Emerson, Home, 20 August 1930. 37

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… Indian firms are of course, being hit no less severely than the Europeans … (and) a highly impressive feature is that many of the ordinary, sober and sensible businessmen seem quite prepared to continue the movement, even though ruin is staring them in the face.41

A greater degree of political consciousness was obviously present and an awareness of the fact that a major objective of Indian nationalism was the unfettered growth and development of the Indian economy which coincided with the long-term interests of Indian capital. Whatever the short-run disasters that befell it, and howsoever apprehensive, movements of a non-constitutional character like Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience made its members, the only choice open before class conscious capitalists was to strive for hegemony over the Congress movement and prevent rival classes from turning it to their own advantage. It was the basic conflict inherent between a colonial power and a national bourgeoisie and the political compulsions this produced which was responsible for what the government call ‘the ascendancy established by the Congress over people who seem to stand to lose everything by supporting it’.42 A major reason for the success of the boycott in Bombay city was attributed by Petrie to the ‘very effective picketing’ with ‘no violence used’. Purchasers of foreign goods were watched by the volunteers ‘from a distance … shadow(ed) to their homes, and hand(ed) over to their caste fellows to deal with’, an invariably successful procedure due to the stringent social boycott that was in operation.43 The success of picketing as a form of political activity was undoubted and correspondingly coping with it was ‘exceedingly difficult … and it was not easy to see what effective steps can be taken.’44 The whole subject was being ‘examined carefully’, the government assured the Dunlop Rubber Co. (India), when it complained that its business was paralysed from Delhi to Calcutta and that in some of their major centres like Lucknow, Kanpur and Allahabad, it stood still. Everywhere, ‘groups of youngmen’ were in action for this purpose.45 41

Ibid. HDP, File 504/1930. 43 Ibid. 44 HDP, File 201/42/1930. 45 Ibid. Letter from Dunlop Rubber Co. (India) Ltd., 25 May 1930 to Home Department. 42

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Thus, the Civil Disobedience Movement, to the extent that antiimperialist vigour was the criterion of its success, involved sufficiently large numbers to upset the government. A.K. Gopalan, the Communist leader, who embarked on an active political life with his participation in the salt satyagraha, observed later that the political activity, whether it was ‘picketing or the fast spreading volunteer movement’, that characterised the struggle of 1930 was ‘a source of serious concern to the organs of government who were aware that their future depended on the ability to crush it’.46 On the other hand, to what extent were the demands, forms of activity and issues raised in the movement bourgeois in scope, failing to draw in the masses as a consequence? Even the most ‘neutral’ issues like salt were an act of supreme politicisation. E.M.S. Namboodripad writes: ‘The emotional upsurge we had when the Salt Law was broken can never adequately be described in words. The thrill aroused in us by the struggle, which an unarmed Indian people launched against the mightiest of all Empires in the world, was unparalleled.’47 As each section of Indian society grieved over its own condition, the majority of its people was certainly not fighting to make salt; salt was only the issue around which they asserted their existence as political beings. We cannot confuse the aspirations of individuals with the issues around which their awareness grows. ‘The unending streams of volunteers’ who formed the civil disobedience ‘jathas’ are not to be reduced to middle class activity for … the real significance of these jathas was not the defying of law or courting of arrest. The importance was the levelling down of … geographical … walls by the political impact it produced. En route, tens of thousands of people were stirred.48

As we have already emphasised, the colonial government was remarkably astute in anticipating precisely such an outcome. That was why the Payyanur salt satyagraha led by Krishna Pillai became ‘a trial of prestige for both’, the satyagrahis as well as the government, for ‘the entire populace of Calicut … from a distance … watched in their thousands, 46

A.K. Gopalan, In the Cause of the People, p. 33. E.M.S. Namboodripad, How I became a Communist, Trivandrum, 1976, p. 112. 48 T.V. Krishnan, Kerala’s First Communist, New Delhi, 1971. 47

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expectant and anxious. The people themselves provided food at the volunteer camps.’49 In contrast to these accounts of the salt marches, Tanika Sarkar writes: ‘The Gandhians … were most careful to build Civil Disobedience solely around salt and chowkidari tax—safely general issues which … inhibited a further broadening and deepening of the movement.’ How such issues inhibited the movement is not explained. A.K. Gopalan, on the other hand, describes how such issues broke the paralysis of fear that enveloped most people who were very frightened of the police and revenue officials. The route marches of the army which terrorised the people dictated the counter method to the Congress movement which carried out ‘jatha marches’ to inspire them.50 One of the major results of the Civil Disobedience Movement was to produce a generation of young, politically fearless persons. According to E.M.S. Namboodripad, ‘picketing was not an easy programme to implement … picketing of toddy shops was still more dangerous than picketing cloth shops … picketing gave tremendous experience to face opposition with a courage of conviction.’51 Through the route of national awareness and participation in the programme and activities of the 1930 movement, was formed a selfless cadre which went to the peasantry and related its political struggles and experiences to ideas of social change. And it was this process which fostered the socialist groups in the National Congress. The influence of the Gandhi-led movement broke the ground for the organisation of peasant agitations. Many of the passive resisters arrested in the salt satyagrahas constituted the active cadre of the national movement as also of the Socialist and Communist parties.52 Joining the volunteer corps, picketing in the streets and, most of all, going to jail were instrumental in emancipating the youth from familial pressures and social constraints.53 R.P. Dutt indicted the salt satyagraha as a clever ruse preventing the participation of the working class in the movement and diverting the 49

Ibid., p. 15. Tanika Sarkar, ‘The First Phase of Civil Disobedience in Bengal’, p. 83; A.K. Gopalan, In the Cause of the People, pp. 26, 66, 67. 51 E.M.S. Namboodripad, How I Became A Communist, p. 117. 52 Krishnan, Kerala’s First Communist, pp. 13, 15. 53 For instance the accounts of A.K. Gopalan, E.M.S. Namboodripad, and Krishna Pillai’s biography reveal this abundantly. E.M.S. for example writes of the social ostracism of persons who had gone to jail in the Namboodri community, p. 59. 50

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peasantry from any struggle against the landlords.54 Apart from showing ignorance of the political significance of the agitation, he also assumed the existence of organised and class conscious peasants’ and workers’ movements poised in readiness to wage class struggles. He appears utterly unaware of the process which enabled Congressmen to ask, ‘Are you with the Congress of the poor or the Congress of the rich?’55 Large numbers of Congressmen themselves, apart from the Communists, saw Gandhi’s programme of temple-entry for Harijans as a distraction from the anti-imperialist struggle. D.N. Dhanagare goes further and sees Gandhi’s direction to Patidars to treat the ‘untouchable’ Dublas well, as motivated: ‘not because this was socially just, but because Gandhi believed that compassion would fetch greater prosperity to the Patidars’. As Agnes Heller says: ‘Imputing motivations is the prerogative of fiction … (and) cannot have explanatory value in any historical reconstruction.’56 In any case, the Kerala Communist, E.M.S. Namboodripad’s personal experience persuaded him to see it differently: Gandhi was touring the length and breadth of the country, creating a feeling and belief that Harijan uplift was a revolutionary movement against the then existing social systems, customs and conventions as a whole … . The Guruvayur Temple Satyagraha was an event that thrilled thousands of young men like me and gave inspiration to a vast majority of the people to fight for their legitimate rights with self-respect, rights that were denied to them for ages.57

Most Communists and many Congress socialists as well, did not appreciate even the anti-imperialist significance of such a campaign. Many laughed at A.K. Gopalan for having become a ‘reactionary’. He writes: ‘They did not appreciate the fact that the struggle against disunity and factionalism was a struggle against imperialism.’58 The process of transformation contained an inner logic. The right to enter a temple was a prelude to the right to live without exploitation. Oppressive economic conditions inhibit the flowering of human dignity

54

R.P. Dutt, India Today, p. 301. Krishnan, Kerala’s First Communist, p. 19; also, A.K. Gopalan, op. cit., p. 63. 56 Dhanagare, Peasant Movements in India 1920–50, Delhi, 1983, p. 92; Agnes Heller, Gujarat, Berkeley, 1974, pp. 231–40. 57 E.M.S. Namboodripad. How I Became a Communist, pp. 151, 123. 58 A.K. Gopalan, op. cit., pp. 28, 31. 55

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but on the other hand no conception of ‘economic’ liberation can take root as long as you are an ‘untouchable’ and a ‘beast of the forests’.59 Young members of tribal castes, agricultural labour, who were educated in the Gandhi Ashrams grew increasingly aware of their subservient conditions at a systemic level and organised protest movements.60 The much scoffed at ‘Harijan work’ augured new self perceptions in consonance with human dignity. As A.K. Gopalan recalled, the Harijan movement ‘led to transformation everywhere … gave birth to a large number of Harijan volunteers … and the landless poor in many regions became a part of the Satyagraha movement.’61

59

Ibid. Jan Breman, Patronage and Exploitation, changing Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat, Berkeley, 1974, pp. 231–40. 61 A.K. Gopalan, op. cit., p. 38. 60

Chapter 11 The Politics of Nation and Class

PEASANTS AND POLITICS IN THE CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE MOVEMENT

The considerable participation of the peasantry, including the rural poor, in the Civil Disobedience Movement can be seen from our account as also from more detailed research at the provincial level (see note 7). As the government discovered, much to its chagrin, the Congress followers were mostly ‘illiterate, ignorant and uncultivated people’ and that Congress volunteers had created a defiant mood in the countryside. Successful peasant organisations had been formed from the very beginning of the movement in U.P. They waged militant struggles not only against revenue but rental settlements as well, combined with resistance to illegal exactions. The terrorisation of the peasants by coercive ‘disciplining’ landlords was resisted, specially, after widespread investigations were conducted by the Congress into police and landlord repression. Rural organisation and agitation encouraging the withholding of rents and revenue even during the ‘truce’ by the Congress made a major contribution to the peasantry obtaining some relief.1

1

HDP, See all the Fortnightly Reports for the year 1931.

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Eventually, the suppression of the peasants was achieved by the government through large-scale rent and revenue remissions and the near military offensive it launched against the whole Civil Disobedience Movement. According to the government, the Congress workers looked upon the reductions announced by the government, ‘as some obstacle in their plan of campaign’. The government had decided to remit one crore and ten lakhs in revenue which would mean a reduction of over four crores in the total rental demand. It was implied that the Congress, faced by these concessions was being pushed into the defensive and into moderate positions.2 A significant feature of peasant participation in the Civil Disobedience Movement in U.P., for example, was the fact that the: … vast majority of Satyagrahis in the early 1930s came from the villages. Even more significant … they represented a broad spectrum of rural society, excluding only its uppermost segments. A U.P. government survey in early 1932, indicated that of the 2,004 Civil Disobedience prisoners held in the five gaols surveyed, 1,397 were ‘petty-tenants or labourers’, 145 shopkeepers, 53 students, and the remaining 409 ‘a sprinkling of beggars’ and people in ‘miscellaneous occupations’.3

The persons of ‘miscellaneous’ origin were chiefly artisans and weavers as evidence from other provinces also suggests. As far as the peasant participants are concerned, it seems clear that ‘the Congress’ long term volunteers … were chiefly men from lower or middle income groups in the villages.’4 In the Tamilnadu region of Madras Presidency, the spontaneous support for Civil Disobedience, included the participation of poor cultivators and weavers in activities like picketing; and clashes with the police were a common occurrence. The extensive zamindari areas of Andhra produced radical agrarian leaders from within the Congress who organised tenants and argued for the redistribution of land.5 As in U.P. and Kerala, left Congressmen were active during the Civil Disobedience Movement organising the tenants in Bihar who were an 2

Ibid. FR October, FR November. The number of students does not tell us much, as they were usually given very short sentences and the turnover was rapid. 4 Pandey, The Ascendancy, p. 107. 5 David Arnold, ‘The Politics of Coalescence: The Congress in Tamilnad, 1930–37’ in D.A. Low, (ed.), Congress and the Raj, London, 1977, pp. 266, 274. 3

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important source of political support and participation in the struggle. The rank and file of the activists consisted mainly of the middle and poor peasants, in some cases involving landless labour as well.6 Moreover, some local Congress leaders were drawn from the tenantry as well. Their efforts to transform the Congress organisation in Bihar were, however, much slower than in U.P. or Kerala, obstructed as they were by the entrenched ‘right-wing’ in Bihar and the intransigent economism of the ‘purely’ peasant leaders. The development of a powerful Kisan Sabha movement in the mid-thirties, on the other hand, revealed the same process at work. The chief leaders of the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha, founded in 1933, came from tenant families and by 1934–35 they had accumulated enough strength within the Congress movement in Bihar to be a positive threat and alternative to the movement’s ‘right-wing’ faction. The radicalism of peasant organisations was considerable, to the extent of causing panic among the landlords, who decried their growing influence and in 1937 felt ‘compelled’ to sectional political activity through the formation of a Bihar Landholders’ Association. Later day legislation by the Congress ministry such as the Bihar Tenancy Amendment Bill (1937), the proposed Bihar Restoration of Bakasht Lands Bill and Bihar Money Lenders Bill (1938) were proof of the ‘helplessness’ of the Congress right-wing as far as the landlords’ perceptions were concerned.7 The nature of peasant participation in, and the relationship of the peasantry to, the Congress-led movement provides a fertile ground to contending theories of peasant involvement and consciousness and also raises crucial questions of theoretical understanding. A whole new ‘peasantist’ trend in the historiography of the national movement that counterposes peasant agitations and interests to the anti-imperialist goals of the movement has emerged in recent years. It is, of course, not all that new for its lineage can be traced back to an erroneous conception of ‘two nationalisms’ popularised by the Communists in the late twenties and early thirties, beginning with and based upon the theoretical formulations of M.N. Roy. The Communists, however, had constructed a coherent, if false, structure according to their conception of the ‘strategic tasks’ of the Indian movement, whereas the recent interpretations of the national 6

Gyan Prakash Sharma, The Congress, Peasant Movement and Agrarian Legislation in Bihar 1937–39, M.Phil., JNU, 1979 (Unpublished). 7 G. MacDonald, ‘Unity on Trial: Congress in Bihar, 1929–39,’ in Congress and the Raj, pp. 298, 300, 308.

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movement are based on premises that are often implicit and any clear or logical concepts that can unify their critique are absent. On the other hand, what emerges from this historiographical trend is a virtual caricature of the Indian national struggle.8 For instance, to allude to Congress ‘actions’ as ‘limiting the extent and intensity of mass actions’9 is unenlightening unless we know whether ‘mass actions’ here mean militancy or the existence of a revolutionary, insurrectionary situation. In fact, often enough, there is apparent confusion between the two, apart from militancy being seen as ‘violent conflict’ and not as a conception of politics.10 If, however, generalisations to the effect that the Congress ‘restrained’ mass actions are based on a notion of the ‘reactionary’ or ‘bourgeois’ nature of Congress politics, then this cannot remain a hidden premise but has to be discussed in the context of the overall anti-imperialist movement led by the Congress. Even a ‘revolutionary’ leadership would constrain rank and file militancy if the logic of the whole movement required it, the logic of its strategy and method of struggle. Then it becomes obligatory to discuss how one sees the strategy of the Congress movement and method of struggle and in what way it was non-revolutionary and what alternatives were possible for it. In the absence of theoretical constructs to grasp the character of this movement, which therefore remains unrelated to the ‘actions’ of either the Congress or the masses, the overall thrust of studies on peasant mobilisation is to conform to the view of imperialist historiography which sees the Congress as performing a balancing act ‘between competing groups in the society’.11 The various criticisms of the relationship of the Congress movement with peasant movements in different provinces overlap greatly and can be usefully discussed at a thematic level. To begin with, one of the most astonishing historiographical problems one confronts is the criticism of 8 See D.N. Dhanagare, Peasant Movements in India, 1920–50, 1973, Microfilm, NMML; Peasant Movements in India, Tanika Sarkar, Bengal, 1928–34: The Politics of Protest, Sumit Sarkar, ‘Popular Movements and National Leadership 1935–48’, Gyanendra Pandey, The Ascendancy, p. 216. David Hardiman, Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat Kheda District 1917–34, Arvind Das, The Journal of Peasant Studies, (Special Issue), ‘Agrarian Movements in India: Studies on Twentieth Century Bihar’, p. 53. 9 Pandey, The Ascendancy, p. 156. 10 Tanika Sarkar, Bengal, for the equation between revolutionary action and violence. Also see Dhanagare, Peasant Movements in India 1920–50, p. 214. 11 Pandey, The Ascendancy, p. 104.

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Congress ideology for not choosing to push those issues which would heighten class conflicts in their political programme or activities. Put simplistically, it blames the Congress movement for not being Communist. For an avowed anti-imperialist movement, openly professing to direct all class national opposition to colonial rule, it was an obvious choice. More, for a colonial liberation movement, it is axiomatic that every class, group or section of society that can be mobilised to oppose the imperialist government should be included, indeed welcomed in the national front. This is a basic criterion, and the only way to realise the potential of such a struggle. In India, it is generally accepted by most historians that the Congress gained impressive strength in its struggle for national liberation because it received the support of all classes. This is also acknowledged by those who appear to see national unity as an obstacle to the development of peasant movements.12 Many historians have emphasised the dialectic between the Congress and peasant movements. For instance, the confluence of peasants and national interests in the Malabar is shown by K.N. Panikkar.13 The peasant movement in U.P., observes Majid Siddiqi, whenever it acquired a more political and organised character, owed it invariably to Congress initiative, efforts at mobilisation and forging links with the national movement. This relationship, he concludes, helped both the peasant and nationalist movements ‘for they drew sustenance and gave support to each other at different stages’.14 It is apparent, therefore, that for those who maintain that Congress ideology ‘impeded the development of anti-landlord struggle’,15 the real villain of the piece is the concept of all-class unity and not any abstract ideology of the Congress as such. That such a concept was, essentially, ‘bourgeois’ is implicit, though never openly stated except in the work of some Marxist historians. 12 D.N. Dhanagare, ‘Myth and Reality in the Bardoli Satyagraha 1928: A Study in Gandhian Polities’. Seminar on Aspects of the Economy, Society and Politics in Modern India, 1900–50, 15–18 December 1980, New Delhi; Pandey, The Ascendancy, pp. 107–8. 13 K.N. Panikkar, in A.R. Desai (ed.). Peasant Struggles in India, Delhi, 1979, p. 627. Also see, K. Gopalankutty, ‘Movements for Tenancy Reform in Malabar’, Seminar on Aspects of the Economy … . December 1980, New Delhi. 14 Majid Siddiqi, Agrarian Unrest in North India, Delhi, 1978, p. 216. 15 Pandey, The Ascendancy, p. 171.

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Any ‘thesis’ that asserts the possibility of simultaneously waging a full-fledged, anti-feudal agrarian revolution with the anti-imperialist struggle in India,16 needs to spell out its implications in terms of the overall political positions that had to be taken up by those who advocated such a strategy. Moreover, a comprehensive and theoretical analysis of the colonial state, which was an active force of intervention through its apparatus of ‘law and order’, its codification of property rights and protection of the propertied, would have to be made, proving that it was not strong enough to interfere in such a strategy and even liquidate its proponents. Because it is impossible to show that a material basis or political environment for an insurrection was present in India, apart from the non-existence of any mass insurrectionist party that could coordinate or direct it, the terrain of criticism of the Congress movement then shifts to another plane. The Congress is now criticised for not working towards, or procuring, adequate concessions for the peasantry. On all accounts, a genuine compromise formula was put forward by the Congress in U.P. as part of the Civil Disobedience Movement when Gandhi demanded that occupancy tenants to given a relief of 50 per cent and the non-occupancy raiyats 60 per cent in their rent payments. Gandhi demanded that occupancy tenants be given a relief of 50 per cent peasant unity considerably when he advised the peasants, ‘in every case’ even if they were unable to pay the 50 per cent rental, to get against their payments ‘a full discharge from (their) obligation for the current year’s rent’.17 Both the government and the landlords complained that the only effect of Gandhi’s manifesto was to encourage the total non-payment of rent by tenants.18 It was not as if the Congress was surprised at the tenants withholding their rent, for the Kisan Conference at Allahabad at the time left ‘no doubt that the peasantry as a whole in that area would not pay their rent to begin with, and not at all unless they were frightened into doing so’.19 It was only several months later when the government 16 This was the position of the Communists in India before 1947 and today it is the fundamental thesis of all those academics who criticise the Congress for advocating cooperation between landlords and kisans and actually mediating compromise settlements between them, as Dhanagare, Tanika Sarkar and Pandey do, while Siddiqi makes a few concessions to such a position. 17 HDP, File 33/XI/1931. 18 Ibid., File 33/24/1931. 19 Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, p. 237.

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and zamindars decided to bulldoze the resistance that the struggle which became practically a ‘no-rent campaign’ retreated. Throughout the period of political truce the Congress concentrated on providing ameliorative relief and remissions for the tenants. They not only conducted negotiations with the government but effected numerous compromise settlements between the zamindars and the peasants. Thus, Congress support and Gandhi’s manifesto had the effect of strengthening the spine of peasant resistance and many peasants for the first time began fighting back against the landlords’ illegal exactions.20 It is important to remember that when the Congress entered into a negotiated settlement with the British government in 1931, this type of internal mediation was inherent in its overall strategy. What was important for Congress hegemony in political terms was that relief and remissions should be seen as having been won by the Movement and not granted by a sympathetic government. For instance in U.P., when violent confrontations between landlords and tenants occurred, the Deputy Commissioner ‘induced some leading talukdars to make considerable reductions in rents’ and succeeded in defusing the situation. Simultaneously, the government organised the local landlords to ‘counteract Congress propaganda’ against them.21 One way of looking upon Congress efforts is that ‘it helped the zamindars to realise “reasonable” and “proper” rents’.22 Viewed with different assumptions, which accept the necessity of national unity, one could say that the Congress helped the tenants to pay more reasonable and proper rents than the earlier oppressive levy. In its political strategy of undermining the ‘legal’ processes of the colonial government, this activity of the Congress, as arbitrators between peasant and landlord interests, was crucial. For the government what was most important was not how may ‘annas’ the Congress asked the tenants to pay, but the fact that they should be in a position to decide the rental without any reference to the state. In the battle for hegemony over the countryside, the government would have been only too happy to see the Congress eliminated by a sharp confrontation between tenants and zamindars—in which case they could step in to ‘restore law and order’. In fact the government retaliated with severe repressive measures precisely because it saw the crisis of its own authority assuming such a 20

HDP, File 33/36/1931. Also see Pandey. The Ascendancy, pp. 100–1. HDP, 14/8/1931. FR for July. 22 Pandey, The Ascendancy, p. 175. 21

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blatant form. The harassment, arrests and beatings of peasants were as a rule accompanied with the dire threat of greater coercion if they did not sever their connections with the Congress.23 And with the crackdown by the government the zamindars’ morale was strengthened.24 Earlier, they had not been sure of their ground as they saw the powerful Civil Disobedience Movement spread through the country.25 The terror launched in the villages by June 1931, with the government forcibly collecting rents as part of the revenue, made it quite clear how easy it was for the government to divert the peasant struggle against colonialism into a civil war in the countryside with the landlords emerging as victors.26 Consequently if such a state of affairs could be avoided by the Congress, even if it meant sliding back from demanding 50 per cent to only 25 per cent relief from the landlords, even radical left Congressmen like Nehru and his following saw the point of not alienating their zamindar supporters in the national struggle and of preventing heavy costs inevitably paid by the peasants. The state machinery that had ordered massive evictions of tenants, needed to be fought another way. Moreover, a genuine problem that had to be tackled by radicals leading the peasantry was: ‘what to do with the evicted peasants?’27 No peasant army was being recruited, no ‘long march’ was to occur, so the evicted peasants could only be left to die. As long as the Congress could influence the zamindars into accepting its mediation and into accepting a compromise with the raiyats, this problem could be circumvented. The government, meanwhile, had taken a stand of threatening evictions on a larger scale than ever before, and landlords who may have accepted arbitration by the Congress and agreed to provide relief earlier were now bound to harden in their own interests. To bend over backwards a little, at least temporarily, soon became acceptable even to the most pro-tenant left Congress leaders. Thus, the Congress devoted itself throughout 1931 to bringing about settlements between landlords and tenants.28 And this effort is invariably the target of all those who are unable to see this policy as emerging from the concept of anti-imperialist unity and as a technique of building 23

AICC Papers, File 14/1931, Part II. HDP, File 33/16/1931. 25 Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, p. 237. 26 HDP, File 33/24/1931 and 18/VI/1931, FR June. 27 Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, p. 308. 28 HDP, File 33/XVI and KW/1931. 24

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hegemony by acquiring the position of an arbiter of conflicting interests. Jawaharlal Nehru’s was position that the abolition of zamindari, which he advocated, had ‘no application to present day polities’, i.e., the politics of national unity against imperialism. This is seen as an ‘excuse’ by Pandey though we do not know for what.29 For those who appear to argue that Congress policy on agrarian issues was ‘reactionary’ it would be useful to recall how the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao, looked at the compulsions of an anti-imperialist struggle for agrarian policy: ‘It is not a policy of agrarian revolution as in the Civil War, but rather a policy to unite all the people in a common front against Japan.’30 It was ‘Imperative to turn a divided China into a united China … (to) prevent civil war and build a new China.’31 Logically, therefore, in the struggle against imperialism, … the land policy carried out by our Party … has been a land policy based on the anti-Japan national united front … that is, a land policy involving reduction of rent and interest on the one hand, and the guarantee of the collection of rent and interest on the other.

The ‘rent should, in principle, be reduced by 25 per cent’, and once the reduction was effected, ‘the collection of rent by the landlord is guaranteed … (and) the tenant must pay rent to the landlord in the full amount.’32 Thus, for Mao, not only was a civil war in the countryside not to be encouraged, it was to be actually ‘prevented’, by ‘guaranteeing’ the collection of rent by the landlords. Such a position did not affect Mao’s ‘revolutionary’ credentials. However, when Gandhi asked the peasants to pay ‘reasonable’ rents to the landlords, the Communists characterised it as ‘reactionary’ and a ‘betrayal’ of the peasantry. Likewise in India, the premise of a national united front against imperialism impelled Congress intervention ‘to placate conflicting agrarian interests’.33 And Gandhi’s retreat from advising a 50 per cent remission to 25 per cent in the case of the U.P. peasant movement was, in principle, 29 For instance, see Pandey, The Ascendancy, p. 197. Also see Dhanagare, Peasant Movements. 30 Mao Zhedong. quoted in Chao Kuo-Chun, Agrarian Policy of the Chinese Communist Party, 1921–59, New Delhi, 1960, p. 39. 31 Mao Zhedong, see SW, Vol. III, Peking 1967, p. 244. Emphasis added. 32 Chao Kuo-Chun, op. cit., pp. 39, 43–44. 33 This criticism is made in Siddiqi, Agrarian Unrest, p. 219.

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comparable to the resolution of agrarian interests that was advocated in the Chinese national revolution. Going even further in Vietnam, during the period of United Antiimperialist Front, it was decided to maintain a moratorium on the slogan of ‘land to the tiller’ in order to obtain the support of the ‘progressive elements in the landowning class’. As Ho Chi Minh recalled: ‘The Party withdrew the slogan of agrarian revolution … (and) to draw the patriotic landlords into the Front.’34 The Indian National Congress followed the policy of ‘class adjustment’ and not ‘class confrontation’ in the countryside. This could be the only viable agrarian programme for an all-class united movement, irrespective of whether the movement was led by Communists or non-Communists. As we see, the Communist-led anti-imperialist movements did exactly the same. Gandhi, as we know, never acknowledged the peasant satyagrahas to be a part of the political national movement, and Vallabhai Patel declared the Bardoli satyagraha to be non-political. In 1930, Vallabhai Patel wanted to launch no-revenue campaigns on a large scale as part of the Civil Disobedience Movement, but Gandhi opposed it on the ground that ‘land revenue satyagrahas should be waged over specific grievances, rather than the less easily fulfilled demand for swaraj’.35 Similarly, the radical Congress leaders of the 1930s in U.P., separated their continuing fair rent agitation in the period of ‘truce’ from the general political movement. An obvious reason for this separation of the purely ‘economic’ from the general struggle against imperialism was the fact that, with disparate economic groups in society, any attempt to derive simple and direct equations from the ‘economic’ to the ‘political’ would result in multiple political outcomes. The logic of class economic issues could not be transformed into a single political battle against imperialism but would, if taken through the route of logical development of class economic demands, turn into political confrontations between landlords and peasants, or workers and capital. Such an outcome could certainly give the colonial state a guaranteed opportunity to manoeuvre and manipulate the different sections of Indian society. 34

Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism, Stanford, 1975, pp. 27, 31. David Hardiman, op. cit., p. 3. It would appear that, on principle, Gandhi separated sectional economic grievances from the anti-imperialist movement. 35

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For the resolution of specific contradictions of economic interests between various classes in the national movement a prime political requirement was the increasing participation of organised peasants and workers mediating the programme of the national struggle with their class demands, by evolving a conscious policy which would ensure that none of their immediate demands broke the parameters of all class unity, this was achieved. In such a consciously worked out strategy of intervening in overall national politics, the ideological and political education essential for raising class consciousness was not contradictory to a deliberate policy of adjustment and intra-class compromise. The contradiction could emerge sharply only when economic militancy and corporate trade union interests are the only kind of consciousness fostered in diverse classes and, moreover, are pushed vigorously because they are viewed as the true measure of successful growth. In other words, the criteria of growth become the physical numerical expansion of a particular union, organisation or party at the cost of growing as a political force in society at large, without the mass of the people seeing and experiencing the political vision and sense of sacrifice of the class or classes concerned. It would appear, for example, that in the absence of any strategy for transforming the Congress, the economism and narrow organisational interests that were espoused by the Kisan Sabha leadership in Bihar during the late 1930s led to their opting out of the politics that were open to the left’s influence becoming a concrete and real possibility.36 This was in sharp contrast to the steps by which the peasant movement developed in Kerala, beginning with jathas of the entire peasantry in each region whose ‘first objective was to take processions to landlords and officials with a list of their urgent demands’. A few landlords decided to accept some of the demands of the peasants and ‘offered to mediate … (and) make peace with them’. There were ‘many such experiences’ in the peasant movement and through such activities ‘the peasants were briefed on the strength of their unity’. An organic growth of the movement was possible with the slow and ‘minor reliefs’ which ‘instilled self-confidence among the peasantry’ and made them fearless.37 It was the success of the ‘politics of transformation’ as opposed to the concept of ‘alternative politics’. 36

See Gyan Prakash Sharma, op. cit., for the consistently economistic stand taken by the Bihar Kisan Sabha. 37 A.K. Gopalan, In the Cause of the People, pp. 86, 96.

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Uniting different social classes, while not ignoring or subordinating the interests of the poor appeared as an apparent contradiction to the Communists. The problems of ‘too much alliance or too much struggle’ that Mao Zhedong spoke of, or, the swing from ‘taillism’ to ‘adventurism’ that plagued the Indian Communist movement could never be solved on the plane of economic interests. For, the logic of ‘unity’ and ‘struggle’ viewed in purely economistic terms is contradictory. One can unite and struggle with various political elements in society only politically. One does not have to search for considerations of economic selfinterest to show why people are moved by a particular vision, whether it be one of social revolution or national liberation. If only such a method of investigation could yield the logic of why people throw in their lot with popular movements then we would have to view very differently the heroic role of the Russian working class in the October Revolution. The slogan of ‘land, bread and peace’ did not represent their specific class interests but national demands for which they laid down their lives. The inner dynamic of any epochal movement like the one for colonial liberation is hard to comprehend if one intends making a sum of the interests of different constituents within it and adding up the score to arrive at an equation between what can only be the general thrust of the movement and specific sectional demands. The social content of a movement is not equal to the particular demands of different sections of society. The making of ideology in a movement is a complex process. Change in ideology is a tough and uphill task, beginning with small things. In U.P. the local Congress leader Kalka Prasad presiding over a meeting introduced Nehru as the ‘new king’ and the peasants gathered there took up the cry ‘the king, the king has arrived!’ Nehru was bitterly critical when he said: ‘You know that we are going to destroy and turn out the “king” of this country, still you have been repeatedly using that title for me … used the same word when we are trying to establish the republican form of government in our country.38 Home Secretary Haig’s comments on this speech showed his grasp of the cumulative effect of such ideological propaganda coming from the Congress, when he wrote: ‘1 am not surprised that they have alarmed local landowners. Propaganda of this

38 HDP, File 90/1930, Speech by Jawaharlal Nehru at Lalganj, District Rai Bareli. 6 February 1930.

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type … must have a most unsettling and even dangerous effect in rousing the peasants both against landlords and against government.’39 For, after all, ‘the idea’ is a material force and cannot then be reversed, while different sections of society are bound to bring with them their economic grievances into the movement whether any programme of demands is presented to them or not. In the course of the Civil Disobedience Movement numerous incidents of attacks on moneylenders by debtors in a number of villages were reported from Bihar, Bengal, Madura (Madras) and Etah (U.P.); and these were seen in ideological terms by the government as ‘the inevitable effect of the Civil Disobedience Movement in encouraging a spirit of lawlessness and attacks on the police’.40 The ideology of a movement is always in a state of flux. Building a counter-hegemony is a slow process of evolution and transformation. Within the frame of anti-imperialist unity the ideologically right-wing leaders would bear down on the side of the upper strata of society. The left-wing Congressmen, who differentiated themselves ideologically, set up for themselves the task of organising the peasantry from 1930 onwards and aimed at tilting the movement towards social change in favour of the poor at the lower rungs of rural society. It should be unnecessary to repeat that the left could perform this task only by not breaking antiimperialist unity. However, this process of transformation, already at work, was thwarted by the Communists who instead of strengthening it proclaimed a strategy of ‘alternative politics’ in place of the politics of transformation. With the later day growth and influence of socialists, the CSP and the Communists in peasant organisations, the balance was tilted to a considerable extent and this was accomplished under the banner of the Congress, in the name of the ‘official’ Congress. Not only were the Congress socialists ‘officially’ a respected part of the Congress, the Communists were openly and ‘officially’ accepted as comrades and co-workers within the Congress. There is absolutely no excuse for any academic work that extends upto 1934 to be unable to perceive the process of the ideological transformation of the Congress, or to ignore later day changes epitomised in the entry of Communists in the CSP.41 The Communists were a 39

Ibid. HDP, File 483/1930. 41 Pandey, The Ascendancy, refers to the Congress’ ‘so-called left-ward turn’ without explaining why it was ‘so-called’. 40

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small and persecuted sect when they were welcomed into the CSP, so it was not their strength which forced the Congress to open its doors but the strength of left ideology in the movement. Any fixed notion of the ‘Congress as a monolithic unity’ and a ‘Congress in parenthesis’ reduces the movement to a caricature which yields no insight into the process of transformation nor the ideological battle between the left and right for hegemony over this Movement. There is enough evidence from different parts of the country to show the changing complexion of Congress ideology and leadership and the possibility of effecting a transformation in the organisation. U.P. alone abounds with examples of pro-tenant interventions made by District Congress leaders. Moreover, the most active among the local leaders politically, were the young Congressmen, all Nehruites, who preached non-payment of rent and spread ideas among the peasantry of their ‘rights in the land’, which the zamindars resented. The government of U.P. was convinced that it was the ‘Nehru group’ in the Congress that was digging its roots among peasants and not observing the Delhi Pact during 1931.42 The case of one such local leader, Anjani Kumar, clearly shows the ferment in the Congress at the grass-root level. Working among the tenants, he led an agitation against the Raja of Sheogarh, and picketed his estate with the help of four to five hundred volunteers. The Raja, under Congress influence, had announced a wholesale remission of 5 annas in the rupee to those tenants who could pay their dues by a stipulated date, had established a Khadi Vidyalaya and was generally liked by the local Congress people for being ‘generous and reasonable’. Thus, the Congress had good reason to be apprehensive of Anjani Kumar’s confrontational activities which would lose them the support of the Raja and reinforce the Deputy Commissioner’s happy anticipation of a ‘serious split in the Congress’—something the government would be only too pleased about, besides giving them a chance to step in as the defenders of such ‘misguided’ landlords.43 Sitla Sahai, the local Congress chief, complained precisely in this vein to Nehru appealing to him to settle the matter.44 Anjani Kumar, himself, also wrote to Nehru narrating the episode and 42

HDP, File 18/V/1931, FR May (i) and (ii); File 33/XI/1931. HDP, File 33/24/1931. 44 AICC Papers, File G-59/1931. 43

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describing the grievances of the tenants in the area.45 Nehru made no attempt to dissuade Anjani Kumar or bear down on the side of Sitla Sahai. Detailed enquiries were conducted on the nature of atrocities on the Sheograrh estate, and Anjani Kumar was given full freedom to present his views and report.46 The burden of this narration is to emphasise that treating Congress ideology as a fixed category and maintaining a rigid notion of the character of its organisation often impede understanding the dynamics at work in the Movement. Further, it neglects the difficulties of working within the frame of anti-imperialist unity that confronted all left radicals—to work in such a way that the left and radical groups did not get pushed out or marginalised but continued to grow. Nehru, who wrote to Anjani Kumar, after the whole matter was settled locally, that he did not want ‘precipitate action’,47 was reacting, essentially, within his long-term perspective of strengthening the left to the point of overwhelming the Congress organisation. In this perspective, seeking the short-term benefits of economic militancy could be counter-productive, for such shortsightedness could lead to a break not only with the Raja—something not locally undesirable perhaps—but would also create a rift with Sitla Sahai who commanded great influence in the area. Sahai’s influence extended not only amongst Congressmen but among the peasants and he was certainly not a reactionary or hardened right-winger by any account. Most importantly, the government was not going to wait by the sidelines, but would intervene directly by removing such radical young men from the scene. As the Deputy Commissioner declared: ‘I propose taking suitable action against Anjani Kumar, Jeetendra Nath, Gaya Prasad and Bhagwan Bux Singh with a view to stop them from spreading further disaffection between landlords and tenants.’48 At such a moment the support of the whole organisation, or of other leaders of the peasantry at least, was invaluable for them, and cooperation was the only basis on which that could be secured. The situation, like the whole Congress movement, was a complex affair and short-cuts were ridden with pitfalls.

45

HDP, File 33/24/1931. This report was included in the enquiry committee’s report on ‘Agrarian Distress in the U.P.’. See Pandey, The Ascendancy, p. 200. 47 AICC Papers, File G-59/1931. 48 HDP, File 33/24/1931. 46

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Till the strength of the left was a generalised phenomenon all over India, and could direct the Movement into different paths, the breakup of existing unity could only be at the cost of the growth of radical tendencies. The immediate project could only be educating peasant organisations in this long-term perspective while helping them to obtain as much relief as possible in the short run. In the absence of an insurrectionary situation the only method of gathering and strengthening the peasantry’s social force was to fight for concessions while preparing and educating the peasantry to a consciousness of their democratic rights. This project, given the framework of maintaining anti-imperialist unity would necessarily, and often, take a circuitous route. WORKERS AND POLITICS IN THE CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE MOVEMENT

The spontaneous participation of workers in the Civil Disobedience Movement has already been pointed out by the few studies which cover the Movement. Their participation in hartals and confrontations with the police reveal that Civil Disobedience in Bengal was indeed general.49 Many of the arrested civil disobedience volunteers in UP were out of job urban workers.50 In the Central Provinces the labouring classes ‘consistently supported the Congress’ in ‘substantial’ numbers and in the Chhatisgarh region ‘almost all the labouring classes and artisans’ decided to boycott foreign cloth and liquor with the ‘coolies’ and ‘cartwallahs’ refusing to carry liquor. In the Tamil Nadu area of Madras Presidency unemployed workers and handloom weavers were ‘common participants’ in civil disobedience campaigns. The one element that reduced the support which workers spontaneously gave to the Civil Disobedience Movement was the development, in certain regions, of the non-Brahmin or depressed classes movement.51 This tended to negate both national and class consciousness, equally. Police clashes with large crowds of weavers were, nonetheless, reported frequently.52 However, the government had ‘anticipated’ that a large section of factory and mill labour, which had been organised and unionised rapidly in the late twenties, would play an ‘active part’ in the national upsurge. It was, therefore, pleasantly relieved 49

Tanika Sarkar, Bengal. Pandey, The Ascendancy. 51 D.A. Low (ed.), Congress and the Raj, pp. 235, 240, 266. 52 HDP, File 18/VIII/1930, FR July (i). 50

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to see that in the big cities workers struck work only ‘partially’.53 This was in May, when the heat was turned on the government by the middle class urban masses holding the cities to ransom and the situation was, generally, considered explosive. Even this ‘partial participation’ was extremely worrying, as the railway workers on the Bengal, Nagpur, Southern Mahratta, and GIP railways tended to synchronise their assault on government authority with the civil disobedience satyagrahas, and advocated support to the latter. This was a cause for ‘increasing concern’ to the authorities.54 However, with the development of an active left-wing youth cadre in the Congress movement the workers were rapidly being drawn into the movement in many provinces. In Bombay, the ‘mill population (was) largely unaffected’, to the great relief of Home Member Haig, who had made a dash to Bombay in May when ‘crisis’ gripped the city. But, meanwhile, the Congress was working hard with ‘some measure of success’ and the managing committee of the Girni Kamgar Union decided ‘to support the Congress programme … .’55 The Congress was increasingly ‘devoting itself to spread its influence among mill-hands … (and) rapidly getting support.’ The retrenchment in the mill industry had already thrown about 30,000 workers into the streets, and ultimately ‘half of the total workforce of 175,000 will be unemployed’; and this provided a fertile soil for Congress propaganda, according to the Intelligence Chief, David Petrie. But ‘not even the Congress can feed … so many unemployed and hungry workers’, and then the trouble would erupt, for though the workers’ actions would ‘be anti-government in character, if looting breaks out, (it) will almost inevitably take a communal turn’.56 The communal tension among workers was, partly, a reflection of the recruitment pattern in the mills, but the significant point about it was that the employers and the government were not averse to utilising and deliberately playing one section of workers against another, as the communal riots of 1929 in Bombay were to show. The correspondence between G.D. Birla, Purshottamdas Thakurdas and L.M. Khaitan, as well as Thakurdas’ oral evidence, emphasised the millowners ‘exploitation of the communal situation’ and their complicity 53

Ibid., File 438/1930. HDP, 18/VI/1930, FR May (i) and (ii). 55 HDP, 18/VIII/1930, FR July (i). 56 HDP, 504/1930, David Petrie to Emerson, 20 August 1930. 54

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in creating communal tension. Equally, the government was held responsible for not acting promptly, rather, delaying action and not taking adequate measures to deal with the riots. While crediting the Communist trade union leaders for being anti-communal, Thakurdas and Birla dismissed their role as insignificant, because they could not prevent a second communal riot following the first.57 However, what concerns us here is the fact that the Congress was rapidly ‘gaining ground’ among mill-workers, and by August this was ‘proved by the fact that recent Congress volunteers and convicted picketers are mill-hands’. Besides, when the AICC organised in August an ‘All-India Prisoners Day’, protest hartals and demonstration, only four mills worked in the city and the workers joined the evening procession of 25,000 persons, which defied the police; many were injured in the confrontation.58 In Bengal, the Golmuri Tin Plate Factory and Budge Budge Mill workers had struck work on the arrests of Gandhi and Jawaharlal, and they were prominent in picketing activities during August. City transport workers went on a lightening strike in Calcutta, on Jawaharlal’s arrest, while the ‘carters riot’ was a protest against the arrest of Gandhi.59 The carters ‘were even willing to suspend their own agitation and court arrest when Gandhi launched the salt movement’.60 It is clear even from the limited evidence we have cited that the workers were moving into the movement once Congress efforts to draw them in had begun, though detailed research at the provincial level alone can fully show the extent and nature of their involvement. The Commissioner of Police, Calcutta, who shared the Communist conception of workers as being responsive only to their immediate economic interests wondered how some of the Congress leaders like Jawaharlal or Bose would reconcile the interests of their capitalist supporters with their ‘proposals of class war and organisation of peasants against zamindars’. This bewilderment was in the context of the ‘ample evidence of the active and growing interest in 57

Purshottamdas Thakurdas Papers, File 81 (II), Letters dated 4, 10 and 16 May 1929: Birla to Thakurdas; 21 February 1929, L.M. Khaitan to Thakurdas; 7 May 1929, Thakurdas to Birla; and P. Thakurdas, Oral Evidence before Bombay Riots Enquiry Committee, 2 July 1929. Also see, Memorandum by Director of Information, GOB, 3 May 1929, HDP, File 344 of 1929; Bombay Chronicle, 30 April, 6 May and 8 May 1929. 58 HDP, 18/IX/1930, FR August (ii). 59 HDP, 18/V/1930, FR April (i); F. 18/IX/1930, FR August (i); F. 18/V/April (i); F. 19/VI/1930. FR May (i). 60 Tanika Sarkar, Bengal, p. 90.

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labour affairs’ evinced by the Congress in 1930. The government’s apprehension was that the influence of leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru ‘may ultimately succeed in inducing the Congress to adopt the capture of labour as part of their programme’.61 Such an eventuality was feared as the biggest threat to the government’s authority, as was clear in the comparisons made between ‘Communist methods and Congress methods’— ‘the reasons for taking action against (Communists) is not their immediate activities …’, that is, trade-union work, for they could always be picked up and isolated before any political challenge materialised. On the other hand, the involvement of workers in the Civil Disobedience Movement and with ‘the Congress whose law-breaking activities are overt and not surreptitious’62 meant that the challenge of workers activity against the government would materialise immediately. Little could be done to counteract it at the level of the factory, once this occurred, for it would become a part of the general political movement. This was to be avoided at all costs, and the ‘only stable solution … for labour troubles’ was the ‘reconstruction of the present relations between labour and capital which might be helped by the investigations and recommendations of the Whitely Commission’. Intelligent legislation could help to wean the workers away from Congress politics and ‘would be an irritant to their desired goal of harmonious relations between employers and workers’.63 As the government of Delhi reported to the Home Secretary in April 1930, it had averted a dangerous situation by negotiating a settlement between the 5,000 workers on strike at the Delhi Cloth Mills and the employers to prevent the Congress from intervening.64 In their efforts at preventing the collusion of workers and Congress, the government happily recorded two unconscious aids: first, ‘the considerable section of the Congress whose interests and inclinations are opposed to the exploitation of Labour on Communist lines’, and, second, ‘those who have been actively influencing Labour in both Calcutta and Bombay, (and) have been antagonistic to the Congress as a bourgeois organisation which was scarcely less hostile to the interests of labour than British Capitalism itself ’. ‘Therefore whatever efforts the Congress may 61

HDP, F. 257/I and K.W. HDP, 7/II/1934. 63 HDP, 58/1930, Note sd. by H.W. Emerson to Secretary, Industries and Labour Department. 64 HDP, 18/V/1930, FR April (ii). 62

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make … it will meet with very active opposition on the part of leaders of the Communists.’65 In fact, the fortnightly reports constantly referred to the clashes of ‘labour leaders’ with Congress volunteers who began visiting the factories during 1930–31. Thus, the government hoped that a crisis of the first magnitude that could be produced by workers enrolling as Congress volunteers, would be avoided, so long as the right-wing of the Congress resisted the ideological transformation of the Congress movement, and the Communists refused to support and strengthen it. A source of great satisfaction to the government was the fact that ‘the attitude of the Communists towards Gandhi’s movement has from the first been one of open hostility, as will be shown by recent issues of the Workers’ Weekly, the proceedings of the Young Comrades League Conference at Rajshahi (April) and by the tone of their leaflets, etc., on 1 May’. Similarly, the Viceroy had reassured the Secretary of State for India, ‘As is clear from Jawaharlal Nehru’s address to the Lahore Congress the Civil Disobedience Movement has a very definite socialistic side. However it does not go far enough to please the Communists who disapprove of non-violence and look with suspicion on middle class organisers.’66 It was extremely disheartening for the government, therefore, when it observed that ‘the attention paid to the Golmuri Tin Strike (and the associated strike at Budge Budge) by the Indian National Congress as an organisation has been marked, which fact would appear to be at variance with’ the notion that only a small section of the Congress were concentrating on workers.67 The government was even more dismayed when, in 1931, the followers of M.N. Roy organised separately, began influencing the GKU and linking it with the Congress movement. However, as the militant phase of the mass political struggle had been beaten down by this time, this linkage was more a problem for the future in which the nature of alignments changed rapidly with the formation of the CSP and the entry of Communists into the Congress movement. Nonetheless, as an organised force, the working class remained passive in the face of the upsurge in the Civil Disobedience Movement. There is an increasing tendency among historians to directly relate the political 65

HDP, 257/I/1930 and K.W. HDP, 11/3/1930. 67 HDP, 257/I/1930 and K.W. The ‘right-wing’ leader, Rajendra Prasad, was also actively involved in the strike. 66

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passivity of the Indian working class to the effects of worldwide depression. As a result of the crisis of world capitalism, the revolutionary working class movement undoubtedly entered a phase of economic retreat and defeat throughout the capitalist world during the early 30s.68 The logic of this retreat was the cessation of economic struggles and strikes. In India, however, what we are called upon to explain is the political passivity of the working class at a time when a powerful anti-imperialist struggle was in progress. To all accounts, the political volatility of a class should increase correspondingly as its economic condition worsens, whether it chooses to express its fury through ‘Luddite’ attacks on the symbols of oppression or joins the ranks of an existing movement which promises a better life, as the national movement in India promised it as a consequence of overthrowing foreign rule. The working class, if it is politicised would assert itself even more when the rationale of earning a living disappears with an increasing number of workers being thrown out of work. Why then did the working class in India not throw in its lot on a large-scale with the Movement against colonial subjugation? The most common argument with which it is sought to explain this paradox is that the ‘bourgeois Congress’ did not put forward a programme that could attract the working class, nor did it take up the workers’ immediate economic demands. This thesis owes its origin to R.P. Dutt but is repeated in historical studies till today.69 There could be, in our view, two answers to this question: first, that the colonial state, through legislation and encouragement of constitutional trade unionism, directed a substantial part of this class into ‘reformist’ channels, and the workers were successfully manipulated by progovernment labour leaders. But as we have already shown and argued this tendency in the working class could be and was partially overcome by the left during the late 20s, and the marginalisation of the constitutional trade unionists was permanently possible provided the paradigm within which the left worked was correct. The second answer could lie in Lenin’s formulation that the working class was capable only of ‘spontaneous trade union consciousness’,70 and had to be politicised into national consciousness. This task was doubly complicated given the extreme backwardness of Indian society in which 68

See Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement. See R.P. Dutt, Modern India, and Sukomal Sen, Working Class. 70 V.I. Lenin. ‘What is to be Done?’, CW, Vol. V, 1964, pp. 373–87. 69

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there was no automatic awareness of an all-India identity except in the intelligentsia, and where communal, casteist and regional or even localist consciousness prevented the linear and consistent development even of trade union solidarity. The task of imbuing the working class with national consciousness was however never grasped and taken up on a basis of priority by the Communists who sought to lead the working class. Their politics engendered economism in working class struggles, depriving the class of all political significance. It is sometimes argued that ‘it is true that the workers’ struggles were not always overtly directed against the state, but politics is not merely a realm of the state; it relates to structures and symbols of power and authority’.71 Undoubtedly, every act of defiance against an existing structure of power and authority, whether it is against the management of a factory or in the estate of a landlord for that matter, is ultimately of political significance whether positive or negative. More often, it helps the structure of power to readjust its relationship with those over whom it exercises authority, with a greater degree of sophistication. It is not and cannot be termed ‘revolutionary’ politics which must intervene in the realm of the state. Economism does not see that politics implies a relation to all classes of modern society and to the state as an organised political force. An economistic, trade unionist interpretation of politics distinguishes itself by the view that only a struggle for economic reforms can arouse the workers and that they are incapable of actively opposing all manifestations of tyranny that are not directly connected with the economic struggle.72 Trade unionist perspectives which fight for narrow class interests in the economic sphere can scarcely be termed politics in the sense that they are incapable of constituting a crisis for the state that governs them. The purely ‘economic’ struggle is never ‘to the distaste of the ruling class on the contrary’.73 How do we understand the problems of economism and politics in our context of the working class’ role in the struggles against colonialism? It is ironical that concrete questions of politics are never taken up theoretically even by Marxists in the few existing studies on the working class in India. When the chronological narrative of strikes and trade unions compiled by them is interrupted by a political comment it is, 71

Chitra Joshi, Kanpur Textile Labour, p. 416. V.I. Lenin, ‘What is to be Done?’, p. 407. 73 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 198. 72

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invariably, an extract from a Communist Party or Comintern document that is quoted without establishing any relationship between the historicity of the Indian working class and the colonial situation.74 In Rethinking Working Class History Dipesh Chakrabarty rethinks colonialism out of the Indian workers’ history.75 He ‘pitches his theoretical perspective at a reified level’ and refuses to take colonialism seriously.76 What were the specificities of the British Indian colonial state and what impact did they have on the structure and consciousness of the workers? What was the relationship between the working class and the broader anti-imperialist movement? Such questions are a matter of ‘political’ analysis and Chakrabarty is rather disdainful of any attempt to address them. Class, capital, consciousness, ideology, are all abstract categories in his work and their treatment ahistorical. Between the schematic notions of pre-bourgeois and bourgeois culture, he completely negates the existence of colonial culture. There are other studies that speak of the ‘dynamic of labour politics’ in terms of a struggle between ‘politicians’ attempting to mobilise labour and the workers’ ‘traditional leaders’, the jobbers, in the cotton mills for instance. These studies relegate politics to the world of manipulation from outside of the class.77 Then there are the newly emerging historians of the ‘self-activity’ of the working class, who regard any examination of nationalist or Communist leaders—‘agitators’ as they would put it—who organised and led the class, as a violation of the ‘independent choices’ 74

See for example, Sukomal Sen, Working Class, and Panchanan Sana, History of Working Class Movement in Bengal, Delhi, 1978. For some more details of Indian workers history in the twenties and thirties, see, S. Bhattacharya, ‘The Indian Working Class and The Nationalist Movement’, Journal of South Asian Studies, New Series, Vol. X, No. 1–2, June 1987; and Sujata Patel, The Making of Industrial Relations: The Ahmedabad Textile Industry 1918–39, New Delhi, OUP, 1987. Though not orthodox Marxist works, both fall broadly within the framework popularised by R.P. Dutt. 75 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal 1890–1940, Princeton, 1989. 76 A.K. Bagchi in his review article on Chakrabarty’s work, titled ‘Working Class Consciousness’, Economic and Political Weekly, 28 July 1990; also see in the same issue another interesting research article titled ‘Communalism and Colonial Labour’ by Parimal Ghosh. 77 For instance see, R.K. Newman, Labour Organization in the Bombay Cotton Mills, 1918–29, University of Sussex Thesis, 1970, Microfilm, NMML, and D. Kooiman, ‘Jobbers, and the Emergence of Trade Unions in Bombay City’, International Review of Social History, Vol. XXII (1977), Part 3, pp. 313–28.

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and self-perception of the workers’78 As a result the emphasis is placed entirely on the ‘social behaviour’ of the working class in the spheres of the workplace and the neighbourhood, which is not without value but tends to become completely ahistorical. On the other hand, there is an exclusive devotion to narrating the workers’ effective resistance to exploitation at the factory, and ‘defence of their own interests’, without any discussion of what is understood by their ‘interests’ at the given stage of their development into a class or the specific historical conjuncture in which this development occurred. Such an approach falls into the trap of economism which is no less a theory in historiography than a theory of political practice. To illustrate the historiography which is the object of our criticism we could cite a history of the Kanpur working class. Writing of the Indian working class protests against their employers at the factory in the period of colonial rule, the author says: The defiance of mill rules, the opposition to mistri raj and protest against victimisation and maltreatment by mistris … are intrinsically political acts … . Followed by Enquiry Commissions, (they forced) wide-ranging changes in regulations effecting a large section of workers within a region. Such demands cannot be dismissed merely as economic demands, representing the backwardness of the working class movement. Though … such struggles are not revolutionary, if by ‘revolutionary’ one is referring to a negation of the existence of capital. They (these protests) allow capital to expand though only by transforming the form of exploitation.79

According to Chitra Joshi, the attitude of the working class towards the colonial state at certain moments appeared to express ‘an implicit faith in the “impartiality” of the state as against the arbitrary and unjust attitude of the capitalists’. The shift from this attitude of ‘implicit faith in the colonial state and the expectation of state intervention to pressurise capitalists to concede some of these demands … to a generalisation of certain anti-imperialist sentiments’ occurred in the mid-thirties.80 Though the author does not try to explain this shift, we think that it can be traced 78 Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, ‘Workers’ Politics and the Mill Districts in Bombay between the Wars’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 15, Part 3, July 1981, pp. 355–721. 79 Chitra Joshi, Kanpur Textile Labour, p. 417. 80 Ibid., pp. 402, 421.

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to the Communist trade-unionists’ entry into the Congress movement in the ‘United Front’ period when they sought to link the working class’s economic struggles to the ‘political’ struggle for national liberation. Protests against victimisation and defiance of mill rules appear to us, however, as examples of workers who sensed ‘the necessity of collective resistance, definitely abandoning their slavish submission to the authorities’. This was, as yet, a kind of ‘primitive revolt’ expressing ‘the awakening of consciousness to a certain extent’ and showing that ‘the workers were losing their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them’.81 Even when the workers conducted ‘systematic strikes’ they marked the awakening of antagonisms between workers and employers; but the workers were not, and could not be, conscious of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system.82 Such struggles were dictated by the necessity of the worker to ‘improve’ his conditions of life. ‘Politics’ for the working class could only mean challenging the exploitative and oppressive character of the state on the basis ‘of all manifestations in general of public and political life’.83 A struggle for reforms and economic agitation could only be a part of the wider struggle. It is in this sense that one criticises the merely economic demands that signify political acts but remain in the realm of demanding measures for improvement within a given social and political system, as shown by the reference to Enquiry Commissions and factory legislation. Can one say that, in colonial India, the acts of defiance that led to changes in regulations at the workplace, apart from providing some relief to the workers (which was not to be rejected certainly) were acts of ‘political’ defiance? What constitutes ‘political’ defiance by a class which in common with all other classes of society, is in a state of political subjugation under an alien, imperialist power? Did the Commissions of Enquiry instituted by the colonial state and the beneficial legislation that sometimes followed them affect the state’s political authority or status adversely, or did they bind its hegemonic control over sections oi Indian society, specifically the workers, even more firmly? What do we mean by ‘revolutionary’ demands in a colonial context? Does negation of capital mean the same thing as the negation of imperialist rule? Particularly and 81

V.I. Lenin, ‘What is to be Done?’ pp. 374–75. Ibid., p. 404. 83 Ibid., p. 405. 82

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specially, when it is implied that the working class in India was ‘reformist’ in the sense that it allowed capital to expand, while it left colonial state power untouched or even more entrenched as its struggles were not ‘overtly directed against the state’. Would it not be apt to describe its activity as directly a negation of revolutionary politics in the existing conditions of India, in which the most revolutionary political task was to overthrow imperialism? This would be the logical conclusion of the above-mentioned study if it sought to answer concrete historical questions, and would perhaps be a very misleading answer, for the working class in India did reveal considerable spontaneous anti-imperialist consciousness, and to the extent it absented itself from the movement it was more due to its incomplete consciousness of nationalist interests and the incorrect political paradigm of its leaders. It was not that there was something intrinsically wrong with fighting for reforms. The problem was infighting for reform’s that were determined by an imperialist state without a strategy that linked them with the anti-imperialist forces which constituted a broad societal struggle against that state. To the extent that the demands of the working class and the economic reforms it sought were non-revolutionary from the point of view of a negation of capital (which was not on the agenda in any case) they were not even a negation of colonialism, which was the first step towards revolutionary change. Class struggle in the given conditions of colonial India could not be directed towards revolutionary anti-capitalism, but towards the creation of a ‘dynamically reformist’ matrix for future changes. In other words, a movement for radical reform in which reforms would be in the nature of internal concessions within the anti-imperialist movement, which would mediate all demands that were to be made on the colonial state. A large participation of the working class in the anti-imperialist struggle, intervening politically to imbue it with revolutionary nationalism, would surely give its agitation based on economic demands a broad social support. In such a situation, all reforms granted by the colonial state would be wrested from it by the Movement and could never become a vehicle for impressing upon the working class the ‘impartiality’ of the state and winning its confidence.

Chapter 12 ‘Sectarianism’ or Alienation?

First of all, it is necessary to consider the popular notion that any criticism of the Communists’ political positions and practice during the early thirties is either an exaggeration or not so pertinent because of certain reasons. The most popular and obvious reason cited is that the Meerut Conspiracy Case had removed all the experienced leaders from the scene and the few that remained were ‘raw and inexperienced college boys’.1 However, numerical strength has never been of paramount importance. The Communist movement began with two or three individuals growing into groups of five to eight, and that too, only in five provinces of India and yet, by the time they were arrested in the MCC the Workers’ and Peasants’ Parties had acquired considerable popularity while their influence in the National Congress was increasingly felt. Those who argue that the Communist movement was ‘small and growing’2 between 1929–34 generally ignore the phase of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Parties and their political experience. Moreover, they cannot explain why the Communists remained ‘small’ but not ‘growing’ till 1936 as a matter of fact. Till as late as June 1936, there was practically no All-India Communist Party in existence. The manifesto on party unity issued at that 1 2

P.C. Joshi and K. Damodaran, Documented History. Sumit Sarkar, ‘Popular Movements and National Leadership 1935–47’.

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time recognised that ‘in achieving our revolutionary tasks, the first and one of the most important impediments is the fact that we are not yet a United Party; individual Communists and Communist groups exist outside the party.’3 The basic question was not of ‘how many’ Communists there were but what their political positions were and how they functioned in the given political conditions. Had their positions and functioning been correct during 1930–34, they could have welcomed back their comrades, released from Meerut jail, to a wider and more sympathetic political platform than the ghetto-like existence into which they had withdrawn. True, the Communists were driven into bitterly opposed factions throughout this period, but their infighting and fragmentation was not the cause of their isolation and exclusivist positions; it was, rather, their product. In Bombay, for example, the destruction of the Girni Kamgar Union was bound to affect their cohesion and create infighting which, in turn, was the result of ‘sectarian’ postures. As for their ‘inexperience’, not only the comrades in Meerut jail but the interventions of the international Communist movement as well criticised them at the level of ‘tactical mistakes’, while upholding the theoretical formulations contained in the ‘Draft Platform’ and other documents—which they, themselves, were later to castigate as pure sectarianism.4 Moreover, the Meerut Communists began to be released from 1933 onwards but as long as their theoretical positions remained unchanged their political effectiveness also remained negligible. They continued to flounder about till 1935, and only with the beginning of the ‘United Front’ policy did they begin to find their bearings. The second reason most often advanced for the political marginalisation of the Communists during the early thirties is that they had made the ‘mistake’ of adventurist trade unionism and conducted prolonged strikes without the requisite resources or workers’ support.5 The working class was therefore exhausted and it was this rather than wrong ‘politics’ that had rendered them ineffective and weak.6 Here, it would do well to remember that the Communist-led workers at this time not only remained 3

The Communist, Organ of the C.C. of the CPI, Vol. I, No. 9, June 1936. K. Damodaran, Introduction to the Documented History of the Communist Movement in India, 1935–39, ACHI, JNU. 5 Prem Sagar Gupta, A Short History of AITUC (1920–47), New Delhi, 1980. 6 Guidelines of the History of the Communist Party of India. Issued by Central Party Education Department, CP Publication, 1974. 4

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largely passive in the anti-imperialist movement but did not conduct any effective or widespread protest against the Labour Commission headed by Whitely. On the other hand, as acknowledged by the Communists themselves, the Indian National Congress successfully brought out 10,000 workers on strike to protest against arrests during the Civil Disobedience Movement. Consequently, one cannot explain the lack of ‘politics’ merely by the ‘exhaustion’ of the class. The ‘sectarian swing’ of the early thirties was an international phenomenon and no one finds it difficult any, more to criticise the famous ‘third period’.7 In India, however, political criticism of the Communists’ theoretical conceptions suddenly stops and the ‘exhaustion theory’ is sprung to account for the failures and shortcomings of this period. It is, after all, a vicious circle—sectarian positions breed isolation and isolation increases sectarianism. THE STALINISATION OF BOLSHEVISM

The history of the Indian Communists between 1929–34 is the tragedy of a given theory breaking itself against a real mass movement. The genuine doubts and the honest attempts to link their thought with concrete Indian reality that characterised the Communist groups in the WPP period had naturally presented a picture of some theoretical confusion which, nonetheless, was an example of their creativity. However, their attempts to evolve a theory in close connection with the practical activity of a mass movement was called into question and categorically condemned by the Sixth Congress of the Comintern. Any connection with the existing movement led by the Indian National Congress was forbidden. The dissolution of the WPPs was called for.8 The Sixth Congress of the Comintern authoritatively informed the Indian Communists that, ‘a single, illegal, independent and centralised party is the first task of Indian Communists … to lead the masses in armed insurrection against the feudal imperialist bloc’. The ‘hegemony of the proletariat’ had to be established, and this, of course, could not be ‘realised without the existence of a consolidated steadfast Communist 7

See Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform, 1975. 8 Jane Degras, The Communist International: Documents 1919–43, London, 1971, Vol. II, pp. 530–48.

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Party, armed with the theory of Marxism’.9 These pre-conditions had not been fulfilled by the Indian Communists who organised Workers’ and Peasants’ Parties and who committed the crime of forming ‘two-class parties’. In 1929, therefore, the small group of Communists in India broke decisively with ‘national reformism’ and ‘came forward with the Bolshevik programme of action’.10 The year 1928 was a turning point not only in the history of the Russian Revolution but also of the Third International.11 The call for the ‘Bolshevisation’ of all Communist parties given at the Fifth Enlarged Plenum of the ECCI (21 March to 6 April 1925) was endorsed by the Tenth Plenum one year after the Sixth Congress.12 Reviewing the working of the Communist parties in the light of the decisions taken by the Sixth Congress, it noted with satisfaction that ‘during the past year certain sections which have traversed this Leninist road have achieved great successes in the Bolshevisation of their ranks (for instance the German, French and Polish CPs) and the others will follow them under the firm leadership of the Comintern, and will forge themselves into a steely power to meet the coming decisive class battles’. ‘Bolshevisation’ was to be carried out by implementing the ‘most urgent task—a fundamental purge of their ranks must be undertaken by all parties’.13 Once Stalinism became the ‘official marxism’ of the world Communist movement, the social democrats of Europe were more dangerous than fascism, while in colonial countries like India the national bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie were as venomous as imperialism itself. The Communist parties were entering, it was argued, a period of battles which demanded bold initiative, enormous energy, endurance and great self-sacrifice. In order that they might accomplish their tasks successfully 9

Ibid., pp. 544, 557–64. The Communist International, Vol. IV, No. 22, 1 October 1929; Vol. VIII, No. 20, 15 November 1931. 11 For the transformation which occurred in the sphere of cultural and intellectual life immediately after 1928, see John Barber, ‘The Establishment of Intellectual Orthodoxy in the USSR 1928–34’, Past and Present, No. 83, May 1979. 12 For theses on the Bolshevization of Communist Parties, see Degras, The Communist International, Vol. II, pp. 188–200. 13 ‘Results of the Tenth Plenum’. The Communist International. Vol. II, No. 20, 1 September 1929. The unfortunate, even disastrous, consequences that attended the ‘Bolshevisation’ of many of these parties have been discussed at length by Fernando Claudin, op. cit. 10

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in the prevailing circumstances, they must first and foremost declare a ruthless struggle against opportunism, vacillations and waverings within their own ranks. Thus all ‘deviations’ from the ‘correct line’ were to be met with denunciation and expulsion from the party. The conception of ‘deviators’ also created its opposite category of those who were ‘not deviators’ and upheld the ‘correct party line’. They were expected to take unbiased decisions and then administer punishment to the defaulters. Inherent in the logic of this process was the notion of a ‘higher authority’ whose decision was to be the ultimate in deciding the ‘correct line’ and subsequently its ‘correct implementation’. Within the party in a country, this authority was to be exercised by the faction identified with the correct line and recognised by the leadership of the Third International.14 Ignorant of the history of inner party debate and democracy that existed among Bolsheviks before 1917, and to some extent even after, it was this atmosphere, imbued with the spirit of monolithicity, in the Stalinist International, which the Indian Communists imbibed in their formative period. Consequently, a litany of Marxist categories with inflexible meanings attached to them were their ‘given’ theory. Unlike the European Communists, the Indian Communists were yet to create such a ‘monolithic party’, and therefore had nothing to purge from their ranks except those who were with them in the WPPs and were not willing to accept, wholly or partially, the new line of the Sixth Congress of the CI. Thus, before marxism could become a world view among considerable sections of the intelligentsia through a battle of ideas, it was identified with the ‘correct party line’ and the acceptance of the ‘party programme’. Naturally, there was no Marxism outside the party and those who refused to accept the ‘correct party line’ were either deviators or vacillating petty-bourgeois elements waiting to be hegemonised. Thus, the notion of the ‘genuine communist’ took root and became a weapon to be wielded against one’s comrades and sympathisers, specially the rising petty-bourgeois revolutionary forces in India. The acid test for a ‘genuine Communist’ in India was the formation of the independent, monolithic party of the working class as opposed to the National Congress, ‘the party of the Indian bourgeoisie’.15 Based precisely on this definition of ‘genuine Communist’ the Workers’ Weekly declared that the imprisoned Meerut 14 15

Ibid. The Communist International, Vol. IV, No. 22, 1 October 1929.

330 A History of the Indian Communists

comrades had been ‘only militant left-nationalists and trade unionists’, not Communists at all.16 A few years later, R.P. Dutt was to attack the Congress Socialists as ‘social fascists’, apart from other reasons, for not mentioning in their programme the necessity for ‘an independent political party of the working class separate from all other parties’.17 Despite the fact that socialist ideology had not been disseminated among the Indian proletariat so far, it was argued that the special nature of the accumulated experience of the Indian proletariat enabled it to appropriate Marxism almost automatically and with tremendous speed. An editorial in the Workers’ Weekly stated: In India, unlike many European countries and Russia, efforts to bring socialist ideas into the masses … on the part of socialist intellectuals were insignificant. The working class in India was compelled to get its revolutionary education only from the bitter experiences of their struggle. This accumulated experience explains the speed with which the Indian workers … accept the most advanced working class revolutionary theories … that is why the working class now so easily and quickly understands the revolutionary marxian slogans and … the period of building a mass revolutionary marxian movement will be very short.18

Compared to the assessment of the Indian proletariat made by the ideologues of the Third International even the exaggerated claims of the editors of the Workers’ Weekly appeared modest! ‘The workers in the largest capitalist countries have a good deal to learn from the Bombay weavers and the workers in the Calcutta jute factories.’19 THE COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL AND THE INDIAN COMMUNISTS

One of the most significant aspects of the colonial theses adopted by the Sixth Congress of the CI was the category of ‘national reformism’ that it employed. The ‘vacillating and compromising character of the bourgeoisie’ was equated with the character of the Congress movement and its 16

Workers’ Weekly, No. 8, 20 March 1930. R.P. Dutt, ‘Congress Socialism: A Contradiction in Terms’, Indian Forum, 1934, Reproduced in Ganashakti (English edn.), Vol. I, No. 1, 30 September 1934. 18 Workers’ Weekly, No. 8, 20 March 1930. 19 The Communist International, Vol. II, No. 22, 1 October 1929. 17

‘Sectarianism’ or Alienation? 331

proclivity towards ‘reforms’ and ‘compromises’.20 Constitutional activity, when mass movements were held in abeyance, was seen as reformist activity within the structure of colonial rule, seeking to compromise with it, in the sense of surrendering the demand for its overthrow. Consequently, any negotiation between the Congress and the government, as in March 1931, or acceptance of constitutional reforms offered by the colonial state were not seen by the Communists as part of a long struggle, but as purely reflecting the interests of the bourgeoisie. This promptly led to speculation and pronouncements on ‘which section’ of the bourgeoisie had gone over ‘completely’ or ‘partially’, to the side of imperialism. At no stage did the Indian Communists treat the Congress movement as independent of bourgeois control and leadership and the terms ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘Congress’ were used synonymously. As the theses of the ‘Agit-Prop’ of the ECCI on the Sixth Congress of the Comintern maintained: A section of the Indian bourgeoisie … has already taken to the path of compromise with British imperialism; another section (the Swarajists), is substantially looking for an understanding with imperialism at the expense of the toilers … the Indian bourgeoisie have already betrayed the agrarian revolution of the peasantry in the past, and in the future they are likely to play a counterrevolutionary role.21

With this omnipotent knowledge applied to the Indian bourgeoisie, and the Congress movement seen as identical to it, it was not surprising that Lozovsky asked: ‘What makes it necessary to wait with our struggle against the Indian bourgeoisie till it turns traitor like the Kuomintang …?’22 It went without saying, of course, that Communist parties had to be mass parties, if they were to grow out of being a sect. The masses, however, followed the Congress, as the Communists complained interminably. Even the organised sections of the working class, were rent into fragments.23

20

G. Adhikari, ed., Documents of the History of the CPI, Vol. IIIC, 1982, p. 418. Outline History of the Communist International, Moscow, 1934. Photocopy, ACHI, JNU. 22 G. Adhikari, Documents, Vol. IIIc, pp. 411, 628. 23 As was clear from the two splits within the Trade Union Movement in 1929 and 1931, leaving the Communists with the rump of the AITUC now styled the Red TUC under the leadership of B.T. Ranadive and Deshpande. 21

332 A History of the Indian Communists

Clearly, the proletariat had not separated from the bourgeoisie as a class and without this separation the mass party could not be created.24 Thus the proletariat had to be liberated from the bourgeoisie’s influence before it could take up the task of liberating the nation. The building up of the Communist Party was reduced to fighting the influence of the Congress over the masses. Despite constant lip service to the position that anti-imperialism was the foremost task of all the Indian people, objectively, the Communists attempted a delinking of those workers’ organisations which they led from the national struggle which was historically identified with the Congress movement. In fact this conclusion was inherent in certain premises that had remained with the Communist movement ever since M.N. Roy advanced his assumptions regarding Indian social reality at the Second Congress of the Comintern. These had lain dormant under the impact of Lenin’s conjunctural position that the Third International must enter into alliance with the ‘revolutionary movements in the colonies’. Now, at the Sixth Congress they surfaced again. Essentially, Roy’s assumptions regarding Indian reality could be traced to two conceptions: (a) the Indian National Movement led by the National Congress was a bourgeois movement and (b) in India there were two distinct movements—one bourgeois and the other a revolutionary movement of workers and peasants. There was no link between them, and in fact they grew farther and farther apart daily. It was precisely these assumptions that characterised all the pronouncements on the colonies at the Sixth Congress. A basic assumption of the Communists was that each class was represented by its own party. This meant that from the start the national movement had to be led either by the bourgeoisie or the Communists as representatives of the working class. Since they were not leading the existing movement it was apparent that it was led by the bourgeoisie. This formulae-ridden Marxism did not permit a complex analysis of the relationship between parties and social classes. The mass upsurge and following of Gandhi and the Congress-led Civil Disobedience Movement, which was acknowledged rather bitterly by the Communists themselves, showed quite clearly that there were no two parellel movements in India. There was only one anti-imperialist movement composed of all sections of Indian society. No ‘independent’ 24

Communist International, Vol. X, No. 2, 1 February 1933, pp. 79–84.

‘Sectarianism’ or Alienation? 333

movement of workers and peasants opposed to the Congress or Gandhi’s leadership existed apparently for the Congress’ call to action led to an upsurge which subsided when the leadership decided to negotiate with the government. However, even in the face of this stark reality the Communists continued to assert that ‘the INC is a class organisation of the Indian bourgeoisie and liberal landlords who are absolutely dependent on imperialist bayonets for their very existence’.25 Cognisance of these facts of Indian reality, which could hardly be ignored, could lead to two alternative interpretations and positions. If the real life movement and activity of the Indian people were accepted as the true measure of the anti-imperialist struggle then it required the theorisation of this reality to enable opposition to the Sixth Congress Theses. However, it was equally possible to utilise the given ‘theory’ (the assumptions, premises and practical positions advocated by the CI as well as the general level of Marxism prevailing at the time) to explain and interpret the reality of the Indian national struggle and more specifically the Civil Disobedience Movement differently—through the theory of ‘deception and bamboozlement’. The theory of ‘bamboozlement’ was rooted in a kind of Marxist understanding of ‘false consciousness’. From R.P. Dutt and M.N. Roy to their present-day followers, the concept of ‘false consciousness’ has been used to explain the ‘illusions’ of the masses and their consequent deception by the National Congress. Obviously, the Indian Communists opted for the second alternative which required of them an explanation of why the masses—including sections of the organised working class—were under the influence of the Congress anti-imperialist movement when actually their class interests were seen as opposed to it. The reason for this phenomenon was sought in the ‘fact’ that the working masses’ consciousness had been blunted by nationalist ideology, making them victims of ‘false consciousness’. The mystique of ‘bourgeois nationalism’ was invoked to explain all the successes of the Congress-led movement and, correspondingly, all the weakness and isolation of the Communists from mass activity: The greatest enemy of the working class and of the revolutionary trade union movement in India at present is bourgeois nationalism. Bourgeois 25 Comrades, Socialists and Revolutionary Youths, pamphlet issued by the CC of the CPI, p. 10; and Indian Revolution and our Tasks, Manifesto of the CPI, issued by the Calcutta Committee of the CPI, March 1933. (Photocopies, ACHI, JNU.)

334 A History of the Indian Communists

nationalists in India are not expected to be the friends of the workers, who fight for the overthrow of the capitalist system. Therefore, they try to permeate their ideology into the working class movement. They try to organise the workers not on a class basis but on a national basis, and speak of united national front against the foreign oppressors for a few concessions and for help in suppressing the revolutionary mass movement …. Bourgeois nationalist-reformism, aiming at destroying the revolutionary class consciousness of the working class by hiding the character of the anti-imperialist struggle in India, is the most formidable enemy that we have to fight at present.26

Apart from investing bourgeois–nationalism with near supernatural powers, this speech by Comrade Bhise was distinguished by its erroneous equation of the ‘reforms’ or ‘concessions’ that were part of the long-term struggle of the Indian National Movement with the reforms and compromises that were effected by the constitutional trade unionist leaders like N.M. Joshi. Of course, the anti-imperialist sentiment of the working masses was historically produced and there lay the irony: The Indian bourgeoisie using the hatred of the workers for the imperialists (and being themselves in the ‘liberal’ ‘opposition’ and ‘fighting’ for reforms) came to the workers with the preaching of the common national front, depicting the Congress as an organisation of the whole people and carefully concealing its bourgeois class nature. In this faith in the National Congress and the illusions regarding the general national front is rooted the fact that many workers who came out into the streets with the slogans, ‘Down with Imperialists! Long Live the Revolution! Long Live the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government!’ simultaneously support the National Congress, considering that it leads the struggle against the imperialists and represents the interests of the whole people.27

The consciousness of the working class was apparently a historical consciousness which spontaneously grasped the nexus between nationalism and socialism. And it was precisely this conception that was decried as ‘false consciousness’ and as a sign of the ‘backwardness’ of the Indian working class: 26 The Bombay Textile Workers’ Conference: Presidential Address by Comrade S.P. Bhise, 20 June 1931. Emphasis added. 27 The Communist International, ‘The Development of the Communist Movement in India’, Vol. X, No. 2, 1 February 1933. Emphasis added.

‘Sectarianism’ or Alienation? 335

What is it that kept the proletariat from turning into an independent leading class force? The main difficulty was the existence of the widespread illusions of an all national united front, which actually meant the subordination of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie, to its leadership … .28

What is striking about the above formulation is the notion that not only did the working class have illusions about the national movement—(read, Congress movement)—but that the very conception of an all national united front was an illusion, for, in practice and effect, it subordinated the proletariat to bourgeois interests. This idea, of course, was embedded in the ‘Marxist’ premise that any notion of ‘national’ interests was a euphemism for bourgeois interests. Thus, transposing the ‘given theory’ on Indian reality led the Communists into making wild charges. And once the historical necessity or even validity of an all national front was denied then, à la Roy, the quest for revolutionary, parallel movements, ‘independent’ of the Congress, began: ‘… for the victory of the Indian people it is necessary to overcome the influence of the national reformists and liberate the toiling masses from bourgeois leadership. And for this purpose it is necessary to form a workers’ independent revolutionary party—the Communist Party.’29 Jawaharlal Nehru was attacked for denying the thesis that there were two distinct movements in India and for advocating the view that the Congress was a multi-class national organisation and not a bourgeois party. Criticising Nehru’s position as a ‘counterrevolutionary theory’, Page Arnot of the Communist Party of Great Britain accused him of both confusion and duplicity: ‘Mr Nehru confuses bourgeois nationalism with revolutionary nationalism. He mixes various conflicting classes and conflicting programmes. Mr Nehru will not be able to prevent this process of class differentiation … .’30 The familiar Royist theme of two parallel and contradictory movements, now reformulated as two distinct nationalisms, one bourgeois (therefore reformist) and the other non-bourgeois (therefore revolutionary) is apparent. Putting it explicitly, the same article continued: There are two kinds of nationalisms … bourgeois nationalism, represented by the Congress leadership, … revolutionary nationalism of the 28

Inprecor, Vol. 14, No. 8, 9 February 1934. Emphasis added. Inprecor, V. Basak, ‘The Present Situation in India’, Vol. 13, No. 43, 29 September 1933, p. 946. 30 Inprecor, Vol. 14, No. 17, 16 March 1934. ‘Whither Nehru’? Emphasis added. 29

336 A History of the Indian Communists

peasantry and considerable sections of the petty-bourgeoisie which is ready to carry on revolutionary struggle for independence. The working class is ready to support the revolutionary nationalism and head these forces towards the anti-imperialist revolution.31

Thus the working class was first theoretically excluded from the national movement and then this theory was used to actively split off from the Congress-led national movement those sections of the proletariat which were organised by the Communists. Once nationalism as an ideology was denied to the working class, the advocacy of a united national front automatically became synonymous with ideological subordination of the working class to the bourgeoisie. The formation of the Communist Party now depended wholly on countering all efforts and aspirations towards building a multi-class common political platform. These positions launched the Communists on the path of ‘relentless exposure’ of the Congress leadership which ‘utilised’ the working masses’ hatred against British imperialism by ‘forcing’ on them a policy of internal class peace camouflaged under ‘radical’ phrases on the ‘joint national struggle’.32 The ‘exposure theory’ followed logically from the theory of ‘deception and bamboozlement’ of the masses, specially by the Congress left-wing: Not a minute must be lost in exposing the Congress and its ‘left’ wing. Ruthless war on the ‘left’ national reformists is an essential condition … to isolate the latter from the workers and mass of the peasantry and mobilise the latter under the banner of the Communist Party and the anti-imperialist agrarian revolution in India.33

The National Congress and not imperialism had become the chief obstacle in the way of the growth of the working class or rather of the Communist Party. No distinction was drawn between a class and a party in all the documents quoted. The influence of the Congress over the 31

Ibid. Inprecor, Vol. 12, No. 22, 19 May 1932. ‘Open Letter to the Indian Communists’ on behalf of the CC of the CPC, CC of the CPGB, and CC of the CPG, also known as the Three Parties’ Letter. Emphasis added. 33 The Draft Platform of Action of the CPI, 1931; The Communist International, Vol. VIII, No. 9, 1 May 1931. 32

‘Sectarianism’ or Alienation? 337

masses instead of being attributed to its struggle against imperialism and its upholding the political programme of national independence was credited to its false assurances and capacity for manipulation. The dogma which was expounded by both the CI and the Indian Communists now was that the ‘bourgeois National Congress’ would not launch any more struggles against imperialism. Henceforth, only the working class led by a CP could and would do so.34 The role of the CP (once formed, of course) would be to work towards the goal of making an ‘Indian October’. Warnings based on examples of the role of the Russian bourgeoisie in the Russian Revolution were now supplemented with morals from the Chinese experience: ‘The great lessons of Shanghai, Wuhan and Canton were not given in vain, the slogan of Soviets is already inscribed on the banner of the Indian proletariat.’ Given this picture of bourgeois betrayal, the Communists in India were told to take over the leadership of the national struggle and the following perspective was put before them: ‘The tasks of the Indian revolution can only be solved through struggle for the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry under the banner of Soviets.’ For, that day was ‘drawing near, when proletariat revolution and colonial revolt will in India fuse into one’.35 Throughout 1929 a series of articles appeared in the Inprecor and the Communist International condemning the betrayal of the freedom struggle by the national bourgeoisie in India and predicting the complete surrender of the Congress and its left-wing to British imperialism. The running theme of these articles was that the bourgeoisie feared the revolutionary activity of the exploited masses more than imperialism and that, therefore, they were bound to ally with imperialism in order to jointly suppress the struggles of the working people. The Communists in India instead of analysing and understanding the changing co-relation of class forces in their own country sought blindly to implement the ‘line’ preached by the CI and its organs. They closed their eyes to the emerging new realities of political developments and changing ideology in the Congress movement. Moreover, the method of drawing parallels was the most popular way of juggling with the facts of empirical reality and substituting analysis with analogies. 34 Inprecor, Vol. 14, No. 40, 20 July 1934, p. 1024; Vol. IX, No. 46, p. 975, 4 September 1929; No. 29, p. 649, 3 April 1929. 35 Ibid.

338 A History of the Indian Communists

The relationship between the CI and the Communists in India should not be understood in an instrumentalist manner. There was no question of the Indian Communists being ‘compelled’ to implement decisions imposed from above by the CI under threats of expulsion or other forms of pressure. Ideologically reared through M.N. Roy’s interventions, they had absorbed enough of his theoretical premises and the logic generated by them to have upheld similar views towards the end of the WPP experiment, albeit confusedly, and with doubts and reservations when faced by concrete problems of national politics.36 With the Comintern from 1928, officially espousing the positions Roy had held ever since 1920, the theoretical premises underlying his colonial theses re-emerged, just as Roy’s scenario of the working class movement in India was resurrected. For instance, Abdul Halim, the Acting General Secretary of the Bengal WPP, proclaimed in 1929: The nationalist bourgeoisie menaced by the ‘red spectre’ of the Indian national revolution under the hegemony of the proletariat are deserting and betraying the struggles for national independence … . It is also quite evident that Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhash Bose, Chaman Lall, etc., being the exponents of the interests of the national bourgeoisie within the labour movement are hindering the national revolutionary independence movement of India.37

Soon after these forecasts by the CI and the Indian Communists, the National Congress in its 44th session held at Lahore at the end of December 1929 repudiated the demand for Dominion Status and adopted the resolution on ‘Complete Independence’. On 26 January 1930, the ‘Independence Pledge’ was taken by thousands of people in public meetings held all over India. On the same day, the Workers’ Weekly, edited by D.V. Deshpande and the official organ of the Communists, asked the question: ‘What Does Independence Mean?’ And answered: Gandhi, Nehru and the rest are not going to fight for Independence … (they) promise to start a campaign of Civil Disobedience in isolated places. A promise which, we doubt, will ever be carried into effect. But 36

This becomes obvious when we examine the criticism of the ‘sectarian’ comrades outside made by the WPP Communists from Meerut jail. 37 Pamphlet issued by the Bengal WPP on ‘The Tasks of the Left-wing Trade Unions of India’, 25 November 1929, ACHI, JNU.

‘Sectarianism’ or Alienation? 339

even if they do, is it possible to achieve any results by isolated action? Mass Civil Disobedience in itself is not enough … praying to British Imperialism and condemning under the guise of non-violence, the revolutionary forces of India, that is the line of Gandhi and Nehru. It only means … trying to disorganise the struggle, … trying to get a compromise with British Imperialism, and trying to deceive the anti-imperialist rank and file of the Congress … .38

The editorial in the same issue dismissed the ‘Boycott of Legislatures, boycott of foreign goods, possible civil disobedience in remote and isolated places as a joke and mockery of a mass struggle for independence.’ As already discussed, the celebration of Independence Day on 26 January 1930 revealed the remarkable ferment in the country, specially in the petty-bourgeoisie and the youth movements. The reaction of the Workers’ Weekly to these events was as follows: ‘It is clear that they will not dare to organise mass civil disobedience.’39 This was written on 2 February 1930. On 15 February the Working Committee of the Congress decided to launch the Civil Disobedience Movement under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, and on 19 February the AICC approved the programme. On 12 March Gandhi started the Civil Disobedience Movement with his march to Dandi to break the Salt Law, stirring millions of people en route. As our discussion of the success and effectiveness of the boycott and the various other methods of the Congress shows, the Communists were not merely sectarian but utterly alienated from reality at this time. COMMUNISTS ON THE CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE MOVEMENT

The Communist documents commenting upon the Civil Disobedience Movement present a queer mixture of fact and fiction. The record of the events of this period is often accompanied by highly exaggerated and even imaginary descriptions of workers’ and peasants’ struggles. On the other hand, the conclusions drawn from the reports on the mass movement frequently transcend the frontiers of reality and enter the realm of pure fantasy.

38 39

Workers’ Weekly, No. 1, 26 January 1930. Workers’ Weekly, No. 2, 2 February 1930.

340 A History of the Indian Communists

In May 1930, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya reported: At a secret meeting of the All India Congress Committee, of whose 300 members over a 100 are already in prison, it was resolved to stiffen the struggle against British imperialism by resorting to the non-payment of taxes and by intensifying the boycott of British goods. Congress committees in the provinces and villages are carrying out the mandate of their executive to the best of their ability.40

However, these decisions were not interpreted as proof of the Congress’ determination to launch a mass movement. The Communists’ analysis based on their ‘given theory’ ruled out that the bourgeoisie—which meant the National Congress as far as they were concerned—could or would lead a mass anti-imperialist struggle. Therefore, warned Chattopadhyaya, … the great Congress leaders can in no way be regarded as sincere. They have taken up the slogan of independence outwardly, because otherwise they would have lost their hold on the masses immediately and because they were astute enough to realise that it is only with the help of the revolutionary mass movement that they can obtain acceptable concessions from British imperialism.41

This interpretation implied the existence of an independent mass movement outside of the Congress movement which was straining at the leash, so to speak, and had to be pacified by the Congress leadership to prevent its emerging as an alternative to it. In short, this was the theory of ‘bourgeois manoeuvre’ that was to be applied consistently whenever the Congress movement showed signs of disproving and invalidating Communist premises and analysis. On the other hand, the masses showed no signs of being disillusioned with the Congress leadership. In fact the working class which the Communists saw as their own exclusive constituency seemed to be falling further into the ‘illusion’ of national unity and crediting the Congress with leadership in the anti-imperialist struggle. As Chattopadhyaya complained: The extent to which the workers are being mobilised for the Congress programme is seen from the following facts. On July 1st 100,000 40 41

Inprecor, Vol. V, No. 24, 22 May 1930. Ibid.

‘Sectarianism’ or Alienation? 341

workers downed tools as a protest against Motilal’s arrest, and 55 mills had to be closed down. A strike was also observed among the textile workers of Ahmedabad, the headquarters of Gandhism. According to the Bombay Chronicle the tramway workers came out as soon as they heard of the arrest of Motilal and went in procession through the principal streets of Bombay. The paper reports that the workers marched with Red Flags and with Congress flags and shouted slogans showing the need of a united front between the Congress and the working class. At the end of the procession, a meeting was held and a resolution passed to the effect that the workers must take a more active part in helping the cause of the Congress.42

Having dismissed the concept of anti-imperialist unity as an illusion and the Congress movement as antithetical to workers’ interests, the Communists were dismayed by the successful efforts of the Congress to organise workers specially on the Railways as part of the national struggle. They saw these as efforts ‘to divert the growing revolutionary movement of the railway workers into safer “national” channels’. With the arrests of large numbers of Congressmen and the repression that government resorted to, it was very clear that the Congress had not only launched a mass movement against imperialism but was considered dangerous enough to call for punitive measures by the government. Now, a new explanation was sought for Congress politics: The action taken against the Congress leaders does not prove that these are revolutionary, but only that their surrender, which is inevitable, is being rendered difficult and being delayed owing to the tremendous pressure from the masses … the mass pressure has compelled the Congress committees all over the country to reject the peace negotiations, declare a sharpening of the boycott and of the non-payment of (certain) taxes, and assert their determination to stand by the Lahore resolution on full national independence.43

As our account of Civil Disobedience has shown, there was not any independently organised mass movement that applied pressure on the Congress committees. There were the radical and left sections of the Congress movement itself which were organising mass resistance and leading a militant and vigorous campaign. 42 43

Inprecor, Vol. X, 3 July 1930. Emphasis added. Inprecor, 4 September, 1930.

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The reality of the Indian struggle could not be wished away and the role of the Congress could be minimised but not completely eliminated. As Safarov, in an article titled ‘The Treachery of the National Congress and the Revolutionary Upsurge in India’, commented: … In the spring of 1930, the mass anti-imperialist movement suddenly, seemingly unexpectedly, acquired the force of a spontaneous revolutionary torrent and aroused many millions to the struggle… . But they were drawn into the movement as a solid mass not having been stratified according to class relations. Its official signboard … was the ‘struggle’ of the Congress.44

Evidence of the radicalisation of the Congress movement and its apparent successes and popularity constantly conflicted with the desire to devalue and denigrate it. Chattopadhyaya, for example, reported: According to the statistics published by the Congress committees, the government arrested 15,989 persons during two months ending 15 June. The total number of arrests upto the end of August is estimated at between 20,000 and 25,000. The conditions in the jails have led to hunger strikes in almost all the important prisons. It is interesting also that non-political prisoners are being released in large numbers before the expiry of their terms in order to make room for the batches of political prisoners that are being brought in daily. There is not the least doubt that there will be a considerable intensification of the revolutionary movement during the next few months, accompanied of course, by more severe repression than India has yet been subjected to under any other government in Great Britain.45

These developments could not, however, be credited to the antiimperialist leadership of the ‘bourgeois’ Congress. Therefore, the Civil Disobedience Movement was seen as a movement of masses without leaders—‘a spontaneous mass revolt without a clear revolutionary programme and without revolutionary leadership’.46 The necessity of squaring the characterisation of the Congress movement as a counter-revolutionary force with the intensity of the Civil 44

Communist International, Vol. I, No. 9, 1 May 1931. Inprecor, 4 September 1930. This account tallies with our own description of the Movement, so it is not as if the Communists were not aware of the true facts of the situation as the Meerut comrades held later. 46 Ibid. 45

‘Sectarianism’ or Alienation? 343

Disobedience campaign produced contradictory generalisations and conclusions. It was noted that ‘in the villages and cities, tens, hundreds of thousands and millions felt a burning, insistent demand to bring to an end the rule of British imperialism at once … .’47 The masses, it was held, however, ‘did not participate in the campaign of passive resistance because they believed in the all-saving efficacy of non-violence. The mass anti-imperialist movement was as such under the Congress leadership only in a very conditional and limited sense.’ More importantly, … as the movement of many millions of the toiling masses, it could not remain within the limits of passive resistance. The very thought of the possibility of restraining revolutionary elements within this framework is equivalent to a complete ignoring of the very essence of mass struggle.48

The ‘very essence’ of the ‘revolutionary struggle’ was thus reduced to violence. The activity of millions within the ambit of passive resistance would, by implication, be condemned as a non-revolutionary act and thus ‘bourgeois’ activity. At times, the search for a parallel, ‘revolutionary’ movement opposed to the National Congress led to absurdities. An article in the Communist International went to the extent of claiming that the real initiators of the mass struggles in 1930 were not Congressmen but the working class led, of course, by the Communists: The working class was active in influencing the masses of the Indian people. Some imagine that the National Congress were the initiators of the movement and organisers of the Indian people in the struggle of 1930. This does not correspond with the truth and contradicts the facts given above.49

Just when the anti-imperialist struggle was becoming more and more widespread and militant, the Communists in India reached the peak of their antagonism to it and the Workers’ Weekly opposed and condemned the Civil Disobedience Movement. And, significantly, their opposition appeared to emanate from a facile pen, without any serious analysis of 47

Communist International, Vol. I, No. 9, 1 May 1931; Vol. VIII, No. 17, 1 October 1931. 48 Ibid., Vol. I, No. 9, 1 May 1931. 49 Communist International, Vol. VIII, No. 17, 1 October 1931.

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the conditions and the politics generated in such conditions in India. A major characteristic of Communist writings in this period was superficial generalisation of the ‘mass revolutionary movements’ without any attempt to identify who or which sections of society were being referred to.50 The Civil Disobedience Movement was in its organised form, led and given intensity by the urban middle class masses and the youth and student movements. These sections were the essence of the Congress movement at this time. To speak of them as ‘toiling masses’ who applied pressure on the Congress from ‘outside’ was utterly misplaced. The Communists argued that the colonial state was actually using Gandhi to ‘behead and betray’ the struggle. ‘To CHEAT the masses who cannot stand the oppression any longer, BY PRETENDING to lead the struggle for independence in order to BETRAY it at a later date.’51 With the mass arrests of Congressmen, including Gandhi, the ‘bourgeois manoeuvre’ of Gandhi acquired the dimension of a ‘joint conspiracy’ by the Congress and British imperialism. A manifesto of the CPGB published in May 1930 stated that as Gandhi’s treacherous strategy had failed to hold the masses in check, the British had been ‘forced’ to imprison him and his followers in order to delude the masses into believing that Gandhi was an enemy of imperialism.52 The final flourish to this interpretation was added by the Workers’ Weekly: At this point, British Imperialism had apparently decided that Gandhi is no longer able to serve as an effective brake upon the mass movement, while his continuing at large may only serve to discredit him in the eyes of the masses and to complicate the matters generally. But British Imperialism still needs Gandhi. British Imperialism looks upon Gandhi and the Congress leadership as the last weapon with which to crush the National Revolution, after all the other weapons shall have failed as they are bound to fail.53

The most important document of this period (1929–34) was the ‘Draft Platform of Action of the Communist Party of India’ which had already been published in the Inprecor November–December 1930. According to the official intelligence report, there was not the slightest 50

Workers’ Weekly, editorial, No. 10, 4 June 1930. Ibid. 52 Quoted in P.C. Joshi and K. Damodaran, Documented History. 53 Workers’ Weekly, No. 10, 4 June 1930. 51

‘Sectarianism’ or Alienation? 345

doubt that it was widely circulated in India as numerous copies were found in many different parts of the country. Translated later into several Indian languages, the reprints were distributed at the Karachi Congress in March 1931.54 The basic position asserted in the ‘Draft Platform’ was that the sole means of winning independence was ‘a general national armed insurrection against the British exploiters’; ‘a revolutionary armed insurrection of the widest possible masses’. A series of extravagant demands (given the colonial condition of India) followed. These included: (a) expulsion of the British troops, abolition of the police, and instead the general arming of the toilers; (b) immediate liberation of all political prisoners, including those who had committed acts of individual and mass violence; (c) unlimited freedom of speech, conscience, press, meetings, strikes and association for the toilers, and abolition of all anti-popular and anti-labour laws.55 The resolution on Fundamental Rights passed by the Congress at its Karachi session was a victory of the leftist forces and a definite advance on the Independence Resolution adopted by the previous session at Lahore. It was an expression of the left-ward swing of the Congress. The debates and discussions during and after the Karachi Congress showed that socialist ideas were becoming increasingly popular and the influence of the left was steadily expanding. It was precisely in this period that the CI and the Indian Communists tried to implement the ‘Draft Platform of Action’ by concentrating their virulent and persistent attacks on the left-wing of the Congress. G. Safarov, for instance, launched into abusive invective against Jawaharlal Nehru: The sly son of an even more sly father, now deceased, Jawaharlal Nehru, still tries to play the clown and loudly affirms that ‘this is only a truce’. This can serve as a warning. Not only actually, but formally as well, the Indian National Congress has gone over to the side of imperialism and counter-revolution and is continuing its policy of openly mocking and betraying the struggling masses. More than that, it strains all its forces in order, having struck from behind, to break and scatter the army of fighters.56 54

Williamson, India and Communism. HDP, File 7/16/1934. 56 The Communist International, Vol. VIII, No. 9, 1 May 1931. 55

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It was acknowledged that … wide masses were, at first, suspicious and on their guard against the attempt by the Communists of a general class survey. They could not believe the Communists, who were few in numbers, who declared that the National Congress who steadfastly shun struggle, who disorganise and make it impotent are preparing a base treachery.57

Nonetheless, it was asserted that: The workers’ movement again moves uphill, drawing new strata of the working class into the struggle …. The peasant revolution comes even closer and becomes more and more an obvious fact. The pettybourgeois youth and wide masses of the small city traders cannot follow the National Congress. The path of ‘conciliation’ with British imperialism is not for them. This exercise in fantasy soon fostered a surreal dream: ‘More than ever before, the time is now ripe for the demonstration by the weak, and still insufficiently formed Communist vanguard, as the pioneers and organisers of the revolutionary counter-attack against imperialism and its aides.’58

Vituperative rhetoric, however, was no substitute for growing roots in mass consciousness and activity, and the Communists again ‘invoked’ the magical powers of the Indian bourgeoisie and railed against the backwardness of the Indian masses.59 The Communists found that broad sections of the people including the working class were following the Congress instead of implementing their own call for an immediate general strike and the establishment of a Soviet Republic under their own leadership. From this they drew the conclusion that it was only because the masses were so backward that they still had ‘illusions’ in the leadership of the National Congress and its left-wing and, that such a situation was due to the absence of a strong Communist Party which could effectively expose the Congress and its left manoeuvre. With this conclusion they entered a mental bind—a tautological dead-end—for a strong Communist Party had failed to emerge because the influence of the bourgeoisie/National Congress prevented its 57 The Communist International, Vol. VIII, No. 17, 1 October 1931; No. 9, 1 May, 1931. Emphasis added. 58 Ibid. Emphasis added. 59 Ibid., 15 November 1931; Ibid., Vol. VIII, No. 17, 1 October 1931.

‘Sectarianism’ or Alienation? 347

formation, while the absence of the Communist Party strengthened the bourgeoisie and National Congress further. It was not as if the rapid left-ward swing and transformation of the Congress movement were invisible to the Communists’ eyes; these developments were observed and recorded: The National Congress passed its … ‘Declaration of Rights’, … the National Congress began to talk a lot about its chief task being to defend the interest of the peasantry, and … considerably developed its activities among the workers. The National Congress recently passed a resolution calling upon the factory owners to grant ‘concessions’ to the workers; further, in several places committees for work among the workers have been formed, and Congress mediators between the workers and owners have begun to take part in several strikes … .60

However, the ‘lenses’ of ‘given theory’ were inadequate for the development of any new insights into the process of transformation fast occurring in the Congress movement. The renewal of Civil Disobedience in 1932 made no dent in the ‘analysis’ and ‘prognosis’ published in the international Communist press throughout these years from 1930 to 1934, and the articles and pamphlets of tfte Indian Communists echoed these. The results were, inevitably, tragic.

60

Ibid., No. 20, 15 November 1931.

Chapter 13 In the Ghetto

As a consequence of their bizarre and alienated political behaviour, the Communists were increasingly isolated not only from the Congress-led anti-imperialist struggle, but also from the working class. Opposition to the national movement on the one hand and what they themselves later characterised as ‘adventurist calls’1 for an immediate general strike and the establishment of a Soviet republic of workers and peasants in India on the other, coupled with petty rivalries, soon splintered them into a number of small factions each claiming loyalty to the Communist International. The All India Communist Party ceased to exist even nominally or on paper; small rival groups existed in Bombay and Calcutta without any mutual contact or collaboration.2 The government’s intelligence reports were duly relieved and sarcastic: There were many to claim that the mantle of Spratt had fallen upon them, but none whom it fitted or became. In the face of the rivalries arid petty squabblings this brought about, and in spite of exhortations, from Moscow itself to establish an ‘Indian Soviet Republic’ and to organise for the ‘approaching gigantic revolutionary fights’ the Communist Party of India (or, it would be more correct to say, the various 1 2

P.C. Joshi and K. Damodaran, Documented History. Inprecor, Vol. 12, 19 May 1932, p. 437. Also see Guidelines.

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Communist organisations in India which Spratt had temporarily welded together) have not as yet been able to recover even a tithe of the power and prestige which belonged to the followers of Moscow’s doctrines prior to March 1929.3

‘As time went by’, observed Williamson, ‘the Communists in India seemed to be growing more and more impotent’. A brief history of the Communists during 1930–34, compiled by the GOI gives the following information: A ‘Young Workers’ League was established in mid-1930 by the Deshpande–Ranadive group of Communists at Bombay, and was known as the ‘official’ Communist Party. When, in early 1930, differences arose between the ‘Communist’ and ‘reformist’ sections in the Girni Kamgar Union over lending support to the Congress, both Deshpande and Ranadive formed the ‘Young Workers’ League. This league made very little progress till 1932, when Ranadive and his small following seceded from the ‘official’ group leaving Deshpande in sole charge of it. In 1933, Adhikari, out of prison on bail, infused some enthusiasm and activity in the Bombay group with help from Bradley prior to the latter’s leaving for Europe. In 1934, the activities of the group consisted mainly of speeches to small audiences of students and a few workers. The tone of the speeches was rather academic in which they traced the history of the Paris Commune, lectured on Karl Marx, etc. Meanwhile, Ranadive had organised a small non-registered union called the ‘Lai Bavta G.K.U.’ in 1932. In a letter to the members of the ‘CC of the CPI’ Ranadive explained his secession from the old group because of the ‘counter-revolutionary clique of Deshpande and his gang which is in the majority in the CPI and has been sabotaging the work of revolution in every sphere’. It was only in 1934, with the final release of Adhikari, that the Ranadive and Deshpande groups merged together again.4 During 1931 and 1932, G. Adhikari on behalf of the Communist group in Meerut jail, sent a number of letters and reports to the Communist International and to the Communists in Bombay. These documents, known as the ‘Meerut Reports’, provide detailed information on the disarray and fragmentation of the Communist groups at the time, and give an insight into the causes of their decline. The reports make abundantly clear the disastrous consequences of the ‘line’ of politics that 3 4

Williamson, India and Communism, NAI. HDP JF. 7/20/1934 and K.W.

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had been dictated within the paradigm of the Sixth Congress’s Colonial Theses and the ‘Draft Platform of Action’. ‘During the past few years’, said one report, ‘the Communist movement in India has received a series of setbacks. It has been losing one vantage ground after another. We have lost our influence over the working masses in Bombay and Calcutta, we have failed to make any mark in the political field, we are faced with confusion and disintegration within our own thinking ranks.’ The report, sent in 1931, outlined the rapid disintegration of Communist influence, during this period, … while it has been a general decline of working class activity throughout the country, it has been a time of continuous political ferment, at times of semi-revolutionary character, and this ferment though coming partly from the bourgeoisie has affected the peasants strongly, and has not left the workers untouched. We feel that in such conditions, in spite of any difficulty, the influence and strength of the party should have increased substantially. The facts are, however, that its strength and influence have declined almost continuously and we seem now to have reached an absolutely disastrous position of weakness and isolation.5

The report concluded that the Communists had … lost all importance … our movement has never had any contact with the peasants (and) with the working class our influence appears to have been reduced to a near zero. None of the unions affiliated to our TUC has a membership of more than a few hundred, and probably most of that is entirely fictitious.

Meanwhile, Dange had been ‘expelled’ by the Communists inside Meerut jail, for carrying out ‘factional activities’. Apparently, his followers such as V.H. Joshi, led by his wife Ushatai Dange, were pursuing their own organisational ideas against the ‘official’ Communist group outside.6

5 Meerut Report, No. III. Document prepared by the Bombay group of the Meerut accused, before the judgement, and sent with M.L. Jaywant to the Communists of Bombay, ACHI. JNU. 6 Meerut Reports, Nos. I, II. Reports submitted by the Meerut Communists in Meerut jail to the Comintern representative in Bombay, September 1931, ACHI, JNU.

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The ‘Meerut group’ held that … the central issue of this whole period is the Civil Disobedience Movement and our attitude towards it, which resulted in a certain divorce between the party and whatever sympathisers it had had in the youth movement and the left nationalist circles, and the party’s national revolutionary platform lost influence and was forgotten. At the same time our principal source of strength—the militant workers’ organisation—had collapsed.7

Such grave observation should have raised questions of fundamental conceptions and theory, based on a detailed analysis of the existing antiimperialist movement. However, the Meerut Reports ascribed all the problems and failures of this period to the ‘mistakes’ and ‘sectarianism’ of the groups functioning ‘outside’. ‘Sectarianism’ was equated with wrong ‘tactics’. No attempt was made to understand or define it, theoretically, as a phenomenon rooted in basically erroneous conceptions of strategy and politics which, in turn, originated in the absence of any concrete analysis of the colonial state or of the existing Congress movement. The failure to correctly locate the source of their weakness and decline lay in the fact that despite all their criticism of the ‘functioning’ and the ‘attitude’ of the Communists towards the national movement, the Meerut comrades unhesitatingly accepted the ‘Draft Platform of Action’ and the ‘Colonial Theses’ of the Sixth Congress of the CI. ‘The suggestion has been made that our lack of success is due to an essentially faulty policy. We should not agree with that view. Our criticism is essentially concerned with details of application or working of policy, not the ‘‘line’’ as such.’8 Such a position was, however, extremely paradoxical. Great unhappiness was expressed by the Meerut comrades over certain ‘actions of the CPI’. For example, ‘the repeated condemnation of the national bourgeoisie and the Congress as ‘‘counter-revolutionary’’ … at the time when the Mahatma and thousands of minor leaders were in jail’. Such unhappiness was, however, immaterial as long as it was seen as a problem of wrong tactics and not as a false appreciation of the ongoing Civil Disobedience Movement. After all, the political activities and positions 7 Meerut Report, No. II. Report submitted by the Meerut accused to the CI Representative in August 1932, ACHI, JNU. 8 Ibid., Report No. I.

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so bitterly attacked by the Communists from Meerut jail flowed from the inner coherence of the ‘Draft Platform of Action’ and were its logical result and this they had accepted unquestioningly: ‘At the outset we may say that we accept the characterisation of the National Congress as given in the Colonial Theses and Platform of Action.’9 The ‘Platform’ had vigorously denounced Gandhi and the Congress, advocated ‘a general national armed insurrection against the British Government’, branded the left-wing of the National Congress, i.e., Nehru, Bose and others, as the most dangerous obstacle to the victory of the national revolution, and had urged the Communists to wage a ruthless war against such ‘social fascists’. Thus, for the Meerut Communists, having accepted this ‘line’ as they said, it was totally contradictory to complain that the Congress ought not to be called counter-revolutionary. A ‘national revolutionary platform’ based on the ‘functioning of the WPP’ which would work as the ‘left-wing of the Congress movement’ was asserted by the Meerut group, pragmatically.10 However, the ‘Draft Platform’ which they accepted uncritically dismissed a ‘national revolutionary platform’ as a petty-bourgeois organisation, obfuscating class differences and struggle. The crux of the problem was that the Meerut Communists were unable or unwilling to formulate the disjunction that had appeared between theory and practice. In theory, they accepted that ‘civil disobedience is the reformist political weapon of the colonial bourgeoisie … deliberately used to disorganise the growth of the revolutionary forces.’ In practice, however, they discovered that the working masses accepted the National Congress as a party of the Indian people and did not perceive it as a ‘class party of the bourgeoisie’. The ‘subjective truth’ of mass consciousness revealed that even the workers obviously subscribed to the belief that national united front to oppose imperialism was necessary. The Communists’ attempt to brush aside, non-seriously, the intuitive political reactions of the working class that were born out of their living experience under colonialism, and their efforts to clip reality in accordance with a priori assumptions, rend asunder all ties between their theory and the practice of the working class.

9

Ibid., Report No. II. Ibid., Report No. III.

10

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The consequence was that when the Civil Disobdience Movement began … we had lost what influence we had among the pettybourgeoisie, and could not maintain our position even among the workers against the Congress. The Royists, especially, were able to take great advantage of this lapse on our part.11

M.N. Roy had returned to India in December 1930 and formed a small group. The Royists at this time were working the WPP paradigm of functioning as a left tendency in cooperation with the left wing of the Congress. The Communists’ failure to explain the causes for the success of the Roy group while empirically observing it was inherent in the framework which they adopted. In fact, the Civil Disobedience Movement was treated by the Communists like a heavy cross they had to bear. It was certainly a dilemma to observe and record the development of the Congress movement and note its mass character tending to veer increasingly towards the left and yet have to denounce the changing composition and ideology of the Indian Natiotiai Congress as dangerous to the interests of the working class. In the context of the isolation and disintegration of the Communists, faced with the rising Civil Disobedience Movement, the Meerut Report remarked: ‘In such an unfavourable situation we were called upon to face so big an event as the CD. Movement. As might have been expected, we failed utterly to cope with it.’12 The ‘story of unrelieved gloom and defeat and setback on all fronts’ that the Meerut group recounted was traced to an empirical or subjective mistake with the ‘overestimation– underestimation’ theory. No insight into the theoretical premises responsible for the politics of this period was forthcoming. This was not, of course, only due to the weakness or poverty of Indian Marxism. The failure to theorise the concrete experiences of one’s country and to bow down before the Comintern—the repository of ‘genuine’ Marxism—was a feature of the Communist movement as much in the advanced west as the colonial east at that time.13 The one ‘really insurmountable obstacle’ to any independent theorisation of specific historical experiences ‘was that the Comintern was quite sure that it possessed the absolute truth of Marxism and was alone obligatory, in 11

Ibid., Report No. II. Ibid., Report No. II. 13 Fernando Claudin, op. cit., discusses and describes this phenomenon at length. 12

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its essential features, for all countries; that the “Marxist–Leninist” party must be organised and must operate in conformity with the model created by the Comintern.’14 No Communist Party in the world had prestige comparable to the Comintern’s, and almost all of them succumbed to the logic of less ‘experience’ or less ‘knowledge’ when confronted by the veterans of the only successful revolution in history. In India, it was definitely possible for the Communists, as we have argued earlier, to form a national left revolutionary mass wing of the anti-imperialist movement within the Congress movement. However, this was possible only on the basis of an open form of Marxism. A Marxism that would question the dogmatic conceptions of the ‘given theory’ in relation to the character of mass anti-imperialist movements (for which the Comintern had no previous experience or knowledge), the notions of the party, the relationship between classes and their representation by political parties, and above all the specificity of the colonial state in India. As Philip Spratt was to recount later: When we had been in jail a year or two, the significance of the new Comintern line which we had accepted so uncomprehendingly at Calcutta began to show itself. It compelled the renovated party to split the central trade union body twice within two years, and to direct fierce criticism at the Congress, whose great Civil Disobedience campaign made our activities look rather silly. It is probable that Dange, a man who thinks for himself, saw this at the time, but we were on bad terms with him for most of the jail period and at one point expelled him, so we did not hear his views. Joshi expressed some doubts about the wisdom of the Comintern policy, but I think he was the only one to do so … we found fault with what was being done but we did not direct our attack at the persons really responsible, viz., the Comintern authorities in Moscow. We still took it as axiomatic that they were right and blamed the new leaders of the Indian party … . This is again an interesting sidelight on the psychological mechanism which allows Communist authorities to persist in their claims to infallibility and to put all the biame for their errors on subordinates.15

The left-bloc which had spontaneously been forged before 1929 naturally split up, once those who proclaimed themselves to be Communists 14 15

Ibid. Philip Spratt. Blowing up India, Calcutta, 1955. pp. 52–54.

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fell into line and upheld the ‘Draft Platform of Action’. Inside Meerut jail, ‘the thirty-one accused had split into two almost equal groups, in effect the Communists and the non-Communists …’16 Similarly, the Bombay group of Communists’ attempt to organise a Bolshevik-type party, pitted them against the left and radical contacts they had inherited from the WPP days. The Civil Disobedience Movement ‘gave rise to a lot of confused thinking which resulted in factional fights’,17 till finally Ranadive and Deshpande split away from the ‘reformist’ groups, split the GKU and formed the Young Workers’ League.18 Once the Communists had separated themselves from the nonCommunist left-wing, very few doubts were expressed over the positions advocated by the Comintern. It is interesting to see that whatever differences existed in the Communist ranks at this time, they couid be essentially reduced to a debate between the votaries of the two Russian Revolutions—the model of ‘1905’ or ‘1917’. The ‘official’ group under Deshpande and Ranadive consistently advocated the fusion of the national democratic and socialist revolutions, in the columns of the Workers’ Weekly. The manifestos of the ‘official’ Communist group led by Abdul Halim in Bengal put forward a similar conception of the nature of the revolution in India. Numerous articles in the Comintern’s journals had provided this lead, by calling for the establishment of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Soviet Republic. However, the manifesto of a rival Communist Party organised by one group in Calcutta debated the validity of a ‘Permanent Revolution’ type of theory for India.19 Putting forward the goal of a ‘bourgeois democratic national revolution’ they outlined a theory of stages in which the first stage was to consist of the overthrow of imperialism and feudalism. Many people … think that Communists, being internationalists, can have nothing to do with a national revolution … some half-styled Communists, in their extreme ultra-left enthusiasm, … foster these illusions by proposing to leave aside the national democratic revolution altogether, and proceed at once to the proletarian, socialist revolution.

16

Ibid. Meerut Report, No. III. 18 HDP, File 7/20/1934 & K.W. 19 Manifesto of the CPI, Bengal. ‘To the Revolutionary Intellectuals, to the Workers and to the Peasants’, ACHI, JNU. 17

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Their own conception was of a revolution by stages but under the hegemony of the proletariat, based upon an alliance between the working class and the peasantry with the goal of establishing a ‘democratic dictatorship of the working class and peasantry’ closely modelled upon the schema of the 1905 Revolution in Russia.20 This position did not contradict the acceptance of the ‘Draft Platform’ nor did it necessitate any links with or participation in the national struggle led by the Congress. ‘The working class and the peasants will carry through this revolution. In this combination the working class will naturally take the lead.’21 Thus the formation of a Bolshevik-type Communist Party which would lead the alliance of the workers and peasants towards a ‘1905’ in India was the position put forward by this group of Communists. This position was, in retrospect, seen as the ‘right’ conception of the national revolution in India and the self-criticism made after 1934, or in historical writing by the Communists later, criticised the ‘sectarianism’ of this period precisely from this standpoint.22 Ironically, the ‘excommunicated’ M.N. Roy had expounded this conception from 1920 itself, and continued to do so even after his return to India, till he finally renounced communism altogether. The interventions made by the International Communist Movement in the form of the ‘Three Parties Letter’ (an open letter to the Indian Communists from the Communist parties of Britain, China and Germany) and the open letter from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China were intended as a corrective to the earlier sectarian positions.23 As a matter of fact, the letters of intervention only reiterated the grandiose tasks placed before the Communists in India by the Sixth Congress of the CI while criticising their inability to form the ‘right type’ of party and shatter the influence of the National Congress on the people. Instead of self-critically examining the harmful decisions of the CI in the light of the developing situation in India, the authors of the open letters based their criticism 20

Ibid. Ibid. 22 See the various articles in the National Front that discuss this question; also see G. Adhikari, Marxist Miscellany, December, 1975 and P.C. Joshi and K. Damodaran, Documented History. 23 The ‘Three Parties Letter’ was published in the Inprecor, Vol. 12, No. 22, 19 May 1932, while the letter from the Chinese Communist Party was published in the Inprecor, Vol. 13, No. 51, 24 November 1933. 21

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and suggestions on the ‘official line’ elaborated in the Colonial Theses of the Sixth Congress and the Draft Platform of Action.24 The refusal to break out of the given theoretical framework meant that the criticism of the foreign Communist parties coincided with that of the Meerut group at the level of finding fault with the ‘tactics’ and the ‘mistakes’ in implementation made by the Communist groups in India. The Three Parties Letter patronisingly dismissed the Indian Communists as blunderers who did not ‘participate’ in the mass national movement, while Wang Ming was later to ridicule them: ‘Our Indian comrades can serve as an example of how not to carry on the tactics of the antiimperialist united front.’25 The Comintern’s conceptions of a ‘united front’ were born of its need to fight and overthrow reformist control and leadership in the European workers’ movement. The tactics of ‘exposing’ the leaders while participating in joint struggles within the working class organisations had developed in that context. This tactic was now translated for the Indian Communists as follows: The Indian Communists must take the most energetic part in the Anti-Imperialist Movement … exposing openly … the treachery of the bourgeois National Congress and its ‘left-wing’. It is necessary to participate in all mass demonstrations by the Congress … constantly criticising the Congress leaders, especially the ‘left’.26 Nobody, however, explained through what mechanism the Communists could participate in the day-to-day struggle and activities of the National Congress, be in their ‘forefront’ as a matter of fact, and yet denounce the leaders of this same movement from the Congress platform. How was it possible to forge any kind of alliance or solidarity even within working class organisations when the ‘treachery’ and ‘betrayal’ of other constituent elements in the united struggle was proclaimed from the outset? The fundamental flaw in all the advice of the foreign parties was the fact that none of them—including the dominant tendency in the Chinese party—at this time had any conception of an anti-imperialist united front between various conflicting classes or sections of society, and in fact did not even begin to examine its specificity. The reluctant 24 Documents of the Twelfth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, ACHI, JNU. 25 Ibid., also see Jane Degras, The Communist International; and Overstreet and Wind Miller, Communism in India, p. 158. 26 The Three Parties’ Letter, in Inprecor, pp. 437–38.

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acknowledgement of the significance of the anti-imperialist struggle did not lead the international Communist movement nor, which was worse, the Indian Communists into a fresh appreciation of the ongoing national struggle. Nor did it produce any conception of the specificity of the tasks of the Indian left. An ‘alternative, genuinely revolutionary antiimperialist front’ implied the formation of a monolithic Communist Party to lead the anti-imperialist struggle of workers and peasants—even if it was decided to call it the Anti-Imperialist League and not a Communist Party.27 In fact the essence of the programme and political positions of the proposed league were easily reduced to the tasks of the Communist Party—‘to ruthlessly expose the National Congress’ and pose an alternative to it. The conception of an anti-imperialist united front on the other hand, was scarcely distinguishable from the struggle to form a Communist Party.28 The three Communist parties of France, Britain and Germany chided the Indian Communists for their ‘mistaken policy’ of self-isolation from the struggle for Independence.29 Having upheld the theoretical positions of the Sixth Congress Theses which identified the National Congress as a bourgeois organisation, Gandhi and Nehru as agents of the bourgeoisie and responsible for the repeated betrayals of the Indian people’s struggles against imperialism, it was dishonest to suggest that Communists should have ‘participated’ in the Congress movement while abusing it roundly—a ‘tactic’ that was likely to deceive nobody. It was the theory of bamboozlement in reverse. If the ‘bourgeois’ Congress deceived the masses while actually cooperating with imperialism, the Communists would bamoozle the Congress by tactically participating in their activities while actually weaning away its mass following. The utter superficiality of the so-called ‘correctives’ offered to the Indian Communists by fraternal parties was, not surprisingly, followed by an utterly unreal interpretation of what constituted an anti-imperialist front: There ought to be no doubt in the mind of any genuine revolutionary in India about the counter-revolutionary role of the Congress and 27

Such an Anti-Imperialist League, which was not even slightly different from a Communist controlled and led front was discussed by ‘The Manifesto of the Anti-Imperialist Conference’, 1934. ACHI, JNU. 28 See ‘Abridged Draft of Political Theses of the CC of the CPI’, Inprecor, No. 40, 1930, p. 1024; and The Communist International, Vol. VIII, No. 20, 15 November 1931. 29 The Three Parties’ Letter, Inprecor, p. 437.

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its capitalist leadership. Only the capitalists and their allies and agents can consciously join the Congress. The workers, peasants and revolutionary middle class youth must combine on an independent united front platform to organise the fight against British imperialism and one of the main tasks of the united front will be to expose and counteract the treacherous manoeuvres of the Congress and its leadership.30 The absolute failure of the international Communist movement to critically examine the Comintern’s position was naturally followed by an intensification of attacks on the National Congress, particularly its left-wing, in the Comintern press. The different positions and approach of the growing non-Communist left-wing in India were dismissed as ‘a theory of treachery’. Wrote Inprecor : ‘India is unarmed and weak they say. We have no other methods of struggle except passive resistance and non-violence. This theory on the impossibility to use revolutionary methods of struggle aims to disarm and defeat the masses.’31 An important aspect of this dismissal of the Indian non-Communist left’s different and specific assessment of Indian conditions and problems, was the identification of ‘revolutionary methods of struggle’ with violent, as against non-violent, struggle. More significantly, it was not as if the highly organised and centralised character, and the relative strength, of the colonial state in India was hidden from the CI, for as the Inprecor acknowledged: It is true that the toiling masses of India, compared to the semi-colonial countries (China etc.) will find it harder to begin the revolutionary uprising. During the first period of the national revolution, the working class will meet with a better organised opponent than the Chinese people met. In India the state power is fully concentrated in the hands of British imperialism. However, after the first stage of the revolutionary uprising it will develop quicker and in a way easier than it is, for example, in China, … though it will be harder to start in India it might be easier to carry on at the succeeding stages of the struggle….32

The fact that the ‘first stage’, starting an insurrectionary uprising was proving difficult with the Communists disintegrating rapidly in size and

30

‘Call a Conference of All Genuine Anti-Imperialists’. Pamphlet, ACHI, JNU. Inprecor, Vol. 13, No. 52, 1 December 1933, p. 1181. 32 Ibid., p. 1183. 31

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influence, did not lead to theoretical questioning. Unrestrained militancy and calls for violent insurrection substituted ‘revolutionary theory’. The villain ‘for all seasons’, and for all the frustrations encountered by the Communists, had already been cast in the Comintern’s play: ‘The National Congress and the “left” national reformists … hinder the formation of the Communist Party, hinder the proletariat from becoming an independent class force, hinder the workers and peasants to realise their interests.’33 Thus the existence of the National Congress became not only the greatest obstacle in the way of the growth of the working class and the Communist Party but the major stumbling block in the overthrow of imperialism as well. Logically, therefore, the chief priority on the Communists’ agenda was the attack on and opposition to the Congress. That the faith and confidence expressed by the workers and peasants was the product of something other than mere ‘illusions’ and a symbol of their ‘backwardness’, requiring an enquiry into the concrete nature of the Congress movement and its complexity, was a counter-revolutionary proposition as far as the CI was concerned. In spite of their theoretical silence, the group of Communists in Meerut jail, while emphasising their lack of adequate education in Marxism in all humility, did try to modify the sweeping generalisations of the CI as far as the developing Congress movement was concerned. Their attempt at suggesting a new appreciation of Indian reality, however, was castigated as the confusion and ‘incorrect views’ which they carried over from their petty-bourgeois origins and connection with the peasant masses.34 Quoting from the Meerut Reports, the Communist International attacked them: The Indian Comrades … maintain that the movement in 1930 was petty-bourgeois. Such an estimate of Gandhism is extremely harmful, hindering the process of the development of revolutionary Marxism … . The starting point in determining the class essence of Gandhism is the statement of Comrade Stalin in his report at the XVI Congress of the CPSU: ‘As for assistants (i.e., of Imperialism) of the type of Gandhi, Tsarism had shoals of them in the form of liberal conciliators of every kind, from which, however, nothing but confusion arose.35 33

Ibid. Inprecor, V. Basak. ‘The Present Situation in India’, Vol. 13, 29 September 1933, p. 947. 35 Communist International, Vol. X, No. 11, 15 June 1933. 34

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The Meerut groups’ confused presentation of their past work was attacked as sheer ignorance of Marxism on the one hand and as pettybourgeois connections on the other. As a matter of fact this was not the first time that the Comintern Press was criticising the ‘petty-bourgeois’ tendency of the Communists who had formed the WPPs before 1929. The letters of the ECCI at the end of 1928, the ‘open letters’ from the European and Chinese parties, had all made these oft-repeated points. The fact that the Meerut group reports continued to cling to the conception of a ‘national revolutionary platform’ of the WPP-type indicated a more realistic appraisal of conditions in India and embodied their experience in the Congress movement. However, their problem was that they were unable to theorise their conception and experience without going against the ‘Marxism’ and ‘Bolshevism’ purveyed by the Comintern at this time. They were accused of ‘lack of confidence in the working class and the failure to understand that the proletariat has already become the vanguard (though not yet the leader) of the masses of the people’.36 A different understanding of the historical necessity and political exigencies of the anti-imperialist struggle in India was identified with a lack of faith in the working class and a denigration of its revolutionary mission—the unspoken word was counter-revolutionary. The choice, then, was to opt out of the Communist movement ‘led’ and ‘guided’ by the Communist International or to succumb to its ‘superior’ knowledge and analysis. Every Communist must understand and realise once and for all that we cannot break the framework of the Party in defiance of the instructions of the Comintern… . In the present epoch of the world proletarian revolution and the existence of the Communist International, all disputed questions of principles should be solved within the framework of the Comintern, and in case they cannot be solved on the spot they should be handed over to the ECCI and then the decision of the Comintern should be firmly and loyally carried out by all members of the CPI. This is the ABC of Communism, and no one has the right to call himself a Bolshevik Communist if he does not understand or if he violates these principles.37 36 Inprecor, Basak, ‘The Present Situation in India’, Vol. 13, 29 September 1933, p. 947. And again: ‘… the lack of faith in the working class, leads, as a matter of fact, to a repudiation of revolution’. Basak, Ibid., Vol. 13, No. 41, 15 September 1933, p. 896. 37 Inprecor, Vol. 13, No. 43, 29 September 1933. p. 947.

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The Communist groups outside prison, led by B.T. Ranadive understood this ABC of Communism and unflinchingly implemented the logic of the Sixth Congress Theses and the Draft Platform, and inaugurated the period of ‘Bolshevisation’ of their work in India. As early as March 1930 they characterised the ‘Meerut prisoners’ as mere labour leaders and militant nationalists, not ‘genuine Communists’ at all: Genuine Communist conspirators would have appeared quite different from the Meerut prisoners… . Genuine Indian Communists would have stood for the building of a mass illegal Communist Party … would have agitated for the armed uprising of Indian toiling masses … . Genuine Indian Communists would have worked among Indian soldiers, built secret revolutionary groups among them, propagated the necessity of workers and students to arm themselves, to build secret armed groups, etc. The WPP movement, in its basic fundamental theoretical principles was a Congress Movement. It carried on its criticism on the basis of a Congress platform … took part in the Congress apparatus. Its organisational structure was based on the Congress principles … . Its programme was not a Communist programme. It reflected the petty-bourgeois socialism of the Indian petty-bourgeoisie.38

Thus, it was no longer a question of what was politically possible in concrete circumstances. It was not a question of wrong understanding and incorrect analysis but could be reduced to a list of ‘genuine’ Bolshevik or Communist principles. The lack of which, of course, could be attributed to petty-bourgeois influences. That the earlier groups of Communists, now in Meerut jail, had helped to form the WPPs and worked in the Congress movement was not to be seen as the logic of their political experiences and the compulsions of Indian reality but as indicating their non-genuineness. And geniune Communist principles boiled down in the last instant to an abiding faith in the working class. The non-formation of the Communist Party before 1930 was located not in concrete history or politics but was entirely due to the subjective failure of the earlier leadership.39 Completely falsifying the history of the Communist groups after 1930, which showed a rapid decline of their influence, it was claimed that: ‘the 38

Workers’ Weekly, No. 8, 20 March 1930. pp. 1–2. Inprecor, Vol. 13, No. 43, 29 September 1933, p. 948; No. 52, 1 December 1933, pp. 1183–84. 39

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influence of the Communist Party and belief in the party and its platform has begun to grow rapidly. This has become possible on the basis of the struggle of the proletarian vanguard especially during 1931.’40 However, by 1934, it was impossible to deny that the major struggle in India since 1930 was not of the proletarian vanguard but of the Civil Disobedience campaign led by the National Congress. And the total disintegration and ghetto-like existence of the Communists had to be admitted. This state of affairs was sought to be explained, by the Comintern in terms of the subjective failure of the Communist leadership, its ‘inexperience’, and lack of Marxist–Leninist training.41 A high degree of intellectual deception was involved in such an explanation. The ‘genuine’ Communist Party had been formed and had adopted ‘Bolshevik principles’, which was the only way to dispel the ‘illusions fostered among people by the bourgeoisie’ (read National Congress). The ‘historically necessary’ rupture with the left-wing of the Congress-led National Front had been accomplished. Why then should the Communists be ‘severed to no small extent from the Mass Independence Movement’ and become ‘isolated from the toiling masses’? The subjective failure of ‘inexperienced’ comrades was nonchalantly presented as the reason. Not even a suspicion of doubt was permitted to be cast upon the ‘political line’ of the Comintern.42 The actual political experiences of the Communists in the course of implementing the policy of ‘exposure’ through ‘participation’ and ‘united struggle’, however, brought the inherent contradiction of such an attempt to the surface. For instance, the AH Maharashtra Political Conference in October, 1933, showed the impossibility of ‘exposing’ the ‘bourgeois reformists’ and denouncing them as ‘agents of imperialism’ while trying to ‘participate’ in their political activities and reaching out to the masses behind them by ‘utilising’ their political platform. The president of the Congress hit out against such ‘tactics’ and declared: ‘If you call us agents of imperialism, I call you agents of Moscow.’43 The Communists were not permitted to move any amendments to the resolutions passed at this conference and were not allowed to address the audience from 40

Inprecor, ‘The Indian Labour Movement’, Vol. 13, No. 22. 19 May 1933, p. 490; The Communist International, Vol. VIII, No. 17, 1 October 1931. 41 Inprecor, Vol. 14, No. 10, 10 February 1934, pp. 277–78. 42 Ibid. 43 Indian Front, No. 9, 1 December 1935.

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its platform. Similarly, the All-India Textile Strike of 1934 collapsed as a result of such tactics without affording the Communists any political advantage, and in fact destroyed the unity of working class actions in the process. Significantly; their allies in this struggle were the ‘Royists’ who had won the support of almost all the unions formerly influenced by the Communists and were not constitutional trade unionists of the N.M. Joshi-type with whom the Communists had allied in the textile strike of 1928.44 The Communists’ utilisation of this ‘united front’ with the Royists to push their ‘line’ of ‘intensification of the struggle’ and the ‘transformation into the political general strike’ regardless of the programme for action jointly worked out earlier, and their ‘exposure’ of the Royist Girni Kamgar Union as ‘a police union’, were tactics designed to abort the strike movement.45 The strike collapsed as a result of the split in the trade union leadership, and not a single demand of the workers was accepted despite the fact that in Bombay there was ‘virtually a general strike in progress’, while simultaneous strikes had broken out in Sholapur, Nagpur, Cawnpore and Delhi.46 Thus, the struggle to form the Communist Party during this period was only a part of the broader process of the ‘Bolshevication’ of the Indian Communists. The process, in the main, involved an emulation of a certain kind of ‘model political culture’ which was understood as a ‘code’ or set of principles pertaining to organisational functioning and methods of conducting political work. To be a ‘genuine Communist’ one had to uphold these principles and methods in day to day struggles. Even if the living experience of political work constantly challenged these principles and methods, the ‘given fundamentals’ which defined

44

The ‘Joint Council of Action’ consisted predominantly of Royists or supporters of the Roy group, including Harihar Nath Shastri, R.S. Ruikar, A.A. Alwe, Maniben Kara and V.B. Karnik. The Communists were represented by B.T. Ranadive and K.N. Joglekar. Williamson, India and Communism, Chapter 18. 45 A self-critical account of the strike was published in The Communist, Vol. I, No. 3, April 1935. 46 Williamson, India and Communism. As the Bombay Chronicle of 13 June 1934 reported, the Council of Action had been appointed to organise the strike for demands clearly laid down by the All-India Textile Workers Conference. ‘But the seeds of destruction were sown by the Communist section of the Joint Strike Committee …. so long as they kept wiihin the united front of action there was no harm. But after extremist attacks on the others as “reformists” the Council broke up.’ HDP. File 7/II/1934.

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a ‘genuine Communist’ could not be questioned, examined or revised as ‘revisionism’ itself was one of their chief enemies. The accumulated experiences of political activity could never be discussed on the terrain of theory but could only be taken into consideration for ‘tactical adjustments’. Such ‘tactical adjustments’ born of the compulsions of reality were bound to result in pragmatic politics which ran alongside the verbalisation of ‘given theory’, i.e., dogmatism. Thus were born the parallel phenomena of ‘Revisionism and Dogmatism’ in the Indian Communist Movement.47 Later day historical writing by the Communists criticises the period 1929–1934 as being a ‘sectarian phase’ in their movement implying, thereby, criticism only at a ‘tactical’ level and not of the entire theoretical framework which informed their politics and organisational functioning.48 We, on the other hand, have focused our critique on the underlying principles of their theoretical framework and on how their politics followed therefrom. A malaise at such a fundamental level produced ‘sectarianism’ not in a simple, tactical sense but, to borrow a phrase from Georgi Dimitrov, as a ‘deep-seated vice’.49

47 E.M.S. Namboodripad, Revisionism and Dogmatism in the Indian Communist Movement, Delhi, 1963. Namboodripad was the first to point out this ‘parallel phenomenon’ though he did not go to its historical roots. 48 See Adhikari, Documents, Vol. III C, 1928; also P.C. Joshi and K. Damodaran, Documented History, Vol. II, 1935–39, ACHI, JNU. 49 Georgi Dimitrov, quoted in Ernst Fischer, An Opposing Man, London, 1974, p. 268.

Chapter 14 M.N. Roy, Indian Communists and the Third International

ROY AND THE CI

An account of the deterioration of Roy’s relationship with the CI, the charges and counter-charges they exchanged, and the final expulsion of Roy from the CI by the Tenth Plenum of the ECCI in September 1929, is available to us in already published work so as to make a narrative account of this aspect unnecessary.1 Roy continued writing for the International Communist Press till March 1929, but after his expulsion joined the German opposition led by Thalheimer and Brandler and contributed articles to their publications. Whether Roy’s expulsion from the CI was, as he himself alleged, due to ‘some internal intrigue, … the desire of the Communist Party of Great Britain to establish its protectorate over the Indian Communist Movement …’, or because of ‘the internal struggle of the Russian 1

J.P. Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism, has focused upon M.N. Roy’s political career and is an excellent source of information on Roy’s writings and Comintern documents as well between 1920 and 1939. A more extensive compilation of documentary extracts and a broad survey of the history of the Communist movement in India is available in Overstreet and Windmiller, Communism in India. Both these studies, however, lack conceptual frameworks and theoretical arguments.

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Communist Party’2 does not concern us here. However, the issue over which Roy was attacked and ridiculed, the theory of ‘decolonisation’, overshadowed all other criticism at the Sixth Congress of the CI and merits some discussion here.3 The essence of Roy’s theory, ‘after analysing the economic conditions of the country and giving facts marking the new tendencies of post-war colonial exploitation’, was, that imperialism had inaugurated a new policy of ‘gradual “decolonisation” of India, which will be allowed eventually to evolve out of the state of “dependency” to “Dominion Status”. The Indian bourgeoisie, instead of being kept down as a potential rival, will be granted partnership in the economic development of the country under the hegemony of imperialist finance.’4 In terms of political positions this implied: Therefore, the process of ‘decolonisation’ is parallel to the process of ‘de-revolutionisation of the nationalist bourgeoisie’ … not only from the point of view of the internal conditions of India, but also from the point of view of present world conditions, the Indian bourgeoisie are rallied on the side of counter-revolution. They cannot and do not lead or participate in the struggle for national freedom (completely outside the British Empire) … . The Indian revolution must still remain a programme of bourgeois democracy, but it is no longer a bourgeois revolution because it can and will succeed only by breaking the bound of capitalist society.5

Soon after the Sixth Congress of the CI, at which he was not present, Roy had written an article whole-heartedly supporting the line adopted by this Congress. His logical argument was that the ‘correct decisions’ taken at this Congress could have been arrived at only on the basis of his ‘decolonisation’ theory.6 Roy was equally quick to point out 2

M.N. Roy and V.B. Karnik, Our Differences, Calcutta, 1938. See the Preface. An extensive account of the debate can be found in Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism; Jane Degras, The Communist International, Vol. II, 1923–28; Sobhanlal Dutta Gupta, Comintern India and the Colonial Question, 1920–37, Calcutta, 1980. G. Adhikari, Documents, Vol. III-C. 4 My Crime, a statement issued by M.N. Roy, discussing his quarrel with the CI. Published by the Young Socialist League, Poona, 1935, pp. 14–197. ACHI, JNU. Also see Our Differences, p. 25. 5 Ibid. 6 M.N. Roy, ‘On the Indian Situation in the World Congress’. G. Adhikari, Documents, Vol. III-C, pp. 630–33. 3

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the contradiction in the Comintern’s position that British imperialism had increased its colonial oppression of the Indian bourgeoisie followed by the assertion that it was inconceivable that the (Indian) bourgeoisie would play a revolutionary role for any length of time. The debate on ‘decolonisation’, that is, the ‘industrialisation’ of India and the assessment of British economic policy in the colony, at the Sixth Congress, was a matter for empirical verification and statistical proof. Various delegates intervening in the debate marshalled facts and figures to substantiate their arguments. It is fully acknowledged now that M.N. Roy was not the only person who advanced the ‘industrialisation thesis’ and that the theory was shared by many others including R.P. Dutt. In fact the two main exponents of the thesis were Roy and R.P. Dutt. At the Sixth Congress the British delegation directed a vigorous attack on Kuusinen’s description of India as an ‘agrarian hinterland’ of Britain and referred to the hue and cry on ‘decolonisation’ as ‘a famous bogey’.7 What must be emphasised in the context of the debate on ‘decolonisation’ in the CI is that for both factions the changes in British economic policy were to be assessed and their political implications gauged as results of purely economic criteria. The existence of a mass national movement that confronted imperialism, was left out of the purview of all analysis and judgements made at the Sixth Congress. All the participants in the debate shared the assumption—that as nationalsim was a bourgeois ideology, the national movement in India was a movement of the bourgeoisie and that this bourgeoisie was unwilling and unable to overthrow imperialism, changes therefore in the economic policy of imperialism had to be discovered in the domain of trade figures and statistics on industrialisation. What is of concern to our work, however, is not the nuances or subtle differences that emerged in economic analysis, but the political positions that were derived from it, or in spite of it. In the official History of the CPI the Sixth Congress’ debate is treated basically as an offshoot of the economic issue, namely, the idea of industrialisation of colonies. The close similarity in the political positions of M.N. Roy and the Comintern, with both emphasising the proletariat’s leading role and the compromising character of the bourgeoisie in India 7

G. Adhikari, in Marxist Miscellany; M.N. Roy, India in Transition; and R.P. Dutt, Modern India. Sobhanlal Dutta Gupta, Comintern India, p. 127.

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is ignored. In fact, they are counterposed by stressing the fact that the Comintern rejected the economic analysis of ‘industrialisation’ in the colonies made by M.N. Roy, viz., the famous theses on ‘decolonisation’.8 In actuality, the positions of the CI were hopelessly contradictory. At the level of economic analysis, Varga’s thesis was reproduced in a report on India issued by the Comintern in 1928, while its political characterisation of the Indian bourgeoisie was identical to Roy’s formulations. While emphasising a renewal of contradictions between imperialism and the colonial bourgeoisie, it simultaneously wrote off the entire Indian bourgeoisie as a counter-revolutionary force.9 Moreover, even when Stalin differentiated between the ‘two wings’ of the bourgeoisie maintaining that only one section had gone over to imperialism completely and when his ‘analysis’ is counterposed to that of Roy’s, for whom the whole class had become counter-revolutionary, it must be emphasised that the resulting political positions were hardly subtle or different. In fact, both types of ‘analysis’ produced identical attitudes to the Indian National Movement which was considered synonymous with the Indian bourgeoisie.10 Economic analysis was, supposedly, the raison d’être of political conclusions and if the latter were identical in substance and effect, the emphasis on nuances of economic policy was mere sophistry. For Marxists, economic analysis is the methodology employed to arrive at correct political decisions—and it becomes necessary to explain how and why similar political conclusions could be produced by sharply different economic analyses. This phenomenon, in fact, precisely shows how false was the conception of deriving politics from economic analysis in a reductionist manner. The political positions of M.N. Roy and the Communist International overlapped. The CI made self-contradictory formulations and employed tortuous logic to justify itself against all criticism. At the Sixth Congress it was Kuusinen who declared that imperialism could not be overthrown unless the bourgeois–democratic revolution passed over into the socialist revolution.11 This was precisely Roy’s position: ‘Because of the fact that 8 Adhikari, Documents, Vol. III-C, 1928; also see P.C. Joshi and K. Damodaran, Documented History. 9 The Communist International between the Fifth and the Sixth World Congresses: 1924–28, London, 1928, ACHI, JNU. 10 Adhikari, Documents, Vol. II, pp. 551–55; Vol. III-C, 1928, p. 628. 11 Degras, The Communist International, p. 529.

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the proletariat is the only class that can radically solve all the problems of the Indian national revolution, this is bound to outgrow the bounds of bourgeois revolution.’12 It would be ridiculous to maintain that Roy’s dismissal of the Indian bourgeoisie as a counter-revolutionary class was very different from the Colonial Theses formulation that, though ‘the bourgeois national movement’s real physiognomy has not yet been exposed in the eyes of the masses, the national bourgeoisie are not significant as a force in the struggle against imperialism’.13 Logically, therefore, the Communists’ immediate and most urgent task was ‘to expose’ the movement’s ‘real physiognomy’ and its ‘sabotage’ of the national struggle. It was not long thereafter that the Tenth Plenum of the ECCI and the ‘Open Letter from the Young Communist International’ advised: ‘Sever your contact with the National Congress and the League of Independence, disclose their falseness and treachery. Show them up for what they are, as assistants of British Imperialism.’14 M.N. Roy’s political positions around the Sixth Congress have generally been castigated as ‘ultra-left’ in Communist historiography, completely ignoring the fact that the Comintern’s positions were, as much if not more, extreme left. Especially, after the Tenth Plenum which expelled Roy, the inexorable logic of the CI’s formulations was that of ‘permanent revolution’ or the ‘fusion’ of the national and socialist revolutions.15 Ironically, the very formation of a Communist Party in India was still in the crucible. None in the CI at that time would have questioned the premise that the nationalist movement had to be led by the working class and the Communist Party. It was not surprising therefore that Roy should feel that his understanding of political tasks was identical with the Comintern’s, even though his economic analysis was rejected. The charge that M.N. Roy was a political opportunist rather than a ‘renegade’ or a ‘revisionist’ as the Comintern branded him later, would appear to be more convincing. His immediate response to the Sixth Congress Theses was to support it fully and express his complete agreement 12

Adhikari, Documents, Vol. III-C, p. 601. Degras, The Communist International, p. 540. 14 Inprecor, Vol. 9, No. 46, 4 September 1929, p. 975; Open Letter from Young Communist International, Photocopy, ACHI, JNU. 15 Adhikari, Documents, Vols. II and III; Sobhanlal Dutta Gupta, Comintern India; A.M. Dyakov and G.Z. Sorkin, quoted in Sobhanlal Dutta Gupta, p. 23. 13

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with Kuusinen. Fighting back against Kuusinen’s charge that he had developed a ‘perverse love for the nationalist bourgeoisie’ Roy vehemently reminded the Comintern: My entire past record ever since the Second Congress of the CI, 1920, gives lie (sic) to the assertion made by Kuusinen. In the Second Congress I disagreed with Lenin about the role of the bourgeoisie in the colonial revolutionary movement. My views on the question are recorded in the theses adopted by the Second Congress as supplementary to those drafted by Lenin.16

After his expulsion from the CI in 1929, however, Roy made a complete volte face and repudiated his own former agreement with the Sixth Congress: I disagree with all the resolutions of the Sixth Congress, not only with that on the Indian question. The mistaken line pursued in India is but a small part of the huge blunder … . The International is in a crisis which is manifested by the composition and exercise of its leadership.17

Roy denounced the resolutions of the Sixth Congress as ‘the catastrophic, ultra-left, sectarian, Trotskyist line’, and attacked the CI’s attitude of ‘touch not’ the infectious petty-bourgeoisie: ‘The nationalist bourgeoisie cannot be effectively exposed in their compromising role by simply shouting stupid, provocative slogans.’ The CI line, Roy charged, was the policy of ‘isolating ourselves on the olympian heights of sectarianism’ which would drive the petty-bourgeois masses in the direction of fascism.18 Roy now emphasised the ‘tragic fact’ that the CI advised the young, inexperienced Communists in India to ‘withdraw into their very small shell’, and not have anything to do with the nationalist organisations. Consequently, Roy charged the CI with sectarianism and with abandoning the ‘Leninist Policy of United Front’.19 Roy’s use of the term ‘sectarianism’ here was far more appropriate than the latter day indictment of the Communists as sectarian by the CI. For sectarianism implies the inability to practise flexible ‘tactics’ within a given political framework, 16

Roy, My Crime. Meerut Conspiracy Case: Prosecution Exhibits, p. 22. NAI, Photocopy Sheet, Nos. 3996 and 3997, ACHI, JNU. 18 Roy, My Crime. 19 Ibid. 17

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which is what Roy was accusing the CI of doing, for he was in complete agreement with the framework itself. While at the time the CI was branding the Indian Communists as sectarian (1935), it had already given up its earlier political line of ‘class versus class’ and enjoined upon them a united front which implicitly included the national bourgeoisie. The CI was sectarian for Roy not because he differed from it in its analysis of different classes or its understanding of the Indian National Movement but because it pursued the extreme positions of a line without the necessary tactical cleverness. Clearly, his criticism of the Sixth Congress was on the same plane of ‘tactics’ as that of the comrades in Meerut jail and the later day interventions by the three Communist parties. The fact which needs to be emphasised, above all, in discussing the differences or similarities between Roy and the CI is that the unity of their respective political positions and formulations was established preeminently by their common assumption that the Congress-led Indian National Movement was identical to the Indian bourgeoisie. Their common obsession with characterising the role of the bourgeoisie in the national revolution was rooted in this assumption, for any connection with the National Congress was, per se, a connection with the Indian bourgeoisie and thus could only be a temporary tactic. Unwittingly, the Communists gave the credit and the prestige on the Congress-led national movement to the bourgeoisie when, actually, the Indian bourgeoisie could not be said to have ever led or ever been the driving force in the Indian National Movement. TWO PARADIGMS OF THE LEFT IN THE NATIONAL MOVEMENT

From the outset of his political career, the premises of M.N. Roy’s supplementary Colonial Theses (1920) were: (a) the National Congress was an organisation of the Indian bourgeoisie, and (b) there existed two parallel national movements, independent of each other in India, one the revolutionary mass movement and the other bourgeois reactionary. Roy consistently projected the perspective of ‘Permanent Revolution’, or the fusion of the national and socialist revolutions into one. This position, which was the substance of Roy’s supplementary draft theses, had been criticised and amended by Lenin. As a result, Roy toned down his perspective of permanent revolution to the Russian ‘1905’ perspective of establishing a democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants. Naturally, he felt that he was in line with Lenin’s views thereafter, though,

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Lenin’s positions in the Russian Revolution were simply transplanted to the Indian context and had no relation to any analysis of Indian conditions. It was from this position that he began criticising the theses of the Sixth Congress and the Draft Platform of the Indian Communists as ultra-left and sectarian—as putting forward the goal of fusion of the national and socialist revolutions instead of the ‘1905’ model of democratic dictatorship of the working class and peasantry.20 As we have shown earlier, the position of the ‘unofficially’ formed Communist Party in Bengal, which was probably influenced by Roy or his followers, also advocated the perspective of ‘1905’ as opposed to that of permanent revolution, that is, fusion of two revolutions theory, that was being pursued by the Comintern and the ‘official’ Communist group. One fact needs to be emphasised here—both the ‘1905’ and ‘1917’ models could emerge from the conception of making a Leninist bourgeois–democratic revolution of Russian variety. There were, thus, two methods, within the same paradigm, which Communists could choose to work with if they reduced the antiimperialist national struggle to a bourgeois–democratic revolution which had to be made and led by the working class and its party, the Communist Party. The first was the method of providing an alternative movement and leadership wholly separate from the existing Congress-led movement. The second was the tactical method of conversion of the existing Congress movement. The ‘conversion model’ must not be confused with the paradigm of transformation, which Nehru’s conceptions and positions amounted to, though they overlapped by virtue of positing working within the same Congress movement and organisation and thus could appear similar. In effect, the Communist experiment of the WPP period and the political efforts of Roy during 1930–31 fall within the conversion model, which postulated a ‘taking over’ of the Congress organisation by the Communists under the leadership and control of the CPI. A ‘tactical’ participation in the Congress-led movement, penetration of its organisational ranks and easing out of its existing leadership was its rationale. It was to be a manoeuvre rather than a process of growth and organic development towards a socialist perspective, which was the basic premise of a process of transformation. The latter was Nehru’s project and necessarily an open-ended one in which a coalition of ideological 20

Roy and Karnik, Our Differences.

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groupings in a state of shifting equilibrium was envisaged, and the exclusive leadership of Socialists and Communists was not posited in advance or at the beginning of the process. This was the reason that led both the Comintern and the Indian Communists to charge Nehru with betraying the left at crucial moments, when a manoeuvre was to be attempted, and he was attacked for staying on with Gandhi and the notion of a united Congress without trying to split it. M.N. ROY AND THE COMMUNISTS IN INDIA 1930–31

Roy arrived in India in December 1930 and in July 1931 he was arrested and convicted under the old charges of the Kanpur Conspiracy Case of 1924. In this brief period of seven months Roy’s political successes were remarkable. There is no doubt that during the seven months … Roy made a strong impact on trade-unionism and radical politics. Working underground, with the police in vigorous pursuit, he succeeded in getting a major section of the trade-union movement to abandon ultra-leftism and to adopt a more moderate policy under his leadership.21

The Intelligence Bureau described some of Roy’s writings at this time as ‘a shrewd appreciation of things as they really were’, and to his work in general paid this left-handed tribute: His doctrines gained many adherents in Bombay and the United Provinces, and at a later date also in Calcutta and its environs. He made serious and by no means unsuccessful endeavours to impregnate the Congress with his views and was received, and well received, by several of the Congress leaders in different parts of India.

Intelligence was convinced that Roy’s ‘exhortations to ‘‘eschew the disastrous ultra-left policy’’ were calculated in the end to win over many more adherents to Communism than Deshpande’s vaporous thunderings could ever have done’. ‘His conviction’, Williamson concluded, ‘removed from the political arena a dangerous enemy … and struck another blow at Indian Communism generally.’22 21 22

P.C. Joshi and K. Damodaran, Documented History. Williamson, India and Communism, pp. 164, 168.

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The dissemination of Roy’s views, … very quickly had its effect … and in an incredibly short space of time Roy’s two lieutenants advanced … from one vantage point to another, from the Congress in Bombay through the Youth League to the Girni Kamgar Union, which they captured early in 1931 to the extreme discomfiture of S.V. Deshpande, the head of the ‘official’ Communist Party.

Critical of the Communists who ‘had no connection with the villages’ despite advocating what he thought was a ‘generally correct agrarian programme’, Roy toured the United Provinces with Jawaharlal Nehru in March 1931 and, at the latter’s invitation, attended the Karachi session of the Indian National Congress.23 The Director of Intelligence argued that it was the ‘spade-work’ put in by Roy that decided Nehru to launch his ‘no-tax’ campaign at the end of November 1931: ‘it is known that he (Roy) was behind the “Central Peasants League” which was working on lines parallel to those of the Congress and that the League’s efforts were attended with a considerable measure of success in certain parts of the province.’24 Roy’s co-workers, ‘whose number had by that time been considerably augmented’, attended the AITUC session in July 1931 at Calcutta and ‘secured the valuable support of Subhash Chandra Bose, the President’, and the new general secretary was elected ‘by Roy’s majority group’. Roy’s arrest at this point of time removed him from the scene, but the Intelligence report noted that by the end of 1933, Roy’s followers had consolidated their position in the AITUC and had secured the affiliation to it of some forty labour organisations of various strengths. They had also set up machinery in three provinces for obtaining a modicum of peasant support. This was seen by Williamson as a result of Roy’s building up contacts with radical and left Congressmen—‘luring Jawaharlal Nehru … and others of his way of thinking into the fold.’25 Roy’s field of operation on the trade unions side covered the cities of Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Nagpur, while inroads had been made in Assam, the United Provinces, Bihar and Orissa and also in several of the smaller towns in Bombay and the Central Provinces. 23

Ibid., Chapter 17. Ibid. 25 Ibid. 24

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The support which they had obtained included that of the labour unions connected with three important railways, while a fourth, though not officially affiliated (owing mainly to financial considerations), was nevertheless a definite supporter of Kandalkar’s organisation and actually selected Ruikar to represent it at the annual session in Cawnpore.26

The Communists in Meerut jail also acknowledged the rapid successes accruing to the ‘Royists’—deploring the fact that practically all the unions over which they had formerly held control had passed into their hands. Both Kandalkar and Ruikar had been won over by Roy, as was Mukanda Lai Sircar. Roy pleaded for working class trade union solidarity and stated that the AITUC ought not to be bound by any shade of political opinion, allowing its members the freedom to hold any political view. For an insight into the reasons for Roy’s impact on trade unionism and radical politics in this period the theoretico-political basis of his functioning must be examined. Having opposed, for long years, any connection with the ‘bourgeois National Congress’ in India, Roy now set out to work with and within it. Many Communists were later to see Roy’s efforts at this time as ‘a much more realistic policy than the one the Comintern had promulgated’.27 After his expulsion from the CI, Roy’s first manifesto to the ‘Revolutionary Vanguard of the Toiling Masses of India’ declared: ‘In India the way to Communism lies through the National Revolution.’ ‘To this end’, it continued, the CPI ‘must work through the national mass organisations—the National Congress, Youth League, students organisations and volunteer corps’.28 And even before Roy’s arrival in India, his co-workers like Tayab Shaikh had got in touch with radical left Congressmen like Yusuf Meherally, C.G. Shah and V.B. Karnik to further the aim of gaining influence in the Congress.29 Further, Roy’s manifesto castigated the ‘official Communist Party’ for drifting further and further away from the ideals of Lenin and for abandoning the ‘Leninist policy of a united front’.

26

Ibid. P.C. Joshi and K. Damodaran, Documented History. 28 Roy, India and Communism, p. 163. 29 P.C. Joshi and K. Damodaran, Documented History. Meherally’s journal, The Vanguard, published a lengthy article entitled ‘The Lessons of the Lahore Congress’ under the signature of Tayab Shaik and many other Royists. See Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism, p. 171. 27

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Much confusion has been generated in historical studies by Roy’s political formulations of this time. While the general view is to regard his position in 1930 as a Veritable somersault, it has also been argued that Roy had ‘evolved’ and ‘modified’ his views.30 What did Roy understand and mean by a ‘Leninist policy of United Front’? The Communist International had clearly moved closer to Roy’s characterisation of the Indian bourgeoisie and its counter-revolutionary role in the national struggle as we have seen in the previous section. Was Roy then abandoning his self-acknowledged position on the Indian bourgeoisie by 1930, a position, he was quick to point out, he had held since 1920 and in fact had been the cause of his chief disagreement with Lenin? On the contrary, before, during and after the Sixth Congress of the CI, Roy consistently upheld his analysis of the class character of the Indian bourgeoisie, and the ‘decolonisation’ theory was the most extreme presentation of this position. Roy’s attack on the CI and Communists in India at this time was against their goal of making an ‘Indian October’ and establishing a Soviet State which, he said, could only be ‘the organ of the dictatorship of the proletariat’.31 On his part, he posited the goal of making a ‘1905’ revolution and his ‘Leninist United Front’ implied an alliance of the working class, peasantry and urban petty-bourgeoisie under proletarian hegemony. The ‘democratic dictatorship of the working class and peasantry’ à la Russia was rebaptised in the Indian context as the ‘revolutionary democratic state based upon the oppressed classes’.32 In that case why then did Roy shift to a position of working within the Indian National Congress which he had unilaterally and consistently characterised as a bourgeois organisation? This question assumes special significance at this juncture when, after its Sixth Congress, the CI had adopted precisely his characterisation of the Indian National Congress. It is here that the major difference between the CI and its Communist following in India and Roy emerged, for, what has been termed Roy’s far more ‘realistic’ policy was actually based upon a very different appreciation 30 P.C. Joshi and K. Damodaran. Documented History. They write: ‘Thus, ironically, where in the past he (Roy) had advocated that the CPI capture control of the nationalist movement by working outside the Congress, he now was trying to regain control of the Communist movement by working within the Congress.’ Also see Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism. 31 Roy’s ‘Manifesto’ quoted in India and Communism. 32 Roy, Our Differences. Also see, Adhikari, Documents, Vol. III-C, 1928, p. 593.

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of the Congress-led national movement than the one he had presented to the CI in the 1920s. The heart of Roy’s Theses in 1920 had been the existence of two parallel movements of nationalism in India—one, a bourgeois movement that was led by the Congress, and the other, the revolutionary movement of the masses which, however, lacked an effective leadership and which Communists had to capture. Now, Roy viewed the Congress-led national movement as ‘an essentially revolutionary movement for national independence’ which was under ‘the leadership of the bourgeoisie’. The National Congress, he now saw, was ‘overwhelmingly petty-bourgeois in composition and outlook’, while its right-wing leadership represented the ‘bourgeois bloc’ which stood ‘outside the Congress (and) for all practical purposes, this bloc of the big bourgeois political groups has become a rival of the National Congress’.33 Roy, now distinguished between the notion of a bourgeois party and a mass national movement under the control of a bourgeois leadership observing that ‘the petty-bourgeois nationalist masses still swear allegiance to the Congress which, however, is not an organised party and is not the same as the Congress (ex-swaraj) party’.34 The characterisation of the Indian National Congress as a bourgeois and petty-bourgeois organisation was obviously no longer valid once Roy began to see that it was ‘a mass nationalist movement and as such was not, “objectively” the party of any particular class’.35 This appreciation of the Indian National Congress as a ‘mass nationalist movement’ and not a bourgeois party was inspired by Roy’s observation of the process of radicalisation of the Congress movement that had occurred over the years 1927–29. He noted the emergence of ‘more or less revolutionary left-wing nationalist bodies’ such as the ‘Political Sufferers’ League, Congress Karmi Sangha, Indian Republican Association, All-India Volunteers’ Corps and Indian Republican Army and, most importantly, ‘the revolutionary development of the national movement (which) finds the most mature expression in the Workers and Peasants Party’. With the formation of the Independence League under Nehru, Roy was to add this organisation to his list of left-wing organisations.36

33

Roy’s ‘Manifesto’ in India and Communism; Adhikari, Documents, Vol. III-C, p. 672. Ibid., p. 591. Emphasis mine. 35 Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism. Quoting Roy’s reply to Thalheimer, p. 174. 36 Adhikari, Documents, Vol. III-C, pp. 59–92, 674. 34

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Significantly, however, Roy did not see this growing left-wing in the Congress as an ideological current and political tendency which based itself on a consistent demand for non-constitutional and mass politics. Instead, he viewed it as an expression of class antagonism between the bourgeois leadership and the petty-bourgeois nationalist masses. He saw the Indian National Congress as ‘split into two distinct factions, one representing the big bourgeoisie and the other the petty-bourgeoisie’ resulting from ‘the process of class differentiation’ in the nationalist movement.37 It was certainly true that the process of class differentiation was constantly at work in society and was bound to be reflected in the national movement which comprised all sections of society. Nonetheless, this reductionist method, of equating and deriving ideological differences in the National Congress with and from class differentiation in society, was inherently faulty. How could the fact of the entire Congress leadership uniting and unanimously backing Gandhi’s launching of the Civil Disobedience Movement be squared with the bourgeois and therefore counterrevolutionary class character of the leadership as against the revolutionary petty-bourgeoisie? The growing left-wing in the national movement represented, said Roy, ‘the tendency of the petty-bourgeois masses to find forms of activities other than parliamentarian and constitutional agitation advocated by the bourgeois nationalist parties’, and consequently, ‘the petty-bourgeois nationalist masses nominally under the banner of the Congress, have been, of late, giving vent to their opposition to the compromising politics of the bourgeois nationalist parties, including the swaraj Party’.38 The successive shifts of almost the entire existing leadership of the National Congress from constitutional to non-constitutional politics was to historically question any such conception of the Congress leadership being only constitutional and therefore purely representative of bourgeois interest. Moreover, the determinism inherent in assigning a bourgeois class character to those who advocated constitutional practice and a petty-bourgeois class character to those who stood for initiating a mass movement at a particular moment in time, would logically lead to Motilal Nehru being bourgeois, Jawaharlal being petty-bourgeois and Gandhi being sometimes one or the other. Obviously, their leadership could be correctly comprehended only in ideological terms and not as 37 38

Ibid., pp. 671–72. Adhikari, Documents, Vol. III-C, p. 591.

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mechanical representations of different classes in society. The fact was that even the mass movements initiated by the chief leaders of the Congress were described as ‘constitutional struggles’ by the Communists, the CI and M.N. Roy. This was due to their conviction that any acceptance of concessions granted by the government or any negotiation with it was a betrayal of the national movement, while the observance of ‘non-violence’ was intrinsically reactionary and counter-revolutionary. Despite the theoretical problems inherent in Roy’s class analysis of the Indian National Congress, the fact that he acknowledged the ‘overwhelming’ presence of the petty-bourgeoisie in its ranks led him to advocate the necessity of working within it, for an alliance with the pettybourgeois masses was an integral part of his conception of the ‘united front’. And as Roy pointed out, ‘the resolution of the Sixth Congress, in principle, does not reject such a united front but practically does so by prohibiting the Communists to enter into any multi-class party’.39 Thus, the different appraisals of the Indian National Congress produced the crucial disagreement between Roy and the Communists (led by the CI) on the question of ‘the party’ at this time. As far as the nature of class alliances—the ‘united front’ of workers, peasants and pettybourgeoisie—and the goal of the national revolution to overthrow foreign imperialism and the native bourgeoisie simultaneously were concerned, there was nothing to distinguish Roy from the CI or its Communist following in India. That it was difficult for the Communists to distinguish themselves from Roy (who was, largely, their theoretical teacher from the outset) becomes clear from Adhikari’s confession that: ‘I didn’t understand anything about Roy’s position—decolonisation and quarrel with the International—despite reading all the documents. I had the impression he was with the Third CI so I came to India and corresponded (with him) and said I was working with him.’40 However, the disagreement on the question of ‘the party’ also was partial and, in Roy’s view, ‘tactical’, and thus the formulations of Roy and the Indian Communists on this issue were not mutually exclusive. ‘The historic task of the proletariat’ to ‘lead’ the national revolution and to form its own class party, the Communist Party, was equally the basic assumptions of Roy as of the Communists at this time. As he wrote: ‘The 39 40

Roy and Karnik, Our Differences, p. 41. G. Adhikari, Oral History Transcript, Acc. 378, NMML.

M.N. Roy, Indian Communists and the Third International 381

Communist Party is an essential factor in the national revolution. It must act as a lever of the whole situation.’ And again: The basic task of the Communist Party is to organise itself as the political organ of the proletariat closely connected and consciously supported by the toiling masses. The Communist Party will be able to discharge its leading role in the national revolution only when it has accomplished the basic task.41

However, to intervene into the existing situation and acquire the leadership of the national revolution as well as to foster their own growth, the Communists had to, in Roy’s reckoning, provide leadership to the petty-bourgeois masses. This could not be accomplished immediately through the instrument of a Communist Party but through the formation of a transitional organ such as the National Revolutionary Party. This was a reassertion of his interpretation of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party, though, to meet the old charge that he was substituting the WPP for the Communist Party, he clarified it by saying: The workers and peasants party cannot be the substitute for the Communist Party. As the driving force of the revolution the proletariat must have its own party; but still there is ample room for a revolutionary nationalist party … . In the present Indian conditions the proletariat, operating through the Communist Party, must take the initiative to hasten the rise of national revolutionary mass party.42

Two things were apparent in this formulation: first, that Roy was emphatic about concrete Indian conditions requiring a broader mass organisation than the Communist Party was likely to be at the outset; and second, the Communist Party’s control over this mass organisation had to be successfully maintained and guaranteed if the very purpose of forming it in the first place was not to be defeated. The same old logical bind that had emerged in the discussions around forming a WPP re-emerges: If the growth and political effectiveness of the Communist Party required the necessary mediation of a National 41

See for example, Roy’s ‘Draft Resolution on the Indian Question’ and ‘On the Indian Question in the Sixth World Congress’, in Adhikari, Documents, Vol. III-C, pp. 572–606 and 630–70. 42 Ibid., p. 593.

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Revolutionary Party, then how could the CP exercise the initiative to form and then control the mediating organ? The concrete Indian conditions were seen by Roy as follows: the restive petty-bourgeois masses were straining against bourgeois leadership. As they were incapable of playing an independent political role the hegemony of the proletariat was to be established over them by helping them ‘to overcome their reactionary tendencies’. He explained: In spite of their political radicalism the petty-bourgeois masses will not enter into the party of the working class. Nor is it desirable that the working-class party should be flooded by the petty-bourgeois elements. The National Revolutionary Party should be the rallying ground for all the classes that carry on the struggle for the overthrow of imperialism.43

As the National Congress had revealed itself to consist largely of pettybourgeois elements, the National Revolutionary Party should enter the Congress and strive to capture its leadership which was bourgeois and had to be ousted. Thus, ‘a left-wing opposition should be developed therein (in the Congress) with the object of pushing the bourgeoisie in the parliamentary struggle against imperialism and finally to liberate the entire petty-bourgeoisie from the domination of capitalistic politics’.44 Roy’s preoccupation with and emphasis on utilising and leading the petty-bourgeoisie would appear to have been inspired by the undeniably rapid radicalisation that the participation of the middle classes had produced in the Congress movement. The middle classes, clearly, had become the most volatile and militant force in the Indian national movement and, in comparison, the revolutionary image of the Indian working class lost some of the exaggerated glow Roy had bestowed upon it earlier. A more realistic appraisal followed: ‘In spite of the fact that the Indian proletariat is objectively charged with a great political task, it is very young, politically immature and organisationally weak.’45 He observed that economism had gained considerable ground in the Indian labour movement and that this tendency was encouraged by imperialism. 43

Ibid., p. 590–92. Ibid. The ‘parliamentary struggle’ between the bourgeoisie and imperialism was provided for, of course, in Roy’s analysis of the bourgeoisie despite its generally counterrevolutionary role. 45 Ibid., p. 602. 44

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‘Even the disease of parliamentarism is penetrating the Indian labour movement.’ That Communists would have to put forward bourgeois– democratic demands in the working class movement to begin with was finally becoming apparent to Roy: ‘The workers becoming classconscious cannot be expected to join the Communist Party if it is organised only with a maximum programme which appears to have little relation to prevailing conditions. They must be shown that the solution of the problems … concerning the minimum demands of the toiling masses, come within the purview of the Communist Party.’46 Thus there had to be a transitional organisation like the WPP or National Revolutionary Party which could take the petty-bourgeoisie and even the working class towards Communist politics. This brings us back to the second aspect of Roy’s formulation on ‘the party’: the Communist Party was to initiate and form the National Revolutionary Party. Through the latter, it would further develop and consolidate the left-wing opposition in the Congress movement. The next stage would be to oust the old leadership and take over the Congress organisation. The Communist Party was, apparently, to be at the apex of this hierarchy of organisations and the successful establishment of its leadership was dependent upon the Communists effectively directing and controlling all other organisations. However, given the petty-bourgeois character of the National Revolutionary Party and of the Congress left-wing, which would prevent their playing an ‘independent’ role, how would the ‘correct’ development of these organisations and their ‘correct’ political decisions at vital moments be ensured? There could be no guarantees and no predetermined outcomes. This question takes us back to the problem we discussed when the formation of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party was first mooted in 1925. Roy had, even at that time, sought to establish the link between the Communist Party and the conception of a WPP by calling the latter organisation’s programme the minimum programme of the CP. But the organisational relationship between the two could not be automatically derived from their programmes and had to be conceived separately. This, however, was impossible as long as Communist control and domination was posited as a certainty and not as an open-ended possibility that could result from increasing ideological influence. 46

Roy’s ‘Manifesto’, India and Communism.

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The result was Roy’s failure to untangle the organisational relationship between the Communist Party and the transitional organisation (variously called the WPP, or Peoples’ Party, or National Revolutionary Party). He also failed to solve the riddle of how Communists disguised within a petty-bourgeois organisation would, nevertheless, successfully direct and control the fortunes of an intermediate party. Precisely this failure reduced all Roy’s conceptions and tactics to a manoeuvre. Roy’s was, perhaps, the best effort made theoretically to reconcile the requirement of building a CP with the reality on the ground. That he realised it would be futile or unfeasible is suggested by the position he finally took by 1935, when his appraisal of the Congress was sharply different from that of the early thirties. Now, in 1935, he maintained that it was absurd: … to look upon the National Congress as the political party of the bourgeoisie, instead of appreciating it—as it really is—as a movement embracing a variety of classes and sub-classes. The National Congress, with its broad social basis and tremendous influence upon the masses, is the typical instrument created by peculiar conditions under which the anti-imperialist struggle had to take place. It is an illusion to think that the workers and peasants are dissatisfied with the Congress. No mass movement can be organised in opposition to the Congress. Those making such attempts are sure to be isolated from the masses as has been the experience of the CP in India.

Only if ‘an organised left-wing’ within the Congress failed to dislodge ‘the right-wing-leadership’ would the Congress ‘become a bourgeois nationalist party’.47 This appreciation of the National Congress was very close to Jawaharlal Nehru’s, though throughout the thirties Roy continued to dismiss Nehru as ‘politically hopeless’. The reason for this was Roy’s identification of the right-wing leadership of the Congress with Gandhi and the fact that he conceived a successful left-wing challenge to the ‘rightists’ in the Congress in the form of a split in the organisation and the overthrow of Gandhi’s political leadership. On both these counts, of course, Nehru disagreed, and, consequently, despite their similarity of positions on the National Congress in the mid-thirties, Roy and Nehru stood within separate paradigms, with Roy very much still within the paradigm of the Communist movement. 47

Roy and Karnik, Our Differences, pp. 115–40.

M.N. Roy, Indian Communists and the Third International 385

The interesting question here is why and how did a person of Roy’s intellectual calibre constantly land himself into this organisational stalemate despite all his clever theoretical arguments? The basic problem, as we see it, was the task of reconciling a theoretical commitment to forming a Communist Party and establishing its leadership with the given conditions in India. The WPP-type of politics had a real and organic basis to exist and flourish in India and, in fact, took root so rapidly that the early Communists working in them (1926–29) were accused by the CI of having completely neglected the formation of the CP. Likewise, Roy, implementing his WPP/People’s Party/National Revolutionary Party conceptions in the 1930s, found easy and quick success in a brief period of seven months in India before he was arrested. The latter day Communist entry into the Congress via membership of the CSP was, similarly, a period of growth and expanding influence for the CPI. This resulted in their being condemned retrospectively, by the ‘purer’ and more rigorously ‘Communist’ faction among them for ‘tailism’. From the experiment of forming Workers’ and Peasants’ Parties to the experience of the ‘Bolshevik group’ a clearly identifiable pattern of repeated ‘rupture’ between the theory and practice of the Communist movement in India emerges.

Conclusion

The marxism of M.N. Roy and the Comintern lay in a mechanical transference of the conceptual framework of the Russian Revolution to the colonial situation. They reduced the national movement against imperialism to bourgeois democratic revolution of the Russian-type, and theoretically translated it into the first stage of the anti-imperialist struggle. Logically, therefore, the ‘party’ Roy sought to establish in India was modelled on the ‘Leninist’ Bolshevik Party. M.N. Roy was instrumental in imparting this conceptual framework to the various Communist groups and individuals in India throughout the 1920s. He played an important role, backed by the Comintern, in structuring the theoretico-ideological origins of the early Communists in India. It was within this conceptual framework that the Indian Communists posed the problem of national liberation in colonial India and in spite of struggling to relate to their environment they were unable to break out of the ‘Royist’ paradigm and remained its prisoner despite denouncing Roy then and later. The reductionism inherent in Roy’s method of analysis was inherited by the early Communists in India who sought to form a ‘party’ of the working class which they would lead towards hegemonising the anti-imperialist struggle. Moreover, the Marxist categories they learnt to employ and the basic premises on which they based their political positions bore the unmistakable imprint of the theoretical training Roy imparted to them.

Conclusion 387

Apart from his mechanical emulation of the Russian experience Roy’s marxism was essentially based on economistic premises. The core of his conceptions and analysis was constituted by the following formulations: nationalism was an ‘abstract doctrine’ because it did not correspond to the ‘economic interests’ of the rural and urban poor and consequently ‘obstructed the development of class-consciousness’; the anti-imperialist revolt of the masses was, primarily, due to ‘economic causes’ and against ‘the propertied classes’ whether British or Indian; the mass revolt was not against the colonial government as such but against the ‘capitalist system’; ‘concrete objective conditions’ were identical to ‘economic hardship’; trade union consciousness or the spontaneous revolt of workers against economic misery was synonymous to class consciousness; political movements ‘must conform to the imperious dictates of economic forces’. The Marxist–Leninist lessons which the Indian Communists learnt from M.N. Roy and the Comintern were centred on: the democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants, two stages of revolution, the Leninist Party, an insurrectionary perspective, and agrarian revolution as the heart of the colonial revolution. As we have shown, given the nature of the colonial state and of nationalism in a colonial society the attempt to practise these lessons turned out to be the exact opposite of what was demanded by the Indian reality. Thus, the entire theoretical exercise of the ‘creative application of Marxism–Leninism’ turned out to be thoroughly misleading and unfruitful. The more the Indian Communists tried to be ‘rigorous Leninists’ the more they became irrelevant to the political outcomes of the struggles against imperialism and for social transformation. As we have seen the Indian Communists evolved a peculiar approach to the relationship between theory and reality. When faced with new facts of reality and unfamiliar developments they clung to the ‘given theory’. They sought to explain away the ‘new departures’ in terms of ‘deviations’, ‘subjective failures’, ‘conspiracies’ and ‘deception of the masses’. The theory was never inadequate. The problem was always with its ‘wrong application’. Thus, they learnt to conceive Marxism in terms of ‘fundamental principles’. The modification or non-acceptance of any principle was tantamount to the abandonment of Marxism itself. The gap between ‘inadequate theory’ and ‘new facts’ was always filled with pragmatic wisdom by devising ‘new tactics’. A popular assumption of both Marxist and non-Marxist historians writing on Nehru’s role in the national liberation struggle is that

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he constantly vacillated between two mutually exclusive perspectives embodied in the Communist and Gandhian paradigms. We have tried to demonstrate that Nehru had a distinct paradigm—a paradigm of transformation—which transcended the two polarites that were, and are ascribed to Gandhi and the Communists. The material basis on which Nehru’s paradigm was constructed was the emergence of a bloc of left and radical forces within the National Congress. This bloc was the basis for an ideological transformation of the anti-imperialist movement towards left and socialist ideas. It was possible for this left bloc to intervene in the social direction of the movement and orientate it towards radical goals if the potential of the Nehru paradigm had been worked out to its ultimate logic. For, what could organically grow within the antiimperialist mass movement was a loosely articulated and flexible left bloc in the National Congress, and not a Bolshevik-type Communist Party of the working class. The intervention of this bloc could be effective only within a paradigm of transformation of the Congress-led movement; it could not be based on the politics of forging an alternative to it. And, of course, the paradigm could be best nurtured into reality by an organisationally united left and socialist tendency and not by separate left groups competing with each other. In other words, the best form of intervention available to the Indian left was that of intervening as an ideological and not an organisational grouping. Nehru struggled to come to terms with Marxism and liberalism without dissolving the uniqueness of the Indian struggle against imperialism. Marxism was to be valued above all as an inspiration and commitment to social justice. Liberal thought was to be valued for its emphasis on democracy and individual liberty. Its opposition to socialism was to be understood in the European context where the two traditions evolved in confrontation with each other. This had to be taken into account. Nehru rejected the Marxist assumption that democracy must necessarily be allied to private enterprise. On the other hand he was opposed to those who argued that planning involved, inevitably, a measure of regimentation and compulsion and was opposed to democracy. A dogmatic acceptance of the existing forms of Marxism or liberalism would lead India nowhere. The specificity of Indian conditions required a new intellectual framework. Nehru was open to the fact that Marx had formulated his theories in the early days of industrialisation when there was no truly democratic

Conclusion 389

structure of the state; that a socialist revolution had occurred only in a backward country and Marxists had yet to overthrow a capitalistdemocratic state in the democratic countries of the West. A genuine synthesis of democracy and socialism, he believed, was not possible unless Marxism (communism/socialism) recognised not only the necessity but also the inevitability of non-violent social transformation, through peaceful mass struggles, within a framework of democratic institutions. Thus, Nehru theoretically solved the problem of the relationship between democracy and socialism by rejecting the insurrectionary paradigm of State and Revolution, and linking it with the paradigm of non-violent social transformation. In Nehru’s paradigm we show how he sought to revise Marxism. He accepted the concept of bourgeois and socialist states. His major difference with the Communists arose on what type of socialist state they should strive for and through what methods of struggle. However, Marxist orthodoxy scoffed at his revisions as serving capitalism. Nehru’s paradigm met with two sets of difficulties: First, his initial disagreements with the Communists widened into a chasm with the latter’s increasing hostility towards the Congress left and the Gandhi-led united movement. Second, Nehru’s slow appreciation of Gandhi’s leadership and the political weight and prestige of other Congress leaders, increasingly led him to re-evaluate his own leftist positions on issues such as negotiations and compromise settlements with the colonial state; on withdrawing struggles where violence erupted, endangering an orderly battle with the government and inviting the repression of the movement. Later, issues such as ‘mass affiliation’ of peasants and workers organisations to the Congress, and his opposition to the idea of working the Act of 1935, or accepting colonial constitutional reforms, were to assault his leftist positions further. On all these issues, his understanding of political and social complexities appeared inadequate when faced by Gandhi’s. Nehru’s slow, at times confused, acceptance of Gandhi’s wisdom gradually transformed his perspectives. Thus evolved what could only be termed his adherence in later life, to the Gandhi–Nehru paradigm. An important, almost catalytic role, in this process was played by Nehru’s plunge into the organisation and mobilisation of the peasantry in the thirties. It led to the development of Nehru’s paradigm into the Gandhi–Nehru paradigm. His encounter with the peasantry and peasant movements gave him proof of the inadequacy of Eurocentric ideas on communism and socialism.

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The hegemonic character of the colonial state was manifest in various ways: its efforts to project itself as an arbiter of diverse social and economic interests; the acquisition of legitimation through wooing and protecting certain sections of society; its capacity to present itself as the source of concessions and gradual reforms; and its prestige and patronage. All these aspects of the state’s hegemonic drive combined to sketch the contours of practicable politics. It could, when all was said and done, prefer one political grouping or ideological tendency over the other, as it did in different ways when faced by a choice between the nationalists and the Communists. In the twenties and early thirties, the colonial state sought to repress the Communists while, in 1942 it sought to use them against the nationalists. In the second half of the thirties it faced the toughest challenge to this policy when the Communists and nationalists forged some kind of unity. Likewise, the state separated currents within classes, choosing to promote or, at least, to permit groups and organisations to work in constitutional ways as against those which were for active mass mobilisation. It was the legal infrastructure of the colonial state which permitted not only the nationalists but also the Communists to utilise a degree of civil rights. For example, during workers’ strikes financial support was allowed to flow in from various trade unions abroad including the Red International Labour Unions. During the Meerut Conspiracy Case, as the Communists themselves have pointed out, they were given the right to demand all the literature of the international Communist movement in order to prepare their own defence. As G. Adhikari has recorded, it was for many Communists the first opportunity freely to study the Comintern documents which they had earlier received in a clandestine way. Given the code of judicial and prisoners’ rights they could also appear for their examinations. P.C. Joshi was one of many who took their law examinations from prison. Without these rights the Communists would not have had the chance to turn their trial into a platform for Communist propaganda during the long-drawn out proceedings. The resentment and unhappiness of the bureaucracy could not prevent this outcome. In many cases, the Communists appealed to higher courts of law and were let off or given reduced sentences. Trials by jury invariably set them free and were loathed by the Intelligence Bureau.

Conclusion 391

Above all, despite the fact that the political organisation of labour was made very difficult, a constitutional and legal framework for trade unionism was evolved to foster labour organisations that would be apolitical. Through this method the state successfully kept sections of the trade union movement away from political movements. To break out of the political constraints imposed by such a state, the paradigm of hegemony, which allowed a continuing struggle for influence over the widest sections of society, was essential. And, for such a paradigm, non-violent mass movements were an absolute must. The repressive apparatus of the state would allow no narrower, insurrectionary forms of struggle to succeed. Thus, the paradigm of hegemony and the paradigm of insurrection were mutually exclusive. In such a hegemonic struggle it was not the victory or defeat in a particular battle but its implications for the general war in the long run which influenced the positions of both sides. We have argued that the Congress movement undermined British hegemony in India both by mass movements and by entering into negotiations, in the spheres of what was regarded as ‘non-constitutional’ as well as within the contours of what was defined as ‘constitutional’ by the colonial state. While acting ‘non-constitutionally’, that is, by mobilising the people in a mass movement, the struggle led by Gandhi questioned the definition of ‘legitimacy’ and ‘rights’. This terrain of struggle was constantly criticised by the Communists in the early thirties as a sign of the ‘constitutional preoccupations’ of the Congress and its predilection for ‘legitimate’, that is, non-revolutionary action. They did not appreciate the fact that the essential terms in which the colonial state clothed its control were ‘legitimacy’ and ‘the law’ and ‘strength’ or ‘inevitability’ of colonial rule—terms which were accepted and absorbed by large sections of the people. Only a grasp of this aspect of colonial rule would enable one to see that it was necessary for the National Congress to peel off these layers to reveal the core of its domination. The British strategy was, undoubtedly, to appear ‘reasonable’ to all ‘legitimate’ and ‘constitutional’ demands and winning thereby the allegiance of constitutionalist trends in the country. This was effectively matched by the Gandhian strategy of uniting all nationalist currents in such a way—by the creation of consensual minimums—that repressive measures by the colonial state invariably disillusioned and alarmed the

392 A History of the Indian Communists

constitutional ‘supporters’ of the government’s ‘rule of law’. Winning over the constitutional stream in Indian politics while, simultaneously, expanding nationalist influence over the masses was the essence of the hegemonic style of politics adopted by the Congress under Gandhi’s leadership. We have found Gramsci’s concept of hegemony very useful towards understanding how states, classes, and mass movements are related. However, the experience of the Gandhi-led movements and Gandhian strategy in India shows that Gramsci’s conception of building counterhegemony cannot be performed by a Communist Party as Gramsci continued to believe. The Indian experience makes it quite clear that hegemonic politics cannot be practised by a class party. In the light of this experience Gramsci’s theory of a hegemonic Communist Party is inherently contradictory.

Bibliography

ARCHIVES

The Archival Sources utilised are from The National Archives of India, New Delhi (NAI). Tamilnadu State Archives, Madras (TSA, Madras Record Office). The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi (NMML). Hyderabad State Archives, Andhra Pradesh (HSA). Maharashtra State Archives, Bombay (MSA). Kerala State Archives, Trivandrum (KSA). Archives of Contemporary History of India, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi (ACHI, JNU).

SOURCES

Government of India, Home Department, Political (HDP), Fortnightly Reports, Home Department, Political, (HDP, F.R.). Documents of the Communist Party of India. G. Adhikari, (ed.), Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India, Vols. I, II, III-A, III-B and III-C, People’s Publishing House, New Delhi, 1971–83. P.C. Joshi and K. Damodaran, Documented History of the Communist Party of India, Vols. I and II, available in manuscript form at the ACHI, JNU. (Some of the major documents of the international and national Communist movement compiled by Adhikari have been a valuable source for ready reference. Most of them are also available at the ACHI, JNU, and they have been used in a complementary manner. The Archives of Contemporary History of India. JNU, also has some rare photocopies of documents from the private collection of Clemens Dutt of the Communist Party of Great Britain and from the Berlin Archives, East Germany.) An important source

394 A History of the Indian Communists for examining the colonial government’s assessment of the Communist movement and the evolution of its strategy to contain it is provided by the three volume study of Communism in India, compiled by the Directors of Intelligence Cecil Kaye (1919–24), David Petrie (1924–27), and Williamson (1927–35) (NAI).

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Inprecor, Communist International (Most of the issues of Inprecor and Communist International consulted are at the ACHI, JNU, and the School of International Studies, Sapru House Library. Many Communist documents published in the Inprecor have also been reproduced in Jane Degras, The Communist International Documents, Vols. I, II and III have been consulted.) Labour Monthly (Organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain, copies available at ACHI, JNU; and extracts in G. Adhikari, Documents.) Vanguard. The Masses of India. Published by M.N. Roy. Selected copies in ACHI, JNU; extracts in G. Adhikari, Documents. Socialist. Published by S.A. Dange. A few copies available at ACHI, JNU; extracts in G. Adhikari, Documents. Ganavani, Krantikari. Few copies available at ACHI, JNU. Kirti. Few copies available at NMML. Meerut Conspiracy Case, Documents (NMML, NAI, ACHI, JNU). Exhibits of published and unpublished documents, resolutions, correspondence and speeches. The Defence Statement of the Meerut Accused. Report of the Whitety Commission on Labour in India, 1931 (NAI). Legislative Assembly Debates (NMML).

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AICC papers (NMML) Halifax Papers (NMML) Jayakar Papers (NAI) M.N. Roy Papers (NMML) N.M. Joshi Papers (NMML) Nehru Papers (NMML) Oral History Transcripts (NMML) Purshottamdas Thakurdas Papers (NMML) R.P. Dutt Collection (British Museum)

INTERVIEWS

Interview with Muzaffar Ahmad, conducted by P.C. Joshi, 1967, Calcutta. Interview with E.M.S. Namboodripad, conducted by K. Gopalankutty, 1976. Interview with B.T. Ranadive, conducted by Shashi Joshi and Bhagwan Josh, 1978.

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Amrita Bazar Patrika The Bombay Chronicle The Hindu The New Age The Pioneer Searchlight The Times of India The Tribune

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396 A History of the Indian Communists Bottomore, T. and M. Rubel (eds), Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, Pelican Books, 1979. Bottomore, T. and Patrick Goode, Austro-Marxism Texts, translated by Tom Bottomore and Goode, Pelican Books. Bradley, B.F., Trade Unionism in India, London, Modern Books Ltd., 1932. Bratents, K.N., National Liberation Revolutions Today, Part I and Part 2, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1977. Brecher, Michael, Nehru: A Political Biography, London, 1959. Breman, Jan, Patronage and Exploitation, Changing Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1974. Brown, Judith, Gandhi and Civil Disobedience, London, Cambridge University Press, 1977. Cabral, Amilcar, Return to the Source, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1973. Carr, E.H., The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–23, Vols. 1, 2 and 3, London, Penguin Books, 1966. ———, The Interregnum, 1923–24, London, Penguin Books, 1969. ———, Socialism in One Country, 1924–26, Vols. 1, 2 and 3, London, Penguin Books, 1970. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal 1890–1940, Princeton, 1989. Chandra, Bipan, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India, New Delhi, People’s Publishing House, 1969. ———, Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India, New Delhi, Orient Longman, 1979. ———, The Indian Left: Critical Appraisals, Delhi, Vikas Publishing House, 1983. Chao Kuo-Ctnm, Agrarian Policy of the Chinese Communist Party, 1921–59, New Delhi, Asia Publishing House, I960. Chatterjee, Jogesh Chandra, In Search of Freedom, Calcutta, 1967. Chattopadhyaya, Gautam, Communism and Bengal’s Freedom Movement, 1917–29, New Delhi, People’s Publishing House, 1970. Ch’en, Jerome, M’o and the Chinese Revolution, London, Oxford University Press, 1965. Chowdhuri, S.R., Leftist Movements in India, 1917–47, Calcutta, Rabindra Bharti University, 1977. Claudin, Fernando, The Communist Movement from Comintern to Cominform, New York, Penguin Books, 1975. ———, Euro-Communism and Socialism, London, 1977. Cliff, Tony et al., Party and Class, London, Pluto Press. Collected Seminar Papers on Labour Unions and Political Organisations, University of London, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, No. 3, January–May, 1967. Colletti, Ludo (ed.), Early Writings of Marx, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1975. Communists Challenge Imperialism from the Dock, Calcutta, National Book Agency, 1967. The Communist International between the Fifth and the Sixth World Congresses: 1924–28, London, Communist Party of Great Britain, 1928.

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Bibliography 403 Usniani, Shaukat, From Peshawar to Moscow, Benares, 1927. Waters, Marry-Alice (ed.), Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, New York, Pathfinder Press, 1970. Williamson, India and Communism, 1935, National Archives of India. Yashpal, Sinhavalocan (Hindi), Lucknow, Viplava Karyalaya, 1951. Zenushkina, I., Soviet Nationalities Policy and Bourgeois Historians, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1975.

ARTICLES

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404 A History of the Indian Communists Davendra, Kaushik and L.V. Mitrokhin, Mainstream, Nos 1, 2 and 3, Annual Number, Vol. VIII, 1969. Debray, Regis, ‘Marxism and the National Question’, New Left Review, No. 105, September–October, 1977. Dutt, R.P., ‘Congress Socialism: A Contradiction in Terms’, Ganashakti, Vol. 1, No. 1, September 1934, ACHI, JNU. Enzensberger, Hansmagnus, ‘On the Irresistibility of the Petty Bourgeoisie’, Telos, No. 30, Winter 1976–77. Epistein, Simon, ‘District Officers in Decline: The Erosion of British Authority in the Bombay Countryside, 1919–1947’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 16, No. 3, 1982. Ghosh, Parhnal, ‘Communalism and Colonial Labour’, Economic and Political Weekly, July 1990. Gopal, S., ‘The Formative Ideology of Jawaharlal Nehru’, in K.N. Panikkar (ed.), National and Left Movements in India, Delhi, Vikas Publishing House, 1980. Guha, Moni, ‘Colonial Theses of the Communist International and its Treatment by the Communist Party of India’, Proletarian Path, Vol. 11, No. 3, March 1974. Gupta, Partha Sarathi, ‘British Labour and the Indian Left, 1919–39’, in B.R. Nanda (ed.), Socialism in India. Hirst, Paul, ‘Economic Classes and Polities’, in Alan Hunt (ed.), Class and Class Structure, London, 1977. Hobsbawm, Eric, ‘Some Reflections on “The Break-up of Britain”’, New Left Review, No. 105, September–October 1977. Jagga, Lajpat, ‘Colonial Railwaymen and British Rule: A Probe into Railway Labour Agitation in India, 1919–22’, in Bipan Chandra, The Indian Left: Critical Appraisals, New Delhi, Vikas Publishing House, 1983. Jeffrey, Robin, ‘Malriliny, Marxism, and the Birth of the Communist Party in Kerala, 1934–40’, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. XXXVIII, No. I, November 1978. Josh, Bhagwan, ‘Nationalism, Third International and Indian Communists: Communist Party and the United National Front, 1934–39’, in Bipan Chandra (ed.), The Indian Left, Delhi, Vikas Publishing House, 1983. Joshi, P.C., ‘Reflections on Marxism and Social Revolution in India’, in K.N. Panikkar (ed.), National and Left Movements in India, New Delhi, Vikas Publishing House, 1980. ———, ‘Towards A Renewal’, Seminar, No. 178, June 1974. Joshi, Sashi, ‘Nehru and the Emergence of the Left-Bloc, 1927–29’, in Bipan Chandra (ed.), The Indian Left, Critical Appraisals, Vikas Publishing House, 1983. Kooiman, D., ‘Jobbers, and the Emergence of Trade Unions in Bombay City’, International Review of Social History, Vol. XXII, 1977. Kumar, Ravinder, ‘From Swaraj to Purna Swaraj: Nationalist Politics in the City of Bombay, 1920–32’, in D.A. Low, Congress and the Raj, London, Arnold-Heinemann, 1977. ———, ‘Bombay Textile Strike, 1919’, Indian Social and Economic History Review, No. 1, 1977. Lowy, Michael, ‘Marxists and the National Question’, New Left Review, No. 96, March–April 1976.

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406 A History of the Indian Communists

Index

Abul Kalam Azad, 102 Adhikari, G., 36, 39–41, 77, 84, 227, 349, 356, 368, 390 adventurist calls, 348 agrarian, 45, 73 agrarian movement, 45 agrarian revolution, 304, 307, 308, 331, 336, 387 Ahmed, Muzaffar, 82, 110, 111, 215 AIWPP session, 63 all-class ideology, 14 All India Congress Committee (AICC), 78, 80, 81, 245 All-India Textile Strike, 364 All-India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), 92, 98, 195; Kanpur session of, 105; Seventh session of, 104; solidarity of left-bloc, 105; split at Nagpur session, 218 All India Youth League, 208 Allison, George, 63 Althusser, 3 Ambedkar, 282 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 51, 133 Amritsar Conference, 197 Anjani Kumar, 312, 313

Ansari, 197, 207, 225, 252 anti-imperialism, 17, 51, 98, 99, 104, 128, 130, 134, 137, 142, 143, 145, 147, 150, 177, 211, 213, 238, 279, 332; objectives of, 101, 102 anti-imperialist consciousness, 13, 14, 30, 69, 90, 192, 210, 216, 277, 291, 324 anti-imperialist people’s front, 13 anti-imperialist struggle, 1, 9, 16, 27, 31, 34, 44, 52, 53, 55, 66, 71, 97, 104, 106, 134, 144, 186, 187, 275, 283, 287, 288, 297, 304, 307, 319, 324, 333, 334, 340, 343, 348, 358, 361, 384, 386 anti-imperialist unity, 98, 108, 118, 306, 311, 313, 314, 341 armed struggle, 22, 25 Arnot, Page, 120, 335 Bardoli agitation, 135, 206 Bardoli Day, 206 Basu, Jyoti, xiii Bauria Jute Workers Union, 102 Bhagat Singh, 190–192, 209, 210, 259 Bihar Money Lenders Bill (1938), 301

Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha, 301 Bihar Restoration of Bakasht Lands Bill, 301 Bihar Tenancy Amendment Bill (1937), 301 Birkenhead, 6, 10, 205 Birla, G.D., 19, 29, 87, 88, 104, 147–150, 154–156, 214, 272, 274, 277, 315, 316 bloc class adjustment, 24 bloc notion, 23 Bobbio, Noberto, 3 Bolshevik Indian communists, 188 Bolshevik revolution, 41 Bolshevik(s)/Bolshevism, xi, 28, 41, 48, 54, 71–73, 108, 113, 124, 142, 143, 146, 188, 209, 238, 274, 327–330, 356, 361 Bolshevism: stalinisation of, 327–330 Bombay Chamber of Commerce: petition against Public safety bill, 155 Bombay Millowners Association, 95, 140 Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee (BPCC), 201 Bombay Presidency Youth Conference: Nehru speech at, 129 Bombay Provincial Congress Committee, 83 Bombay Textile Labour Union (BTLU), 87, 93 Bombay Youth League, 206 Bose, Subhash, 83, 117, 118, 127, 130, 136, 150, 218, 221, 338, 375 bourgeois: nationalism, ideology of, 55 bourgeois-democratic revolution(s), 38, 39, 41, 54, 57, 65, 369, 373 bourgeois development, 88, 272 bourgeoisie, 13, 15, 19, 27, 29, 39–43, 50–56, 61, 63, 65, 68, 71, 98, 112–15, 120, 121, 193, 268, 269, 271, 272, 274–77, 328–40, 347, 350, 352, 353, 358, 362, 363, 367–72 bourgeois nationalism, 40, 55–57, 165, 333–35 bourgeois national movement, 38, 39, 50 Bradley, B. F., 63, 103, 109, 217, 349

Index 407 British Labour Party, 142 British Trade Union Congress, 216 British Trade Union movement, 92 Brussels Congress, 142 BTLU, 87, 91, 93, 94 capital and labour, 27, 181, 187 capitalism, 24, 38, 64–67, 71, 72, 109, 110, 116, 163, 165, 168, 169, 171, 173, 190, 213, 217, 286, 287, 317, 319, 389 capitalist class, 19, 138–41, 146, 148, 150, 156–58, 180, 214, 271 capitalist(s), 19, 20, 29, 34, 37, 40, 53, 87, 92, 97, 98, 103 Chamanlal, 93, 104, 107, 109, 153, 155 Chattopadhyaya, Kamladevi, 261 Chattopadhyaya, V., 224, 340, 342 Chiang Kai-shaik, 24, 189 China, 24, 55, 112, 117, 137, 170, 197, 307, 356, 359 Chinese revolution, xii, 308 Civil Disobedience movement, 2, 47, 200, 222; aim of, 226; communal clashes, absence of, 247; communists on, 339–47; creation of: Congress Panchayats (see Congress Panchayats); Congress Thanas (see Congress Thanas); criticism of, 287; first phase of, 234; Home Department assessment, 281; limitations of, 282; peasants in (see Peasants, in Civil Disobedience movement); political landscape before, 224; politics in (see Politics, in Civil Disobedience movement); significance of, 279 class-adjustment, 24, 169 class appellation, 16 class/class politics, 2, 217 class-conflict, 12, 169, 286, 303 class-consciousness, 43, 49, 50, 54, 182, 309, 314, 334, 387 class contradictions, 10 class(es), 7, 8, 15, 16, 18, 19, 23, 24, 64, 68, 79, 101–3 class essence, 14

408 A History of the Indian Communists class-interest, 15, 17, 43, 75, 80, 111, 113, 116, 156–58, 273, 288, 310, 320, 333 class party, 56, 66, 73, 76, 193, 273, 352, 380, 382, 392 class-struggle, 24, 44, 54, 67, 126, 168–70, 186, 276, 297, 320, 324 class unity, 29, 273, 303, 309 Claudin, Fernando, 40 colonial bureaucracy, 11, 264 colonial constitutionalism, 6, 95, 283 colonial countries/colonial rule/colonialism, 3, 10, 26, 29, 31, 36, 37, 39, 40, 53, 148, 156, 161, 271 colonial government, 4–9, 12, 30, 97, 98, 100, 102, 107, 151, 153, 158, 220, 259, 263, 272, 277, 279, 283, 286, 295, 305, 387: objective of, 6; policy of, 5 colonial ideology, 3 colonial India (society), 2 colonial liberation, 28, 41, 44, 209, 303, 310 colonial question, 38, 56, 367 colonial revolution(s), 37, 40, 55, 371, 387 colonial state: characteristics, of modern India, 7; semi-hegemonic, 5; strategy to deal with Congress, 8 colonial theses, 36–38, 40, 41, 56, 58, 330, 338, 350–52, 357, 370, 372: Lenin, of, 37; concentration on international alliances, 38 communal/communalism, 9, 31, 146, 315 communism, 74, 76, 77, 84, 126–30, 136, 138, 145–47 communist international, 40, 330–39 Communist movement: India, in, 28 Communist Party: Lenin views on, 39; organizational conception of, xi; Russia, in, xii Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), 59, 63, 111 Communist Party of India, 1, 13; antiimperialist struggle, acknowledgement

of, 16; Central Executive Committee meeting, 76; members of, 126; minimum programme of, 62; nationalism as bourgeois ideology, 15; official history of, 36, 45; theoretico–ideological formation of, 58 communists, xiv, 1, 10, 15, 23, 24 communist sectarianism, 159 communists international/comintern, 39, 40, 42–45, 58, 170 communists movement, xii, 2, 3, 10, 16, 24, 28, 30, 41, 43 communists paradigm, 12, 159 compromise(s), 8, 30–32, 50, 94, 99, 100, 109, 157 Congress: impact on youth, 200 Congress leaders, 46, 214, 251, 286, 301, 306, 308, 312, 316, 340–41, 357, 389 Congress-led mass movement, 1, 3, 264 Congress movement: characteristics of, 272; against imperialism, 2 Congress organization, 46 Congress panchayats, 278 Congress Socialist Party (CSP), 279, 280 Congress Thanas, 278 consciousness, 2, 12–14, 16–18, 43, 48, 100, 110, 178–180, 210 consent, 5–7, 25, 202, 221, 247, 259, 277, 282 consent concept, 7 constitutionalism/constitutional, 6, 8, 12, 19, 23, 33, 95, 98, 108, 219, 229 Constitutional trade unionism, 96 constitutional trade unionist, 87, 91, 93, 95, 97–98, 104, 106–107, 216, 319, 334 constructive programme, 68, 213, 230 Contai Enquiry Committee report, 246 contending hegemony, 125 contending ideologies, 19 control restraint theory, 137 counter-hegemony/counter-hegemonic, 11, 311 counter-strategy, 7, 8, 35 Criminal Law Amendment Act, 252

Dange, S.A., 1, 59–60, 62, 64, 66–74, 90–91, 94, 99–101, 103, 105, 110, 117, 124, 181, 209, 350, 354 Das, C.R., 9, 49 Decolonization, 367–69, 377, 380 Delhi Agreement, 257 Delhi manifesto, 224 democratic/democracy, 5, 7, 19, 20, 36, 40, 62, 64, 76, 172 democratic/dictatorship/dictatorship of the proletariat, 134, 169, 174, 181, 193, 337, 377 democratic revolution, 36, 61, 64, 355 demonstrations, 8, 82, 200–1, 203–7, 211, 234, 236, 241, 243, 258, 264, 357 demoralisation: Indian youth after 1922, of, 65 depressed class(es), 314 Despande, S.V., 375 Dimitrov, Georgy, 365 dogma/dogmatism, 121, 184, 185, 270–71, 276, 337, 354, 365, 388 Dutta, Bhupendra Nath, 38 Dutt–Bradley thesis: anti-Imperialist People’s Front in India, on, 13 Dutt, Clemens, 59, 79, 82, 112–13, 116, 118–20, 393 Dutt, R.P., xiv, xviii, 11, 13, 85, 193, 262, 269, 274, 276, 281, 287, 288, 296, 297, 319, 321, 330, 333, 368 economic, 34, 49, 50 economic determinism, 52, 111, 286, 287 economic determinism law, 111 economism, 18, 28–30, 32, 97, 98, 301, 309, 320, 322, 382 economistic, 15, 29, 32, 97, 310, 320, 387 Emergency Powers Ordinance, 259 Emerson, 6, 222 Eurocommunists, 175 false consciousness, 17–18, 110, 333, 334 fascism, 174, 328, 371 feudal/feudalism, 39, 111, 122, 181, 186, 327, 355

Index 409 form(s) of struggle, 96, 124, 192, 288, 391 Forward, 133 Gandhi, 4, 5, 10–13, 17, 20, 21 Gandhian movement: criticism of, 287; growth of, 284 Gandhian strategy, 11, 70, 114, 250, 391, 392; independence struggle, for, 11 Gandhi Ashrams, 235, 298 Gandhi-Irwin Pact, 8, 259, 262, 265, 267–70, 281; Congress strategy, for building nationalist counterhegemony, 269; impact of, 259; negotiated settlement, 268 Gandhi-led movement, 13, 23, 25, 266, 296, 392 Gandhism/Gandhian methods, 68–71, 110, 124, 284 Ghaffar Khan, 208, 233, 237, 260, 278, 279 Ghate, S.V., 76, 104, 126 Ghosh, Ajay, 41 GIP, 106, 109, 143, 201, 202, 205, 217, 218, 226, 315 Giri, V. V., 93 Girni Kamgar Union (GKU), 86, 90, 218, 219, 326 Given theory, 110, 122, 123, 176, 327, 329, 335, 340, 347, 354, 365, 387 Gokhale, 9 Gopalan, A. K., 13, 14, 46, 209, 295–98, 309 Gramsci, Antonio, xvii Gramsci’s method of historical analysis, 17 Harijan(s), 12, 27, 31, 297, 298 hartals, 22 hegemonic, 3, 6, 9, 11, 13, 19, 23 hegemony, 1 hegemony concept, 18, 19 Hindu-Muslim unity, 12, 202 Hindu-Raj, 226 historical method, 1 historic bloc, 31 historiography, xv, xvi, 13, 32, 33, 267, 277, 288, 301, 322, 370 Ho chi minh, 308

410 A History of the Indian Communists ideological/ideology, 2, 3, 12, 15, 23, 33 ideological spectrum, 34 ideological struggle, xv, 22, 77, 163, 188 imperialism: Indian people struggle against, 3 imperialist, 17, 25 independence, 27 Independence resolution: Bengal, in, 206 Indian bourgeoisie, 15, 111–13 Indian Communist, 330–39 Indian Communist movement: Lenin’s colonial theses, on, 36 Indian left, 26, 98, 147, 216, 358, 388 Indian Marxism/Marxism of the Indian communists, 2, 353 Indian Merchants’ Chamber: petition against Public safety bill, 155 Indian National Congress, xvi; bankruptcy of, 53; bourgeoisie disenchantment with, 112; communists attack on, 168; and Nehru, 165–67; 44th session of, 131 Indian nationalism, 5–8, 165, 203, 266, 286, 294 Indian National movement: analysis of, 275, 276; bourgeois led, 52; initiatives of, 31; Nehru efforts, to influence, 195; Nehru views on, 177–80 Indian October, 337 Indian politics, 10, 31, 61, 62, 200, 288, 392 Indian revolution, 38, 45, 337, 367 Indian Socialist Labour party, 66 Indian state, 26, 72, 191, 275 Indian Textile Tariff Board, 87 Indian Trades Disputes Act, 1929, 150 Indo-USA nuclear deal, xiii industralisation, 19, 20, 112, 117, 138, 149, 150, 154, 368, 369, 388 industrial, 61, 116, 133 industrialist(s), 20, 112, 138, 149, 150, 154 insurrection/insurrectionary, 12, 13, 21, 22, 26, 57, 175, 240 intelligentsia/intellectuals, 9, 20, 31, 71, 117, 179

International communist movement, 3, 24, 44, 112, 123, 326, 356, 358, 359, 390 internationalism, 37, 161, 170, 186 International (Second), 171 International (Third), 43, 44, 73, 77, 96, 128, 163, 165, 170 Italian communists, 174 Iyengar, Srinivas, 144, 145, 150, 153, 154 Jathas, 238, 239, 243, 295, 296, 309 Jaykar, M.R., 142 Jhabvala, 82, 91, 100, 101, 201 Joglekar, 80–82, 101, 181, 182, 197, 199, 202, 217 Joint Strike Committee, 93 Joshi, N.M., 87, 91–94, 98, 217, 334 Joshi, P.C., 181, 344, 356, 390 Jumnadas Mehta, 109, 143, 144, 150, 154, 214 Kanpur conspiracy case, 374 Karnik, V. B., 106, 376 Kerala Communists, xii khadi, 186 Kirti-Kisan party, 79 Kisan sabhas(s), xv, 238 Krishna Pillai, 295 Kuomintang (KMT) party, 24, 189, 331 labour, 27, 49–51, 54, 66, 69 labour revolt: India, in, 49 labour swaraj, 67 Labour Swaraj Party, 66, 79 Lahore Congress: reception and effects of, 225 Lajpat Rai, 104, 144, 150, 198, 208 landlords/landlordism, 7, 9, 64, 65, 111, 116, 193 League against Imperialism, 134, 177; Nehru reports on, 195 left-bloc, 34; content and form, 167; impact on British authorities, 131; and working class, 215–19 left-hegemony, 195 left/left-wing; paradigms in national movement, 372–74

legal apparatus movement, 63 legality/legal, 12, 58, 60, 61, 72, 153, 192, 283 legislation, 12, 98, 116, 125, 126, 138, 141, 142, 148, 151–53, 155–58, 226, 275, 301, 317, 319, 323 legislative assembly, 141, 142, 150, 151, 153, 202 legitimate/legitimacy, 9, 12, 88, 89, 174, 181, 197, 231, 283, 297, 390, 391 Lenin, 3, 36 Leninism, xi; Stalin’s deification of, 57 Leninist party, 3–4 Lenin’s theses, 36, 38, 40, 44 Liberal Party,112 liberal(s)/liberalism, 5, 91, 95, 142, 388 Long rope policy, 248 Lukacs, G., 37 Madan Mohan Malviya, 147 Madras Liberal Federation, 231 Madras session, 83; Congress, of, 197, 198 Malir station: hostile reception, of Gandhi at, 257 Mao Zedong, 310 Marx, 3–4, 14, 16, 37, 56, 170, 349, 388 Marx and Engels, 37, 56 Marxism-Leninism, xiii, xiv, 124, 387 Marxism/Marxists, 2, 14, 15, 28, 43, 57, 83, 110, 111, 116, 121 mass meetings, 8, 226, 239, 251 mass notion, 20 May Day, 216 McDonald, Ramsay, 205 Meerut communists, 326 Meerut conspiracy case (MCC), 59, 126, 127, 325; communists impact on, 220 Meherally, Yusuf, 83, 202, 211, 231, 376 merchants, 24, 103, 110, 138, 148, 155, 202, 214, 225 methods of struggle, 21, 68, 70–72, 75, 110, 281, 359, 389 middle class(es), 16, 42, 52, 53, 81, 100–3, 110, 112, 131, 141, 154, 179, 214, 227, 229, 239, 287, 295, 315, 318, 344, 359, 382

Index 411 mills/millowners association, 93–95, 140, 145, 148, 152, 201, 273 Mohammad Ali, 196 Morley, 9 Mukerji, Abani, 64 multi-class movement, 68 Namboodripad, E.M.S., 10, 211, 263, 295–97, 365 nation, 14, 31, 37, 53, 66, 100, 125, 299 national front, 9, 110, 303, 334–36, 363 national interest, 20, 100, 110, 161, 303, 335 nationalism, 8, 14–17, 39–41, 56, 71, 114, 147, 148, 164 nationalism as a bourgeois ideology, 15, 39 nationalist hegemony, 11, 248, 286 nationalist revolutionary movement, 47, 49 national revolutionary platform, 352 nationalist(s), 3–5, 7, 43 national liberation, 2, 13, 15, 27, 31, 36–39, 43–45, 52, 56, 116, 227, 272, 303, 310, 323, 386, 387 national movement: nature of, 4 national revolution, 41, 42, 75, 110, 128, 165, 344, 352, 355, 356, 359, 370, 372, 376, 380, 381 national revolutionary party, 65, 381–85 Naujawan Bharat Sabha (NBS), 210, 233, 245 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 34, 81, 115, 119, 127, 129, 130, 134, 150 Nehru, Motilal, 9, 110, 136, 142, 147, 156, 221, 226, 246, 341, 379 Nehru paradigm: communist vs., 188–94; conflict of, 160–65; Gandhi vs., 186–88; ideology for youth, 180–86; and Indian National Congress (see Indian National Congress and Nehru); national movement, on, 177; working class, on, 177 New economic policy, 170 NFTU, 108 Nimbkar, 80, 81, 197, 199, 201–202, 205

412 A History of the Indian Communists non-communist left, 28, 227, 355, 359 non-constitutional, 9, 10, 33, 35, 96, 229, 294, 379, 391 non-cooperation, 48, 51, 53, 71, 119, 187, 193 Non-cooperation movement (NCO), 46; destruction of moral authority and prestige, of colonial state, 125; Prince of Wales’ visit, boycott of, 50–51 non-violence/non-violent, 8, 12, 13, 68, 190, 230, 239 no-revenue agitation, 236 NWF Province, 233, 236, 237, 282 October Revolution: Russia, in, 209 Pant, G. B., 207 paradigm of transformation, 373, 388 Passive civil disobedience, 285 passive resistance, 22, 68, 99, 114, 343, 359; Gandhi’s ideology of, 21, 114 passive revolution, 21–22 Patel, Vallabhai, 34, 147, 251, 267, 308 Patel, Vithalbhai, 9 peaceful, xii, 10, 12, 13, 52, 57, 69, 70, 100, 114, 119, 152, 191, 197, 205, 214, 228, 260, 268, 282, 287–90, 389 peasants: Civil Disobedience movement, in, 299 peasants party: formation of, xi peasants/peasantry, 7, 9, 17, 20, 34, 58 Pellicani, Lucio, 3, 18 people’s democracy, 20 people’s party(ies), 23, 60, 385 petty-bourgeois/bourgeoisie, 20, 32, 61–63, 69, 70, 77, 111–115, 120, 121, 329, 336, 339, 352, 360–62, 378 political party(ies), xv, 15, 20, 50, 66, 67, 98, 111, 136, 172, 193, 330, 354, 384 politico-ideologico, 15, 71, 156–158 politics: Civil Disobedience movement, in, 299, 314 politics/political, 3–5, 7, 8, 10–12, 14, 16 proletarian movement, 45 proletariat/proletarian, 15, 19, 38, 41, 45, 56

Public opinion, 8 Public Safety Bill (Act), 1929, 125, 126, 132, 143–50, 185, 227; Birla debate on, 148; Central Assembly, presented at, 141; government repression, 142; Legislative Assembly, defeat in, 141 Purshottamdas, Thakurdas, 19, 87, 140, 142, 145, 146, 149, 150, 154, 155, 157, 214, 276, 315, 316 radical/radicalization: national movement, of, 78, 195 Rajagopalchari, 34 Rajendra Prasad, 34, 245, 261, 318 Rama Raj, 187 Ranadive, B. T., 17, 331, 349, 355, 362, 364, 394 Red International of Labour Unions (RILU), 85 Red Shirt movement, 260 reformism/reformist(s), 54, 55, 93, 94, 96 reforms, 5, 9–10, 62, 80, 97, 176, 224, 272, 320, 323–324, 331, 334, 389–390 ‘reform’ versus ‘revolution,’ 8, 263 religion, 3, 124, 142, 145–146, 183 representatives/representation, 17, 38, 93, 98, 146, 153, 226, 332 revisionism, xiii, 365 revolution: vs. constitutional communism, xiv revolutionary, 13, 16, 24, 47, 48, 60, 70, 73, 85, 90, 121, 149 revolutionary mass party concept, 73 revolutionary movement: India, in, 43 revolutionary theory, 123, 335, 360 right-wing, 21, 28, 33–35, 104, 113, 125, 141, 227, 301, 311, 313, 318, 378, 384 RILU, 85 Round Table Conference, 268 Royal Commission on Labour, 151. See also Public Safety Bill (Act), 1929 Royism, 57 Royist, 39, 44, 83, 98, 108, 115, 121, 335, 353, 364, 376, 386 Roy, M. N., 366–85 Ruikar, 109, 217, 245, 364, 376

Russia, 54, 71, 117, 168, 184, 186, 209, 330 Russian revolution, 41, 209; Nehru on, 167; theoretical framework of, 44 Russian revolution, xii, 1, 5, 24, 41, 44, 48, 54, 55, 71, 72, 117, 167, 170, 173, 175, 180, 181, 209, 210, 328, 337, 355, 373, 386 Saklatvala, 84, 98, 104, 126, 140, 195, 196, 201 salt satyagraha, 234, 291 Sapru, T.B., 224, 251 Sarabhai, Ambalal, 87, 88, 273 Sarkar hargai, 262 Satyagraha/Satyagrahis, 71 Scientific socialism, 74 Second Congress of Comintern, 38 sectarian/sectarianism, 326, 351 seizure of power, 21, 25, 69, 270 Sen, Mohit, 41 Seva Dal, 233 Seva dal(s), 200, 233, 242 Shah, C.G., 83, 376 Shaukat Ali, 196, 206, 282 Simon Commission, 196, 203; boycott of, 200, 201; Lahore response towards, 208 Singaravellu, 216, 217 Singh, Manmohan, xiii Sitla Sahai, 312, 313 Sixth Congress, 120–22, 327–33, 350, 351, 356–58, 362, 367–73, 377, 380 social democratic parties, xii, 119 socialism, 26, 37–38, 40, 116–18, 125, 137, 138, 145, 147, 161–64, 169, 334, 388 Socialist ideology, 26, 84, 115, 182, 209, 210, 330 Socialist revolution, 37, 40, 169, 185, 355, 369, 372, 373, 389 socialist(s), 20, 23, 26, 27, 32–35, 37, 38, 51, 72–74, 76, 77, 110, 115, 116, 159, 168, 184 South Indian Railway: strike by, 217 Soviet, 145, 163–65, 168–70, 175, 209, 210, 337, 346, 348, 355, 377

Index 413 Spratt, Philip, 59, 63, 81, 96, 112, 117, 119, 146, 201, 205, 354 Stalin, 57, 369 Stalinisation, 327–30 state: struggle between Gandhian movements and, 12 state power, xii, xv, 7, 12, 50, 67, 179, 324, 359 state within a state, xv strategic/strategy, xiii, 4, 5, 8, 36, 70, 125, 176, 250 strike/strikes, 17, 22, 46, 87, 91, 94, 103, 151, 153, 217, 226, 235, 283 students, 83, 101–3, 201–8, 211, 233, 236, 349, 376 Sun Yat-Sen, 24 Swaraj concept, 173 Swarajists, 285, 286, 331 tactics/tactical, xii, xiii, 13, 36, 40, 41, 54, 237, 357, 358, 363–65 Tagore, S. N., 121 Tata, Dorabji, 273, 274 Telengana insurrection, xii teleological conceptions, 30 tenants, 12, 177, 238, 253, 300, 301, 304–7, 312, 313 Textile Labour Association, 156 theoretical, 26, 28–31, 37, 39, 44, 45, 52, 53, 55, 59, 115, 120–22, 128, 134, 165, 167, 168, 174, 191, 220, 269, 271, 274, 276, 289, 301, 302, 304, 321, 326, 338, 351, 353, 357, 360 theory(ies), xv, 2, 3, 18, 36, 50, 176, 184, 322, 327–29, 333, 359, 365, 385 Togliatti, 174 Trades Disputes Bill (Act), 96, 126, 141, 142, 148, 150–58 Trades Union Congress’ General Council, 92 trade union movement, 86, 90, 92, 93, 96, 98, 104, 106–8, 151, 169, 333, 374, 391 trade union(s)/trade unionist(s), xii, xv, 62, 63, 68, 73, 80–83, 86, 87, 90, 95, 107, 145, 151, 226, 227, 309, 316, 317, 320, 323, 330, 334, 364, 375

414 A History of the Indian Communists transform/transformation, 17, 21, 25, 26, 32–35, 68, 78, 97, 114, 169, 171, 212, 271, 297, 298, 301, 309, 311, 312, 318, 347, 364, 373, 387 tribal, 244, 245, 254, 298 truce, 11, 22, 30, 247, 256, 260, 265, 267, 268, 299, 305, 308, 345 Tsarist autocracy, 54 TUC, 83, 105, 354 two stage theory, 41 Unionist Party, 9 United anti-imperialist, 9, 34, 41 United front, 13, 23, 24, 102, 108, 111, 307, 323, 326, 335, 341, 352, 357–59, 364, 371, 372, 376, 377, 380 United Front policy, 326 United left, 26, 35, 388 United struggle, 19, 163, 357, 363 Unlawful Instigation Ordinance, 252 urban middle classes: Indian National movement role in, 16 Vietnam, 308 violence/violent, 13, 32, 57, 72, 97, 119, 190–92, 230, 234, 237, 243, 255, 266 violent mass struggle: perspective of, 12 Walchand Hirachand, 88 war of manoeuvre, 24, 25 war of movement, 21, 22 war of position, 21–24, 270 Western India National Liberal Association, 231 west European states, 7 Whitely Commission, 97, 107 workers: Civil Disobedience movement, in, 314 workers and peasants, 24, 34, 49, 55, 65, 68, 71, 84, 105, 110, 125, 133, 165, 179, 180, 189, 332, 356, 358, 360, 372, 384

Workers and Peasants party(ies) (WPPs), 59; Bombay, in, 61; adoption of Constitution, 79; Congress, attitude towards, 81, 135; cooperation with political trends, of Congress, 128; dissolution of, 110; importance of, 60; left-bloc movement, 141; members of, 81; mobilisation of masses through, 62; movement of, 79; nature of origin of, 79; as organised left-wing, 65; party formation, process for, 60; politics and organisational forms of, 78; Provincial Congress Committees, pressure on, 196; resolutions of, 216; Roy views on, 75; success of, 86 workers movement: progress during 1927 and 1929, 105 workers party: formation of, xi working class: left-bloc and (see Left-bloc and working class); Nehru views on, 177–80 working class party, 56, 58, 64, 66, 73, 76, 382 world alliance: Lenin, of, 38 world revolution, 37, 38, 40 youth: Nehru ideology for, 180–85 Youth Conference: under Nehru Presidentship, 197 Youth Conference, 129, 197, 202, 206 Youth League movement, 202 Youth League(s), 82, 83, 129, 136, 184, 186, 199, 200, 202–9, 211, 229, 231, 233, 235, 237, 238, 252, 257, 375, 376 Youth movement(s), 115, 117, 118, 127, 130, 131, 136, 149, 166, 200, 233; Assam, in, 236; Bengal, in, 218; Congress and, 220, 225; ideology of, 209–15; middle class intelligentsia and, 227 zamindars, 110, 111, 133, 187, 261, 305–7, 312, 316

About the Author

Shashi Joshi is currently Senior Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. A PhD in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Dr Joshi began her career as a senior lecturer in History at Miranda House, University of Delhi. She has also been a senior fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. From 1983 to 1987, she was co-director of the ‘History of the Indian National Congress, 1885–1947’—a project sponsored by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR). Dr Joshi has authored a book The Last Durbar: A Dramatic Presentation of the Division of British India, published in India and Pakistan simultaneously in 2006. She has also authored Religion, Mission and Caste: Essays in the History of Christianity in India (2008). Presently, she is finalising the manuscript for another book ‘In Gandhi’s Arc: Charles Andrews and Gandhi’ to be published in 2012.

Praise for the Previous Edition

[Joshi and Josh] on their part go deep into the ‘medieval’ past of Indian history to try and find answers to the fundamental question of what hinders the creation of a ‘composite nation’. Sudarshan Sathianathan in Asian Affairs: Journal of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, Vol. XXVI (Part 1), February 1995 Bhagwan Josh and Shashi Joshi’s three volumes are a reconstruction and reinterpretation of the Indian independence struggle that is largely refracted through the central concept of ‘hegemony’… The structure of the narrative offered is distinct and takes it in a very different direction. Theirs is, above all, a detailed and insistent critique of the communist left in the National Movement period and, as a counterpoint to it, a defence of Gandhi and the ‘Gandhian strategy’ for securing independence via the Congress… What is distinct in the treatment here is the diagnosis and description given for this communist failure. Achin Vanaik in Economic and Political Weekly, 23 December 1995 Joshi and Josh made in my judgment an extremely useful contribution to our understanding of the Indian colonial state. This necessarily reopened several issues which historians have the need to grapple with afresh. Bhupinder Brar in New Quest, November–December 1995

Joshi and Josh provide good reason to suppose that there was a greater identity of interest between the Congress leadership and their mass following than Marxist-inspired histories generally allow. This, of course, is deeply committed history-writing. Joshi and Josh have few qualms about writing the history not merely of ‘what was’, but also of ‘what ought to have been’. Nicholas Owen in South Asia, Vol. XVII, June 1994 [As] a sociological analysis of various hegemonic struggles that have taken place in India this century, and their historical foundations, this is an excellent work, which displays possibly the most important criteria for such an undertaking: a clear and thorough understanding of the topic. Stuart Tilley in Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 25, No. 2, 1995 The study is a pioneering attempt to understand why the Communist Party in India, comprised of brave and sacrificing cadres and sympathizers and having conducted many heroic struggles could not provide an alternative to the National Congress, in leading the people to achieve freedom… [This work] is the first systematic endeavour during [the] post-independent period to examine the role of the Communist Party during the national movement since it became a mass movement under the unique strategy and tactic evolved by Mahatma Gandhi… The volumes should be studied because it has relevance in understanding the policies and practices followed by the Communist parties in the postIndependence era. A.R. Desai in The Book Review, Vol. XVIII, Nos 2–3 (February–March), 1994 [Joshi and Josh] look far more critically at the history of the formative period of the CPI in the wider context of the national movement for independence and study the process by which the communists cut themselves off from the national mainstream. Sham Lal in The Times of India, 7 November 1992. Joshi and Josh show that the communists were mistaken, too, about the sentiments of the Indian people… [They] explain communist blindness in terms of an unthinking adoption of Russian images as Indian facts,

and of a failure to grasp the truth that Gramsci had understood about how hegemonist or semi-hegemonist states can be fought. Rajmohan Gandhi in Indian Express Sunday Magazine, 20 December 1992 This is a significant contribution towards understanding of strategies and methods advocated by the rival ideological groups within India’s national movement… This is a mature analysis within a neat conceptual framework. Amal Ray in Deccan Herald, 12 September 1993 Undoubtedly, a great deal of effort has gone into the making of this book. The readings are impressive and extremely informative for anyone wishing to undertake research on communalism. There are several highly perceptive observations, especially in the postscript which deals with the present day scenario. Visalakshi Menon in The Economic Times, New Delhi, 24 April 1994 The book provides an excellent overview of a turbulent period in Indian history which continues to fascinate both laymen and experts. Amulya Ganguli in The Times of India, 12 April 1992 It is an extremely interesting book, worth reading for all social scientists, academicians and activists. Aditya Nigam in The Sunday Observer, 12–18 April 1992 [The] use of hegemony as a central category in politics when applied to an anti-colonial movement does provide a new frame for the discussion of our past. More significantly, it re-centres the role of ideas and culture as material forces influencing history. One wishes that these formulations generate serious debate, such that historical narratives return once again to the fold of history rather than remain mere pawns in sterile ideological polemic. Harsh Sethi in The Express, 2 August 1992 The most remarkable quality of Josh’s book is that it has been able to tell a controversial story with great plausibility. However unusual for a

Marxist to articulate such a view of Indian nationalist politics, he makes it a highly persuasive account, and it is underpinned by a theory which is certainly impeccably Marxist in its origins, if not in the conclusions it is made to support. He also achieves a commendable balance between the detailed empirical accounts of Congress policies, debates among the radicals, the politics of the ministerial government in the provinces after 1935, and his theoretical commentary on what is going on, within one single narrative frame. His work, which is the second in the series, is an interesting, if controversial, contribution to the history of Indian nationalism. Sudipta Kaviraj in Asian Affairs: Journal of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, Vol. XXVI (Part II), June 1995 Shashi Joshi has placed all who will—and may their number be legion— read her book deeply in debt to her. Those who want India and communism to grow will learn much from what she has written. Mohit Sen in Mainstream, 19 December 1992 Shashi Joshi’s work is an important contribution to the historiography of our freedom struggle. It helps us understand and critically appraise the Indian Left in a much better way. Ganesh Mantri in The Times of India, 29 July 1992. Shashi Joshi displays considerable grasp of detail without losing sight of the broad contours of her story which is related with fluent authority. Premen Addy in Asian Affairs, February 1993

A History of the Indian Communists From United Front to Left Front

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A History of the Indian Communists

Other Volumes in the Series Volume 1 A History of the Indian Communists: The Irrelevance of Leninism by Shashi Joshi Volume 3 Culture, Community and Power: A Critique of the Discourses of Communalism and Secularism by Shashi Joshi and Bhagwan Josh

Struggle for Hegemony in India Volume 2

A History of the Indian Communists From United Front to Left Front

Bhagwan Josh

Copyright © Bhagwan Josh and Shashi Joshi, 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. First published in 1992 This second edition published in 2011 by Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd B1/I-1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044, India www.sagepub.in Sage Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320, USA Sage Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP, United Kingdom Sage Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 Published by Vivek Mehra for Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd, typeset in 10.5/12pt Adobe Garamond by Star Compugraphics Private Limited, Delhi and printed at Chaman Enterprises, New Delhi. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Joshi, Shashi, 1949–   Struggle for hegemony in India/Shashi Joshi, Bhagwan Josh.     p. cm.      Includes bibliographical references and index.   1. India—Politics and government—1919–1947. 2. Nationalism—India—History. 3. Communism—India—History. I. Josh, Bhagwan, 1949– II. Title. DS480.45.J665324.254'07509041—dc23

2011

ISBN:  978-81-321-0654-8 (HB) The Sage Team: Rekha Natarajan, Sushmita Banerjee, Anju Saxena, and Deepti Saxena

2011034896

In memory of P.C. Joshi and K. Damodaran

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Contents



List of Abbreviations,  ix Preface to the Revised Edition,  xi Preface,  xv Acknowledgements,  xvii Introduction,  xix

  1. The Colonial State,  1   2. Gandhian Strategy and the Framework of Hegemonic Politics,  24   3. State Policy, Congress Crisis and the Birth of a New Ideology,  49   4. Gathering Forces of the Left and Government’s Strategy of Suppression,  72   5. The Third International and Indian Communists: Communist Party and the Disunited National Front,  103   6. Marxisms and Marxist Practices,  132   7. Of Political Issues and Ideological Conflicts: Colonial Constitution, Council Entry and Office Acceptance,  152

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  8. The Ministries and the Left: Experiments with Class Adjustment,  181   9. The Left and the Ministries: Experiments with Class Confrontation—I,  211 10. The Left and the Ministries: Experiments with Class Confrontation—II,  231 11. The Divided Left: Notes on Permanent Disunity,  256 12. Politics of Transformation vs. Politics of Alternative,  288 13. Communists since Independence,  317

Epilogue: From Naxalbari to Lalgarh: The Continuity of Insurrectionary Politics,  375 Conclusion,  382 Bibliography,  392 Index,  403 About the Author,  412

List of Abbreviations

AICC ACHI CSP AITUC BPCC BPTUC BPKS CI CPI DCC FDI FR (i) FR (ii) GKU HDP HFM IAEA IUML INC MSA

All India Congress Committee Archives on Contemporary History of India Congress Socialist Party All India Trade Union Congress Bombay Provincial Congress Committee Bombay Provincial Trade Union Congress Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha Communist International Communist Party of India District Congress Committee Foreign Direct Investment Fortnightly Report for the first half of the month Fortnightly Report for the second half of the month Girni Kamgar Union (Red Flag) Home Department Political History of Freedom Movement files (Hyderabad) International Atomic Energy Agency Indian Union Muslim League Indian National Congress Maharashtra State Archives (Mumbai)

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NAI NMML NTUF TSA UPCC WC PPP NDA SEZs MPs BJP UPA APL PDS NHRC AIRF UNPA NREGS RTI PCPA

National Archives of India (New Delhi) Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (New Delhi) National Trade Union Federation Tamil Nadu State Archives (Chennai) United Provinces Congress Committee Working Committee Public–Private Partnership National Democratic Alliance Special Economic Zones Members of Parliament Bharatiya Janta Party United Progressive Alliance Above Poverty Line Public Distribution System National Human Rights Commission All India Railway Federation United National Progressive Alliance National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme Right to Information People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities

Preface to the Revised Edition

The discussion of the theme of irrelevance of Leninism for the Indian social conditions, as formulated in the first chapter of the first volume, was continued in the second and third volumes. The set of arguments developed in the second volume sought to demonstrate that given the semi-liberal nature of the colonial state, the very idea of forming a Communist party in the 1920s was in fact a misconceived project. The Indian equivalent of the European type of social democratic party, called the Workers and Peasants Party, formed in 1928, was arbitrarily dissolved under instructions from the Third International. This experience continues to be relevant even today. Was there any possibility of an insurrectionary armed revolution against the colonial state? The question has never been raised and discussed by the various communist parties or intellectuals sympathetic to these parties. This is one of the questions that has been discussed at length in this series. It was taken for granted that India needed a Bolshevik-type revolution and only a Communist party could lead such a revolution. Therefore, a Communist party should be created. It was as irrational a decision as the decision to dissolve the Workers and Peasants Party in 1928. The organisational conception of the Communist party as developed by the Third International was something qualitatively different from the social democratic type of parties already existing in Europe. The idea of

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the Communist party as the party of revolution was developed by Lenin, keeping in mind the feudal–absolutist character (i.e., non-hegemonic character) of the czarist state in Russia. The Russian state, unlike the semidemocratic colonial state in India, did not possess even a rudimentary constitutional framework or any civil liberties for the organisation and functioning of open democratic parties or trade unions. The Communist Party in Russia was an ‘underground’ party of ‘professional revolutionaries’, consistently working with the aim to create an insurrectionary situation. This situation was supposed to provide an opportunity conducive for the intervention of the Communist Party to forcibly capture state power. On the other hand, social democratic parties were designed to compete with other democratic parties within the constitutional arena and win majorities in the parliamentary systems, forming governments for a fixed period of time. The Indian Communists, from the very beginning, were of the view that there was no difference between the nature of the colonial state in India and the feudal–absolutist state in czarist Russia. Therefore, the lessons of the Russian Revolution regarding the nature of the Party to be formed, and its strategy and tactics, were equally applicable to India. For a long time the Indian Communists tried to stage the ‘Russian Revolution’ in India. The failed Telangana insurrection of 1948 and their suppression by the Nehru government forced the Indian Communists to participate in the first parliamentary elections held in India in 1951. After this, the Communist Party was compelled to come out in the open and compete with other democratic parties in parliamentary politics. Soon after, in 1957, the Kerala Communists succeeded in forming the first Communist government in the world within the framework of parliamentary politics. This was a turning point in the history of Communist politics. From now onwards, they began to be pulled in two opposite directions: between the preconceived notion of insurrectionary politics necessary for making a Russian- or Chinese-type violent revolution, on the one hand, and the attractions of parliamentary mass politics promising governmental power through peaceful means, on the other. Indian Communists were caught between the a priori commitment to the romantic dream of their youth, i.e., revolution and the need of a realistic mass politics in a parliamentary system. This tension, over a period, led to confusion and conflict within the ranks of the undivided party giving rise to endless debates, and finally resulting in the first split in



Preface to the Revised Edition

the Communist movement in 1964. Once again, the ‘Kerala Experiment’ was repeated in Bengal in 1967 when the CPM-led front came to power. It immediately led to the ‘second split’ when the insurrectionary wing of CPM declared the path of ‘constitutional communism’ as nothing but revisionism—a word of abuse in the Communist lexicon. The point that must be emphasised is that the Indian Communists never attempted to provide a theoretical basis to place the ‘Kerala experience’ as well as the ‘Bengal experience’ in a strategic framework. Its significance has continued to be ignored till today. And this was done by reducing this rich experience to what Communists call ‘tactical participation in parliamentary politics’. Had the Communists undertaken this exercise seriously, i.e., working out a theoretical justification for building upon this rich experience, they would never have stopped Jyoti Basu from becoming India’s first Communist prime minister. They would have immediately realised not only its symbolic significance but also the far-reaching consequence it would have had on the Indian imagination. Moreover, in the context of the 2004 elections, when the Congress was unable to form a government without the Communists, they could have demanded one-third of the share of power in the Manmohan Singh ministry. Because, this was the only way the party could have enhanced its power and influence at the Centre and its political prestige among the poor masses. Had the Communists done this, the relationship with America would have certainly evolved differently. The Indo-US nuclear deal controversy would perhaps never have originated. It was precisely their absence from the ministerial power that the situation was precipitated. Here, there was a golden opportunity for them in the light of their stated goals to pressurise the Central government into genuinely implementing the Common Minimum Programme. Once again, as in pre-independence India, the Communists missed the bus. How should one interpret the Indian Communists’ ‘Kerala-type experiments’? The successful practical politics in Kerala had emphasised the point that what was required was the formation of a new type of social democratic party—a party of the broad left—that evolved its political perspectives slightly left of the Indian National Congress. This is because the Indian National Congress is itself a conservative social democratic party. But that presupposed a fundamental break with what the Indian Communists called ‘Marxism–Leninism’ and shifting to what was, once upon a time, denounced as ‘Revisionism’—that is critically embracing the

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traditions of European social democracy. This dilemma, inherent in the perspectives of revolution vs. ‘constitutional communism’, continues to confront the Communists even today. Do the Indian Communists possess the intellectual wherewithal to make such a fundamental rupture in their mindset? That is the challenge today, needless to say, a gigantic one. So far they have tried to resolve the above-mentioned dilemma by taking the easy way out: trying to make the Communist party behave and act like a social democratic party by transforming it into an open mass Communist party. As a result, the Communists of India have fallen between the two stools. Over the years, what has emerged is a party which is neither ‘Communist’ nor ‘Socialist’. This continues to be the main problem with the Communists even today. The Congress at the Centre reminds them of their outdated commitment to Marxism–Leninism, while the Maoists denounce them for abandoning the true revolutionary road of insurrectionary politics. Obviously, the Communists (CPM and CPI) have lost their self-confidence to pose a serious challenge at the national level to both these forces by seeking to represent a viable practical politics of the broad democratic left. What is urgently required is the dissolution of sectarian Communist parties in favour of a new social democratic formation—‘a party of the broad left’ based on a realistic strategy that is left of the Congress. Otherwise, they would permanently remain what R.P. Dutt called ‘small and growing’. Actually, Communists are indirectly admitting the need for such a formation by constantly harping on the fact that to keep the Congress and the Right-wing at bay a third force is required. But they are knocking at closed doors by not coming to terms with their own historical experience. What is needed is not a ‘third alternative’ or ‘third front’ but a new type of social democratic party—‘a party of the broad left’. In the absence of this, the Communist politics would continue to revolve in a vicious circle: sometimes supporting the Congress and sometimes pitting itself against it.

Preface

In this project an attempt has been made to combine organically the perspectives of ‘a history from below’ with ‘a history from above’ to emphasise that their mutually exclusive deployment tends to blur rather than sharpen our understanding of historical events and processes. The macro-structures such as the colonial state/institutions/political parties/ kisan sabhas/trade unions/workers–peasants mobilisations have been placed in a context of interaction and interdependence, and their relationships focused upon. Theories in themselves do not confront history. They serve to provide meaningful questions and a language to explore historical problems. By discussing Gramsci’s theories in the context of mass movements, political representations, group alliances, ideological struggles, domination– subordination, conflict of interests between social groups and his insights into the specificity of the state structure and strategies, we evolve a new framework for the study of this theme. This has enabled the construction of a new paradigm: revealing the specific form and uniqueness of British rule in India, the rise of a mass movement, i.e., a protracted struggle to build ‘national hegemony’/‘state within a state’ and baring the logic of a ‘transfer of power’ rather than of a violent seizure of state power. In traditional historiography, what have been generally considered as three separate histories (history of state policies, history of the National

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Movement and the history of the left) are here treated as three strands of a single history. Also, we do not approach the reconstruction of this triangular relationship in the traditional way, i.e., dividing the project into three parts narrating the individual characteristics of each one of them separately. Rather, we chose the left, specifically the Communists, as the protagonists of this story and then constructed the experience of their interaction with the others as well as with social and political reality. The reason for this is the fact that for a long time the already existing historiography has revolved around the ‘Raj’ and ‘nationalism’/‘the Indian National Congress’. By conceptualising the period not in terms of a ‘dual contest’—the Congress and the Raj—but in terms of a ‘triangular contest’ we introduce a fundamental change in the reconstruction of the ‘national experience’. With the entry of the third contestant, the other parts of the picture also change. It becomes a different scenario—a very, very different history. In the historiography of the subaltern studies, which sought to write history of the third type, the heroes, despite appearing in brilliant but brief flashes on the political scene, do not constitute the ‘national experience’. They remain combatants but not contestants in the struggle for hegemony. The subaltern studies series reflected largely the traditional left’s historiographical premises exemplified in R.P. Dutt’s India Today. Logically, therefore, it focused upon the concept of subaltern insurgents rather than on hegemonic politics in the study of Indian history. We, on the contrary, begin with the rejection of R.P. Dutt’s methodology and analytical categories. A point in clarification of the focus in the three volumes: the first two volumes addressed, mainly, the political project of establishing hegemony of all the three contenders, i.e., the Colonial State, the National Movement, and the Left. However, the social–cultural project of integrating a hegemonic view of Indian society, as a basis for Indian nationhood is also taken into account. The third volume addresses the problems and perspectives involved in the contention over a social–cultural hegemony. Shashi Joshi Bhagwan Josh

Acknowledgements

For being stimulating participants in discussions, I am thankful to K. Gopalankutty, Ewa Toczek, Murali Atluri, P. Chandermohan, Gynesh Kudesia, Vanita Damodran, Sucheta Mahajan, Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee, Vishalakshi Menon, Anthony Thomas, Salil Mishra and Sashi Bhushan Upadhyaya. I have also benefited from interesting exchanges with Gurchain and Santosh, Pritam and Meena, Bhupinder Brar and Naren Panjwani. I also take this opportunity to thank my colleagues at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. In particular, I appreciate comments from, and discussions with, Professor Bipan Chandra and Professor K.N. Panikkar. I am grateful to the Indian Council of Historical Research, New Delhi, for providing financial help to enable me to visit various state archives and libraries. Thanks are also due to the staff of the following archives and libraries: National Archives of India (New Delhi), Archives on Contemporary History of India, Maharashtra State Archives (Mumbai), Tamil Nadu State Archives (Chennai), West Bengal State Archives (Kolkata), Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (New Delhi), National Library (Kolkata), and Jawaharlal Nehru University Library (New Delhi). I also acknowledge the enthusiastic support extended by Primila Lewis and Swati Mitra. Thanks are finally due to the British Council for a grant which enabled me to visit the British Museum in London to consult the valuable R.P. Dutt Collection. Bhagwan Josh

xviii A History of the Indian Communists

Introduction

A historical perspective to understand the left-wing movements in India before 1947 can be outlined by asking the question: How does one explain the failure of the Communists, rather the failure of the entire left-wing, to be a hegemonic force within the national movement? The lack of widespread influence of the left and its inability to provide alter-native politics is sometimes explained by the ‘fact’ that the left was a small force. But this kind of superficial explanation itself begs the question: Why did the left remain a small force throughout the anti-imperialist struggle? Why did its growth remain stunted? The question regarding the ‘stunted growth’ of the Communist movement should also be posed in another way: Given the Indian conditions, was it at all possible to build an alternative anti-imperialist movement led by an illegal Communist party committed to the overthrow of British rule through a popular armed insurrection? The above question can be posed from yet another angle and in another manner: How does one explain the success of the Gandhi-led national movement in mobilising millions of Indian people? At the same time, how does one explain the failure of the Congress movement to be transformed into a people’s party under the left-wing hegemony? These two sets of questions are the two sides of the same process and, therefore, must be explained within a single totality.1 1 Bhagwan Josh, ‘Understanding Indian Communists: A Survey of Approaches to the Study of the Communist Movement in India: 1920–47’, in S. Bhattacharya and Romila Thapar (eds), Situating Indian History, 1986, p. 307.

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Here we would like to spell out briefly the concepts and processes which constitute the broad parameters of the historiographical frame­work. As would be clear from our interpretation of the national move­ment, we are not tailoring facts in order to fit them perfectly into a given theoretical framework. We first define our concepts in a specific manner and then interject them in the working out of our historical material in order to bring out the internal coherence and patterns of experience of the Indian people’s struggle against imperialism. In other words, we are not ‘applying’ Gramscian concepts exactly the way Gramsci does in the context of European or, specifically, Italian history. We are only ‘looking through them’. Rigorous definitions are not helpful unless they are organically worked out through the historical material. State and Strategy

In the first chapter we elaborate on the Gramscian insight at length that there is a sort of relationship of symmetry or correspondence between the form of state (or state form) and the forms of politics/struggles and strategy which could prove effective in terms of undermining the authority of that state.2 The object of an anti-imperialist strategy was to spell out broadly how the Indian people were to act in each phase of a long-drawn-out struggle to reach the goal of final victory; how the offensive steps were to be coordinated with defensive steps keeping in view the balance of forces; how nationalist forces were to be mobilised, consolidated and deployed; and finally, keeping in view the objectively imposed historical necessity, how the entire nation—a nation-in-the-making—was to be united into a ‘historic bloc’ against imperialism. The revolutions of the twentieth century have occurred only in indus­ trially backward countries where the state form was not rooted in some sort of stable parliamentary democratic constitutional network.3 These countries are the czarist Russia, the colonial China, Vietnam and Cuba. The 2 In his critique of cynical ‘Left Marxism’, E.P. Thompson has also repeatedly emphasised the crucial importance of the idea of form of state while propounding his conception of ‘rule of law’ as an inhibition on state power which distinguishes between liberty and despotism. See his following works: Poverty of Theory, Merlin, 1978; Whigs and Hunters, Penguin, 1977; Writing by Candlelight, Merlin, 1980. 3 Lenin was the originator of the idea that parliamentary democracy under capitalism was democracy only for the ruling class. Roger Simon, Gramsci’s Political Thought: An Introduction, London, 1985 (reprint).



Introduction

mass upheavals which overthrew the oppressive rulers and seized power in such states developed into armed revolts or were insurrectionary in nature. Throughout the period of its existence, except perhaps during the short phase of popular fronts, the strategy of the Third International and its constituent parties was a strategy of dual power and of achieving the possibilities of destroying the state at one blow. Everything was ‘reformist’ which did not lead to the creation of dual power and achieving the possibilities of a frontal clash with the state apparatus.4 This strategy of the Third International corresponded to a certain conception of the state as suggested by Lenin in State and Revolution.5 In the context of failure of revolutions in Europe and the rise of Fascism, Antonio Gramsci was the first Marxist to emphasise the fundamental distinction between the czarist state and the European states and the need for a different strategy to carry on a revolutionary transformation.6 Political power was highly concentrated in the state in czarist Russia; therefore, a frontal attack on the state, which Gramsci called ‘war of manoeuvre’, could succeed in capturing state power at one blow. But in capitalist societies, where the state is fortified by a complex network of ‘trenches’, a different strategy was required. Gramsci called this strategy a ‘war of position’. The earlier one was an adequate strategy to undermine the authority of a non-hegemonic state form, while the latter one was the strategy required to successfully fight against a hegemonic state form. But what is the differentia specifica between these two types of state forms? In order to answer this question, we must first introduce the concept of hegemony. Put simply, hegemony is a relation not of domination by means of force, but of consent by means of political and ideological leadership.7 It is the organisation of consent which is ultimately linked up with either maintaining the existing political power or balance of forces or creation of new balance of forces and a new political power. The consent of groups or ideologico-political currents is gained through creating and maintaining alliances by means of political and ideological struggle. The system of alliances would involve compromises, accommodation and 4

‘Interview with Nicos Poulantzas’, Marxism Today, July 1979, pp. 194–201. Simon, op. cit., p. 16. Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought, 1981, Vol. 2, chapter 7: ‘The State and Revolution’, pp. 110–41; ‘The State and Revolution’, in Ralph Miliband, Class Power and State Power, 1983, pp. 154–66. 6 For a detailed discussion of this distinction and other Gramscian concepts in the context of anti-imperialist struggle in India, see Shashi Joshi, Vol. 1. 7 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, New York, 1973, p. 215. 5

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concessions of an economic–corporate nature. ‘The fact of hegemony’, wrote Gramsci, presupposes that account is taken of the interests and tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain balance of compromise should be formed—in other words that the leading group should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind.8

Gramsci’s theory of hegemony as contained in the Prison Notebooks has been subjected to multiple and incompatible interpretations.9 In the process of contending hegemonies, each side plans moves to isolate its opponent and directs its activities in such a way that the forces of the other side are demoralised, abandon their positions under pressure and finally lose faith in their own strength and future. In short, the struggle for hegemony involves gain or loss of prestige, respect, honour, influence and, above all, authority over the various sections of the population. It is in this sense that we shall be employing this concept while referring to the struggles/moves/compromises/negotiations (a) between the colonial state and the national movement as a whole and (b) between various ideological currents, especially the Congress right-wing and left-wing, the two contending hegemonies within the national movement. There is no stable political order which is solely based on naked force. All states and rulers in history have normally obtained the ‘consent’ of important sections of the population to their rule. But successive his­ torical forms of consent must be distinguished from the consent obtained by a modern democratic state. The differentia specifica of the consent won by the hegemonic state lies primarily in the supremacy of the rule of law as an impersonal set of rules and constraints and its parliamentary representative framework. When it is said that the colonial state was a hegemonic state-in-formation, we mean that from the end of the nine­ teenth century onwards this state had begun to seek its legitimacy partly from this qualitatively new type of consent while still combining within it old forms of loyalty and obedience. 8

Ibid., p. 161. Throughout the Prison Notebooks, the term hegemony recurs in a multitude of different contexts. For ambiguities, incoherence and discrepancies in Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, see Perry Anderson, ‘Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review, Special hundredth issue, November 1976. A large selection of works on Gramsci is available in English. For a select bibliography see Simon, Gramsci’s Political Thought: An Introduction, pp. 147–50. 9



Introduction xxiii

The idea of representation can be traced back to the political discourse of nineteenth century British India on the representation of ‘native opin­ion’. In the post-Mutiny decades the dominant idea was to seek the opinion of the ‘natural leaders’ of society who were then identified as members of the landed aristocracy; hence the nomination of landlords and the representation of landholders’ associations to the Legislative Council. This colonial state in India, with its rule of law, distorted and limited civil liberties and an evolving constitutional framework was entirely different from the absolutist feudal state in Russia.10 In czarist Russia there was no freedom of the press and no legal rights of assembly. While in nineteenth century colonial India, a large number of newspapers constituted a formidable opposition to the colonial state and open mass meetings were held to express grievances and criticise the policies of the state. Later, in the twentieth century, the Franchise Committee of 1919 even proposed the representation of labour as a new sectional interest.11 Unlike British India, the social conditions prevailing in many of the Indian states were probably very much similar to the oppressive social conditions prevailing in czarist Russia. Therefore, one of the demands of the state people’s organisations was that similar civil liberties be introduced in Indian states as were available to the people under the British rule. Perhaps it was because of this basic difference that peasant movement in Telangana developed along different lines as compared to the peasant movement in Tebhaga, despite the fact that both were led by the Communists. Even the peasant movement in coastal Andhra in British India was different from the Telangana upsurge. Unlike the working class in colonial India, the Russian working class lacked even elementary trade union rights. The Indian Trade Union Act of 1926 allowed any seven persons of a company to form a registered trade union. Labour laws were enacted to keep the working class movement within the constitutional bounds and separate it from the general political movement in the country. It is through this framework that the colonial state attempted to exercise hegemony over the working class.

10

‘Before the February–March revolution of 1917’, wrote Lenin, ‘state in Russia was in the hands of one old class, namely, the feudal landed nobility, headed by Nicholas Romanow’. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Moscow, 1964, Vol. 24, p. 44. 11 For details see Ravi Narayan Reddy, Heroic Telangana Struggle, 1973; K. Chinnaya Suri, Agrarian Movements in Andhra: 1921–71, Ph.D. thesis, JNU, School of Social Sciences, New Delhi, 1984, pp. 186–255; Sunil K. Sen, Agrarian Struggle in Bengal, 1946–47, New Delhi, 1972.

xxiv A History of the Indian Communists

In the last 15 years, the Marxist debate to understand the state in a capitalist society has produced a significant body of literature. Recently Marxist analyses have begun to show an increasing concern with the problems of socialist strategy.12 But the existing Marxist theories of the capitalist state give no indication about how to analyse concretely the processes of evolution, crisis and dismantling/transforming of a histori­cally constituted form of the state. The levels of abstraction and the obscurity of analysis forbid any appropriation of Marxist state theories for the purpose of a historical study of the state. Taking the Gramscian insights as a point of departure, we have attempted to place the colonial State in a realm of historical study. Gramsci emphasised the broad distinction between the nature of the State in the West and the East and then suggested a strategy of the ‘war of position’ as opposed to the ‘war of manoeuvre’ as the suitable strategy for socialist transformation in the West. But how was this algebraic formula—the ‘war of position’—to be carried on? What would be the role of violence in it? Does ‘war of position’ categorically reject the notion of ‘violent seizure of state power’? These fundamental questions were never directly posed or answered by Gramsci. As we shall see, throughout this volume, the question of ‘violence’ versus ‘non-violence’ stands at the centre of the Gandhian strategic perspective as this is inseparably linked with the mobilisation, organisation and conduct of mass movements—one of the basic methods of expanding the sphere of nationalist counter-hegemony. Gandhi agreed with one aspect of the Marxist understanding that the State is an instrument of organised violence. But, as we have tried to suggest, hidden behind Gandhi’s strategic understanding is a conception of the modern state machine which is systematically armed. According to him, this State could never be overthrown by a violent armed revolt. To do so would be to fall into the trap of this state. Hence the so-called dogmatic emphasis on nonviolence in Gandhi’s ideological and political practice. Though this conception is not sharply formulated, it is here that Gandhi differs in a fundamental sense with the Marxist strategy of the overthrow of the State. 12 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Verso, 1985; David Coates and Gordon Johnston (eds), Socialist Strategies, Martin Robertson, Oxford, 1983. Also see Jessop Bob, ‘Accumulation, State and Hegemonic Projects’, in Kapitalistate, op. cit., pp. 89–111.



Introduction xxv

We are of the view that Gandhi was faced with the problem of dealing with a hegemonic state-in-formation much before Gramsci and certainly at a time when the Marxists in Europe had not yet discovered the theoretical perspectives elaborated by Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks. It is understandable why Gramsci pointed towards the Gandhi-led antiimperialist movement in India when he had to give a concrete example of the strategy of ‘war of position’. This is what Gramsci had written about India13: Thus India’s political struggle against the English knows three forms of war: war of movement, war of position, and underground warfare. Gandhi’s passive resistance is a war of position, which at certain moments becomes a war of movement, and at others underground warfare. Boycotts are a form of war of position, strikes of war of movement, the secret preparation of weapons and combat troops belongs to underground warfare.

It is clear from the above formulation that in the context of India Gramsci uses ‘war of position’ in an extremely narrow sense. For us apart from ‘boycotts’ the ‘war of position’ would comprise peaceful hartals, phases of mass upsurges followed by limited constitutional activity, rallies, open meetings, demonstrations, mass dharnas, hunger strikes and jatha marches. In fact, Gramsci’s formulation would make perfect sense if looked at in another way. In India’s struggle against the British three strategies were being followed. Gandhi was following a strategy of ‘war of position’, Communists were following a strategy of ‘war of movement’ and ‘revolutionary insurrectionists’ were using the methods of ‘underground warfare’ with the object of ‘secret preparation of weapons and combat troops’. A strategy points to the importance of maintaining an objective consistently and, also, of pursuing it in a way adapted to circumstances. But a correct strategy does not present itself automatically, nor is it made by decree. The continuous attempts to discover such a strategy in India were being made broadly in two directions. One trend was repre­sented by the ‘revolutionary insurrectionists’ in Bengal while the other was represented by Gandhi with the backdrop of a split in the Indian National Congress between the so-called moderates and extremists. 13

Prison Notebooks, op. cit., pp. 229–30.

xxvi A History of the Indian Communists

The various elements of the Gandhian strategy, unsystematic and in semi-theoretical form, lie scattered in his writings and utterances, and in many cases are implied in his political practice. Though not clearly articulated in the form of a developed rigorous theoretical system, Acharya Kripalani draws attention to the insights scattered in the poli­tical practice of the Gandhi-led mass movement. ‘Some rough system’, he writes, ‘was evolved out of the way the problems were sought to be solved. The pattern grew out of practice. Even so, it was not rigid or intellectually and logically worked out into a system.’14 Gandhi formulated the various elements of a unique strategy to effectively confront the British–Indian colonial State—a hegemonic state-in-formation. The significance of this contribution, which places him in the line of such master politicians and strategists as Lenin, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, needs to be placed in the world historical context. Nowhere has a developed democratic State broken down through its inner contra­dictions; nowhere has power been seized from the bourgeoisie by a revolutionary proletariat. The point we want to emphasise is that the Indian national movement led by Gandhi remains the only movement in the world in the twentieth century which wrested State power from a colonial State—a hegemonic state-in-formation. The hegemony of the colonial State manifested itself in many forms such as passive acquiescence, apathy, submissiveness, resignation and unquestioned obedience to the State apparatus. A critical temper could not be developed unless a psychological transformation was brought about. The physical force and the ideological onslaught on the part of the colonial State created in Indian people what the nationalists called a ‘defeatist, slave mentality’. And fear constituted the core of this psycho­logical complex. It was described as a state of spiritual paralysis, of mental torpor, inertia and despair. ‘There are fetters’, commented N.N. Mitra: … economic, social and political which have arrested and imprisoned life. At the bottom they are psychological and ethical complexes. The fetters can be removed only by an effort that produces a psychological and ethical awakening and expansion. And this can be effected only through a course of voluntary suffering and selfless sacrifice.15 14

J.B. Kripalani, Gandhian Thought, New Delhi, 1961, p. ix. Perhaps it was because of this reason that Gramsci includes ‘Gandhism’ within the category of ‘naive theorisation’ of ‘passive revolution’. Prison Notebooks, p. 107. 15 The Indian Annual Register, July–December 1935, Vol. II, p. 54.



Introduction xxvii

Lowering the respect and prestige of rulers meant divesting one by one the various layers of the penumbra of legitimacy of the colonial State. It is during this process that relations of subordination begin to be perceived and be understood as relations of oppression. It is only after the subversion of considerable layers of this legitimacy that in the minds of men and women these relations of oppression now begin to be transformed and grasped as antagonistic relations. From now onwards, despite attempts at management, the relationship enters into an irrever­sible crisis. It was through the ‘rule of law’ that the colonial State exercised its legal and legitimate authority over the Indian society as a whole as well as mediated between the conflicting interests in the colonial society as a ‘disinterested’ party. The notion of legal rights played an important part in the above-mentioned transition from sub­ordination to opposition, i.e., in awakening the political consciousness of the oppressed and giving its expression a definite form. Despite their critical moments, the relations of subordination continue to legitimise and reproduce themselves till they begin to be perceived as relations of oppression. For instance, in colonial India ‘landlord’ and ‘tenant’ did not designate in themselves antagonistic positions; it was the atmosphere of awareness of rights created by the national movement— ‘the availability of democratic discourse’—which helped the tenants to question the paternalistic nature of this relationship. This led to the erosion of existing relationship between the ‘landlord’ and the ‘tenant’. The lowering of the prestige and respect of the colonial State occurred at various levels and in various ways. Let us illustrate it with an example. ‘As the Government of India’, observes Michael Edwards, ‘at its real level, the district, was based not on a display of power but on the consent of respect, administration would not function if that respect was eroded’.16 To meet the Gandhian challenge as formulated in the Bombay session of the Indian National Congress (1934), the Willingdon admin­ istration set aside a crore of rupees for rural development. His successor Linlithgow advised the district level administrators: ‘know your villages.’ Meanwhile, the Bengal Government appointed a three-member committee of European officers to suggest measures for carrying out Linlithgow’s advice. The report of the committee reflected the perceptions of districtlevel officialdom. It began by emphasising the fact that the district officer 16

Michael Edwards, The Myth of the Mahatma, London, 1986, p. 98.

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had lost ‘his position as the recognised leader of the rural popu­lation in all schemes of improvement and development’. Before they could be expected to know their villages, argued the Report, the government should take steps to ‘reinforce their prestige and authority’. With the successive installments of reforms the appointments to the local selfgoverning bodies no longer remained in the hands of the bureaucracy. This ‘loss of patronage’, concluded the report, had been ‘a great blow to their prestige’.17 This process of erosion of British influence and authority, though varying in sweep and intensity, was going on in almost all the districts. Thus, we see, that till 1934 the hegemony of the colonial State had already been eroded to a considerable extent. The process of destruction of the moral authority of the British in the heads and hearts of a large section of the population was to be a long and tortuous one. True, the non-cooperation movement eroded the omnipresence of the legal and educational institutions of the British and to some extent lessened the feeling of awe towards government and authority. Young Dange was grossly exaggerating in assuming that the moral authority of the British had been completely destroyed by the Non-cooperation Movement, when he wrote, ‘The moral ground des­troyed on what then does it (British Rule) rest now? Essentially on its military basis. The British Government in India is morally extinct; now only the military Government is existing by which we are coerced into submission to it.’18 Nonetheless, it was noted by the Ahmedabad session of the INC that the country had made ‘great advance in fearlessness and self-respect … the movement has greatly damaged the prestige of the government’.19 National Programme, Contending Hegemonies and Transformation

To state that the Indian National Congress was an all-class movement/ organisation does not mean that at a particular moment in history the economic interests of all the labouring classes as well as the propertied classes were directly represented in a proportionate way. It signifies that 17

N.N. Mitra, The Indian Annual Register, Vol. II, July–December 1936, p. 24. S.A. Dange, Gandhi vs. Lenin, Bombay, 1921, p. 56. 19 Quoted in Arun Chandra Guha, India’s Struggle: Quarter of a Century, Publication Division, 1982, p. 35. 18



Introduction xxix

by changing the balance of forces through ideological struggle and mobilisation, it was open to the introduction of a relatively more advanced programme through debate and discussion and accepted as a ‘National Programme’ within the expanding organisation. This would, in turn, direct the dynamics in the organisation in such a way that the Congress would increasingly stand for divesting of vested interests. It followed naturally that the Congress should have emphasised the goal of Swaraj in the abstract initially as its content would be determined by the future evolution of the mutual relationships between different classes/groups in the process of struggle against imperialism. All dynamic movements evolve or release forces that more or less tend to disturb the existing dispositions of the vast sections of the society. Slowly, as the movement is radicalised, national popular goals are defined in a new way. The conception of a national programme was an ideological conception which depended upon levels of mobilisation, willingness of propertied classes to provide economic concessions and the degree of awareness attained by the vast majority of the participants. For example, the ‘Swaraj’ of the non-cooperation days was replaced by a ‘purna swaraj’ which now talked of fundamental rights of the masses. The acceptance of an agrarian programme at Faizpur (1936) added a further dimension to its popularity for the rural masses. The ‘effective­ness’ of a national programme was to be underlined by the political consequences it was likely to produce rather than its abstract advanced nature from the point of view of a particular oppressed section of the colonial society. The aim behind a radical programme was to enthuse the popular masses so as to activate them on a large scale. A radical programme of this nature was to be designed not to end the exploitation of the masses (a job which only the future national government was supposed to do) but to mobilise the oppressed and the exploited in order to place them into the forefront of the political movement. A national programme could only be a series of ameliorative measures—a kind of ‘transitional’ programme. Looking from this angle, a moderate ‘national economic programme’ would have stood greater chances of being imple­mented as compared to a sectional programme of exceptional radicalism which, though far more attractive, was destined to remain unimplemented. Jawaharlal Nehru’s efforts to create a new national ideology and national programme have been placed in this context. With the absorption of the economic dimension as an aspect of the egalitarian vision of society within the earlier national

xxx A History of the Indian Communists

ideology, Nehru was causing shifts of meaning in the existing nationalist political discourse. This new discourse not only evoked a national sentiment but also conveyed a sense of class struggle and the vision of a non-exploitative society. In the anti-imperialist struggle it is the ideological category of ‘people’ which becomes the subject of history. But the popular identity of these subjects is not fixed a priori. It gets constructed in the course of the struggle itself. While struggling against imperialism people enter into a process of ideological development. Slowly the class dimension begins to be absorbed and, over a period, changes the colour of the nationalist ideology. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the nationalist ideology which had so far asserted the idea of racial equality absorbed within itself the economic critique of colonial exploitation,20 thereby generating a new vision of an independent and democratic India. This subversive democratic discourse, which till 1920 had remained limited to the field of economic and political equality between Britain and India, now began to permeate into the dormant contradictions internal to the camp of the people. After the First World War, under the influence of the Russian Revolution and Marxist ideas a new type of economic critique of exploitation began to be synthesised with the national sentiment producing a powerful vision of a democratic socialist India. Nurtured first by the movement of Workers and Peasants’ Party and later the Congress Socialist Party, it was given a coherent shape by Jawaharlal Nehru. This ideological impact resulted in a ‘left bloc’ within the national movement. The period between 1934 and 1940 is the period when this vision was on the ascendant. During this period two different kinds of nationalist discourses (being the product of two different stages) were contesting for the heads and hearts of the Indian people. We call this process one of contending hegemonies. It would be wrong to concep­tualise this contest as a contest between two parallel and contradictory streams, one representing nationalism and the other socialism, or even of two nationalisms, one elite and the other subaltern. Moreover, this would lead to the upholding of a different theoretical framework which would result into different interpretations of the

20

Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India, New Delhi, 1966.



Introduction xxxi

relationship between ‘national’ and ‘class’ movements. Implied in it is a certain conception of ‘nationalism’ within the history of Marxist thought where ‘nation’ and ‘class’ have been posited as two entirely different kinds of movements—one is seen as the ideological move­ment of the bourgeoisie while the other is seen as the ideology and movement of the working class. The two may at times join hands but they essentially are separate and distinct. We reject such a theoretical perspective and base our arguments on a perspective of ‘nation-class’.21

Prior to these two discourses contending with each other the existence of patriotic sentiment is presupposed. How could the various political forces within this all-enveloping nationalist domain relate to each other while simultaneously expanding the domain of nationalist hegemony? Since ideology is the precise terrain on which the relations between various political forces are constituted, this could happen only through divergent and competing interpretations of Swaraj by imbuing this con­ ception with different meanings of national programmes. In the context of contending hegemonies, we would like to make another point. We are not arguing on the basis of a zero-sum game according to which the fundamental economic contradiction between labour and capital is extrapolated into the domain of ideology. This way of conceptualising contending hegemonies would permit the existence of only two mutually exclusive sets of hegemonies—‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletarian’. In this way of conceptualising, the problems of contending hegemonies the working class’s failure to establish its hegemony would automatically imply that the bourgeois hegemony has come to hold its sway over the mass movement and vice versa. This holds crucial implications for under­lining the nature of the independent state which would be established at the end of the successful liberation movement. Such a state would then be viewed as the state of a single class, for example, the bourgeoisie. We are of the view that it would be more appropriate to conceptualise the resultant hegemony at each stage in terms of ‘synthetic whole’ which could be described as ‘more bourgeois and less socialist’ or ‘more socialist less bourgeois’. At every stage, developing is a process in which opposite extremes are to some degree reconciled and integrated. Which of the many possible resultant combinations of competing contradictory hegemonies would come to hold sway over the entire movement? This 21 Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies, Vol. I, New Delhi.

xxxii A History of the Indian Communists

would depend upon many factors. In the process of struggle, there would appear a point/stage when it would be possible to characterise the shifting equilibrium between the competing hegemonies weighing heavily in favour of being ‘more socialistic and less bourgeois’ in the overall movement. The attainment of such a stage in the anti-imperialist movement we call the ‘transformation’ of the Indian national movement. The substance of Swaraj, being the end product of a series of ‘nation–class’ struggles, could not be predetermined by theory or speculation. Though emphasised as an abstract entity to rally round all the conflict­ing interests within the nation, ‘purna swaraj’ over time was bound to acquire a character and form with the onward march of events. ‘That character and form’, wrote N.N. Mitra, the perceptive editor of the Indian Annual Register, ‘will be determined by the socio-economic ensemble of conditions as they evolve as we forge ahead’.22 And now, here is the justification for studying this period (1934–41) as a separate period. The year 1934 was a turning point not only in the history of Indian nationalism but also for the activities of the com­munists. The Civil Disobedience Movement peters off, the Communist Party is banned, the CSP emerges within the Congress and political positions are sharply defined during the course of a great debate on the issues of council entry and office acceptance. In the light of the decisions taken at the Seventh Congress of the Third International (1934) and as a part of the worldwide shift in the Comintern policy, the Indian com­munists begin to grapple with a new kind of politics, the politics of the United National Front. This new style of politics comes to an end on the eve of the Second World War. The communists now begin to grope towards a different kind of politics and Hitler’s attack on the USSR in June 1941 further complicates the situation for them. Also the eighteen-month-long experiment when the Congress movement occupied a unique position of being in the government as well as in the opposition comes to an end once India is dragged into the war against her will. These eight years were the years in which the forces of the left forge ahead to take a coherent shape. A new correlation of forces begins to emerge along the lines of two mutually conflicting strategies arriving at a culmination, a turning point at Tripuri. Tripuri represents the culminating event which symbolised 22 Mitra, The Indian Annual Register, July–December 1935, Vol. II, p. 55. Emphasis in original.



Introduction xxxiii

the outcome of the Indian left’s youthful strivings; it tested its capacity to unitedly endure and fight for its immediate political goals and to assess its own potential for realising its aims in the future. The process of crystallisation of forces along two mutually conflicting stra­tegies within the Congress generated tremendous stress and strain for the Congress organisational structure. For the first and the last time, the convergence of all the left tendencies posed a serious challenge to the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, albeit in a confused manner. And strangely enough, contrary to expectations, the convergence occurs around the personality of Bose rather than of Nehru, the leader who had so far nurtured, symbolised, inspired and consistently defended the forces of the left. Writing history, especially the history of politics, means, ultimately, making sense of a story of success or failure. Reflections on bygone times are more likely to be understood by participants as links of self-created destiny in a chain of necessity, leading relentlessly towards a final goal. To them, in retrospect, everything happened simply as it did; it could not have happened otherwise under the given circumstances. But when the actors were in the process of making history, when the process was not yet sealed as fate, the lines of future development towards success or failure were open to them. They made certain choices and acted in one way while they could have made other possible choices equally well and acted otherwise under the same circumstances. Therefore, the researcher’s difficult task is not only to construct the logic of certain choices as successive links in the emerging chain of inevitability, but also to point out simultaneously the possibility and potential of other available choices which could have been followed but were not. This approach towards the problems of historiography forms an essential part of our historical method.

xxxiv A History of the Indian Communists

Chapter 1

The Colonial State

The state and the structure of the society are not, from the standpoint of politics, two different things. The state is the structure of society.1 Karl Marx The destinies of our Indian Empire are covered with thick darkness. It is difficult to form any conjecture as to the fate reserved for a state which resembles no other in history, and which forms by itself a separate class of political phenomenon. The laws which regulate its growth and its decay are still unknown to us.2 Macaulay’s speech in the House of Commons in 1833 NATURE OF THE COLONIAL STATE

The significance of studying and analysing the specific nature of the colonial state3 and locating the counter-strategy followed by the Indian 1 T. Bottomore and M. Rubel (eds), Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, Great Britain, 1979, p. 222. 2 K.S. Vakil and S. Natarajan, Education in India, New Delhi, 1966, p. 117. 3 By the phrase ‘nature of the state’, we do not imply the question: which class or classes exercise power through the state? By ‘nature of the state’ we mean here the form of rule and the style of functioning of the state apparatus.

2

A History of the Indian Communists

National Congress under Gandhi’s leadership to fight this state has so far not received any attention.4 When the Indian National Congress was born in 1885 the colonial state was already more than a hundred years old. The colonial state became the ‘engine of modernisation’ of Indian society and, from the very beginning, the logic of the emerging political order contained in it the potential for parliamentary institutions of the future. As a result the state apparatus turned out to be an ‘advanced’ one while the corresponding processes in society not only ‘lagged behind’ but also acquired a measure of complexity not witnessed by the history of western countries.5 In the background of the disintegration of the Mughal Empire the colonial state at its initial stages performed certain functions which the feudal state of absolutism performed in Western Europe, such as the creation of centralised political power, uniform legal system, progressive consolidation of private property, introduction of communications systems, abolition of internal barriers to trade, etc.6 The need for the creation of a new state in order to facilitate the aim of long-term colonial exploitation has been emphasised by Marxist authors. However, what has been missing from their argument is the discussion of the specific form of the colonial state in India. For example, Professor Bipan Chandra does not discuss the specificity of the political form of the colonial state which is the basic point of departure for our study. ‘Our major effort will be,’ he clarifies at the beginning, ‘to outline what is specifically colonial about the colonial state.’ The task which he sets before himself in this context is to underline the fact, a fact denied by ‘nearly all historians and other social scientists of the imperialist school’ that ‘the colonial state is the instrument for oppressing entire societies’.7 4 A comprehensive study of the colonial state has not yet been attempted. S. Gopal’s British Policy in India, 1858–1905, first published in 1965, discusses in detail the subtle mechanisms through which the newly emerging colonial state apparatus begins to manifest ‘hegemonic features’. Contributions by Anil Seal (1971), and S.R. Mehrotra (1971) are also helpful in understanding the evolution of the colonial state. 5 The debate on the ‘colonial mode of production’ left the theme of specific nature of colonial state in India untouched. For the debate see Utsa Patnaik (ed.), Agrarian Relations and Accumulation: The Mode of Production Debate in India, New Delhi, 1990. 6 For a discussion of the feudal absolutist state in western Europe, see Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, London, 1979. 7 Bipan Chandra, ‘Colonialism, Stages of Colonialism and the Colonial State’, Left View—2. Rahul Smarak Lekhak Sahyog Samiti, December 1985. The article was first published in Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 10. No. 3, 1980.

The Colonial State

When the British established their supremacy in India up to the Sutlej in 1818 they inherited a country very different from the India of the great Mughals. The needs of the metropolis could be served only if the British monopoly of power was placed on a less arbitrary and more regular basis. The necessity to organise the collection of land revenue punctually, the safety of trade and markets and creation of conditions of certainty and security for exchange transactions demanded the omnipresent authority of the new rulers. In other words, the British were faced with the practical problem of constructing a new type of political control, in short, a new state apparatus. Cunningham remarked as early as 1882 that the newly assumed power and position of the English rulers compelled them to confront the ‘seriousness’ of dispensing ‘criminal and civil justice’ in an alien land which they had conquered.8 Since this task of founding a state was to be performed in a society which was the product of a long standing civilisation it was but natural that its evolution would occur through the clash of beliefs, theories and ideological justifications among the colonial administration. With Cornwallis’ claim that the colonial government itself would be subject to the rule of law in 1793 the principle of legal equality in the land was theoretically upheld. Despite its hollowness in practice this principle became the first plank on which the ideological apparatus and the colonial state itself was to be evolved. The introduction of the idea of rule of law based on the theoretical–legal equality of all Indians and embodying within it the defence of life and property was to have a long-term effect on colonial society. The impact of this on Indians was visible to the rulers of the day. ‘It is enough’, records Cunningham, ‘to say that, by general admission, no part of the British system has made a deeper impression on the native mind, or inspired great confidence.’9 T.B. Macaulay as the law member of the Governor General’s Council started the codification of Indian public law which was not completed until 1886.10 These laws constituted a complicated legal system which through the network of the police and law courts came to impinge 8

H.S. Cunningham, British India and Its Rulers, Delhi, 1986, p. 197 (first published in 1882). ‘The immediate problem at that time’, writes Stokes, ‘was the manner in which the British should exercise their controlling power in the Bengal territories’. Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, London, 1959, p. 1. 9 Ibid., p. 199. 10 Percival Spear, A History of India, Penguin, 1973, Vol. 2, p. 127.

3

4

A History of the Indian Communists

upon the day-to-day life of the Indian masses. Thus the rudimentary framework of a new state consciously projected as based purely on rules, procedures and principles began to ideologically permeate Indian society. Meanwhile colonial exploitation in India had passed on to the second stage and the thrust of the newly developing industrial and commercial interests posited the need for a transformation of indigenous structures so that India could be used both as a market for goods and as a supplier of raw materials. This transformation was actively undertaken under the slogan of development and modernisation.11 It was against this backdrop that liberals and the ‘radical’ democrats of the metropolis started a debate which provided the framework within which decisions were taken to construct the apparatus of the colonial state. The ‘reality’ of power and the ‘illusion’ of power are not contradictory. Shorn of illusion naked force soon realises its limitations. Illusory perceptions add to naked force the strengths of reason, purpose and destiny. Thus, at the beginning the ideological framework of the conquerors conditioned the perceptions not only of the rulers but also of the people they had conquered.12 The continuing division between the legislators and the actual rulers, between the British Parliament and the British administrators in India, in short, between the general policy of Indian administration and its application in practice must be kept in mind in order to understand the ‘gap’ between the ideology and the reality of imperial control. It should be remembered that when the above-mentioned debate began (1818) the British parliament was dominated by the Tories and the leaders of various shades of liberal thought were not to come to the fore for a dozen years. Inside India the slowly expanding apparatus of the colonial state had begun to create a market for the employment of English-educated Indians to fill the lower rungs of various administrative departments. Even as the rulers were engaged in a fierce controversy on the question of mediums of instruction the ruled had already launched into learning the English language. The main premise underlying Charles Grant’s and

11

Bipan Chandra, Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India, New Delhi, 1979, pp. 1–38. 12 K.N. Panikkar, Presidential Address: Modern India, Indian History Congress, Aligarh, 1976, p. 7.

The Colonial State

Macaulay’s arguments for the introduction of English education was that although supremacy was won with the help of arms its consolidation and perpetuation now demanded different measures to ‘conciliate the people to the new British East India regime’.13 Thus the dissemination of colonial ideology and utility for administrative needs were the twin objectives of the educational policy of the British Government.14 Macaulay and many of his contemporaries were convinced that the military conquest had won ‘a barren and precarious hegemony’ while ‘the permanent and most profitable form of conquest was that over the mind.’15 Their ideological make-up led them to believe, notwithstanding the fact that India was now to serve the ends of the industrial revolution, that the new India could be created as a mirror image of England. The newly-born Indian intelligentsia came to assimilate this ideological perspective—the perspective of a moral mission undertaken by the colonisers. Interestingly, a section of educated Indians also came to form an equally firm belief that it is only through the medium of the English language that the reservoir of European scientific knowledge would be available to them.16 But the educational ideas of nineteenth century Indian intellectuals were different both in purpose and detail from the policy of the colonial rulers. Thus at the very beginning we see the phenomenon of a conjunctural and temporary convergence of projects and the mutual sympathies they aroused despite the fact that they were oriented towards contradictory goals. Later on this phenomenon was to repeat itself during the tenure of Dufferin when A.O. Hume and the Indian nationalists joined hands to lay the foundations of the Indian National Congress in 1885. The logic of the arguments of Macaulay and Charles Grant was further developed by Charles E. Trevelyan. He formulated in very precise terms the relationship between colonial policy and the forms of opposition

13 Vakil and Natarajan. op. cit. p. 93. For ‘Charles Grant’s Observations, 1797’, and ‘Macaulay’s Minute, 1835’, see M.R. Paranjpe, (ed.), A Source Book of Modern Indian Education: 1797–1902, London, 1938. 14 K.N. Panikkar, ‘The Intellectual History of Colonial India: Some Historiographical and Conceptual Questions’, in S. Bhattacharya and Romila Thapar (eds), Situating Indian History, Delhi, 1986, pp. 403–33. 15 Stokes, op. cit., p. 45. 16 Raja Rammohan Roy’s Address, 1923. M.R. Paranjpe (ed.), op. cit., p. 12. Also see, Iqbal Singh, Raja Rammohan Roy: A Biographical Enquiry into the Making of Modern India, Delhi, 1987.

5

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A History of the Indian Communists

which British rule in India was likely to face in the future. Trevelyan based his argument on the assumption that to aspire for ‘national honour and prosperity’ was a principle of human nature and Indians were no exception to it. ‘No effort of policy’, wrote Trevelyan, ‘can prevent the natives from ultimately regaining their independence.’17 Therefore, the connection between India and England could never be a permanent one. But given the implementation of a specific colonial policy—a ‘liberal and enlightened policy’—it could be a prolonged one. The question Trevelyan asked was: What were the ways open to Indians to reach the goal of independence? But there are two ways of arriving at this point. One of these is, through the medium of revolution; and the other, through that of reform. In one the forward movement is sudden and violent; in the other, it is gradual and peaceable ... . No doubt, both these schemes of national improvement suppose the termination of English rule, but while that event is the beginning of one, it is only the conclusion of the other. In one, the sudden and violent overthrow of our Government is a necessary preliminary; in the other, a long continuance of our administration, and the gradual withdrawal of it as the people become fit to govern themselves, are equally indispensable.18

He divided the forces opposed to British rule into two camps. In the one were the people—‘men of all classes’—who thought that there was no remedy for the existing depressed state of their people ‘except the sudden and absolute expulsion of the English’ while the people in the other camp were imbued with ‘another set of ideas’. ‘The most sanguine’, he observed, ‘dimly looked forward in the distant future to the establishment of national representative assembly as the consummation of their hopes.’19 Trevelyan believed, and here he formulates an important principle of hegemonic politics, that the nature of their own political intervention would considerably influence the form of politics which would emerge as an opposition to their rule in India. He continued: The only means at our disposal for preventing the one and securing the other class of results, is to set the natives on a process of European 17

Extract from ‘Education of the People of India, 1838’, in op.cit., p. 37. Ibid., pp. 57, 62. 19 Ibid., pp. 61–62. 18

The Colonial State

improvement, to which they are already sufficiently inclined. They will then cease to desire and aim at independence on the old Indian footing. A sudden challenge will then be impossible; and a long continuance of our present connection with India will even be assured for us. A Mahratta or Mahommedan despotism might be re-established in a month but a century would scarcely suffice to prepare the people for self-government on the European model. The political education of a nation must be a work of time; and when it is in progress, we shall be as safe as it will be possible for us to be.20

The perspective outlined in the above paragraph is remarkable for its foresight and prescience. The idea that the British could choose their opponents and also overwhelmingly predetermine the path they were likely to follow by consciously pre-empting developments along one path while opening another, was remarkably original. It was within the framework inspired by this idea that the policymakers were designing their tactical moves when they were busy framing the constitutional reforms (1928–32) which were to be imposed after the Civil Disobedience Movement had been suppressed. Given the nature of the British intervention and its consequence—the process of politically educating the nation—according to Trevelyan, would result in the establishment of ‘self-government on the European model’. Trevelyan envisaged two kinds of threats to the colonial state in the future: (a) an armed insurrection which could be sudden ending up in the establishment of an old state form with which the Indians were familiar; (b) a constitutionalist opposition aspiring for independence. The latter, he believed, could be absorbed by voluntarily carrying on the necessary modifications of ‘political institutions to suit the increased intelligence of the people and their capacity for self-government’.21 Trevelyan’s assumption—the sheet-anchor of liberal imperialist ideology and later on liberal imperialist historiography—that the British ruling class would voluntarily surrender power to the Indians once it was satisfied that Indians had acquired the capacity for self-government had enough room within it for the ideological rationalisation of an endless perpetuation of colonial rule. The slow and long-drawn-out process of curbing the powers of the Company and its ultimate abolition placed the political control of India 20 21

Ibid., p. 47. Ibid., p. 59.

7

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A History of the Indian Communists

in the hands of the British parliament. The new structure of the state was being evolved by creating checks and balances to temper the despotism of the Company’s rule which tended to alienate Indians. The period falling roughly between 1833 and the end of the nineteenth century was the period when essential elements were being evolved which went into the construction of a specific type of colonial state in India. Once India was subordinated to the British parliament the evolution of this state could not but be influenced by the ideas and political discourses prevalent in British society. The ascendancy of liberalism in British society and state introduced an alternative and contending approach to the already existing conservative approach towards exercising control over the colonies.22 The methods of Gladstonian liberalism were different from the methods of Disraeli, Salisbury and Lytton. The specific form of colonial state in India was to develop through a slow and protracted process by cautiously following a tortuous middle course between the farsighted ‘liberal experiment’ and the unimaginative ‘conservative adventure’.23 The interplay between these two moments over time led to the structuration of the colonial state giving it a definite form and stamping on it characteristics of its own. Many a time these two sets of policies clashed and contradicted each other in the short run while professing to serve the same goal in the long run, i.e., the maintenance of imperial control over India.24 By 1882 the contradiction between the ‘authoritarian principles’ and the ‘liberal principles’ lying at the foundation of the colonial state was becoming more and more visible. Six years earlier, while speaking for the opposition on the Royal Titles Bill in 1876, Gladstone had underlined the fundamental differences between these ‘two policies’.25 Summarising the clash between these two approaches Viceroy Ripon concluded: There are two policies lying before the choice of the Government of India; the one is the policy of those who have established a free press, who have promoted education, who have admitted natives more and 22

Gopal, op. cit., pp. 7, 40 and 302. Ibid. 24 Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism, 1971, chapter 4; S.R. Mehrotra, The Emergence of Indian National Congress, Delhi, 1971, chapter 6. 25 Gopal, op. cit., p. 302. 23

The Colonial State

more largely to the public service in various forms, and who have favoured the extension of self-government; the other side is that of those who hate the freedom of the press, who dread the progress of education, and who watch with jealousy and alarm everything which tends, in however limited a degree, to give the natives of India a larger share in the management of their own affairs. Between these two policies we must choose: the one means progress, the other means repression. Lord Lytton chose the latter. I have chosen the former … .26

The Ilbert Bill controversy, according to Ripon, was a clash between ‘two opposite theories of government’, one based on ‘force’ while the other took into account ‘solemn promises’ on the part of the British Parliament. Hobhouse described it as a contest ‘between two methods of governing India’, ‘two theories of Government’, and ‘between the two schools of statesmen’.27 Dalhousie had created the legislative council in 1853 as a means of ascertaining official opinion in the presidencies. After the Revolt of 1857, the vital need for such an institution was now emphasised in a changed context as this alone could obviate the perilous experiment of continuing to legislate for millions of people with few means of knowing except by a rebellion whether the laws could be imposed upon them or not.28 On the other hand, from the very beginning the demand for representative government in India was made by the nationalists though in very general terms. Against this backdrop of public opinion one of the results of the clash and compromise between the above two policies was the Act of 1876 which empowered local governments to introduce the elective system into the constitution of a municipality if asked for by one-third of the ratepayers of that municipality. The Indian press continued to urge the introduction of the elective principle for the provincial councils. The next phase of the struggle was for the further extension of this principle. Indians with hope and Britons with trepidation anticipated that Ripon’s resolution of 18 May 1882 on local self-government that would prove to be the thin end of the wedge which would lead to the more general introduction of representative institutions in India and finally to national 26

Quoted in Mehrotra, op. cit., pp. 305–06. Ibid., pp. 346–47. 28 Gopal, op. cit., p. 22. This mechanism of ‘legislative forms’—and Canning knew that ‘forms were of incalculable importance’—was also needed to allow the expression of non-official British opinion in India. Ibid., p. 20. 27

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A History of the Indian Communists

self-government.29 The nationalist politicians scored a decisive victory with the Councils Act of 1892. This Act, for the first time, introduced a representative element in the Councils, though the Government was careful to maintain official majorities. It was expected by the government that the presence of Congress leaders ‘in the Councils will have the effect of considerably discounting external agitation’.30 The government had conceded the principle, though not the substance, of what the Congress leaders had been agitating for since 1885. The law, according to a Marxist scholar, is based on a sort of fourfold structure. It presupposes a clash of interests, institutions of court and punishment, and above all, the ultimate authority equipped with means of coercion in whose name the punishment is imposed.31 The feudal or patriarchal authority is distinguished from bourgeois authority in the fact that the latter not only recognises the distinction between the private and public but it also proclaims its submission to the same legal system. Thus there is nothing in society which is above the law.32 This way the coercive authority of the state is transformed into impersonal laws ready to regulate exchange transactions, contracts, etc., and to mediate the antagonisms and clashes between individuals and groups. This legalism successfully projects the supposed neutrality of the state. Once the day-to-day life of a society is deeply imbued with these laws, the ‘rule of law’ becomes the dominant ideology of the state. To show obedience to those laws means, at least potentially, the identification of all citizens with the state. The supposed neutrality of the laws, and therefore of the state, is ensured so long as these laws remain legitimised or legitimation is sought by acquiring the consent of the citizens through a constitutional framework. In the Indian context, to begin with, laws were imposed on society as a whole by the colonial state in an authoritarian manner and Indians were not associated with the framing of these laws. The awareness of this submission and the conflict rooted in it gave birth to the notion of a ‘national interest’. Once Indian society as a whole acquiesced in these laws (e.g. those governing property ownership, eviction suits and exchange relations) life came to be regulated by them and the authority 29

Gopal, op, cit., p. 184; Mehrotra, op. cit., pp. 303 and 307. Gopal, op. cit., p. 186; Tara Chand, History of the Freedom Movement in India, Vol. 3, 1967, p. 562. 31 E.B. Pashukanis, Law and Marxism, London, 1978, pp. 73–77. 32 This is what Cornwallis did in the context of the colonial state. See footnote 10. 30

The Colonial State

of the colonial state penetrated the remotest villages. It became an essential constituent element of all relations, especially the relations between landlord and tenant and between labour and capital.33 As the small nationalist forces gathered momentum towards the middle of the nineteenth century and the revolt of 1857 indicated the unacceptability of the laws framed in a distant country, the need was felt for introducing constitutional institutions to now consciously acquire the consent of at least some sections of the Indian population. In order to emphasise the colonial aspect of these laws Gandhi called them ‘lawless laws’. Nevertheless the acceptance of these laws implied some degree of consent. Disciplined disobedience of colonial laws—‘satyagraha’—meant not only assertion of freedom but also a conscious withdrawal of consent. This disobedience if practised on a mass scale could not but paralyse the state apparatus. To fight the colonial state meant fighting its laws and to slowly gather organised strength with the ultimate objective of occupying all the institutions which framed those laws. The withdrawal of consent and a parallel organisation in the form of a disciplined mass movement aiming at the creation of a Constituent Assembly came to symbolise the national state within a state. The law presupposes differentiation and conflict of interests between individuals as well as groups. Implied in it is the notion of right.34 But there must first exist the awareness of this legal right before courage is summoned to demand and assert it. This expanding awareness of legal rights transforms relations of subordination into relations of antagonism. What was earlier being perceived as legitimate now turns out to be illegitimate and therefore unfair and unjustifiable. This cannot but result in disturbing the equilibrium of power relations between the exploiter and the exploited. There must be some sort of adjustment before a temporary new equilibrium in power relations is restored. The demand for a fair rent on the part of the UP peasantry was rooted in this dynamic. Given the existence of a democratic movement of the oppressed the process of change becomes irreversible. Only it is slow and tortuous because it passes from one phase to another through a shifting equilibrium. This method

33 This should explain why unlike many other colonial countries a powerful consitutional current of the working class movement existed in India. 34 Pashukanis, op. cit., pp. 81, 103–06, 117.

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of bringing about a social change centring around shifts in power relations between mutually conflicting interests would involve negotiations, compromises and mutual concessions, either of a political or economic nature. Such a process of social change would defy the development of contradictions along the lines where their accumulation would result into a sudden explosion. At the centre of a hegemonic political struggle lies the attempt to shift this equilibrium in the desired direction.35 The democratic discourse of ‘nationalist ideology’ (of the first phase and of the second phase) as well as the dissemination of modern techniques of organisation could not but enlighten the peasantry with an awareness of their rights and the desire to assert them. That is why almost all the peasant movements in British India after the Non-Cooperation Movement revolved around the question of cesses levied over and above the legal share of the landlord. The notion of legality on the one hand helped the peasants to perceive the illegality of the landlords’ demand while on the other hand it convinced them of the fairness and legitimacy of their own demand. The fact that their demand had the backing of law sharpened their sense of injustice and added to their boldness. The notions of legality and illegality were central to the process of changing consciousness of the tenants. In these peasant movements the landlords’ right to rent was never questioned. What was questioned was the legitimacy of the quantum of his share. Even the Communist-led peasant movement in British India—the Tebhaga Peasant Movement—was fought not on the slogan of abolition of feudalism and land to the tiller, but on the question of peasants’ rights to 2/3rd share of the produce.36 In Punjab the peasant struggle was fought on the slogan of peasants’ right to half the produce.37 The powerful peasant movements, in Bihar under the leadership of Swami Sahajanand and in Kerala under the leadership of nationalists, came up on the basis of agitations conducted around the question of changing the agrarian legislation. 35

Shashi Joshi, Vol. I, op. cit., Introduction. D.N. Dhanagare, Peasants Movements in India: 1920–1950, Oxford, 1983, Chapter 7. Land to the tiller was the general slogan of the Communist-led Kisan Sabha. The demand was backed by the Floud Commission’s judgement that peasants have a right to two-thirds share of the produce. 37 Bhagwan Josh, The Communist Movement in Punjab, 1926–47, 1978, Chapter V. 36

The Colonial State

As mentioned, through law the authority of the colonial state was the supreme arbiter in the relationship between the landlord and peasant. Through this law the colonial state mediated the class struggle between them. Whenever the law was perceived as being unfair and unjust peasants carried on long-drawn agitations to put pressure on the colonial state to pass amendments to it. The crucial point which we would like to emphasise is that given this framework of the peasant movements their potential and form of struggle was largely predetermined.38 The landlords always attempted to prove that their efforts to realise rent and carry on evictions were within the limits of the law while the tenants tried hard to prove through their struggles that the rent was more than ‘legal’ and evictions were arbitrary. Thus the domain of law became the target of peaceful mass movements, and class struggle against the landlord was fought in terms of putting pressures on the colonial state to mould the law in favour of a particular class. Given this framework, the Indian peasantry was not to fight one of those famous peasant wars of the twentieth century which resolved the agrarian question through armed insurrection. At the most, if directed on correct lines by the leadership, the Indian peasantry could support peaceful mass political movements on a vast scale so as to influence the nationalist forces and thereby the nature of the future government which was to come to power at the end of imperialist rule.39 It was to be the coming nationalist rule which was to deal with the basic demand of ‘land to the tiller’. Peasant movements, however radical they might be, if directed away from nationalism on a maximum and militant programme of sectional demands, could not but result in undermining the strength of the movement against imperialism and thereby harming the cause of the peasantry in the long run. Any state apparatus in its day-to-day activities is constituted by the coordination of decisions of various individuals placed at the various levels of hierarchy. Therefore, the calibre and quality of human beings who fill the various posts in this hierarchy account for the efficient and smooth functioning of the apparatus. The Indian colonial state was run by a bureaucracy responsible to the British people through their parliament. It could not but be gripped by a heightened sense of legality and 38

For Bihar see Chapter 8, and for Kerala see Chapter 12. Bhagwan Josh, ‘Review: Peasant Movements in India, 1920–50’, Studies in History, New Series, Vol. 1, No. 1, January–June 1985. 39

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justification for its actions. As Gandhi said, Indian patriots were ‘engaged in the very difficult and delicate task of wresting authority from an organisation whose members are able, industrious, intelligent, brave and above all trained in the habits of exact discipline’.40 It was a state apparatus run by Halletts and Haigs, Petries and Williamsons, Haileys and Darlings. During the whole period of British rule how many top or middle ranking communists were killed? How many of them were hanged? Unlike the Chinese Communists the Indian Communists were not to be shot dead for leading militant strikes of the workers; they were not to be hanged for conspiracies. Unlike the Russian Communists who were frequently sent to Siberia, Indian Communists were not to be sent to the Andamans; they were not to be sentenced to continuous long imprisonment. They were to be watched carefully and removed from the scene through legal procedures whenever and wherever they were perceived to be making significant headway in the industrial or agrarian sector. Even when the police and provincial bureaucracy urged upon the Central Government the necessity of devising ‘permanent weapons’ for effective action, the contemplated legislation against Communism was never carried out. Even when he agreed with the Bombay Government to ban the Communist organisations, Hallett was constantly worried about its justification in the face of public opinion in England: I have thought it desirable to examine in detail these proposals of the Government of Bombay regarding Communist organisations to be proscribed under the Criminal Law Amendment Act, for I felt that possibly our action or rather that of the Government of Bombay may be attacked even more in England than in India, for the danger of Communism is not yet fully appreciated in a sober and sensible country such as England; if the action taken is attacked in parliament, we must be in a position to brief the Secretary of State effectively, for I venture to think that even His Majesty’s Government is not very whole-heartedly in support of the policy of attacking communism.41

In dealing with the proposal of anti-Communist legislation, His Majesty’s Government attached particular importance to the inclusion 40

M. Gandhi, Young India, 28 August 1924. Telegram to the Government of Bombay, No. 1996, 1 October 1934. Subodh Roy (ed.), Communism in India: Unpublished Documents, 1925–34, Calcutta, October 1972, p. 334. 41

The Colonial State

of the words ‘by use of force or violence or threat of force or violence’ in the definition of an unlawful organisation and wished to make it clear that ‘the provisions of the Bill should only be used to deal with activities of Communists in cases when they are clearly to lead to the use of force or of violence’.42 Three levels of distinctions characterised the perceptions of the colonial state apparatus regarding the growth and development of the Communist movement. These perceptions are also indicators of the nature of the colonial state as it functioned from day-to-day to ensure control over the Indian people. 1. British policy-makers at the highest level knew that all mass movements were preceded by ‘an atmosphere of mass discontent’.43 Many a time the difference between the approaches of the bureaucracy at the Centre and the provinces consisted in the fact that unlike the top bureaucracy the lower level officials faced with the nitty-gritty of struggles wanted to suppress even the first indications of discontent ‘instead of waiting until the translation into action of such manufactured discontent confronts the Government with a hard and fast situation’.44 Unlike the lower bureaucracy the policy-makers suggested action and defined the limits of law only from the second stage onwards carefully avoiding its extension to the first stage. Their conception left a margin or space for the expression of discontent and grievances within the legal limits. The extent of this ‘margin’ or ‘space’ was the measure of the colonial state’s hegemonic policies, of its tolerance of civil liberties. Even the communists who openly declared their intentions of forcibly overthrowing the colonial Government were allowed to function in the Trade Union movement to the extent to which they were perceived to be expressing the genuine grievances of the working class. R.M. Maxwell, Secretary to the Government of Bombay (Home Department, Special) commented: ‘Communist agitation has been in existence for a number of years and it has never been thought necessary to legislate for it, possibly because of the difficulty of drawing the line between genuine and revolutionary labour movements.’45

42

Ibid., pp. 334–35. Under Secretary’s Safe File No. 931, 1 September 1935 (TNA). 44 Ibid. 45 File No. 543 (44), of 1933–34 (MSA). 43

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A deputation of leading Sholapur merchants met the Collector of Sholapur on 11 April 1934 to express their grave concern at the continued presence of communists in Sholapur from other places. I replied that now-a-days communist agents were found in all big cities... . Government had done their best to contain the movement by the Meerut Case and that whenever an agitator was found to be inciting to violence or sedition he was prosecuted, but that I had no power to keep them out of Sholapur as it was not the policy of Government to employ the emergency laws against such people.46

In fact, communist leaders frequently visited various industrial towns to form Trade Unions by openly holding public meetings and presiding over other functions. All the Trade Union leaders who were arrested during the Textile general strike of 1934 under the Trade Disputes Act (1928) were acquitted by the various courts and the police could not establish its case against the communists. Once the CPI and its affiliated organisations were banned in July 1934, communists started their open activities through various other organisations such as Labour Protection Leagues and Youth Leagues. These organisations could not be declared unlawful under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1908 as: … it cannot be said that they interfere or have for their object interference with the administration of the law or with maintenance of law and order. Unless these organisations reach a stage where they will constitute a danger to the public peace it will not be possible to take action against them under the CLA Act of 1908. The objects of these organisations have no doubt a tendency towards or may result in the use of force or violence … .47

In 1934, thirty-three communist leaders were in jail and Bombay Government submitted proposals for passing a special legislation to cope with the ‘communist menace’.48 In this connection a Draft Bill was also 46 Ibid., File No. 543 (44) of 1933–34 (MSA), Collector’s letter to the Home Department, Bombay. 47 USS File No. 931, 1 September 1935 (TNA). 48 HDP, File No. 7125/34. They were all arrested to crush the General Strike of the textile workers.

The Colonial State

circulated to the local governments. But after consultation with the Secretary of State, the Government of India did not proceed with the Bill. The discussion carried on among the policy-makers in connection with this Bill also illustrates the ‘space of legality’ within the framework of the oppressive colonial state apparatus and sensitivity of this apparatus to public opinion. 2. The policy-makers also distinguished between promotion of strikes for ‘communist purposes’ and strikes to alleviate ‘definite grievances’. The underlying assumptions behind this distinction were that (a) without the intervention of the communists the workers would not resort to strikes so easily and (b) in case workers felt that their genuine grievances were not being redressed and the strike ultimately materialised, they would be inclined to compromise and be amenable to suggestions.49 When the Trade Unions led by the Communists were being hit simultaneously it was emphasised that ‘care be taken that no bona fide trade unions or labour organisations were attacked in this way’.50 In the light of this distinction the experience of the Textile General Strike (1934) was summed up by the Bombay Government as following: The question of using the Bombay Special (Emergency) Powers Act at an earlier stage was discussed, but with the knowledge that workers had certain legitimate grievances it was thought necessary to test their wishes by allowing the strike to run and to reserve the powers under the Bombay Special (Emergency) Powers Act for use when conditions indicating a strong probability of disorder might arise … . In the stages before law and order are definitely and immediately threatened, the activities of the Communists are not in themselves an offence and they are capable of being carried on for an indefinite time without the commission of any offence punishable by law. The real reason, in fact, for taking action against them is not their immediate activities but their ultimate object, and in this respect it is more difficult to take action against them than it was against the Congress, whose law-breaking activities were overt … .51

This distinction between the stage of immediate threat to law and order and preceding stages and Government’s tolerance of Communist activity 49

HDP, File K.W. to 7/II/34. Subodh Roy, op. cit., p. 197. 51 HDP, File No. K.W. to 7/II/34. Letter from the Governor of Bombay to the Viceroy, 28 June 1934. Copy of this letter was also sent to the Secretary of State. Emphasis added. 50

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in the earlier stages while fully knowing their ultimate object suggests a picture of the colonial state which is so different from the feudal absolutist state of czarist Russia. Earlier, in a letter to the Bombay Government, M.G. Hallett had emphasised the same distinction: When Communist agitators are working in secret to bring about a strike and it has actually started and has resulted in breaches of the peace and undue interference with workers and when and if it is clear that the strike is being conducted not with a view to a settlement but with the apparent object of spreading and intensifying disturbed conditions, the local Governments which have in force Acts similar to the Bombay Special (Emergency) Powers Act should, it is suggested, use the power of arrest, detention and control given by sections 3 and 4 of that Act. This policy has, with the full approval of the Government of India, been followed by the Government of Bombay during the recent strike in which, after the situation had declared itself, the Communist ringleaders were arrested.52

3. Another level of distinction was inherent in the Bombay High Court’s Ruling where it was stated that: … the existing law is that no action can be taken in respect of matter which advocates the overthrow of ‘capitalism’, ‘imperialism’ unless it also contains passages clearly exciting hatred of Government as such, and even such passages will be overlooked by the High Court as foreign to the main purport of the speech or publication unless they form a considerable and prominent part of it.53

The policy-makers took into account the public opinion in this country as well as abroad while framing particular proposals as law or deciding a tactical approach in the implementation of policy. Inherent in this was a conception of the ‘justification theory’ without which no legitimacy can be sought for particular ‘actions’ of the Government. This legitimacy was to be sought through the law-making agencies even when most of the time majorities in the legislative chambers were already ensured by manipulating the reactionary Indian vested interests. 52 HDP, File No. 7/7/34. M.G. Hallett, Secretary to the Government of India’s letter to All Local Governments and Administrations, 16 May 1934. Emphasis added. 53 The Ruling of Bombay High Court in the case of Emperor vs. Maniben Kara. ‘Instigation to fight and destroy capitalist system’. Roy, Communism in India, 1972, p. 197.

The Colonial State

The Communists were fully aware of the Government’s motive of getting the laws passed through legislative councils but they characterised this approach of the Government as hypocritical. While criticising the Act for the Settlement of Disputes by Conciliation, one of the leaflets states: ‘This law is to be got through as passed by the Legislative Council. And in this manner Government is going to make a show that this law is enacted with the consent of the people.’54 As far as the anti-Communist legislation was concerned the Secretary of State for India wrote to the Governor of Bombay: I realise that there is force in your argument that it would be a good thing to introduce the anti-Communist Bill at a time when memories of the recent strike are fresh in the public mind and that, on that account, its introduction would come less as an unpleasant surprise now than it would later. But we cannot overlook the forthcoming election for the Central Legislature. The situation as regards the election is awkward enough without adding any further difficulties to it. I cannot help agreeing with the Government of India that the necessity for holding the election this year had made a big difference as regards the introduction of the anti-Communist Bill at the present time. They think it would be hard, and I agree with them, on Government supporters in the Assembly to ask them to pass a Bill like this which would … have a very good effect on their chances against the Swarajists in the election. I have therefore agreed with the Government of India that the Bill should be held over unless definite emergency arises in Bombay.55

Sensitivity to public response or criticism of Government policies naturally flowed from a conception of ‘justification’. For a policy to be ‘legitimate’ it must be ‘justifiable’ within the context of a concrete situation. The degree of justification would be judged by the nature of criticism levelled against a particular policy or action. In practical terms, the tactics of an action must be chosen in a manner that it invited the minimum of criticism, especially from those quarters whom the Government could not afford to alienate given the immediate or long-term needs 54 Translation of a leaflet entitled ‘Down with the New Attack of Repression’ issued by the President of the Young Workers’ League on 29 July 1934, Roy, op. cit., p. 263. Emphasis added. 55 HDP, File No. 7/7/34. Secretary of State for India to the Bombay Governor, 20 July 1934.

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of stability of colonial rule. For instance, reporting about Communist activities in Madras, the Chief Secretary wrote: Any action under Madras Regulation II of 1819 must provoke a certain amount of criticism, but it is not likely to have any serious repercussions in the Madras Legislative Council, which does not meet again until the end of October. Moderate public opinion is in this presidency hostile to Communism and not likely to oppose the measures the Government have proposed in order to combat Communist activities.56

The Indian colonial state was responsible to a country with a parliamentary democracy. The politicians of this democracy were sensitive to public opinion not only in England but also in other countries of the world. Though strong repressive measures, such as ordinances, were a part of colonial rule in India, India was not ruled basically by ordinances. In the eyes of the rulers these ordinances were extraordinary and temporary, designed only to deal with a specific situation or crisis. Beyond the limits of that crisis or situation their justification could not be argued convincingly to meet the criticisms of liberal opinion in India, England and the world. It was not sufficient that the Government was convinced of their necessity; it was also necessary to convince public opinion. An aspect of hegemonic state policy is its sensitivity to the pressure of public opinion and takes it into account even while ignoring it at times. The bureaucrats who ignored public opinions took the calculated risk of causing embarrassment to their country and the party. This is, for example, how the British Prime Minister expressed his uneasiness about the rule of ordinances in India during March 1932: The only concern I have is what is to come after the ordinances, because the weakness of Government by ordinance is that the longer it lasts the more ineffective and faulty does it become. The ordinance method has never been welcomed by us and I would not be at all surprised if a simple renewal led to resignations ... . I think you ought to be protected against any storm that might arise here if you pressed us to renew the ordinances and continued the existing state of things beyond the first time-limit.57 56 Roy, op. cit., p. 219, G.T.H. Bracken to the Secretary to the Government of India, 3 September 1934. 57 Haig Papers, Extracts from a letter from the Prime Minister to the Viceroy, 31 March 1932.

The Colonial State

The officials on the Indian side were fully alive to the problems of the Government at home. But at the same time they were duty-bound to deal with the Indian situation firmly and consistently. Haig summed up the attitude of the Indian side in his following comment: ‘When necessity calls act firmly and swiftly but when the need has passed … return to normal methods.’ ‘That is really a precise statement of our own attitude,’ concurred Willingdon, the Viceroy.58 All these facets suggest a picture of the colonial state which was certainly not of the type of feudal-absolutist state of czarist Russia. With all its distortions, it was a state closer to the form of the constitutional democracy of the advanced European countries. But simultaneously the state form was colonial which did not express the sovereignty of the Indian people nor was responsible to them. This is one reason why we call this state a semi-hegemonic state. If the state is the focal point of all politics, then the nature of the state could not but have a determining influence on the form and substance of any anti-state politics. The forms of politics and the style of conducting those forms to gather together the forces for an onslaught on such a state cannot be chosen arbitrarily. Thus it was to be of crucial importance for those who wanted to replace the existing state to thoroughly comprehend the character of the British Indian colonial state. Indian Communists as well as the Third International did not bother to understand the specificity of this state. They did not go beyond the general formula that the British Indian colonial state was an organised form of repression, and therefore, could only be overthrown by an organised armed insurrection of the workers and peasants. In this sense the British Indian colonial state was no different from the czarist state of Russia. In their day-to-day propaganda they evoked the imagery of the ‘Czar’, ‘czarist repression’ and ‘czarist laws’. Along with the Communists this imagery was also shared by Royists and Congress socialists.59 For example, while preparing the Bombay working class for a general strike (23 April 1934) one of their numerous leaflets exhorted: Workers Brothers! We must put down, on the strength of our organised struggle, this naked dance of Czarism started in order to suck every drop 58 Haig Papers, Haig to Mieville, Private Secretary to the Viceroy, 13 April 1932, comments on the P.M.’s letter for the benefit of the Viceroy. 59 For Nehru’s attitude see Chapter 6 in this volume.

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of the blood of the workers and peasants. The workers and peasants of Russia brought about their organisation under the Red flag with (the emblem of ) hammer and scythe and fought on the communist lines and reduced Czarism to dust, established workers and peasants’ Raj and created circumstances under which the toiling masses can lead a happy life. We also must not be afraid, in the least, of this repression and must give a bold front to it … . Down with Repression! Down with the czarist Laws! Down with Capitalism!60

But, as we have pointed out above, the reality of the British Indian colonial state was far from the reality of the czarist state. The Russian Revolution was a workers’ revolution against the feudal czarist state which had failed to transform itself into a genuine democratic state form evolved in Europe. In China there was no centralised state power which could keep the warring lords under control. British-Indian colonial society (not state) shared many features with Russian and Chinese societies in terms of its industrial backwardness and exploited peasant masses. But the Indian colonial state was a qualitatively different state—a modern state form struggling to preserve its semi-hegemonic character so essential for its long-term survival, since the Britishers were in India, an alien nation trying to control a vast population through a few hundred thousand British soldiers, officers and officials. A peculiar feature of constitutional development in colonial India was its character of deferred instalment payment.61 From the very beginning, howsoever vague its form, the establishment of representative parliamentary democracy was the early nationalists’ vision of modern India. For years they continued to create public opinion around that vision while simultaneously pressing for constitutional reforms to give expression to this democratic will. To begin with, the colonial state was structured through the interplay of ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ movements. Historically speaking, its dominant features were to remain autocratic for a long time. Its potentially liberal features were to manifest slowly in 60

Roy, op. cit., pp. 264–65. A.K. Majumdar, Advent of Independence, Bombay, 1963, p. 6. This observation has been made by almost every historian of the Indian national movement. For example, Communist intellectual, Hiren Mukherjee, writes: ‘Freedom came to us so to speak by instalments and doses of constitutional reforms were given to us from time to time.’ Recalling India’s Struggle for Freedom, Delhi, 1983, p. 33. Successive instalments came at the following points: 1861, 1892, 1909, 1919, 1935 and 1947. 61

The Colonial State

response to the pressure of nationalist demands and agitations. The successive reforms by the British Parliament were designed to serve a three-fold aim: (a) to prove the legitimacy of liberal credentials, (b) to accommodate and absorb the nationalist opposition, and (c) to defuse and split the gathering forces of Indian nationalism. Immediately after the birth of the Congress it was clear to the rulers that the perpetuation of British supremacy required that they introduce constitutional reforms to actually secure the consent of a section of the Indian people. At the same time they knew well that widening and deepening of these institutions of securing consent would be extremely dangerous for the empire. Nationalists being fully aware of this dilemma declared that cautious and half-hearted attempts to secure consent were tantamount to rule by force. What was needed, they argued, was the introduction of representative institutions to fully secure the consent of the Indian people. ‘We all are working’, said the Congress leaders, ‘for the consolidation of British supremacy in India in such a way that supremacy may rest, not as now, on force, but be carried on with the consent and cooperation of the governed.’62

62

Quoted in S. Gopal, British Policy in India, 1858–1905, London, p. 187.

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Chapter 2

Gandhian Strategy and the Framework of Hegemonic Politics

Satyagraha has introduced a new kind of fight and with it a new kind of strategy ... . There is no doubt that as military science has advanced through the ages each generation adding to it, so will non-violent strategy advance with time.1 Acharya Kripalani

How could a handful of civil and military British officers (about one lakh) rule over a population of about 300 million? Certainly not through the scattered British Army posts of 60,000 soldiers. Tolstoy once said: A commercial company enslaved a nation comprising two hundred millions. Tell this to a man free from superstition and he will fail to grasp what these words mean. What does it mean that thirty thousand people, not athletes, but rather weak and ordinary people, have enslaved two hundred millions of vigorous, clever, capable, freedom-loving people? Do not the figures make it dear that not the English, but the Indians have enslaved themselves?2 1 AICC Papers, File No. G-19/1934, ‘Non-Violence is Worth A Trial’, by Acharya Kripalani. 2 Gene Sharp, Gandhi as a Political Strategist, Boston, 1979, p. 47.

Gandhian Strategy and the Framework of Hegemonic Politics

But in what sense had the Indians enslaved themselves? Gandhi was never tired of pin-pointing the answer to this crucial question: ‘For even the most powerful cannot rule without the cooperation of the ruled.’3 Gandhi derived this sharp insight into the functioning of the modern state from the ‘immutable maxim that government of the people is possible only so long as they consent either consciously or unconsciously’.4 British Government was not the elected government of the Indian people but it never tired of mounting the claim that they were ruling for the benefit of the Indians. It also sought to legitimise its rule by taking into account Indian public opinion. Colonial constitutionalism was evolved as a specific mechanism to rule India by consent with the Viceroy having special powers to issue ordinances in case the system failed to push through British proposals on particular issues. Legislatures were the arena where the consent of the representatives was sought. Many of the elected representatives of the people were willing to side with the government. Initially the electoral system was so designed that in the normal course the government was in a position to manipulate the majority for its Bills and budgets and thereby also secure the consent of the representatives.5 However, such manipulation became increasingly difficult after 1919. Thence onwards the nationalists constantly pointed out the contradiction of a foreign, non-elected government trying to secure the consent of the Indian people. For instance, the Criminal Law Amendment Bill (1938) was passed by the Legislative Assembly on 24 August 1938. During the discussions, Ramdas Pantulu (Madras: non-Mohammadan), referred to this peculiar mechanism of British rule in India: If they frankly say, ‘we will do what we like with the country, we will recruit armies by legal compulsion and you have no voice in the matter’, then there is no question of getting our consent for Bills like these. 3

Mahatma Gandhi, The Collected Works, Vol. V, p. 132. Sharp, op. cit., pp. 83–84. 5 In fact these institutions were double-edged weapons. They were also used by the nationalists to expose the true nature of colonial rule. A large number of monographs on the role of the legislatures in various states have been published: M. Jha, Role of the Central Legislature in the Freedom Struggle, New Delhi, 1972; A K. Gupta, North-West Frontier Province Legislature and Freedom Struggle, 1932–1947, New Delhi, 1976; A. Guha, Planter Raj to Swaraj: Freedom Struggle and Electoral Politics in Assam, 1826–1947, New Delhi, 1977; K.M. Patra, Orissa Legislature and Freedom Struggle, 1912–47, New Delhi, 1979. 4

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That would be more consistent with the position that has been taken up, namely, India is a pure (sic) subject country and Britain is the sole arbiter of its destinies and the laws need not be passed with the consent of the people because they have not got Dominion Status. Let them say it frankly, then I shall not waste one more moment of this House; but Mr. Williams was not addressing us in that strain but on the other hand was trying to convince us of the reasonableness of the Bill, and of its necessity in the interests of India, etc. …. If the mask is thrown off and if Mr Williams says to us, ‘you are a subject people and that your consent is not necessary’, I have no more argument. Because he is seeking our consent I have been trying to make it clear … (that) we have every objection to increase the control for imperial purposes … .6

Moral prestige constituted the legitimacy of British rule. Neither the British had built their moral prestige and authority in a day nor could it be destroyed at one stroke. The process of dismantling and replacing it could not but be a protracted one. In the process of establishing British rule in India Britishers were able to secure the passive or active consent of large sections of the Indian population especially the propertied sections. This consent was expressed in many ways: (a) In the belief that the British were just rulers and that their rule was according to certain laws irrespective of caste and creed. This gave the rulers immense prestige and authority in the minds of the ruled; (b) belief in the permanence of British rule and their supremacy; and (c) British rule of law stood for the defence of private property and ‘law and order’. The property-owning classes in colonial society looked towards the colonial authorities for the protection of their interests. The conservative and anti-Congress sections of these classes sought the patronage of British administration to acquire economic benefits and to consolidate their power at the tehsil, district and provincial levels. These attitudes and sentiments of consent, diffused throughout society, we call hegemony. Alternatively the process of building nationalist hegemony involved the permeation of nationalist sentiment to all these levels and also, the creation of sympathy and support for those working for self-rule. Thus the Britishers ruled mainly through their hegemonic influence over considerable sections of population. An instrumentalist understanding of the social roots of the colonial state in India must be avoided here. 6

HDP, File No. 612/1938.

Gandhian Strategy and the Framework of Hegemonic Politics

Let it be emphasised that not a particular group, strata or class or classes but this overall hegemonic influence over the population formed the basis of British rule in India. It would be wrong to believe that only the propertied (as excluded from have-nots) formed the props of British rule in India.7 How to maintain this influence in the changing circumstances? This was the fundamental question to which the British bureaucracy addressed itself from conjuncture to conjuncture. Their policies of winning over and neutralising some through concessions of various kinds while suppressing others would be documented at proper places in the text. In the face of the rising nationalism of the Indian people their efforts were to never allow themselves to be isolated from the ‘important’ sections of the population of India, especially the propertied classes. Isolation from the vast sections of the Indian population along with active opposition from a sizeable minority meant approaching the end of their supremacy in India. The success of the nationalist forces depended upon the extent to which they would be able to maintain their internal unity, spread their influence and win the sympathies of the vast ‘neutral’ intermediate sections. Here the elementary principle of hegemonic struggle can be formulated thus: Unless the forces opposing the established Government win over a section of the population under its influence—in other words, unless they carry ‘war’ into the enemy’s camp—they would never be able to undermine the authority of the existing Government, much less overthrow it. The ‘paradigm of insurgency’ and the ‘paradigm of mass movements’ are mutually exclusive. The essential thrust of the former is towards violence (violent armed revolt for seizure of power) while it might include ‘moments’ of non-violence. As opposed to this the essential thrust of the ‘paradigm of mass movement’ is non-violence though at times it might manifest ‘moments’ of violence. Mass movements would certainly involve militant attitudes, confrontation with the apparatus of oppression and even instances of bloodshed but unlike the ‘paradigm of insurgency’ these instances would not figure as interconnected moments in the inevitably rising crescendo towards violent insurrection. Mass movements would rise, subside, or be suppressed, only to rise again. An ‘insurrectionary situation’ is not the logical conclusion of a powerful mass movement, as non-violence as a policy is indispensable for all mass movements. Its logical 7

For colonial state’s hegemony over the working class, see Chapter 3 in this volume.

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end is fizzling out, resulting in negotiation, truce or suppression. Given the context of its birth and growth it would rise and recede as successive waves undermining the hegemony of a modern state. The politics of the Gandhian era can be best understood through this paradigm.8 The formation of the Ghadar Party (1913) was not an isolated event. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, two mutually exclusive paradigms were contending with each other to capture the imagination of the Indian people. The first—‘the paradigm of insurgency or insurrection’—was being articulated by the Bengal revolutionaries while the other—‘paradigm of mass movement’—was being propounded by Mahatma Gandhi. The logic of the revolutionary insurrectionists was simple. ‘British held India by force. So the revolutionaries had to come forward to meet this armed adversary with bombs and pistols.’9 ‘Hind Swaraj’—Gandhi’s first serious reflections on India—was written as an ‘answer to the Indian school of violence’.10 By the time Bhagat Singh and his comrades started their revolutionary activities the first non-cooperation movement had already come and gone, and the masses had registered their entry into Indian politics. But before the dying ‘paradigm of insurrection’ lost its romantic appeal it was vigorously reasserted through the impact of the Russian Revolution staged as an armed revolt of the workers and peasants. Reason and romanticism found its best expression through this revolution. Thousands among the younger generation of the Indian intelligentsia were simply enchanted. Gandhi’s advocacy of a different method of struggle and his criticism of the revolutionaries, and later on of all those who advocated violence including Communists, was rooted in an entirely different conception of the colonial state. ‘British domination’, wrote Gandhi, ‘has been as much sustained by British arms as it has been through the legislatures, 8 The Third International as well as the contemporary communist leaders had no clue to the specific nature of this uniquely distinct paradigm. They assumed that just like them Gandhi and the Indian National Congress were also working within the same framework. According to the inherent logic of their own paradigm they posited the assumption that each mass upsurge against imperialism must inevitably lead to an insurrectionary situation. Later on R.P. Dutt in India Today (1947) worked out these views into a full-fledged historiographical framework. 9 Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee, In Search of Freedom, Calcutta, 1967, Preface, p. 20. The author, Jogesh Chatterjee, was a well-known revolutionary in Bengal. The book narrates his life’s experience as a revolutionary fighter for freedom. 10 M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, Ahmedabad, 1939, p. 16.

Gandhian Strategy and the Framework of Hegemonic Politics

distribution of titles, the law-courts, the educational institutions, the financial policy and the like.’11 In one of his speeches Nehru remarked: The British Government has established an organisation which keeps us as slaves. It is not so much the military force as its organisation that is keeping us down. From the Viceroy down to the Patwari in the village, its organisation is full and complete and with that it rules over us.12

For all the left-wing currents except Nehru the character of the colonial state in India was no different from the czarist state in Russia. In March 1934 the communists circulated a document in which it was stated: In India … there is no development of parliamentary democratic form of government which generally characterises free capitalist countries. The imperialist state in India bears the character of an absolute state under which there are no democratic rights such as freedom of press, speech, and association and which is an open expression of the fact of the national enslavement of the Indian people as a whole.13

M.N. Roy described the British rule as ‘imperialist absolutism’ while Jayaprakash Narayan was of the view that Indians were living under ‘conditions of Czarism’.14 Gandhi was convinced that without the consent of the Indians it was almost impossible for the British to continue to rule India with the help of armed forces. One lakh of Europeans, without our help, can only hold less than oneseventh of our villages each and it would be difficult for one man even when physically present, to impose his own will on, say, four hundred men and women, the average popu-lation of an Indian village.15 11 Gandhi The Collected Works, Vol. LXVI, p. 104. Communist intellectual and wellknown parliamentarian Hiren Mukherjee attributes the expertise acquired in running the democratic institutions after 1947 to the fact of our experience of running ‘quasiparliamentary institutions under British rule’. Mukherjee, Recalling India’s Struggle for Freedom, Delhi, 1983, p. 32. 12 Nehru, Selected Works, Vol. 8, p. 373. 13 ‘Struggle for Bolshevik Unity inside the Communist ranks’. Draft Political Thesis adopted for circulation at the first session of the provisional CC of the CPI. File No. 543 (45) of 1934–38. Home Department Special (MSA). 14 Letters by M.N. Roy to Congress Socialist Party, Bombay, 1937, p. 76; Jayaprakash Narayan, Structure of the Socialist Party, Socialist Party Pamphlet, 5 December 1948. 15 Young India, 9 March 1921. ‘If all India was to unite against us how long could we maintain ourselves?’ The question was asked as early as 1862. Gopal, op. cit., p. 36. Wood to Elgin, 19 May 1862.

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‘Is it such a difficult thing for India’, observed Gandhi, ‘to realise that thirty crores of human beings have but to feel their strength and they can be free without having to use it?’16 Hence the real struggle for the overthrow of imperialism was to uproot British prestige and moral authority. ‘The Congress’, writes Pattabhi Sitaramyya, … had fairly early recognised—recognised indeed so early as in 1920–21—that in fighting the British for power, the Congress had also to take on hand a constructive programme in order to reconquer India from the British who had through a century’s conscious and deliberate striving, effected a moral and spiritual, economic and social conquest as well not merely a political and territorial conquest.17 NEW STRATEGY

Gandhi continued to argue that the method of ‘civil disobedience’ was ‘an effective substitute for violence or armed rebellion’.18 Indian National Congress led by the Mahatma was fighting a different kind of war19—‘the war of position’. So it was natural that the imagery of war should recur so often in the Mahatma’s writings as well as resolutions of the Congress. For example, one of the political resolutions passed in 1939 reminded the Congress: Civil Disobedience requires the same strict discipline as an army organised for armed conflict. The army is helpless unless it possesses its weapons of destruction and knows how to use them. So also an army of non-violent soldiers is ineffective unless it understands and possesses the essentials of non-violence.20

Gandhi evolved a new kind of strategy which was able to steer clear of the pitfalls of constitutional conformism and armed misadventure. 16

Nirmal Kumar Bose, Selections From Gandhi, Ahmedabad, 1948, p. 119. B. Pattabhi Sitaramayya, The History of the Indian National Congress, 1935–47, Delhi, 1969, p. 6. Emphasis added. 18 Mahatma’s Rejoinder to Viceroy. Included in Indian National Congress: 1930–34. Resolutions passed by the Congress, n.d., p. 156. 19 One of the rules of this war was: ‘… it is inherent in every form of satyagraha that no effort is spared to achieve an honourable settlement with the opponent.’ Indian National Congress: March 1939 to January 1940, Resolutions passed by the Working Committee, p. 51. 20 Ibid., p. 52. 17

Gandhian Strategy and the Framework of Hegemonic Politics

Subhas Bose carefully noted this aspect of Gandhi’s practice when he wrote: ‘The success of the Mahatma has been due to the failure of constitutionalism, on the one side, and armed revolution on the other.’21 But satyagraha had introduced, as noted by Acharya Kirpalani ‘a new kind of fight and with it a new kind of strategy’.22 It was perhaps natural that many a nationalist leader should have found it difficult to master its intricacies. The science of the satyagraha fight is yet to be evolved. Though the nationwide campaigns of 1930 and 1932 are before us, this kind of fight has not become fully familiar with us; and it would not be wrong to say that the leaders even do not know where and how to begin a satyagraha movement, and where and how to end it.23

To call this state semi-hegemonic is not to say that it was not a repressive state. It only means that it carried on repression in a form and within limits which were imposed and circumscribed by the need for legitimation. It is an attempt to locate this state as a specific type of state between the two main typologies, i.e., the feudal absolutist state form and modern constitutional state form of Europe. The prefix ‘semi’ has been used in the structural sense to underline its formation through two contradictory tendencies. The actual unfolding of this contradiction would over time continuously rearrange the various elements of these two aspects. One cannot discuss empirically the degree of its hegemonic character as it was actually unfolding unless it was already present potentially. This degree of hegemonic character accumulated as we move towards the end of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century. To sum up, over a period the colonial state evolved an in-built strategy to perpetuate itself. On the one hand it tried to manipulate and convert all forms of opposition into constitutional forms in order to absorb them within its framework by giving small concessions while on the other it drove underground all those who frontally attacked this state with the aim of evolving an insurrectionary perspective in the long run. It then took 21

Quoted in Samar Guha, The Mahatma and the Netaji: Two Men of Destiny of India, New Delhi, 1986, p. 41. 22 AICC Papers, File No. G-19/1934. 23 AICC Papers, File No. G-39 (i)/1937. ‘The Strategy of Office Acceptance’ by K. Kondaiah, typescript.

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steps to destroy, disorganise and scatter them. In other words it was not difficult for this state to neutralise and contain those forces which either followed the strategy of constitutional opposition (pre-Gandhian phase of the Congress) or attempted to evolve an insurrectionary strategy to overthrow the British rule (the revolutionary insurrectionists of Bengal, later on Ghadar Party and Bhagat Singh and finally the Communists). Gandhi succeeded in avoiding these two pitfalls of constitutionalist politics and insurrectionary politics and evolved a new paradigm to confront the colonial state—the paradigm of peaceful mass movements. Here was a strategy which was neither insurrectionary nor constitutionalist. In the language of Marxism it was neither ‘revolutionary’ nor ‘reformist’ but a strategy of ‘revolutionary reformism’,24 or transformation of the state. Interestingly, the forms of struggle, which were to be adopted later on by Gandhi to transform the colonial state were already emerging in the process of resistance offered by the Indian masses. The organisation of Soviets was not invented by the Bolsheviks in Russia but emerged from the creativity of the masses. Similarly the newly emerging forms of peaceful struggle in India were not invented by clever nationalists out of nowhere. Two examples could be mentioned here. Commenting upon the weapon of ‘hartal’ or protest strike as a mode of resistance the Friend of India, 9 February 1854, wrote: Strikes are thoroughly Oriental. An European growls and goes on. A discontented native stops work. Strikes are the orthodox method of expressing discontent throughout India. When a town considers itself oppressed, the shops are closed, and the organisation is more perfect than in Europe … should there ever be rebellion in Bengal it will take the form of passive resistance.25

The experience of the ‘blue mutiny’—big mass meetings and demonstrations—against the English planters was equally unique. ‘The conduct of the ryots’, wrote the Hindoo Patriot, … has taught two lessons: the one to our rulers and the other to our countrymen. The former have learnt not to reckon too confidently on 24 We borrow this phrase from Lucien Goldman. See Lucien Goldman, Power and Humanism, 1974, p. 47. 25 Mehrotra, op. cit., p. 237.

Gandhian Strategy and the Framework of Hegemonic Politics

the passive patience of the Bengali, and our countrymen have learnt that if India is ever to improve in her political condition, it will be not indeed by the force of arms but by the united will and inflexible determination of her sons never to yield their lawful rights to the voracious capacity and insolent hauteur of any class of oppressors. They have learnt that unflinching perseverance to claim and assert whatever belonged to them by natural legal justice as creatures of the same creator or as subjects of the same sovereign is sure in the end to be crowned with success.26

The years 1928–29 marked a watershed in modern Indian history. It was in this year that all the currents of future Indian politics which were to contend together as well as against each other acquired their recognisable physiognomy. The slowly evolving forces of ‘communalism’ (Hindu and Muslim) on the one hand and the forces claiming to represent the interests of the workers and the peasants on the other completed, along with nationalism, the totality of political spectrum. The movements of the industrial workers, peasants and middle class youth were coalescing with each other to produce a rising tempo, anticipating in an embryonic form the crystallisation of a left nationalist bloc. Gandhi succeeded in avoiding a split at the Calcutta session between those who stood for complete independence and dominion status. Once again Congress as a whole was taking a sharp turn and new forces were growing within it. At this juncture Congress was far from being an ideological or organisational monolith. It was quite in the fitness of things that an emerging ‘organisational framework’ representing the entire nation should express itself in such an amorphous form. In addition to their diverse personalities and intellectual backgrounds, Congressmen were a heterogeneous lot reflecting among other things, the multi-national, multi-lingual and multi-religious character of colonial society, as well as the generational split between fathers and sons. Behind this loose scaffold of political and organisational unity, there was no one consensual philosophy or political ideology, apart from the desire and object to see India free from foreign domination. Colonial administrators understood this point very clearly: In India subversive movements or organisations, directed or formed against the Government, naturally have one common factor. Whatever changes they wish to bring about and whatever means they may wish to employ with this object, one of their objectives is to free India from 26

Ibid., p. 238, Hindoo Patriot, 26 May 1860.

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what they call the British yoke. For instance, a communist wishing to establish a Socialist Republic in India, must obviously first rid India of the British.27

It was this ‘common factor’ which constituted the substance of the overarching reality of anti-imperialism and laid the objective basis for unity of the various ideological colours in the spectrum of antiimperialist politics, from moderate Congressman to the revolutionary insurrectionist. Unlike China, given the semi-hegemonic nature of the British Indian colonial state, the primary contradiction manifested itself into two forms of opposition to imperialism, i.e., constitutionalism (liberal as well as Congress) and non-constitutionalism.28 There were further divisions between the non-constitutionalists along the lines dictated by methods of struggle and ideology.29 The mainstream of non-constitutionalist politics can be further characterised in ideological terms as right, centre-right, centre-left and left tendencies. A graphic representation of the anti-imperialist forms of politics is given below:

27

USS, File No. 843, 30 August 1932 (TSA, Madras). ‘A Note on Subversive Movements and Organisations in India’, by H. Williamson, DIB. 28 There was a further division between the constitutionalists along the lines of communalist constitutionalists and non-communalist secular constitutionalists. 29 There were also communalists within the ranks of non-constitutionalists. Many did not see the contradiction in being communalists and militant anti-imperialists simultaneously.

Gandhian Strategy and the Framework of Hegemonic Politics

The upper half of the diagram distinguishes between forms of politics irrespective of ideological orientation. These two forms of politics were being practised by numerous ideological currents. For instance, there were communalists, semi-communalist-cum-nationalists, pro-British landlord parties and secular nationalist liberals (T.B. Sapru) who practised constitutional form of politics. As we have argued, this form of politics fitted in very well with the colonial state’s hegemonic strategy to perpetuate itself. This form of politics could be placated with minor concessions and absorbed within the state. Struggle for concessions is a hallmark of this kind of politics. Any political movement which does not want to reject concessions outrightly has to come to terms with this form of politics in some way or the other. This is precisely what Gandhi learnt when the Congress was split between ‘pro-changers’ and ‘no-changers’. A section of the Congress led by Motilal and C.R. Das did not want to be permanent non-constitutionalists like Gandhi.30 Gandhi took over this form of politics and integrated it as a subordinate element in his strategy of mass movements. Therefore, Congressmen could practise this form of politics as long as they did not question the primacy of the politics of mass mobilisation in overall Gandhian strategy and were willing to terminate it when demanded. Therefore, we have separated the Congress constitutionalists from other constitutionalists as the former entered constitutional politics only during the period when Gandhi was not leading a mass upsurge. The second half of the diagram depicts ideological currents and shades within the spectrum of non-constitutional forms of struggle. This entire spectrum comprised Congressmen who stood for Purna Swaraj as defined by the Lahore session of the Congress. Two contradictory strategies were contending with each other in this spectrum to win the allegiance of Congressmen. One was non-constitutional and non-insurrectionary and Gandhi was its main spokesman. The other was the non-constitutional and insurrectionary strategy, the Communists (including Royists) being its main advocates. Large number of Congressmen outside the ranks of organised Communists were sympathetic to this strategy. Standing for mass movement insurrection the main efforts of its proponents were to build and work up mass movements to a point where they would be 30 Laxmi Srivastava, ‘British Government and the Swarajists, 1924–29’, M.Phil Dissertation, Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, New Delhi, 1984.

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transformed into an insurrectionary force. Unlike Gandhi, for whom the mass movement was the correct way of achieving independence, they looked upon it as a necessary preliminary towards the realisation of their final aim of staging an armed insurrection. They shared the conception of mass movement with Gandhi but in conformity with the logic of their strategy they wanted a different kind of militant mass upsurge produced by the sharpening of internal class contradictions and logically building it up towards a crescendo. They wanted to take over Gandhian strategy and integrate it as a subordinate movement within their own strategy in the same way as Gandhi had absorbed the constitutionalist form of politics within his own strategy. It was quite logical that they should have opposed negotiations, compromises and concessions. In the 1930s, once the Communists rejoined the Congress organisation, large number of Congressmen vacillated between these two strategies. The strategy of insurrection was no longer outside; it was making a bid for power within the Congress organisational framework. ‘Violence’ and ‘non-violence’ became symbolic names for these contending strategies. During the great debate (1935–37) on the issues of council entry and office acceptance, the right-wing leaders came to realise the threat posed by the contending strategy and began to close their ranks. Despite the fact that all the Congressmen genuinely wanted unity within their ranks the contending strategies could not live together for long. Even when the declared policy of the communists was United Front, the logical unfolding of these strategies was generating unbridgeable differences. The idea of contending strategies is different from contending hegemonies: ‘contending hegemonies’ can operate within the same strategy. During the period of ministries (1937–39) groups committed to alternative strategies were busy strengthening their ranks and naturally this led to fierce exchanges and clashes. The final confrontation came at Tripuri where the right-wing made all out effort to defend the Gandhian strategy. As pointed out earlier, Gandhi was staunchly non-constitutionalist. He definitely occupied the position we have characterised as centre-left in the diagram. The entire ideological space between centre-right and centre-left was occupied by leaders such as Dr Ansari, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and the large number of nationalist leaders at the middle and lower level.

Gandhian Strategy and the Framework of Hegemonic Politics

In order to understand the relationships between various shades of ideological trends within the Congress we have separated them analytically and conceptually while in reality their borderlines faded into each other and a number of individuals stood on ‘nodal points’ having vacillating sympathies and representing transitional dilemmas. For instance, there were liberal constitutionalists who did not follow the leadership of Gandhi, sympathised with Congress ‘moderates’ but without joining their ranks and stood nearer to them when the latter came back to work out the constitutional strategy as a tactic once the mass movement phase was over.31 This complex pattern of politics was grasped to a considerable extent by the colonial bureaucracy which intervened actively by carefully separating the various shades and currents.32 Keeping in view this complex nature of anti-imperialist politics the primary element of imperialist strategy to fight Indian National Congress was to devise interventions so as to strengthen constitutionalist form of politics within the Congress at the cost of non-constitutionalist form of politics; within the ideological currents to strengthen right-wing vis-à-vis left nationalists. Gandhi was a non-constitutionalist and occupied a far more complex position between the left and the right fringes. When the mass movement had fizzled out he was closer to the constitutionalists but when the mass movement was on the ascendancy he moved towards the non-constitutionalists. To have an extended influence and multiple ties with the centre-right and centre-left was of decisive importance for overall ideological hegemony and constituted the essence of ideological struggle between the left and right fringes. At the same time left–right unity was also of crucial importance to save the whole national movement from being pushed on to the constitutionalist path under government pressure and to extend its social base by united anti-imperialist mobilisation. During the mass struggle—mass upsurge against imperialism—the fate of the left and

31 Even liberals differed from each other. G.A. Natesan was a liberal leader and editor of Madras-based paper Indian Review. He was, to borrow a phrase from Rajaji, ‘almost a violent moderate’. For instance see G.A. Natesan’s Welcome Address to the All-India Newspapers Editors’ Conference, Madras, 10 July 1940. G.A. Natesan Papers, part IV, p. 917. NMML. 32 See Chapter 3.

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non-constitutionalist right-wing was tied together. Also in order to ensure their hegemonic influence over the national movement neither could afford to jump out of the spectrum and rupture ties with centre-right and centre-left. If unity was to be the primary task both against constitutionalist pressures within the national movement and against the government, left-wing could not afford to denounce the right-wing as an enemy. Those politicians are characterised as right-wingers who consciously carried on ideological struggle against socialist views and resented or actively opposed the right of socialists to propagate socialist ideas within the Congress. Those who neither accepted socialism as a world view nor carried on an active ideological crusade against this ideology but were committed to non-constitutionalist mass action formed potential allies of the socialists—an area of politics which was open to the influence of contending hegemonies, between the left and right fringes. Mahatma Gandhi, Abdul Gaffar Khan and Abul Kalam Azad belonged to this category as did the overwhelming majority of the lower level cadre. We have characterised all those individuals or groups who either sympathised or advocated some sort of socialism as ‘left-wing’ irrespective of their group affiliations. If the left was to champion the fight against British imperialism it needed to evolve an equally complex strategy and tactics to ensure the dominance and constant extension of the space of non-constitutional politics over constitutional politics; within this broader distinction to consolidate the ‘centre’ as a whole by forging multiple ties with it; further within this ‘centre’ to strengthen the positions of the centre-left, i.e., Gandhi. While maintaining firm hold over the liberal constitutionalists the strategy of the British bureaucracy was to wean away Congress moderates on to the constitutionalist path thereby isolating Gandhi and the left, i.e., the non-constitutionalists as a whole. The perception of the bureaucracy was that so long as they were able to keep the liberal opinion on their side or to make it stay neutral between them and the Congress, their rule was sufficiently legitimised. The object of the British bureaucracy was to fight the Congress in such a way that its hegemony over considerable sections of Indian society remained unimpaired. It was this need which determined the relative proportions of the dual policy of repression and concession. On the other hand, the strategy of the

Gandhian Strategy and the Framework of Hegemonic Politics

Gandhi-led Congress movement consisted in following a dual policy. The first step before the mass movement was started was that the liberal opinion must be placated and neutralised and, above all, vacillating Congress moderates must be won over to the side of struggle. In such a situation government repression further disillusioned the liberal constitutionalists and pushed them on to the side of the Congress. Congress movement undermined the British hegemony by two ways: first by organising a mass movement and second, by settling down for negotiation and ‘honourable’ compromise.33 The government wanted to keep its influence intact over the liberal constitutionalists and also win over the ‘Congress moderates’ from under the influence of Gandhi. Gandhi wanted to extend the space of Congress hegemony by eroding the influence of the Government over the constitutionalists. Gandhi and the government fought for the heads and hearts of the liberals. This was the primary level of hegemony but not the only level. In fact it was a kind of extended process which penetrated into the various shades of the national movement. A similar struggle was going on between constitutionalists and the Centre to extend their hegemony over right-wing nonconstitutionalists; between the right-wing and the left-wing to extend the space of their hegemony over the Centre. Clearly, the forces of socialist orientation were to emerge only from among the non-constitutionalist sections through anti-imperialist mobilisation. Thus the possibilities of the growth and development of left-wing within the Congress depended upon the relative strength and ideological direction of the Centre vis-à-vis non-constitutional right-wing and liberal constitutionalists as a whole. In short the fate of the left-wing depended upon the approach they evolved to relate themselves to Gandhi. Among the leftists Nehru was the only leader who had an inkling of this structure of nationalist politics: If the Congress is looked upon from the Right and Left point of view it might be said that there is small rightist fringe, a left minority, and a huge intermediate group or groups which approximate to left-centre. The Gandhian group would be considered to belong to this intermediate

33

For the impact of Gandhi–Irwin Pact on mass consciousness see Shashi Joshi, Vol. 1.

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left-centre. Politically the Congress is overwhelmingly left; socially it has leftist leanings, but is predominantly centre. In matters effecting the peasantry it is pro-peasant.34

It was this relatively complex grasp of political reality that helped Nehru to evolve a different relationship with Gandhi and the right-wing while the left as a whole failed to do so. It based its politics on simple demarcation, i.e., dividing Congress into two groups, left-wing and right-wing. The leftists defined themselves in terms of their commitment to the strategy of insurrection. Those who upheld the logic of the paradigm of insurrection proclaimed themselves as leftists while they labelled their opponents as right-wingers. In this scenario Gandhi turned out to be an arch right-winger as he was the main opponent of the strategy of insurrection. To accept that the right-wingers, though opposed to socialism, were as genuinely anti-imperialist as the left-wingers, was to accept the imperative of relating to them in a non-antagonistic manner. This could not be done so long as the left was being defined in terms of commitment to the strategy of insurrection. This definition of ‘left-wing’ caused utmost confusion within the ranks of the nationlist movement. For example, this is how Bose defines ‘leftism’: … . What exactly is meant by leftism. When different individuals and organisations claim to be leftists, how are we to decide who are and who are not genuine leftists? In the present political phase of Indian life, leftism means anti-imperialism. A genuine anti-imperialist is one who believes in undiluted independence as the political objective and in uncompromising national struggle as the means for attaining it. After the attainment of political independence leftism will mean socialism … .35

V.B. Karnik, at that time a well-known Royist noted that the terms ‘the left’ and ‘the right’ were constantly in use in all discussions regarding Congress policies and programmes. But ‘strangely enough in spite of their use for years the terms have not yet acquired a precise meaning and a definite content’.36 34

Jawaharlal Nehru, The Unity of India, 1941, pp. 121–22. Quoted in V.B. Karnik, ‘The Right and the Left’, Independent India, Vol. III, Nos. 10 and 11, 8 March 1939. 36 Ibid. 35

Gandhian Strategy and the Framework of Hegemonic Politics

If ‘leftism means anti-imperialism’ then the Congress was an organisation of the leftists. But that is not what Bose actually meant. For him a leftist was a genuinely anti-imperialist individual or group—one who believed in ‘uncompromising national struggle’. What is meant by this ambiguous phrase? Negotiations and compromises were an essential part of Gandhi’s strategy. Therefore according to Bose only those individuals or groups were left who were opposed to this strategy. One day he was to unite the ‘left-wing’ within the Congress around this confused definition of ‘leftism’ to oppose Gandhi and his ‘right-wing’ followers. ANTI-IMPERIALIST NATIONALISM

In the age of imperialism the emergence of patriotic sentiments in a subjugated country is historically given. It is the product of longstanding colonial oppression and results from the tortuous realisation and internationalisation on the part of the insulted and the injured of their experience embodied in the self-perception of ‘they being people’ as excluded from their ‘oppressors’—the latter being characterised as alien rulers. At the initial stage of this unfolding of the new awareness this nebulous feeling of nationalism may articulate itself into ideological forms heavily charged with religious overtones and racial animosity, though in the case of India the latter was rather muted. The emergence of anti-imperialist nationalism produces a distinct national identity which heralds the process of a nation-in-the-making committed to a separate destiny and passionately defending its right to independence. Such an identity is not merely a geographical category. It is rooted in the process of formation and growth of national consciousness in the course of the national movement itself. This consciouness which infuses this identity with its dynamic content, implies a necessary opposition to all forms of imperialism. The given totality of existing identities, such as caste, religion, language and region, is sucked into the melting pot of the formation of a new identity of national consciousness as a result of transformation of these earlier identities, embodying the various threads of the accumulated subjective experience under a colonial environment. It is possible that all the above described identities (caste, religion, language, region), instead of being completely absorbed and transformed into the broader national identity, may get radicalised as multiple codes of consciousness either co-existing with or opposing national identity. Even the emergence of class as an identity needs the dissolution of these earlier

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identities producing secondary codes of consciousness. Hence nationalism was not only the ideology of the historical process of a nation-in-themaking but was also the process of crystallisation of social classes. Both ‘communalism’ and nationalism are ideologies which serve the purpose of social cohesion in order to constitute a political community. The important point is not that both these ideologies undertake the projects of constituting imaginary communities; all ideologies seek to perform this task. What is significant is that nationalism derives its legitimacy and the right to self-determination from the fact of an objectively existing economic, social and political oppression of a colonial nature. While ‘communalism’ appeals to the forms of oppression internal to the colonised society or posits an imaginary oppression one builds its arguments around ‘culture’ as a kind of transmitted historical consciousness while the other emphasises the idea of ‘political democracy’. Nationalism is not superior to ‘communalism’, just because it claims to defend the interests of many communities unlike the latter which defends the interests of only one community. The democratic impulse lies at the heart of nationalism while ‘communalism’ is intrinsically authoritarian. Nationalism in India was not the ideology exclusively of any one class. It was a non-class ideology in the sense that it was not a direct rationalisation and articulation of the distinct economic interest of a class. Having the characteristics of a non-class ideology means that it is indeterminate and open-ended in terms of what precise class interest it is to serve in the long run. Not being the exclusive ideology of either the bourgeoisie or the working class its indeterminate and open-ended nature carries within it an implicit notion of a people’s state or state as a libertarian ideal serving the interest of the mass of the people. Nationalism was the ideology of all the classes involved in the process of a nation-in-the making. The interests of the various classes (in terms of a programme and policies) as a process of building their respective hegemonies had to be fought in terms of a struggle between various forms or variations, i.e., discourses of the same nationalist ideology. The orientation, however, of these different forms would evolve over a period towards the polarised categories of bourgeois or socialist ideologies only as a series of graduated and mediated developments. Classes exist at the ideological and political level in a process of articulation and not of reduction. They can compete for their respective hegemonies at the ideological level only if there exists a common framework of meaning shared by all the forces in the struggle. According to Laclau, the political discourses of various classes will consist of antagonistic

Gandhian Strategy and the Framework of Hegemonic Politics

efforts of articulation in which each class presents itself as the authentic representative of the ‘people’, of ‘the national interest’. The ideology of nationalism being non-class does not imply that the actual movement of the people against imperialism at a particular conjuncture does not have any class content in terms of the orientation of policies and demands. Though the end-product of the all-class movement against imperialism would result in a class-oriented regime of some sort depending upon the fact as to which discourse would have succeeded, during the course of the struggle in building its hegemony over the movement, but this in no way predetermines the nature of the hegemony from the very beginning of the mass movement. It must be emphasised that the unfolding of the hegemonic character of the all-class mass movement from one conjuncture to another is open to transformation depending upon how and to what extent possibilities open to different contending discourses are restructured. In historically concrete terms the process would be one of open possibilities in which nationalism could slowly evolve towards socialist perspectives. The absorption of socialist ideas into the mass movement would be a continuous spiralling process, the extension and depth of which would be conditioned by the sections which participate in the national movement and the nature of the struggles in which they absorb their political experience. THE NATIONAL MOVEMENT LED BY THE BOURGEOISIE?

The understanding that the Indian bourgeoisie stood at the head of the national movement was one of the most significant premises underlying all communist positions. This view was derived from the understanding that from the very beginning the national movement would be led either by the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. As the proletariat (i.e., the Communist Party) was not heading the movement so naturally then it was assumed that it was the bourgeoisie which was in command of the national movement.37 According to Ajoy Ghosh, the leading theoretician of the undivided Communist Party: 37 For example, the logic of class leadership was argued like this: ‘It is necessary to face the facts. Can it be said that the working class at this stage constitutes the leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle? Is it not a fact that the anti-imperialist struggle is for most part led by the bourgeoisie? It is also a fact that the working class is for the most part led by reformists.’ The Communist, Organs of the Central Committee (CC) of the CPI, Vol. II, No. 11, August 1936, p. 36.

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In the days when India struggled for freedom against British rule, the two-fold and closely interrelated tasks which confronted the Indian communists were: (1) building up a broad anti-imperialist front for national emancipation and (2) the establishment of proletarian hegemony over the front. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the key task of building a united anti-imperialist front under proletarian hegemony could not be carried on. The national movement grew in extent and sweep but throughout all phases of the movement, effective leadership remained in the hands of the national bourgeoisie.38

A similar interpretation of the national movement is presented by the noted Russian scholar R. Ulyanovsky. ‘The Indian national bourgeoisie’, writes Ulyanovsky, ‘stood at the head of the anti-imperialist mass movement … .’39 It is with the help of this premise—that the Indian bourgeosie stood at the helm of the national movement—that the so-called objectively bourgeois character of Gandhian ideology is established. This conception of the ‘bourgeois revolution’ has been subjected to scathing criticism by the well-known Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher. Deutscher writes: It seems to me that this conception, to whatever authorities it may be attributed, is schematic and historically unreal. From it one may well arrive at the conclusion that the bourgeois revolution is almost a myth, and that it has hardly ever occurred, even in the West … . Bourgeois revolution creates the conditions in which bourgeois property can flourish. In this, rather than in the particular alignments during the struggle, lies its differentia specifica.40 38 Ajoy Ghosh, ‘For a Mass Party’, New Age, February 1958, p. 4. In a recently published work by a group of Russian historians we are informed that national bourgeoisie stood ‘at the helm of the national movement’. K. Antonova, G. Bongard–Levin, G. Kotovsky, A History of India, Book 2, Moscow, 1979, p. 175. The same view is echoed by E.M.S. Namboodiripad in Kerala: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Calcutta, 1968, p. 165. 39 R. Ulyanovsky, ‘Marxist Critics of Mahatma Gandhi’, Indian Left Review, Vol. I, No. 5. This view of the national movement has been uncritically assimilated by many people and has become more or less a part of the popular Marxist historiography. In a recently published and otherwise an interesting essay, Sarat Lin has repeated this dogmatic oversimplification. Sarat Lin, ‘The Theory of Dual Mode of Production in Post-Colonial India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 15 March 1980. 40 Isaac Deutscher, ‘The Unfinished Revolution: 1917–67’, New Left Review, No. 43, pp. 27–28. In 1938 M.N. Roy had also clarified this point. ‘As a matter of fact’, wrote Roy, ‘in the successive stages of its development, even the classical type of the bourgeois revolution in Europe was led by classes other than the bourgeoisie proper.’ ‘Our Differences’ in Independent India, Vol. II, No. 3, 17 April 1938.

Gandhian Strategy and the Framework of Hegemonic Politics

The national bourgeoisie, more specifically the capitalist class, was one of the classes involved in the all-class anti-imperialist movement. The support of the industrialists, merchants and traders to the national movement on a large scale has been recorded by several scholars.41 At no stage from its initiation to its later development was the capitalist class either the driving element behind the struggle for freedom or a leading class standing at the head of the national movement.42 The nationalist intelligentsia which led the multi-class movement against imperialism was not above class struggle and without a sense of direction in ideological matters. On their part, assertion of the national interest as primary might give the impression (even some of the historical actors might have such illusions in their minds) that they were above class struggle and non-partisan. But after the struggle to acquire this position of leadership their ideological evolution did not stop, arrested and frozen. The pressures generated by the mobilised social sections, their own education, and a host of other factors soon started the slow but steady process of ideological differentiation propelling them to articulate, with varying degrees of clarity, the alternative perspectives of social development. This process of ideological differentiation among the nationalist intelligentsia produced a continuous spectrum of radical ideologies connecting bourgeois liberalism on one extreme to Marxism at the other. Not to understand this continuous process of radicalisation was to create a pseudo-Chinese wall between the ‘nationalist intelligentsia’ (implying bourgeois) and the ‘Marxist intelligentsia’ as if they were self-enclosed and diametrically opposed. To split or reduce this continuous spectrum

41

S. Bhattacharya, ‘Cotton Mills and Spinning Wheels: Swadeshi and the Indian Capitalist Class, 1920–22’, in K.N. Panikkar (ed.), Nationalism and Left Movements in India, New Delhi, 1980. Aditya Mukherjee, ‘Indian Capitalist Class and Congress on National Planning and Public Sector, 1930–47’, in K.N. Panikkar (ed.), op. cit. A.D.D. Gordon, Business and Politics; Rising Nationalism and a Modernising Economy in Bombay, 1918–33, New Delhi, 1978. Ravinder Kumar, ‘From Swaraj to Purna Swaraj: Nationalist Politics in the City of Bombay’, in D.A. Low (ed.), Congress and the Raj, London, 1977. Claude Markovits, Indian Business and Nationalist Politics from 1931 to 1939. Doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1978, unpublished. Sumit Sarkar, ‘The Logic of Gandhian Nationalism’, Indian Historical Review, Vol. III, No. 1, July 1976. Judith Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power, Cambridge, 1972. 42 Bhagwan Josh, ‘Indian National Congress and the Politics of the Capitalist Class before 1947’, in D. Tripathi (ed.), Business and Politics in India: A Historical Perspective, Manohar Publications, New Delhi, 1991.

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of ideologies to two mutually exclusive polarities was to split the ‘historic bloc’ and artifically force individuals to identify themselves with one or the other class. PARTY AND CLASS

What was the character of the Indian National Congress? Was it a party of the national bourgeoisie having strong ties with the liberal landlords?43 In order to grasp the unique and peculiar character of the National Congress, a distinction must be drawn between an ordinary bourgeois party like the present day Congress (I) and a people’s party which is the arena of contending hegemonies. Unlike an ordinary bourgeois party, a people’s party allows any national programme to be preached within its ranks which might be more radical than the consensus programme. And not only that, it also keeps open the possibility of such a platform acquiring a majority and becoming dominant within the organisation. It will be more appropriate to describe the National Congress as the Congress movement structured as a party which accommodated a whole spectrum of ideologies from liberal constitutionalism to socialism as all of them had a common goal—the liberation of the country from foreign rule. The common goal of the contending ideologies opened the all class national movement to possibilities in which socialists as well as their opponents could legitimately attempt to hegemonise the movement during the process of strengthening it. It is true that the class orientation of an organisation comprising multiclasses is determined by its structure, role, leadership and ideology. The difference between an ordinary bourgeois party and a people’s party lies in the fact that at a particular juncture the people’s party might have a leadership, programme and ideology which could be superficially identified with an ordinary class party, but unlike the ordinary bourgeois party is always open to transformation into its opposite. The Indian National Congress was a people’s party which remained under the hegemony which was ‘more bourgeois and less socialistic’ but it was not destined to be so from the very beginning. The Indian National Congress which represented the Congress movement was the party of a ‘historic bloc’ and not a class party.44 43

R.P. Dutt, India Today. A distinction must be drawn between ‘Congress organisation’ and ‘national movement’. For us ‘Congress movement’ was the chief vehicle of the ‘national movement’. 44

Gandhian Strategy and the Framework of Hegemonic Politics

A bloc of social classes emerges historically and should not be conceived mechanically as a simple addition or coming together of already separated antagonistic classes after due calculation to outmanoeuvre each other. Here the conception of the United National Front must be distinguished from the bloc of classes.45 Unlike the bloc, the United National Front presupposes the crystallisation and separation of social classes through intense class struggles and then the coming together of these classes through the representation of their respective parties to fight the common enemy. The ‘Popular Front’ in France and the ‘People’s Front’ in China in 1937 were examples of such a United National Front. The anti-imperialist awakening and struggle take the form of the bloc because this struggle is also the process of crystallisation of social classes, their growing awareness of themselves and hence separation through the process of building ideological hegemony over the entire bloc. By the historic emergence of the bloc we mean that the existence of the bloc is the necessary precondition for the emergence of any ideology as a hegemonic ideology. Thus at each stage the various elements of the bloc, i.e., the extent of overall ideological radicalisation, character of the leadership, extent and nature of organisation and mobilisation, etc., keep on reshuffling and readjusting to attain a relatively stable equilibrium orienting itself in favour of one developmental perspective or the other from a long-term point of view. The willingness to have mutual adjustment and compromise between the structurally antagonistic classes is not injected externally through manipulation, rather these characteristics form an organic whole of the growing consciousness of a particular group or strata under colonialism. The recognition of the historical necessity of uniting all the forces involved in the process of nation-in-the-making against imperialism posits itself experientially at the birth and growth of national consciousness in the form of the desire and willingness to accommodate mutually antagonistic class interests. Without this, the unity of various classes in the colonial society against the common enemy would be an impossibility. 45 In an interview Nehru made a distinction between the ‘People’s Front’ in France and the united anti-imperialist movement in India. ‘In France,’ he clarified, ‘self-conscious political groups … have confronted fascism in a conscious unity. The Indian Congress Party, it is true, has become conscious of an economic conflict and a class-conflict inside its own ranks, and is sometimes uncomfortable about it; but in contrast with France, the political groupings lack self-consciousness, and therefore, are not aware of a pact or an alliance.’ Inprecor, Vol. 8, 16–18 February 1936.

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A History of the Indian Communists CLASS AND LEADERSHIP

How does a class relate to the leader(s) of a multi-class party, i.e., a people’s party?46 The complex understanding of this relation is bound to get distorted when forced into a framework based on the premise that ultimately each individual must represent this or that class interest. This premise has also an inseparable corollary that each class must have its own true political party. This premise reduces complex relationship between party, class and nation under colonial conditions into a simplistic formula.47 It is via this premise that the complex ideological system of the leader of a multi-class party (i.e., Gandhi) is reduced to one or two essential points (‘class essence’) by emptying out the intricacies of its internal contradictions, logical inconsistencies and significant lacunae. It is also via this premise that ultimately these ‘essential points’ are declared to be the ‘grain’ of the ideology and the rest of it ‘husk’ put forth only to bamboozle the innocent masses. It is this unquestioned premise that every individual leader ultimately represents one class interest which constantly raises the question to demand a reductionist answer: What is the class essence of Gandhism?

46 The Indian communists never distinguished between class and the party. The word ‘Congress’ and ‘bourgeoisie’ are used interchangeably and sometimes the word ‘Congress bourgeoisie’ is used so that the reader is not left with any confusion. ‘The Congress bourgeoisie—Gandhi, Rajendra Babu and Co.—who are giants in manoeuvring ability in contrast to the Congress leftists, socialists, etc.’ Red Star, No. 10, January 1937, p. 11. 47 How the Indian capitalist class, over a period, grasped the complexities of this relation and how they resisted the temptation to form their separate class party outside the muiti-class people’s party (i.e. Congress), I have discussed in my paper ‘Indian National Congress and Politics of the Capitalist Class Before 1947’.

Chapter 3

State Policy, Congress Crisis and the Birth of a New Ideology

It becomes absolutely clear from the Fortnightly Reports for the month of January 1933 that except for a few stray incidents and spurts of enthusiasm here and there, the mass Civil Disobedience had almost fizzled out.1 The decline in the mass movement was followed by dissen­sions and quarrels within the Congress. Partly, this was the result of the crystallisation of two extreme opinions within the Congress ranks as shown by the range of reactions to the decisions of the Poona Confer­ence.2 A section of the Congress had recognised the painful fact that mass movement had already come to a halt notwithstanding scattered incidents. They wanted the Congress leadership to accept this reality and begin the process of finding a way out of this situation.3 Nariman accused some colleagues in the Working Committee of suppression of democracy and issued a pamphlet ‘Whither Congress’? to give publicity to his views. On the other end of the spectrum stood Jawaharlal Nehru, representing the militants, 1

HDP, File No. 10/1/1933. A conference of Congressmen was called in July 1933 in Poona. Though a large section of the delegates asked for the abandonment of the mass movement but Gandhi was not willing to side with them. HDP, File No. 4/10/1933. 3 K.F. Nariman to Nehru, 20 December 1933. Nehru Papers, Correspondence, Vol. 54. Also see Jawaharlal Nehru, Selected Works, Vol. 6, 8 November 1933, p. 60. 2

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especially the left-leaning youth, determined to carry on the struggle without any compromise. Meanwhile Gandhi was busy trying to open communication with the Government with the idea of coming to an ‘honourable compromise’.4 If the response epitomised by Nariman and his friends was tantamount to surrender before a fait accompli the other, represented by Nehru, symbolised the stubbornness and blind militancy of the radicals. Gandhi was the only leader trying to score an important point at this eleventh hour. And that was to somehow make the Government respond to the Congress willingness to sit at the negotiation table. The Poona Confer­ence had requested for an interview with the Viceroy. But was the Government willing to open negotiations and thereby repeat another ‘Gandhi–Irwin’ Pact? The bureaucracy was busy anticipating Gandhi’s moves and making as dispassionate an assessment of the state of the Congress movement as possible. Noted the policy-makers: As soon as Gandhi’s fast is over, it would seem that there would be two obvious alternatives open to him, either to resume his efforts to open negotiations with Government, with the object of securing the release of the civil disobedience prisoners and of reviving the prestige of the Congress, or to revive civil disobedience on the ground that Government have rejected his peace offer.5

After his release on 8 May, Gandhi made a statement recommending suspension of Civil Disobedience Movement for one month or six weeks.6 The Government did not respond to this statement as it hardly took it seriously as a ‘gesture of peace and reconciliation with the Govern­ment’.7 For not responding to the statement the authorities had the following reasons in mind:8 (1) Civil disobedience as a result of the policy adopted and maintained by Government since January 1932 has now manifestly failed and 4 On 14 July 1933, Gandhi sent a telegram to the Viceroy. The draft in Gandhi’s hand read: ‘Will His Excellency grant me interview exploring possibilities of peace? Kindly wire.’ Mahatma Gandhi, The Collected Works, Vol. V, p. 309. 5 HDP, File No. 44/57/33. 6 Mahatma Gandhi, The Collected Works, Vol. LV, p. 158. 7 HDP, File No. 44/57/33. 8 Ibid.



State Policy, Congress Crisis and the Birth of a New Ideology

has practically ceased to function. In ‘suspending’ it, therefore, Gandhi is doing little more than pressure of circumstances has done independently of him, and is demanding in return that Government should in effect confer unfettered liberty upon those who initiated movement to build up their influence again with the object of renewing it or similar activities as soon as they feel strong enough. This was precisely what happened in 1931. (2) A peace which is to be of real value to Government would not consist merely in cessation of Civil Disobedience activities, but would include definite determination to substitute constitutional for unconstitutional methods. There is no reason whatever to suppose from Gandhi’s statement that if civil disobedience prisoners were to be generally released before expiry of their sentences, Congress would, under his guidance, cooperate in working out a new constitution on the basis of the White Paper. In absence of such cooperation the only apparent result to Government in acceding to Gandhi’s request would be to give Congress leaders free oppor­tunity to consolidate their forces with the object of wrecking new constitution as soon as it is introduced. The Government noted a growing disposition on the part of many Congressmen to get back to the constitutional course until Gandhi intervened ‘with his ill-tuned proposals for negotiations’.9 In 1931 Irwin’s willingness to negotiate with Gandhi raised Gandhi to the level of a ‘plenipotentiary on equal terms with the Viceroy’ and he was perceived by the public as ‘one who was practically the head of a parallel Government’.10 Colonial authorities judged any proposed course of action ‘not so much by its possible effects on the Congress, but by its probable effects’ on their ‘supporters, officers and men’.11 The experi­ence of the Gandhi–Irwin Pact had confirmed their worst fears. It led people to imagine that the Government was ‘on the run’.12 Colonial authorities clearly observed the fact that in the eyes of their ‘allies’ Government’s decision to enter into negotiations with Gandhi betrayed their weakness and 9

Ibid. Lord Willingdon to Lord Zetland, 17 July 1935. Quoted in B.R. Tomlinson, The Indian National Congress and the Raj, 1929–42, London, 1976, p. 35. 11 HDP, File No. 5/45/31 and K.W. Emerson’s Note dated 12 February 1931. 12 Shashi Joshi, Vol. I. 10

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strengthened the impression that the final victory of the Congress was only a matter of time. The calculated advice of the Secretary of State and the Acting Viceroy that the Governor of Bengal should refuse an interview to Gandhi in July 1934 was in stark contrast to Irwin’s decision to enter into negotiations in 1931. Government wanted complete surrender while Gandhi wanted to offer some sort of compromise. The iron heel of imperialism had cowed down the people. The masses were not able any longer to suffer the prolonged torture of Ordinance Rule. Gandhi suggested ‘individual Civil Disobedience’ as the way out. However, Government was not willing to lift the pressure on the Congress as its own assessment, based on the reports from the provinces, showed that its tough policy had successfully suppressed the movement. ‘The great majority of the Congress supporters recognise that mass civil disobedience is a dead issue’,13 reported the Government of Bihar and Orissa. From Bombay, Haig reported gleefully: ‘It (Poona Conference) shows clearly how Gandhi’s stock has fallen, one might almost say crashed, even in his own country.’14 While in UP, ‘Congress extremists regret that mass movement has been abandoned … . More moderate members regret that no movement towards adoption of a constructive programme has been made’. The prevailing feeling, according to the Madras Government, was of ‘a general weariness and disgust at the lack of success of the tactics till then pursued’, and ‘absence of any very clearly formed ideas … as to what course to adopt’. Tendency towards polarisation was also pointed out by the Central Provinces: ‘Congress die-hards do not accept Aney’s statement and the moderates are considering the revival of the old swarajist party and council entry’.15 The condition of the Congress as seen by Dr Syed Mahmud is worth quoting. That he was in a position to give a valuable opinion was proved by the fact that he was one of those summoned to meet Gandhi at Wardha. In the course of a letter to Nehru he said: There is no prospect of rousing the people. But in spite of all this we have to continue … . The Government has beaten us, if I may use the word, or checkmated us. It is quite true that we are lying prostrate at 13

HDP, File No. 4/10/33. In a letter to S. Satyamurti (17 November 1933), Swami Govindanand wrote: ‘We are the Congress. Gandhi is not the Congress today.’ HDP, File No. 4/19/33. 15 Ibid. 14



State Policy, Congress Crisis and the Birth of a New Ideology

the moment but it should not be denied that they are also tired a bit and within two to three years they will be so tired that they will be compelled to treat with us. If we stop now, we shall not be able to begin within five years if we can begin at all. The Government can use much greater force then and can checkmate us again. Where is the guarantee that at that time we shall be not lying prostrate within a year of martial law rule? The Government will know that they have simply to hold for a year or two in order to defeat any national movement.16

The spirit of the times, i.e., uncertainty and bewilderment, permeates this letter thoroughly. It brings out clearly the dilemmas of those nation­alists who stood against any compromise with British imperialism. Once the Government had decided to follow the policy of suppression and simultaneously introducing the reforms it had achieved a sense of clarity about its daily moves. It was keenly watching the developments within the nationalist camp without disturbing the process of crystallisa­tion of forces along the lines of constitutionalism versus non-constitu­tionalism. The policy was, as usual, two-pronged: to create conditions to wean away a section of the Congressmen to a constitutional path by convincing them of the futility of carrying on civil disobedience while, at the same time, working for a split within these two tendencies and always looking towards Jawaharlal Nehru and the left-wing to do this job by adopting an irreconcilable attitude towards the constitutionalist tendency and right-wing Congressmen. H.G. Haig, the master mind behind the Government strategy to contain the forces of civil disobedi­ence, noted in May 1934 that a strong movement had been developing for the rehabilitation of Congress through the withdrawal of civil dis­obedience. Many right-wing Congressmen were genuinely anxious to resume the constitutional course and to make use of the power offered to them by the councils; others who did not believe in council entry, were equally anxious that the Congress should be able to resume its other activities particularly in the matter of direct approach to the masses. Apart from this difference in methods, there was also a clear distinction between the right-wing, which in Haig’s view believed in constitutional action and would be prepared to play a constitutional part under the new conditions, and the left-wing whom he regarded as irreconcilable with some of them inclining definitely towards com­munism.17 16 17

Ibid. This letter was intercepted by the police. HDP, File No. 4/4/1934. A Note by H.G. Haig, 22 May 1934.

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‘We are entering a new phase,’ said Haig, and ‘it is clear that though the Congress as represented by Mr Gandhi and Pandit Jawaharlal are changing their tactics, there is no diminution in their hostility to Govern­ ment and no change in their objectives which are definitely revolutionary.’18 At the same time there were ‘obvious differences between Gandhi and Nehru in regard to methods’ and the authorities’ assessment was that Nehru would ‘maintain close contact with the movements which would resort to violence’.19 The need of the hour was to simplify the complex of intertwined forces of various ideological persuasions and separate the ‘revolutionary elements’ which in turn could be handled sternly. There­fore, the aim of Government policy was to permit and even encourage the right-wing to resume a constitutional course of action while ensuring that the activities of the left-wing were not allowed again to become a serious menace to the peace of the country. If the right-wing, argued Haig, were drawn into constitutional activities, it would not be possible for the Congress to keep the two wings together in one organisation very much longer, particularly under the new constitution. The position would certainly be simplified if the revolutionary elements were separated and stood by themselves.20 Who are being referred to as ‘revolutionary elements’ here? Those who are not willing to follow a constitutional path and are inclined towards mass movements irrespective of the fact whether their method is violent or non-violent. Earlier, as Haig had clarified: ‘Our object should be to separate those who are prepared to work the constitution from those who are not. Gandhi and Nehru are clearly in the latter category’.21 In practical terms the Government reached the following conclusion: ‘… notification against the various branches of the Congress organ­ isation should be experimentally withdrawn, so that the Congress may be enabled to carry out its apparent intention of resuming its position as a constitutional party … .’22 In this declining phase of the mass upsurge the perceptions of the various inclinations within the Congress were quite different from the Government’s perception of these perspectives. Though Congressmen 18

HDP, File No. 4/8/1933. A Note by H.G. Haig, 25 September 1933. Ibid. 20 HDP, File No. 4/4/1934. A Note by H.G. Haig, 22 May 1934. 21 HDP, File No. 4/8/1933. A Note by H.G. Haig, 22 September 1933. 22 HDP, File No. 4/4/1934. 19



State Policy, Congress Crisis and the Birth of a New Ideology

were torn by crisis and were proposing different methods to give a meaningful turn to the movement yet in the eyes of the Government they were united by a common thread, the hostility towards the imperialist Government.23 Gandhi was undoubtedly the tallest leader of the move­ ment but even he could not be equated with the Congress organisation as a whole. He was dangerous to the extent that he was able to unify the Congressmen along a particular line of action. In a letter to Mr Mieville, Private Secretary to the Viceroy, Harry Haig wrote: ‘The broad pro­blem we have to face is one not merely of dealing with Gandhi, but of dealing with the Congress.’24 The most important thing about the British policy-makers was their dispassionate assessment of the objective factors of reality without confusing it with their desire to develop the situation along favourable lines. At any particular moment the ‘favourable factors’ were carefully separated from those ‘factors’ which stood in the path of achieving desirable results. Then through a policy move (or moves) a kind of ‘magnetic field’ of affinity and repulsion was created vis-à-vis these factors with the intention of undermining those forces which were being perceived as more intransigent and strengthening those forces which could be placated. The policy moves were worked out in a complex manner and at many levels. The communalists, regionalist and casteist forces were to be encouraged against the national movement as a whole, constitutionalists were to be strengthened against non-constitutionalists, non-violent elements were to be separated from the violent ones, right-wingers were to be constantly warned against the leftist threat. The state apparatus did not only operate with the permanent digits of ‘enemies’ and ‘friends’ but also actively preferred one enemy vis-à-vis another, one ideological shade vis-à-vis another and one political position vis-à-vis another. Thus constitutional opposition was preferable over non-constitutional opposition as a whole and within the nonconstitutional opposition the right-wing was preferable over the left-wing. They even distinguished between the various shades of the left while devising tactics to tackle them. Gandhi and the left-wing were to be countered by bolstering up the right-wing but a strong right-wing was 23 In a telegram to all local Governments it was stated by the Central Government that ‘it must be recognised that Congress though suspending civil disobedience for tactical reasons is still hostile to the Govemment.’ HDP, File No. 4/4/1934. 24 Ibid.

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a potentially grave threat. The Government was keen to encourage right-wing Con­gressmen to follow the constitutional path but far from anxious to see them elected. This partiality of attitudes was conveyed and established by the above-stated approach of creating a ‘field’ of affinity and repulsion at various levels through suitable moves. Channels of communications were always kept open or devised accordingly. This kind of complex attitude presupposed that the state apparatus was willing to accommodate a part of the opposition’s demand by losing a ‘bit’ of the ground under its feet, instead of conceding the entire demand, with the hope of taking the wind out of the sails of the movement by neutralising a section of the opposition and creating divisions and dissensions in the rest. This also presupposed the fact that the state was open to the impression of public opinion and pressures of the mass movement and responded accordingly. This attitude of the state conditioned the nature of oppositional politics and also determined its inner dynamics to a considerable extent. With the clear recognition of the aforementioned circumscribing limits of state policy, nationalist politics had to match it by evolving a complex strategy if it were to be effective. It was faced with the choice of either recovering ground from the enemy inch by inch by adopting a strategy of what Gramsci called the ‘war of position’ or facing severe repression and demoralisation by attempting an insurrection to forcibly seize poli­tical power, i.e., follow a strategy of ‘war of manoeuvre’. On the one hand without unduly exposing its forces to repression and destruction the national movement was duty bound to create a powerful impression on the policy-makers while on the other hand always be willing to negotiate and bargain to recover maximum ‘ground’ and ‘space’ for manoeuvrability. If the state was open to the ‘impression’ of the move­ment the ranks of the movement were equally open to the ‘impression’ made by the state through its policies of concession and repression. The existence of one presupposed the existence of the other. The political process enveloping both the colonial state and nationalist opposition moved through a dynamic of shifting equilibrium of power relations. Each time the mass movement disturbed the earlier equilibrium to establish a new one it sapped the strength of the state to some extent, while the Congress organisation and the mass movement correspondingly gained a sense of strength and power. The very fact that the Govern­ment was willing to negotiate at a certain point indicated that it was forced to recognise the strength of the Congress and the mass movement



State Policy, Congress Crisis and the Birth of a New Ideology

it led. To the broad masses, as well as the forces under the Government hegemony, it was a clear sign that the Government was ‘on the run’ and had realised that it could not crush the Congress. This gave the Congress masses confidence and encouragement and sowed the seeds of conster­ nation among those forces which were opposed to the Congress. It is only in this framework that the ‘meaning’ of the Gandhi–Irwin Pact in the first round of civil disobedience in 1930 and Government’s deter­mined refusal even to negotiate during the second round become perfectly clear. In such a structure of politics both sides could not but display hard-headed realism and to a considerable extent they understood each other’s strong and weak points. Thus the Government approach towards the national movement was based upon the firm belief that the Congress would not artificially carry on the barren politics of mass civil disobedience once the masses were perceived by the leadership as nearing exhaustion. It would shift its tactics to the terrain of constitutional struggle to avoid demoralisation among its ranks. This would be followed by attempts to revive the spirit, regrouping and consolidation. This capacity to choose one enemy vis-à-vis another at a particular juncture and willingness to concede to this enemy a part of what is being demanded was an important manifestation of one of the hegemonic characteristics of the colonial state. When the Congressmen of left as well as right inclinations were criticising Gandhi for his Harijan campaign as a ‘non-political’ diversion the Government understood his objective differently. M.G. Hallet was of the opinion that instead of regarding this programme ‘as a vague and indefinite attempt to develop the home-spinning industry’ it was necessary to ‘probe deeper into (these) proposals and to attempt to appreciate their implication’.25 According to the Government’s understanding Gandhi was confronted with the problem of extending the ideological influence of nationalism to much larger sections of the population to generate a movement strong enough to pressurise the Government: In the opinion of the Government of India this new move of Gandhi’s, though ostensibly aimed at what may be called broadly rural reconstruc­tion, was quite possibly a very subtle and astute attempt to work up, in course of time, a civil disobedience campaign on a much larger scale than anything they had had hiterto, and supported to a far greater extent by the rural population.26 25 26

HDP, File No. 3/16/34 and KW. HDP, File No. 3/16/34 and KW.

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Ostensibly the new programme of the Congress in 1934 was to be directed towards the encouragement of village industries and other related measures which were supposed to contribute to the economic upliftment of the peasant. Government, which talked of carrying on devel­opmental programmes for the rural population, could not object to this constructive activity and restrict, at least theoretically, the movement of Congressmen, in the countryside by using repressive measures. ‘These objects would be in complete accord with the policy of Government’, noted H.D. Craik.27 This superficial similarity of objects obscured the real meanings of Gandhi’s move for the left. They did not understand that these objects could be approached from two opposite ideological angles. In the face of Government determination to carry on the repres­sive laws on the pretext of Congress’ adherence to civil disobedience programme perhaps this was the shrewdest move to ensure once again a close touch between the Congress activists and the rural population once the mass movement had subsided. But the ever-vigilant colonial authorities did appreciate this specifically Gandhian style of politics: ‘Gandhi’s real object, viz., the promotion of a spirit of revolt in the rural population generally, will no doubt be kept carefully in the back­ground.’28 In a letter to all local Governments, Secretary to Government of India. M.G. Hallett stated that a campaign for development of village industries would also have the advantage that it would give employ­ment to those Congress workers who disliked parliamentary work and were anxious to participate in a more active policy. The penetration of these workers into the village on work to which no exception could be taken would also give them opportunities of spreading political ideas and of establishing their influence.29 What were the ‘hidden’ meanings of Gandhi’s programme of All India Village Industries Association? It will mean that Congress workers will penetrate in large numbers into rural areas, will rouse the political consciousness of the masses and instil into them ideas which may not be in all cases in agreement with those of their leaders. The village campaign, if developed, will also give opportunities to the socialist-cum-communist left-wing of Congress ….30

27

Ibid., 6 November 1934. Ibid. 29 Ibid. From Secretary to Government of India to Local Governments, 23 November 1934. 30 Ibid. Emphasis added. 28



State Policy, Congress Crisis and the Birth of a New Ideology

The significant point about the programme was that it circumvented the repressive laws to place the Congress workers once again in touch with the masses without much delay to minimise the impact of demoral­ isation, a necessary outcome of the ebbing away of the mass movement. It also opened the channels for left-wing Congressmen to penetrate the rural areas to carry on a programme which was within the bounds of legality. And it was expected that they would instil in the rural population ‘ideas which may not be in all cases in agreement with those of their leaders’. Here an important aspect of ‘Gandhian mobilisation’ needs to be emphasised. Only a moderate programme within the limits of existing legality could rouse the broadest sections of the people to come forward to defy those very limits. Implementation of such a programme generates awareness and forces which invariably fall outside the confines of the existing legality. More radical programmes would lead only to limited sectional mobilisations. First, the state would place innumerable hurdles in the path of such radical mobilisations. Second, such limited mobilisations would certainly be more militant but they would not be able to with­stand suppression and terrorisation by the state apparatus. The policy-makers took it for granted that the left-wing would lose no time to make use of these openings, successfully warding off the Govern­ ment machinations to isolate them and thereby reducing the impact of State intervention to the minimum possible. This analysis of the bureaucracy which anticipated a two-pronged attack from the forces led by Gandhi and Nehru was exaggerated to the extent that it visualised such an attack in the immediate future. But it was sufficiently realistic as a guiding perspective for evolving concrete policy measures to deal with the various ideological currents within the Congress. The Congress Socialist Party held its first All-India Conference at Patna on 17 May 1934, under the presidentship of Acharya Narendra Dev. In October 1934 Gandhi resigned from the Congress with a view to influence it from outside. The Bombay session of the Congress (26–28 October 1934) under the presidentship of Rajendra Prasad adopted the idea of a Constituent Assembly for drafting the constitution of the country. It also adopted Gandhi’s programme for khadi and village industries. In this non-upsurge phase Congressmen were grouping in three different directions, i.e., council entry, constructive programme and mobilisation of the classes on economic demands. As pointed out in the first chapter, council activity was absorbed within the Gandhian strategy. It also utilised the talent of a different kind of Congressmen.

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There are fighters who fight their very best in the councils and only their second best elsewhere. Others fight equally well when and so long as there is something like a fight going on; but they cannot breathe their full anywhere behind the ‘front’, where reserves and supplies are stocked and developed, and where plans and preparations are made and perfected. For such of them (i.e., the former) we must provide a parliamentary board.31

Gandhi was not a constitutionalist but gave limited support to the ‘council entry’ tendency. He hoped that ‘the majority will always remain untouched by the glamour of council work’.32 But the Mahatma knew that many a Congressman did not realise ‘the essential connection’ between the constructive programme and civil disobedience for swaraj. ‘Trust begotten in the pursuit of continuous constructive work’, he said, ‘becomes a tremendous asset at the critical moment’. Constructive work, therefore, is for a non-violent army what drilling etc., is for an army designed for bloody warfare. Individual civil dis­obedience among an unprepared people and by leaders not known to or trusted by them is of no avail, and mass civil disobedience is an impos­sibility.33 The main idea behind the constructive programme was to prepare the masses for a psychological transformation. This constituted, what N.N. Mitra called the ‘inner side’ of the constructive programme: On the inner side, it means the psychological education and moral training of the masses and classes whereby, (1) they became conscious of their individual and group limitations; (2) they feel an urge to outgrow those limitations; (3) they have an appreciation of the means and methods by which the limitations can be outgrown; and (4) they create and develop conditions—in terms of organised ideas, feelings, character and conduct—favourable to a successful employment of those means and methods.33a 31

N.N. Mitra, The Indian Annual Register, January–June 1937, Vol. 1, pp. 79–80. Collected Works, Vol. 58, p. 11. Also see R.J. Moore, The Crisis of Indian Unity, 1917–40, Delhi, 1974, p. 296. 33 M.K. Gandhi, Young India, 9 February 1930. Quoted in B.N. Pande (ed.), A Centenary History of the Indian National Congress, Vol. II, p. xxiv. The conception of constructive programme as a necessary part of preparation of war was also emphasised by J.B. Kirpalani in his speech at the Lucknow session of the Indian National Congress. See S.G. Zaidi and A.M. Zaidi (eds), The Encyclopaedia of the Indian National Congress, Vol. 10, p. 48. 33a N.N. Mitra. The Indian Annual Register, July–December 1935, Vol. 2, p. 54. 32



State Policy, Congress Crisis and the Birth of a New Ideology

On the ‘outer side’ the constructive programme meant the requisite kind of economic and social planning. Invariably the socialists pounced upon this ‘outer side’ and subjected it to ruthless criticism. To most of the militants, especially the leftists, any shift from the mass movement to constitutional activity meant abandonment of the goal of swaraj. Irrespective of the juncture the logic of uncompromising militancy always ran as follows: The Indian masses were ready for a bold lead and a militant plan of action. It was the leaders who were weak-kneed. In a political fight you either go forward or you go under. Even if the Congress was crushed by the Government for the time being, the left-wingers would much rather face that contingency than accept a position of compromise with the Government.34 For the left, the masses were always ready to go forward, to ceaselessly struggle till victory was achieved. To an audience at Ahmedabad, Sardar Patel argued differently: ‘We have not given up the fight for freedom; we have merely changed the mode of our fight.’35 This belief that the Congress could spread its influence among the rural population without coming into conflict with the Government and then after an interval again enter into a conflict to tap that influence did not make any sense to the left. Only the period of mass upheaval, when Congress openly declared confrontation with the colonial state, was seen by them as a phase of struggle. Since the leftists were trying to understand and intervene into the anti-imperialist struggle through the ‘paradigm of insurrection’ it was quite logical for them to see the abandonment of mass movement as the abandonment of struggle itself. Even temporarily to give up mass movement was to give up the goal of Swaraj itself. The logic of their paradigm created expectations from the mass movement which it simply could not fulfil. Its rising curve was always expected to move upwards, consistent and uninterrupted towards its logical finale, i.e., insurrection. Its disintegration and decline could not but be an anti-climax, something which defied ‘reason’ or ‘logical grasp’. Given their paradigm the decline of a mass movement could not be grasped rationally and hence it was the product of a ‘betrayal’. The socialists/communists took it for granted that those who were oppressed or exploited already possessed the readiness and will to struggle against their situation. They were firmly convinced that where there is 34 35

For details see Chapters 6 and 7. HDP, File No. 3/16/34 and KW.

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oppression there will be opposition or to put it another way, the greater the degree of exploitation, the greater the readiness to revolt against that exploitation. Perhaps they had too ‘physicalist’, and there­fore simplistic, a notion of the awakening of the first stirrings of human consciousness. They did not pay much attention to the significant aspect, which Gandhi never ignored, that long-standing oppression, poverty and misery dehumanised the oppressed by benumbing their desires and dreams of a normal human life. Such a population lived their day-to-day life by accepting their situation as their fate. Myriad theories provided the rationale of these inner shackles. The tradition of all the dead generations weighed like a nightmare on the mind of the living. Only human beings having a sense of dignity and shame could muster the courage to awaken to their surroundings. Only such human beings could believe that through struggle they could change their position in society. Economic programmes whether of moderate or radical nature could make sense only to such human beings. The ‘psychological world’ of sub-human existence could not be allured to the ‘would-be worlds’ of the radical economic programmes. Built into the programme of the socialists was the belief that once you preach a programme of economic welfare of the masses they would automatically be attracted to you. The more radical the programme the wider the participation and mobilisation of the poor. The point which we want to emphasise is that the task with which the socialists were faced in colonial India was much more gigantic than it was actually defined and assessed by them. And not only that, it was of a qualitatively different nature, i.e., of transforming the ‘psycho­logical-world’ of subhuman existence of a vast population and developing in them the capacities to dare, desire and dream a different life, i.e., to develop the conviction that they must struggle to change their position and way of life. And those like Gandhi, who realised the vastness of this task without getting overwhelmed, could not help seeing socialists as individuals who were in too much of a hurry. Among the Indian population two processes were going on simul­taneously: the process of ‘psychological transformation’ and process of ‘social transformation’. The latter presupposed the earlier and only those could absorb radical economic programmes who had already covered a fairly long distance of their ‘journey’ in the first process. If India had to pass through a series of massive upsurges before it could win its independence then the dissipation and withdrawal of such



State Policy, Congress Crisis and the Birth of a New Ideology

mass movements was as natural as their building up to a crescendo. As there must be somebody who initiates these movements, becomes their central symbol and chief rallying point, similarly somebody must take the responsibility to decide their halt and calling off after they are perceived to be petering out. In Gandhi’s own words: An able general always gives battle in his own time on the ground of his choice. He always retains the initiative in these respects and never allows it to pass into the hands of the enemy … . A wise general does not wait till he is actually routed; he withdraws in time in an orderly manner from a position which he knows he would not be able to hold. In a satyagraha campaign the mode of fight and the choice of tactics, e.g., whether to advance or retreat, offer civil resistance or organise non-violent strength through constructive work are deter­mined according to the exigencies of the situation.36

Acceptance of the bitter fact that carrying on the civil disobedience struggle was no longer possible and beneficial could not but produce emotional upheaval and a sense of shock among a section of the move­ ment and its sympathisers. In such circumstances it seems quite natural that a section of the movement should have become disheartened and demoralised while another section drew upon its deepest reserves to exhibit characteristics of tenacity and militancy. On 8 May 1933, Gandhi suspended the Civil Disobedience movement for six weeks. Like thousands of other youngmen, Nehru, lodged in jail, felt exceedingly irritated. He noted in his Diary: I am afraid I am drifting further and further away from him (Gandhi) mentally, in spite of my strong emotional attachment to him … . What a tremendous contrast to the dialectics of Lenin & Co. More and more I feel drawn to their dialectics, more and more I realise the gulf between Bapu and me … . I want to break from this lot completely—I want to place our ideal crystal clear before the people37

Nehru was trying to settle down with this mood when he was released on 30 August due to his mother’s illness. 36

Nirmal Kumar Bose, Selections from Gandhi, Ahmedabad, 1948, p. 202. Jawaharlal Nehru, Selected Works, Vol. 5, 1973, pp. 478–79. ‘I am getting more and more certain that there can be no further political cooperation between Bapu and me. At least not of the kind that has existed. We had better go our different ways,’ p. 489. 37

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On the very day of his release he stated in an interview that there was a struggle between Fascism and Communism for power in every independent country. This was the inevitable result of the failure of capitalism which had created more wealth but left no purchasing power in the hands of the consumers as the result of great unemploy­ment.38 Thus for Nehru, the struggle in India against British imperialism was to be a part of the communist forces struggling against capitalism on a world scale. But let it not be misunderstood, the struggle in India was not against capitalism and for socialism. In a new context he was only repeating what he had been saying since 1928.39 He frankly told his countrymen, especially the youth which had gone through the fire of Civil Disobedience, that he was convinced that the days of capitalism and the privileged classes were over and a new structure of society was inevitable. ‘Not necessarily on the Russian model, but on the general lines of the Russian conception’, he emphasised.40 Once out of jail he realised the lull in political activities of the nation. But he knew that lulls serve a very necessary purpose in a nation’s development by teaching the masses many a lesson. ‘They help in making us think clearly about the ideology that should govern our action … . Out of it will be born a mightier movement with clear direction.’41 Thus the question of ideo­logical clarity was uppermost in his mind. It must precede the next wave of political action and the minds of the youth must be equipped with this new found ideology. Nehru noted that despite the fact of a certain demoralisation among many people the influence of the Congress among the masses had never been so great. Once out of jail and in touch with reality there was an obvious change in his mood once again. His free and frank discussions with Gandhi on the question of vested interests helped him to regain a proper assessment of the forces at work. He remarked in an interview that there was not the slightest difference between Gandhiji and him. As a matter of fact, their recent conversations made it perfectly clear that there was a fundamental unity in regard to their line of action. In all important 38

Ibid., p. 505, 30 August 1933. Sashi Joshi, ‘Nehru and the Emergence of the Left Bloc, 1927–29’, in Bipan Chandra (ed.), The Indian Left: Critical Appraisals, Delhi, 1983. 40 Jawaharlal Nehru, Selected Works, Vol. 5, p. 507. 41 Ibid., p. 521. 39



State Policy, Congress Crisis and the Birth of a New Ideology

matters, as before, Gandhiji was the only possible leader of the Indian struggle, and he was happy to be one of his numerous soldiers.42 Increasingly, he felt the urge to develop his views on economic and social problems in the Press. ‘Briefly they are socialistic’, he explained in one of his letters, ‘and my interpretation of history is what is commonly called the Marxist view. That view limits private property but of course some private property still remains.’43 Later on these views were published under the title Whither India? as a series of articles in the Indian Press on 9,10 and 11 October 1933 and were also reprinted as a pamphlet.44 In his articles Nehru insisted that politics must be treated as a science. Re­formulating Lenin’s famous dictum, he said, ‘Right action cannot come out of nothing; it must be preceded by thought.’45 Nehru went on to say that nothing was more absurd than to imagine that all the interests in the nation can be fitted in without injury to any. At every step some had to be sacrificed for others. But nationalism did not make us realise the inherent and fundamental conflict between economic interests within the nation. There was an attempt to cover this up and avoid it on the ground that the national issue must be settled first. Appeals were issued for unity between different classes and groups to face the common national foe, and those who pointed out the inherent conflict between landlord and tenant, or capitalist and wage labourer were criticised. Nehru not only emphasised the primacy of the anti-imperialist struggle but also pointed out the organic links between the perspective of nation­alism and socialism. Till colonialism lasted the struggle was to be for independence though it would increasingly, depending upon the forces involved, touch some of the economic issues. What was happening in India concretely in terms of ideological changes? The Indian scene was characterised with confusion and perplexion as large sections of the national movement were caught in the painful process of ‘crossing over to a new ideology’.46 ‘Old nationalist ideology’ was struggling with 42

Ibid., p. 538. Ibid., p. 541. Letter to Bhagwan Das, 23 September 1933. 44 Whither India? was translated into Malayalam and published in Mathurbhumi, 13–14 October 1933. Gopalan Kutty, The Rise of Communist Party in Kerala, Ph.D. Thesis, JNU, New Delhi. 45 Nehru, Selected Works, Vol. 6, pp. 1–16. 46 Ibid., p. 12. 43

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as well as absorbing within itself the ‘new economic ideology’ in order to forge a new complex. If an indigenous Government took the place of the foreign Government and kept all the vested interests intact, this would not even be the shadow of freedom. The achieve­ment of freedom thus became a question of divesting the vested interests. This lengthy statement was important not for its content, for there was nothing new in this survey of history, but for the fact that it was being said by somebody who was second to none but Gandhi as one of the leaders of the national movement. For the first time, it directed the public mind, especially the large sections of the youth, to certain basic problems which were seldom considered in India with the seriousness they really deserved. It helped thousands of youngmen who carried the Civil Disobedience Movement on their back to think along novel lines. For the first time socialism caught the imagination of the youth in a big way. To a considerable extent this intervention of Nehru laid the ideo­logical foundations for the rise of left-wing within the Congress. The ideological thrust of the new ideas propounded by Nehru was so forceful that literally there was no opposition to it at the level of argument. Nehru remarked that the opponents of socialism in India at that time were extremely backward—to the extent of not even having a sufficient introduction to the ‘accepted commonplaces of history and economics and modern thought’.47 The elan of the ideology of socialism was on the ascendancy. The national movement had entered a new phase—the phase of the socialist ‘thirties’. There was a great deal of loose thinking among Congressmen and no clear ideas as to what system or society they were driving at. Some Congressmen, indeed, did not think of changing the existing system of Government much, but simply of replacing the British by the swadeshi brand. The process of social consciousness begins not by providing answers but by posing questions. ‘Are we fighting for their perpetuation? Are they products of British rule alone and will they disappear when freedom is won?’48 These were the fundamental questions. Echoing the thoughts of many youngmen Jayaprakash Narayan wrote that it was his firm belief that 47

Ibid., p. 19. ‘Samyavadi’, India of the Future, June 1933, pp. 18–19, xeroxed copy of this book is available in Archives on Contemporary History of India, JNU, New Delhi. The name of the author and place of publication are not mentioned. Perhaps the text was circulated secretly. 48



State Policy, Congress Crisis and the Birth of a New Ideology

most of them who were fighting for complete independence were doing so not only because foreign subjection hurt their sense of self-respect and national dignity, but also because they had a vision of a glorious future for India—a better, juster, more prosperous, more cul­tured, healthier, happier India. Take that vision away and the will to fight, that beautiful spirit which took them through suffering and travail, would disappear, would turn to dust.49 All these youngmen drew a great vision before themselves—a vision of tireless striving stretching its arms towards perfection. This was the source of their energy and passion for struggle. But these youngmen were not romantic poets who could remain satisfied with noble visions. They were determined to face them with actualities and give them definite lines and clear-cut forms. Above anything else primarily they were soldiers who were possessed by a powerful drive to battle with and for realities. These youngmen wanted to redefine freedom—‘freedom meant removal of all economic inequalities—that freedom means the right to food, education, culture and unrestricted growth—in short freedom means justice and perfect equality’. Together they wanted to sound the clarion call of this new freedom. Armed with this new gospel they wanted to go amidst their suffering countrymen. They ardently believed that these countrymen were eagerly waiting for this ‘new truth’. Nehru had been at liberty for five and a half months from August 1933 to February 1934. After his release he gave special attention to the formulation and dissemination of ideas which would rapidly advance economic development and social change. He addressed meetings of youth, workers and peasants. Everywhere in his speeches as well as in his letters to individuals Nehru amplified the analysis contained in his articles Whither India? and stressed the appropriateness of socialism as the goal. In his speech to the All India Trade Union Congress on 23 December 1933, peasants and labourers were given a call for a general strike to remove British imperialism from India. The speech gave the British bureaucracy ‘a very frank exposition’ of Nehru’s ‘attitude and aims’. ‘His object is to overthrow by the force of mass revolutionary movement the existing British Government. The whole speech is a violent attack on what he calls Angrezon Ka Samrajya which has got to be destroyed and 49

Jayaprakash Narayan, ‘Why Am I a Congress Socialist?’ Congress Socialist, Vol. 1. No. 7, 6 January 1935.

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driven out of India.’50 In his three speeches in Calcutta on 17 and 18 January 1934, Nehru urged the youth of Bengal to desist from terrorist activities and follow the path of mass revolution. Gandhi did not doubt the patriotism of the current articulating council entry and its genuine desire to fight for the cause of emancipation of the country. As during the period of mass upsurge this current was willing to follow Gandhi’s method of mass movement, during the period of nonupsurge Gandhi accepted the method of council entry as a legitimate form of struggle. In Gandhi’s conception, and this was recognised by the ‘right-wing’, mass movement in India needed both the methods of struggle without being counterposed to each other. And which method should be brought in the forefront was a matter of tactics flowing from the analyses of concrete situation. Gandhi was the only leader among the top leadership who without being a constitutionalist stood for the unity of the entire Congress around one form of struggle depending upon the fact whether the mass movement had fizzled out or it was going to be started. The crucial difference, and this was not understood by the left including Jawaharlal, was that British bureaucracy wanted both the currents to follow mutually exclusive methods, i.e., the method of permanent constitutionalism or permanent non-constitutionalism. However, the council entry current was willing to foresake the constitu­tional form of struggle and join the mass upsurge led by Gandhi at critical times.51 If the British were disgusted with the militants for not precipitating a split in the Congress the militants represented by Nehru were disgusted with the council entry current yet were wary of breaking away. Both, the colonial authorities and the current represented by Nehru, wanted ‘clear cut’ situation of being face to face with each other. Thoughout this period, till his arrest on 12 February 1934, the entire range of Nehru’s reactions were confused and contradictory: the Congress had arrived ‘at a certain stage of historical growth’ and this was an inevitable and desirable development’. And when 50

HDP, File No. 4/1/1934. As opposed to the Congress constitutionalists who wanted to use council entry as a temporary strategy after the mass movement had fizzled out liberals constituted a truly constitutionalist current. On 18 April 1934 the council of the Western India Liberal Association issued a statement to the Press urging the abandonment of Civil Disobedience and claiming that the liberals who have always stood for constitutional methods have consistently adhered to the policy laid down by the pioneers of political agitation in the country. 18/4/34 FR (ii). 51



State Policy, Congress Crisis and the Birth of a New Ideology

... a national movement grows it reaches a stage when it must cease to be a constitutional movement, in the limited and governmental sense of the word, and come into conflict with various laws made to suppress it. Having arrived at that stage it cannot go back except by rendering itself wholly ineffec­tive.52

In other words, he envisaged the desirability of ‘a permanent movement’ without any halt. On the other hand he accepted the reality of mass movements following a rhythmic course: ‘Every mass movement’, he observed, ‘goes up and down. You cannot keep up a mass movement at a certain pitch forever, it cannot be done’.53 Although he was fully aware that there was a great deal of political depression in the country and there was ‘exhaustion today both among the workers and the peasantry and little can be done immediately to rouse them up even on an issue that affects them immediately’.54 However, such obser­vations were always accompanied with a rider: ‘but essentially the national fight must continue’. He gave vent to his firm conviction ‘that a withdrawal of civil disobedience would be a blunder of the first magni­tude’.55 He pointed towards the favourable international situation and argued that ‘we must carry on the struggle aggressively’ because ‘winding up of the fight will bring utter demoralisation’.56 But the author of satyagraha would argue patiently: ‘Quick disorganisation and defeat are bound to be the fate of bolstered up cases and artificial agitations, if the battle is fought with satyagraha weapons.’57 Moreover demoralisation was a sign of ‘inner weakness’ and lack of firm faith ‘an unshakable mountain like faith that flinches from nothing’. In the process of guiding the mass movement Gandhi was constantly called upon to wade through contradictions. Like a first-rate dialectician he would start with the general principles leading up to concrete and vice versa: Life is governed by a multitude of forces. It would be smooth sailing, if one could determine the course of one’s actions only by one general principle whose application at a given moment was too obvious to need 52

Jawaharlal Nehru, Selected Works, Vol. 6, p. 74, 28 November 1933. Ibid., p. 106. Speech at the Albert Hall, Calcutta, 18 January 1934. 54 Ibid., 15 October 1933, p. 46. 55 Ibid., 12 October 1933, p. 43. 56 Ibid., p. 45. 57 Young India, 23 June 1920, in Nirmal Kumar Bose, Selections from Gandhi, Ahmedabad, 1948, p, 162. 53

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even a moment’s reflection. But I cannot recall a single act which could be so easily determined.

Hence a wise general leading the armies of satyagraha ‘does not wait till he is actually routed; he withdraws in time in orderly manner from a position which he knows he would not be able to hold’.58 But Nehru’s perspective of ‘permanent mass movement’, and this he shared with other socialists/communists, was derived from the classical Marxist perspective rooted in a conception of crisis periods and dual power, of the crucial importance of timing and revolutionary seizure of the state power. His objective assessment was that given the international situation India was entering into a pre-revolutionary situation—a situa­tion which he tried to capture through the conception of ‘dual power’.59 ‘Two powers cannot exist in the same country and at the same time. Of course, you may have dual authority during the transition period when power is shifting from one party to other.’60 He consistently hammered at the idea that the growth of the national movement had now reached a historical stage when it was likely to be ‘permanent and intensive conflict with imperialism’. This notion of the ‘historical stage’ was central to his understanding of the contemporary situation.61 If it was a correct assessment, and Nehru believed it to be so, then within the Congress it was also ‘a conflict between those who can only work on constitutional and legal lines and those who have come to the conclusion that it is impossible to go ahead within the framework of the existing political order.’62 Nehru expected that as the struggle grew more intense the weaker elements would fall away. The ‘corpse of constitutionalism’ could not be revived even by the National Congress. The only way out was to struggle through to the other side. ‘Carry on the struggle for freedom without compromise or going back or faltering.’ He concluded his speech in Calcutta with the following remark:

58

Ibid., pp. 168, 202. Trotsky develops this conceptional length in the context of various revolutions in a chapter on ‘Dual Power’ in his History of the Russian Revolution. Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, 1965, Vol. I, Chapter XI. The book was first published in England in 1932–33. It seems that Nehru had read this account. 60 Nehru, Selected Works, Vol. 6, pp. 104–05. 61 Ibid., pp. 70, 74, 77–78, 94. 101–03 and 105. 62 Ibid., p. 70. 59



State Policy, Congress Crisis and the Birth of a New Ideology

You cannot stop half-way, because today the two forces in India— imperialism and nationalism have come to close grips … . We are today in the midst of a historic struggle, which all nations have to face at a particular time and from that there is only one escape—victory of one side or the other.63

If the British bureaucracy wanted the Congress to tread the path of permanent constitutionalism Nehru and the militants wanted it to stick to the path of permanent non-constitutionalism. Both were against the Congress for following the path of ‘dual tactics’, though from different angles. Nehru’s assessment of the processes of ideological transformation within the Congress—‘growing out of a narrow and purely nationalist ideology’—was correct and gave an edge to his interventions at the ideological plane. But the strategy which he advocated for the Congress in this declining phase of the mass movement was unrealistic and doctri­naire. This made him unable to comprehend the relationship between constitutional activity and the mass movement within Gandhi’s strategy. Nehru also emphasised the idea of organising the peasantry because ‘any big mass movement must fundamentally be a peasant movement in this country’.64 Like all socialists/communists Nehru wished the working class to develop the most advanced ideology and to take the lead both of the peasantry and the freedom movement. But he did not confuse his wishes with objective social reality and pointed that ‘at the present moment in India the industrial workers have no such influence over the rest of the country’. He put forward the prognosis that ‘the next step will be influenced very greatly by the attitude of the peasantry’.65 He also emphasised the necessity to organise the nuclei of Congress workers in all provinces who were ready for a sustained and prolonged fight. Ideologically Nehru prepared the ground for the emergence of the forces of contending hegemony inside the Congress and political per­spectives popularised by him during this period were absorbed by a large section of the youth who later on organised the Congress Socialist Party.

63

Ibid., p. 94. Ibid., p. 101. 65 Ibid., pp. 119–20, 125 and 137–38. 64

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Gathering Forces of the Left and Government’s Strategy of Suppression

After the suspension of the mass Civil Disobedience Movement throughout the country on 12 July 1933, political activity considerably slackened till the Government of India Act of 1935 came into force and Provincial Ministries were formed after the elections. However, even during this interregnum new political forces came to the fore which kept political activity alive. Towards the end of 1933 and the beginning of 1934 militants and radicals within the Congress began to organise nuclei of Congress workers in various parts of the country. To a considerable extent this was the result of new ideology forged by Jawaharlal Nehru as discussed in the preceding chapter. Here, in this chapter, we are concerned with the delineation of the process of coagulation and crystallisation of these ‘molecular’ activities. GRASSROOT ACTIVITY 1934–35

Bihar

A group of Congressmen at Patna decided to form a socialist organisation under the direction of B.P. Sinha who was convicted in 1933 as one of the secretaries of the AICC. An article titled ‘Inevitability of Socialism’ written by Sinha appeared in the Searchlight in the first week of 1934.

Gathering Forces of the Left and Government’s Strategy of Suppression

Later on ‘A Short Socialist Syllabus’ was also circulated by Sinha on behalf of the Socialist Research Institute of Patna.1 In January 1934, small meetings were held in Bhagalpur and Monghyr. Swami Sahajananda was the principal speaker at these Kisan meetings. During the month of August Sahajananda addressed meetings in the villages of Monghyr, Muzaffarpur, Champaran, Chapra and Gaya. Everywhere he told the rural audience about the Russian Revolution. ‘The speeches’, noted the Fortnightly Report, ‘were of a type, which, though unlikely to do much harm in a town, would be liable to create agitation if repeated to a rural audience’.2 In his speeches he recommended his audience to enrol themselves as members of the Congress.3 The Council of Action of the Bihar Socialist Party brought in a resolution in the Provincial Congress Committee to incorporate the party’s immediate programme. It was defeated by a bare majority. The following were the items of the programme: (1) Amendment of the Bihar Tenancy Act in favour of the peasants and particularly, the deletion of its obnoxious features, such as, the ‘certificate’ and ‘salami’ clauses. (2) Freedom from attachment in execution of rent or money decrees of homestead, agricultural resources and that portion of a peasant’s holding which is just sufficient to maintain an average peasant family. (3) Liquidation of arrears of rent and other agricultural indebtedness. (4) Reduction of rent and land revenue by at least 50 per cent. (5) Abolition of semi-feudal levies, illegal exactions and forced labour. The second conference of the Monghyr district socialists of the Bihar party took place on 6 and 7 January 1935 under the presidentship of B.P. Sinha. On the afternoon of the 6th a huge demonstration of workers, peasants and other sections of the population marched through the city.4 The organisation which was most active in the villages of Bihar in the first quarter of 1935 was the Kisan Sabha. Apart from Madhubani, 1

HDP, File No. 18/1/34, FR (i) and (ii). HDP, File No. 18/8/34. FR (ii). 3 HDP, File No. 18/8/34. FR (i). 4 Congress Socialist, Vol. 1, No. 8, 15 January 1935. 2

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‘simultaneous political and Kisan meetings’ were organised at a number of places. Sahajananda’s meeting at Bakhtiarpur (Monghyr) was prohibited under Section 144 CPC ‘in view of the strained relations existing between the principal local landlord and his tenants’. Socialists were associating with him in these activities. In his meetings he attacked the low price paid by the mills for sugarcane, the Bihar Tenancy (Amendment) Act, the zamindari system and, in particular, the oppression of the zamindari amla.5 Sahajananda made a pointed attack on Dip Narayan Singh, president of the Bhagalpur District Congress Committee, as an oppressive landlord. In Patna and Saran districts he drew ‘substantial though not large audiences’. In these meetings he repeated his favourite jibe that zamindars treated their dogs better than their raiyats. He urged his hearers ‘to join the Congress’. ‘The combination’, it was noted, ‘between the Kisan Sabha and the Socialists is becoming more and more obvious’. Congressmen were touring the villages and hoisting Congress flags. Villagers were becoming Congress members.6 Sahajananda pointed to the grievances ‘which have a very considerable basis of truth underlying them and takes pains to study the local audiences’.7 The Kisan Sabha was holding meetings in Monghyr district and recruiting members vigorously. Devabrata Shastri, Sri Krishna Singh, Swami Sahajananda, Karayanand Sharma and Awadeshwar Prasad Singh were the most prominent speakers. A short leaflet ‘What and Whom do we Stand For’ was widely distributed in Muzaffarpur and Hajipur.8 ‘He has’, remarked a very perceptive bureaucrat, ‘now become an adept at infusing into his speeches the maximum amount of class hatred without actually saying anything that is actionable’.9 Awadeshwar Prasad Singh, Secretary of the Provincial Kisan Sabha and Kishore Prasanna Singh, Secretary of the Socialist Party were working in close cooperation. Hajipur sub-division of Muzaffarpur came to be considered as the stronghold of the socialists in north Bihar. In June 1935 Swami Sahajananda addressed meetings at Purnea, Katihar, Kishenganj, Khaga, Hat and at a few other places. ‘There is no doubt’, noted the local government, ‘that the 5

HDP, File No. 18/2/35, FR (i). Also see Shahid Amin, Sugarcane and Sugar in Gorakhpur, Delhi, 1984. 6 Ibid., FR(ii). 7 HDP, File No. 18/3/35, FR (i). 8 HDP, File No. 18/5/35, FR (i). 9 HDP, File No. 18/1/35, FR (ii).

Gathering Forces of the Left and Government’s Strategy of Suppression

movement is gaining ground and that his policy of working up his brief against local abuses wherever he goes is gaining him adherents’.10 By July 1935 a feeling had begun to grow that the tenant meetings particularly were the preserve of the Kisan Sabha.11 In Saran district local Congress leader Babu Bipin Bihari Verma was strongly opposed to ‘Communist-Socialist Wing’ of the Congress. In Bihar there was an increase in communal tension during 1934–35. The ‘Mahabiri Jhanda processions’ were far more numerous and kept springing up in new places.12 Meanwhile Kisan Sabha meetings were held at Khagaul (Patna), Kishenganj (North Bhagalpur) and Dehri (Shahbad). Though a joint Kisan Sabha and a district political conference at Purnea was held under the presidentship of Babu Sri Krishna Singh, this did not ‘indicate any rapprochment between the Kisan Sabha and the Congress’.13 The whole of November was spent by Sahajananda touring and addressing meetings in the Patna and Tirhut Divisions. His presidential speech at Hajipur (27 November) consisted very largely of an elaborate justification for the organisation of the Kisan Sabha independently of, but in close cooperation with the Congress. He also stated that at that time the chief leaders of the Kisans were also staunch Congressmen. But, the Swami warned the Congress, if it did not take an active interest in the organisation of the Kisan movement the leadership of the latter body might pass into anti-Congress hands.14 The Fortnighly Report from the Government of Bihar noted that Babu Sri Krishna Singh was showing … a clear desire to combine the Kisan movement with the general Congress activities and it is noticeable that at some small Congress meetings in this (Bhagalpur) division, the proceedings have included attacks on landlords. It seems likely at present that pressure for a combination of the two movements is coming mainly from the Congress side.15

Despite the Swami’s declarations of cooperation with the Congress the authorities were able to sense his ambiguous attitude when it was noted that ‘it is difficult to know whether the Swami himself is any nearer in 10

HDP, File No. 18/6/35, FR (i) and (ii). HDP, File No. 18/6/35 and 18/7/35. 12 HDP, File No. 18/8/35, FR (i). 13 HDP, File No. 18/11/35, FR (i). 14 Ibid., FR(i) and (ii). 15 Ibid., FR (ii). 11

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identifying himself with the Congress’.16 In December Sahajananda was conducting a strike of the sugarcane suppliers of the Bihta Sugar Mills.17 The building up of tension between the Kisan Sabha leadership and the Bihar Congress leadership was a slow and protracted process. The Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha was organised in the year 1929 by the Congress leaders with a view to getting specific grievances of the Kisans redressed through propaganda and agitation.18 In 1932 feudal lords of Bihar organised themselves in the Bihar United Party and sponsored a Bill in the Bihar Council with a view to amending the Tenancy Act of Bengal of 1885 which regulated the tenancy relations between the zamindars and the peasants of Bihar. The public workers of the province were almost all in jail. Swami Sahajananda Sarswati, the president of the Bihar Kisan Sabha was out of prison and he organised a series of Kisan meetings to oppose the proposed Bill. The Sabha took the stand that no tenancy legislation excepting one in accordance with the fundamental right of the Kisan would be acceptable to them. Interestingly the fundamental right of the Kisan as enumerated by the Kisan Sabha was that the land belonged to the Kisans and uneconomic holdings must be freed from any rent and every peasant family must possess land which is necessary for the maintenance of an average family with an average standard of living. The campaign against the Tenancy Amendment and the attitude of the zamindars towards the general interest of the peasants brought in ‘a great change in the ideology of the Kisan Sabha leaders’. Later on in their newly-framed constitution the leaders emphasised ‘the class character of the organisation’.19 One of the sources which led to the process of ideological change of the Kisan Sabha leaders was the bitter experience of the landlord class’s onslaught on the tenantry in the background of general suppression of the Congress movement as a whole. That experience strengthened the perception that landlords and the colonial state were not only inseparable but were also the irreconcilable enemies of the peasantry.

16

Ibid. HDP, File No. 18/12/35, FR (i) and (ii). 18 Awadeshwar P. Singh, ‘The Peasant Movement in Bihar’, Congress Socialist, Vol. 1, No. 12, February 1935. 19 Congress Socialist, Vol. 1, No. 2, February 1935. ‘The Peasant Movement in Bihar’ by Awadeshwar Prasad Singh. There were ‘a fair number of Congress Socialists’ in the Provincial Kisan Council. 17

Gathering Forces of the Left and Government’s Strategy of Suppression Uttar Pradesh

Towards the end of 1933 active Congress work was practically confined to the four tehsils of Allahabad district and small groups of Congressmen were touring the villages. They were not collecting and addressing big meetings, rather, confining themselves to collections of small groups of people to whom ‘they have been talking in a more or less communistic strain’.20 In UP the socialist group was very active and ‘strong branches of the party have already been formed in Benares and Allahabad’. The Congress left-wing in UP condemned the tendency towards council entry and they succeeded in carrying out a resolution that there should be no Swaraj Party apart from the Congress Party; that all candidates would be selected by the AICC.21 In Benares, Sampurnanand was pressing his proposal to form an Indian Socialist Party and the ‘Platform’ of the Party was a modified form of the policy advocated by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. ‘Actually this party is the only section of the Congress in this province which seems to be thinking on concrete and practical lines, and if politics in India were realistic it might command a considerable following.’22 It was significant that of all the 46 members of the AICC belonging to UP 32 went to Patna and all 32 attended the socialist conference held there. In Benares the Congress Socialists had obtained complete control of the local committees.23 On 28 December 1934, the UP Provincial Congress Socialist Party held a conference at Etawah. This conference criticised Sardar Patel by name and passed the following resolution: ‘This conference expresses its deep concern at the fact that there exists a clique within the Congress whose evil influence is making the Congress policy reactionary and diverting the attention of the country from the goal of complete independence.’24 The conference also condemned the leaflet entitled ‘Congress and Zamindar’ published by the UP Parliamentary Board in which it was stated that the Congress had been consistently trying to preserve the 20

HDP, File No. 18/12/1933, FR (i). HDP, File No. 18/4/34, FR (ii). Also see Zareer Masani, Radical Nationalism in India, 1930–42: The Role of the All India Congress Socialist Party, 1976, Microfilm, Nehru Memorial Library. 22 HDP, File No. 18/5/34, FR (i). 23 HDP, File No. 18/9/34, FR (ii). 24 HDP, File No. 18/12/34, FR (ii). 21

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zamindari system and to strengthen the position of zamindars in this country. The interpretation which the conference placed on this document was that the Congress was opposed to the real interests of the peasants, for zamindars and tenants were two classes in mutual conflict, only one of which can benefit at the expense of the other.25 Kisan Sabhas were being formed in several districts of UP and a number of meetings were held in villages. The speeches made at Basti conference were all strongly ‘tinged’ with socialist and communist ideas.26 In April 1935 bureaucracy’s assessment was that ‘the Congress–Communist group are active if not practical’. A Provincial Kisan Conference at Allahabad was held in May 1935 under the Presidentship of Vallabhbhai Patel. The resolution that zamindars should be compensated for expropriation from loans granted by the Government ‘caused considerable resentment amongst the extreme socialist section, who are holding meetings, very poorly attended, to carry resolutions in the contrary sense’. ‘The interesting point’, observed the UP Government ‘is that the official Congress policy seems at the moment to be not to go too far in attacking, and alarming the zamindars.’27 In UP the situation was very complex like many other parts of the country. Small Kisan meetings were being held, especially in the districts of Allahabad and Meerut and it was reported that ‘political agitation of this kind is a normal feature’.28 Simultaneously communal feelings were running strong as was clear from the vernacular press. Meetings of Hindu Mahasabha were resulting in counter meetings by the Muslim communalists. In Oudh and Bundelkhand Congress was organising training camps for Seva Dal volunteers.29 Even when workers and peasants were busy fighting for their economic grievances, and Congress was busy trying to revive the spirits of the masses, a dangerous ground-swell was steadily manifest. ‘Nearly all Commissioners remark on the strength of communal feeling’, reported the local Government.30 An ideology can be sensed as a feeling only when it has become fairly widespread and starts binding people together as a kind of spontaneous phenomenon. 25

Ibid., Congress Socialist, Vol. 1, No. 7, 6 January 1935. HDP, File No. 18/1/35, FR (ii). 27 HDP, File No. 18/4/35, FR (i) and 18/5/35, FR (i). 28 HDP, File No. 18/4/35, FR (ii). 29 HDP, File No. 18/5/35; 18/6/35 and 18/7/35. 30 HDP, File No. 18/5/34. 26

Gathering Forces of the Left and Government’s Strategy of Suppression Andhra

The Andhra Congress Socialist Party held its first meeting at Bezwada on 23 June 1934, the same day as the Provincial Congress Committee’s meeting. It was attended by some 300 Congressmen and N.G. Ranga was elected as president.31 The first Andhra Provincial Congress Socialist Conference was held in February 1935 in Guntur under the Presidentship of T. Viswanathan. About 100 delegates from all over the province attended the conference. Soon branches were established at Ellore, Guntur, Ongole, Gudivada and Bezwada. During the later part of July 1934 Jayaprakash Narayan toured Andhra Pradesh and addressed meetings at several places.32 The Andhra Party unit got three seats in the AICC and 23 seats out of 100 in the Provincial Congress Committee. The Andhra Provincial Conference concluded its session on 30 December 1935 in Vishakhapatnam. It passed a resolution recommending the Congress to adopt the Socialist programme. The resolution evoked considerable discussion and was finally carried by 58 votes against 46.33 N.G. Ranga was carrying on a campaign asking the voters to vote for the Congress in the coming Assembly (Central) elections. He also made anti-zamindari speeches at Nuzvid (Kistna District) and Tenali (Guntur).34 A confidential report on the tone of the Telugu newspapers and periodicals during the year 1934, stated: ‘During the year under report, socialist thought was noticeably to the fore. Of course, no paper advocated socialism or communism, but published discussions and descriptions thereof .’35 Maxim Gorky’s Mother was translated into Telugu entitled Amma by G. Lingayya. In the foreword to the book editor Gadde Lingiah Chaudhari made an exhortation to the youth: ‘You are not to spend your youth in pleasures and plays. Destroy injustice. Bury the word “autocracy”. What you have to do will be seen in “Amma” as in a mirror. Resolve and come forward.’36 A number of young men were initiated in left-wing ideology through this book. 31

HDP, File No. 18/6/34, FR (ii). History of Freedom Struggle Files, Andhra Pradesh, State Archives, Hyderabad, 1937, pp. 4525–70. 33 Hindu, 2 January 1935. 34 HFS (AP), pp. 8324–529. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., G.C. No. 1180, Pub. (Gen.) Dept., Confidential, 18 July 1935. 32

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To begin with not much attention was paid to the organisational work. But towards the beginning of 1936 P. Sundarayya and his other comrades, associated with the Labour Protection League in the Telugu districts, concentrated their energies on organising themselves along efficient lines.37 They formed new district units in East and West Godavari and Guntur and revived the dormant Kistna district unit. In addition to a Provincial Conference, conferences were held in West Godavari, Kistna and Guntur. ‘A noteworthy feature of these conferences was that communists predominated in both the district and provincial committees of these parties.’ 38 Forty-seven socialists were elected to the Andhra Provincial Congress Committee and eight to the AICC. Bombay

A Congress Socialist group in Bombay announced its existence by a statement sent to the Bombay Chronicle.39 The object of the INC, according to the group, ought to be to convene a Constituent Assembly on the basis of adult suffrage for the purpose of formulating a constitution acceptable to the Indian people. ‘The statement uses the sociopolitical jargon affected by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and the millennium which it envisages is that of the communist wing of the Congress.’40 Soon the Bombay Government observed: ‘The Congress Socialists are drifting more definitely in the direction of communism.’41 In Bombay, a common meeting was held under the joint auspices of the BPCC and about a dozen other nationalist, communist and labour organisations 37 Some of the prominent leaders of the Andhra Socialist Party were Rangasai, C. Rajeswara Rao, Krovvidi Lingaraju, P. Sundarayya, Alluri Satayanarayana Raju and K. Satyanarayana. 38 HFS (AP), 1937, pp. 4525–70. The following were elected the office bearers of the party: General Secretary—M. Annapurnayya, Joint Secretaries—K. Lingaraju, B. Rangasai, P. Sundararama Reddi, Members: P. Syamasundra Rao, Dr M.V. Krishna Rao, Daresi Jagnnatham Rao, A. Satyanarayana Raju, T.V. Chelapathi, K. Seshayya, Inturi Venkateshwara Rao, C. Vasundera Rao, Durba Krishnamurthi, P. Sivayya, P. Narasimhamurthi, S. Jagannatham. Majority of these were communists. 39 Bombay Chronicle, 25 Feburary 1934. The statement was signed by sixteen Congressmen. 40 HDP, File No. 18/2/34, FR (ii). 41 HDP, File No. 18/10/34, FR (i).

Gathering Forces of the Left and Government’s Strategy of Suppression

to protest against the Joint Parliamentary Committee’s Report. K.F. Nariman presided. Two Congress flags and two red flags were hoisted on the dias and banners with such slogans as ‘Down with the Joint Parliamentary Committee’s Report’, ‘Long Live the Revolutionary Youths of Bengal’, ‘Down with Imperialist Terror’ and ‘Long Live the Communist International’ were prominently displayed.42 Seven April was observed by the Bombay branch of the CSP as ‘All India Detenus Day’ by holding a meeting which was attended by 300 persons. Similar meetings were held at Ahmedabad and Poona by the Gujarat and Maharashtra branches. Congress activity in the Bombay Presidency was ‘steadily increasing’. In celebration of May Day three meetings were held in Bombay city, under the joint auspices of the AITUC, the All India Red-TUC, the National Trade Union Federation and the Bombay CSP. The meetings were poorly attended and according to the Government report the audience was not more than 250 persons. A Marathi leaflet entitled ‘the Joint Manifesto of the Red-TUC and AITUC to Indian Workers’ was issued over the signatures of the President and General Secretary of the AITUC and Vice-President and General Secretary of the Red-TUC, announcing the union of the two organisations. Communist workers were being arrested for making ‘objectionable’ speeches.43 In an interview to Bombay Sentinel V.B. Karnik said that ‘they will strengthen the radical tendencies in the Congress and will help to overthrow its present reactionary leadership.’44 Orissa

M.R. Masani inaugurated the Orissa branch of the CSP on 17 June 1934. Important Congressmen had come within the fold of the party. The Utkal unit of the Party succeeded in persuading the Provincial Congress Committee of the necessity to organise peasant unions to protect their class interests. Naba Chaudhuri was simultaneously the General Secretary of the Utkal (Orissa) Provincial CSP as well as the PCC.45 42

HDP, File No. 18/2/35, FR (i). HDP, File No. 18/5/35, FR (i). 44 Ibid. 45 Congress Socialist, Vol. 1, No. 6, 30 December 1934. Much before the formation of the Provincial CSP he was in touch with Nehru. For his letters to Nehru, see Selected Works, Vol. 6, p. 44. 43

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The Calcutta Congress Socialist Conference was held on 9 September 1934 in the AITUC Hall under the presidentship of Amarendra Nath Roy. Three hundred delegates from different districts were present in the conference. One of the resolutions of the conference stated that the conference regarded ‘the activity of the Congress Parliamentary Board without adopting a mass programme as reactionary and futile constitutionalism’.46 A public meeting was held by the Bengal CSP unit on 9 January 1935 to express solidarity with the Port and Dock Workers’ struggle. Rajani Mukherjee, Samsul Huda and Promode Sen made militant speeches.47 At the Provincial Congress conference at Dinajpur CSP leaflets were distributed and workers and peasants were the ‘burden of numerous speeches’. Harihar Nath Shastri presided over the Fourteenth Annual Session of the AITUC held at Calcutta on 20–22 April 1935. The president, reported the Labour Commissioner, … further remarked that the Indian National Congress is not, as many believe, a political party of the Indian bourgeoisie; the present leadership of the body is reactionary. He suggested that these leaders should be overthrown and the movement radicalised and instead of wrecking the Congress they should try to change its ideology and outlook.48 Kerala

In the middle of May 1934, a meeting of the local Congressmen held at Calicut passed a resolution advocating that ‘the policy of Congress should be socialistic and in conformity with the ideas of Jawaharlal Nehru’.49 In December 1934, E.M.S. Namboodiripad, one of the joint secretaries of the AICSP informed that 125 meetings were held in the countryside and at least 50,000 signatures were secured for the ‘monster petition’. Resolutions were passed on issues relating to land revenue, agrarian debt 46

Congress Socialist, Vol. 1, No. 1, 29 September 1934. Congress Socialist, Vol. 1, No. 8, 15 January 1935. 48 HDP, File No. 18/4/35, FR (ii). Harihar Nath Shastri was an important leader of the Congress Socialist Party. Along with Rajaram Shastri he took an active part in the Trade Union movement in Kanpur. 49 HDP, File No. 18/5/34, FR (ii). 47

Gathering Forces of the Left and Government’s Strategy of Suppression

and irrigation facilities. ‘The demand made is very modest: a wholesale reduction of the assessment by 25 per cent and more relief in those places which are affected by the drought.’50 Numerous labour meetings were held in Calicut against the wage cut. There was a strike in the Malabar Spinning and Weaving Mills when one of the workers—Narayana Appu—was dismissed. The strike began on 12 February and lasted for a fortnight. The management agreed to reinstate Narayana Appu and to raise the wages of workers by 6¼ per cent.51 ‘In Kerala,’ asserted an editorial comment, ‘the Congress machinery is entirely in the hands of our Provincial Party, which has therefore the singular luck of being the first to interlink the struggles for Independence and Socialism.’52 Gujarat

A conference of socialists was held on 1 July at Ahmedabad and a regular unit of the party was formed. Gujarat socialists were able to create pockets of influence at Ahmedabad, Dohad, Baroda, Rajpipla. They even started propagating their principles among the rural population and opened their campaign by a meeting held at Borsad in Kaira district.53 The first Gujarat Congress Socialist Conference was held at Ahmedabad on 22 and 23 June under the Presidentship of Acharya Narendra Dev. Attendance was stated to be only 500 and ‘nearly all of whom were students or young men’. The Fortnightly Report concluded: ‘It is clear that the CSP has made considerable progress among students and the middle class unemployed youths of Gujarat and Kathiawar. What headway it will make among mill and other labour and among the villages remains to be seen.’54 Berar, Madras and Maharashtra

Berar unit of the Party passed the following resolution in September 1934: ‘Acceptance of Ministerial offices will create the dangerous illusion that 50

Congress Socialist, Vol. 1, No. 7, 6 January 1935. Ibid., Vol. 1, No. 13, 10 March 1935. Seven hundred workers including one hundred women were involved in the strike. 52 Congress Socialist, Vol. 1, No. 2, 24 February 1935. 53 Congress Socialist, Vol. 1, No. II, 29 September 1934. HDP File No. 18/8/34, FR (i). Kamla Shankar Pandya was the secretary of the Gujarat unit of the CSP. 54 HDP, File No. 18/5/35, FR (i) and FR (ii). 51

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the imperialist state machine can be utilised for the good of the masses, while its essential structure is so designed as to automatically result in their exploitation.’55 In the strike wave at Nagpur, the government sensed the ‘connection between strike and communistic organisation’ and four important labour leaders Ruikar, Marathe, Kulkarni and Jagam were sentenced to six months’ rigorous imprisonment on 9 June 1934. Jayaprakash Narayan and Charles Mascarenhas toured Berar and organised groups at Nagpur, Jabalpur, Wardha, Akola and Amraoti. At Nagpur, they addressed the strikers’ meetings. Their speeches were ‘chiefly attacks on capitalism and capitalists, government being referred to merely incidentally’.56 In March 1934 a Sama Dharma (Socialist) Conference was held in Tanjore district for the first time. In Madras Presidency there were indications of activity on the part of ‘various organisations of communist complexion’.57 The Congress workers who had been convicted in the Civil Disobedience Movement organised a ‘Madras Provincial Youth Conference’ in Madras.58 It was reported from Madras that in the vernacular press there had been a very marked increase in the number of articles written in support of socialism and in praise of the Russian system. Some of these articles ‘verge closely on communism’.59 In the beginning of the year 1934 a strong group of Congress socialists emerged in Poona. At an informal meeting of the Maharashtra Provincial Congress Committee60 in June 1934 the Congress Socialist group succeeded in getting a resolution passed declaring that future swaraj of India should be based on socialist lines and the struggle for independence should be carried on by organising the peasants and workers and by infusing class consciousness into them. 55

Congress Socialist, Vol. 1, No. 2, 6 October 1934. HDP, File No. 18/7/34, FR (i). P.Y. Deshpande was appointed the organising secretary of the Party for Berar. 57 HDP, File No. 18/3/34, FR (i). 58 HDP, File No. 18/5/34, FR (ii). 59 HDP, File No. 18/10/34, FR (i). 60 Following were the members of the Executive Committee of the Maharashtra CSP: (a) N.G. Gore, (b) H.R. Mahajan, (c) R.K. Khadilkar, (d) V.M. Tarkunde, (e) W.G. Kulkarni, (f ) V.R. Inamdar, (g) G.P. Khare, (h) A.R. Patel, (i) Gowarikar Sinhasane, ( j ) D.A. Kabote, (k) M. Dattwala, (l ) N. Parulekar, (m) A.B. Phatak, (n) A.K. Bhosali, (o) M.D. Vibhute, ( p) A.S. Patwardhan, (q) Madhusadan Dalui. File No. 800 (75) A-III of 1935 (MSA). 56

Gathering Forces of the Left and Government’s Strategy of Suppression CONGRESS SOCIALIST PARTY

The first preliminary conference to take steps to form the All India Congress Socialist Party was held in Patna on 17 May 1934, two days before the AICC session. Twenty-two Congress socialist delegates from nine Provincial Parties met at Benares in the first week of October 1934 to define their attitude towards the current programme of the Indian National Congress. The Benares conference, by reiterating the claim of the Congress Socialists that participation in class struggles or the advocacy of confiscation of private property was not inconsistent with the Congress creed, indicated the direction in which the Congress Socialists all over the country were expected to gear their activities. They also stated that Assembly election was not the major issue before the country and a much healthier expression of political activity was to engage in peasants and workers’ organisations and in participation in their economic struggles. Parliamentary activity is ill-placed if it is not directed to further mass solidarity and mass initiative. If through parliamentary activity the people can be enlightened as regards their interest and assistance to them in the task of organisation can be given which will spur them on to self-defence, such parliamentary activity is welcome. But the Congress Parliamentary Board is obviously not for this.6l

The CSP leaders were urging the Congress leadership to intensify the struggle but the leadership was thinking of reviving the spirit of the tired masses and not of struggle. Bihar Government’s considered opinion was that it was unlikely that the Congress would attempt any popular campaign against the proposals of the Joint Parliamentary Report. ‘The leaders are not misled by the results of the elections and realise clearly that active enthusiasm for Congress agitation has ebbed, that there is a general lack of interest and that neither the resources nor the atmosphere for a campaign exist.’62 Throughout the years 1933–34 the scattered seeds of socialist thinking continued to sprout individually and separately in the form of small nuclei. The need to tie these threads into a knot was being increasingly felt by some of the individual socialists. The All India Congress Socialist 61 62

Congress Socialist, Vol. I, No. 2, 6 October 1934. HDP, File No. 18/10/34, FR (i).

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Conference was held in Bombay on 21 and 22 October with Sampurnananda as President. Thirteen provinces were represented at the Conference. The constitution and the programme of the Party were adopted and the object was defined as the achievement of complete independence and the establishment of a socialist society. An ‘objective programme’ together with ‘a plan of action’ and the list of ‘immediate demands’ were announced. To the Bombay authorities all this was ‘strongly reminiscent of the programme and demands of the CPI’.63 The formation of the AICSP, as we have tried to show, was the result of coagulation and crystallisation of an organic process encompassing the experience of international events and the unfolding dynamics of the national movement. It should not be seen as a ‘percolation process’ from a ‘top organisation’ which was planned in Nasik Road Central Prison by some individuals. These individuals themselves were the product of the above-mentioned process of radicalisation and acted as a catalyst to accelerate the same process by grasping its internal organic logic and acting accordingly. Setting the perspective before the socialists Congress Socialist put forward the following characterisation of the Indian National Congress: The Congress Socialist does not regard Congress as a capitalist organisation. The Congress, in its composition and cadre of active members who have risked the security of their lives in obedience to its mandate, is largely lower middle class. In its activities, the Congress is basically anti-imperialist; time and again, it has adopted the line of direct action to set up the free Indian state. Only the parallel tendency of compromise with imperialism represented by vested interests, has often clogged its actions. The Congress Socialists are out to destroy this compromising tendency in the Congress.64

Unlike the communists’ denunciation of the Congress Socialists as ‘socialist fascists’, the Socialists’ criticism of the communists was friendly and milder in tone. Perhaps the reason being that the Indian Communists were simply implementing the political line evolved by the Sixth Congress of the Third International. And to begin with they were all inspired by the Russian Revolution and always upheld it as an example before the Indian masses, especially to inspire the workers and peasants and to 63 64

HDP, File No. 18/9/34 and 10/10/34 FR (i). Congress Socialist, Vol. I, No. 7, 6 January 1935.

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convince them of their latent prowess. ‘I feel’, wrote Achyut Patwardhan, ‘the Congress is too precious an institution to be condemned and discredited by unintelligent shibboleths. It is the height of unwisdom to substitute slogan for thinking.’65 In an article ‘The inevitable Moscow Road’ Ashok Mehta asserted: ‘So today for the world socialism is the only goal available. Sooner or later the nations of the world will have to go the Moscow Road.’66 Congress Socialist Party maintained that in the peculiar conditions of India, the workers had the added task of ridding the country of imperialism and poverty. This was a task which had to be carried out not by the workers alone, who by themselves would be powerless, but by all the anti-imperialist forces in the country, such as the peasants and the lower middle classes. ‘The workers cannot isolate themselves, as they have largely done so far, from the movement of national liberation. They, in fact, ought to lead it, as indeed they are destined to.’67 The labour subcommittee of the party defined the objects of a labour movement as two-fold: The first and immediate object was to protect the rights and interests of the workers and to fight for a progressive improvement in their condition. The second and ultimate was to end the system of capitalist exploitation and to establish a socialist society. The first All India Conference of the CSP was held in October 1934 in Bombay, just preceding the all-India session of the Indian National Congress. Within the span of a year Congress Socialist Party gained considerable momentum. The party had secured about 20 seats in the new AICC. In Kerala and Utkal, members of the party were in charge of the Congress organisation. In Andhra the Provincial Congress Committee had recommended to the AICC the adoption of the socialist programme. In the labour world, the party had been able to bring together on the same political platform such divergent groups as those represented in the AITUC and NTUF and the Red-TUC. From the beginning, however, the party had not been devoid of its critics. From one side had come the complaint that they were dividing the nationalist forces. ‘If you must preach socialism, why not clear out of the Congress?’ From the other side came the suggestion: ‘Leave the Congress. It is a bourgeois and reactionary organisation. Come out and form an independent party.’ 65

Ibid., Vol. I. No. 9, 27 January 1935. Ibid. 67 Congress Socialist, Vol. I, No. 7, 6 January 1935. 66

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New ideas like all things new take birth in the womb of the old. They are born and given coherence in the minds of men as an attempt to grasp their own experience in order to outline the main and general principles of the new vision transcending the here and now of contemporary events. Before the process of take off of creative insights begins, a primitive accumulation of knowledge is presupposed. The sum total of this mainly information-oriented knowledge may be characterised as adopted conceptions carrying within themselves inadequate approximations, lacunae and contradictions which become visible only when confronted with ‘actual events, of precise facts of reality’. Theory emerges not when these adopted conceptions are turned into a catechism and ossified as doctrines but from an attempt at transforming them into sensuous conceptions by breaking their crust and internal rigidity with specific human experience. It is only through this process that most vital linkages within the adopted conceptions are preserved and transcended. This is how an ‘already given theory’ in the form of formulae is rooted in as well as emerges from an original historical experience—that is to say, an experience lived in an original way where all the elements for constituting a particular experience are drawn upon and a synthesis reached through an immense labour of criticism. So theory exists ready-made and available in the form of adopted conceptions but does not exist in the form of sensuous conceptions. The ‘new ideology’ within the ranks of the Congress was neither interjected from outside nor was it a badly mixed up conception of ‘democratic socialism’ of the Second International and ‘communism’ of the Third International. It embodied within itself the elements of both but it was an organic whole and not the result of a misunderstanding. To refer to the uniqueness of the historically concrete manifestation of this ideology the British bureaucracy devised new usage of the existing words. They described it as ‘socialistic’ not ‘socialist’ or ‘communistic’ and not ‘communist’. The other labels were ‘communist colouring’, ‘communist complexion’, ‘verging on communism’, etc. They were also able to observe its ‘drift’ as it evolved over a period. The organic character of this ideology was forged out of the peculiarities of the Indian situation, i.e., out of the impact of Russian Revolution and Marxism within the context of the most powerful democratic mass movement in the world striving to build an alternative hegemony. The inspiration was the Russian Revolution and not the Second International but the problems of organising an open legal mass movement to build left-wing hegemony were absolutely unique. It was a ‘new ideology’ groping towards theoretical

Gathering Forces of the Left and Government’s Strategy of Suppression

clarity in terms of its ‘sensuous conceptions’ and presuppositions to grasp the complexities of its own birth and development. The best way to distort this project was to analyse and understand it in terms of ‘adopted conceptions’ of the earlier contradictory traditions of European socialist thought, i.e., ‘democratic socialism’ of the Second International and ‘communism’ of the Third International. The leaders of the CSP failed to understand the uniqueness of their own experience and therefore also the originality of their own project. Instead, soon they started moving towards the acceptance of ‘adopted conceptions’ to make sense out of their new experience. From a state of relative and genuine confusion with the ‘new’ because of its initial stages of development they now willingly embraced the frozen clarity of the ‘adopted conceptions’. Thus the emerging edges of the new theoretical universe and its premises, as a result of the summation of the uniquely Indian experience, got aborted. The slowly unfolding clarity provided by the ‘adopted conceptions’ of the above-mentioned traditions of European socialist thought forced the CSP intelligentsia into a strait-jacket. Once the visions of these contradictory traditions began to be absorbed by various individuals in the organisation, the feelings of mutual repulsion and recrimination came to grip the inner party life. Distrust and suspicion was born in the hearts of erstwhile comrades. It was only a matter of time before the party came to be ripped apart with its larger sections moving into the Communist ranks. In retrospect, it became virtually impossible for these individuals to understand their own initial unity, the fact of their being in the same organisation.68 THE TEXTILE STRIKE OF 1934 AND REPRESSION

The year 1933 was marked by spontaneous strikes of the individual mills where wage cuts were effected. There had been nearly forty strikes between the period January to December 1933. A majority of these individual mill strikes failed because there was lack of concerted action.69 After a 68 Minoo Masani, ‘If Nehru had died in 1958 . . .’, The Sunday Observer, 16 September 1984. Minoo Masani, The Communist Party of India: A Short History, London, 1954, p. 53. E.M.S. Namboodiripad, ‘The Congress Socialist Party and the Communists’ in The Marxist, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1984, p. 51. 69 A Review of the Last General Strike’, by Y.V. Kondvikar in Mahratta, 15 July 1934. Cutting in File No. 543 (46), Pt. I of 1934. (MSA).

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period of intensive propaganda the joint strike committee in Bombay city launched the general strike of the textile workers on 23 April 1934.70 Once the unrest became apparent among the workers various trade union groups forged a temporary alliance. This alliance was ratified at a meeting of the All India Textile Workers’ Conference held in Bombay on 26 and 28 January 1934. Three main currents of the Trade Union movement, i.e., followers of M.N. Roy, followers of N.M. Joshi and Bakhale, and the CPI group constituted the Joint Strike Committee. On 25 April orders under Section 144 were issued regulating places and routes allowed for meetings and processions. On 27th there was confrontation between the police and the workers, and the police ‘dispersed the crowd with their revolvers’. On the morning of 30 April, 14 of the principal communist leaders were arrested under section 3 of the Bombay Special (Emergency) Act. On 25 May, 14 other communist strike leaders were arrested. ‘It is since these developments that the principal improvement in attendance has occurred.’71 B.T. Ranadive, the General Secretary of the Red Girni Kamgar Union and a member of the Joint Strike Committee, was convicted by the chief presidency Magistrate on 29 May and sentenced to two years’ rigorous imprisonment for a speech delivered on ‘Unemployment Workers Day’ on 4 March 1934. Meanwhile, considerable exodus of mill-hands from Bombay was reported by the Government agencies and was roughly estimated at 13,000 hands.72 The Government brought out a case in which eight members of the Joint Strike Committee were prosecuted under the Trade Disputes Act (1928) for the ‘promotion of an illegal strike’.73 Of the 28 communist leaders who were arrested on 30 April and 25 May, seven were released unconditionally on 29 June and eight on 13 July. The remaining nine, including Dr G. Adhikari, were sentenced to imprisonment under various clauses of IPC. Later on Dr Adhikari, his brother J.M. Adhikari and G.M. Mote were externed from Bombay as they were considered ‘the most dangerous communists’ and it was not ‘safe to allow them to resume their activities in the city’.74 A.A. Alwe and seven other members of the Joint Strike Committee were acquitted by the Bombay Presidency Magistrate. 70

For details see Sukomal Sen, Working Class of India, Calcutta, 1977; V.B. Karnik, Strikes in India, Bombay, 1967. 71 HDP, File No. 18/5/34 FR (i) and (ii). 72 HDP, File No. 18/5/34 FR (i) 73 HDP, File No. 18/8/34 FR (i) and (ii). 74 HDP, File No. 18/7/34 FR (i) and (ii).

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Two of the communist leaders who were prominent in the All India Textile Workers’ strike, P.G. Beke and B. Belose, were convicted and sentenced each to one year’s rigorous imprisonment for ‘incitement to violence’. S.G. Sardesai was convicted and sentenced to two years of rigorous imprisonment under Sections 124-A and 109-IPC. M. Shahid, president of the Red GKU was sentenced to two years of rigorous imprisonment for making objectionable speeches. Like A.A. Alwe and J.R. Kasle, M. Shahid belonged to the category of worker leaders. M. Shahid was 30 years old when he came in contact with the Red GKU in 1932. He studied Urdu up to fourth standard and was employed in the Weaving Department of the Sassoon Silk Mills. On 18 September the Police searched the residences of a number of communists and their sympathisers in Bombay and in other districts. A large quantity of papers and books were seized. Government hoped to find more threads about the communist organisation thereby implying its further suppression and paralysis.75 Bombay communists issued numerous leaflets in Marathi condemning the action taken by the government against the communists, criticising Trade Disputes Conciliation Bill, exposing ‘the betrayal of struggle by Indian National Congress’ and ‘true class character of the Reformist and pro-capitalist’ trade unionists such as Ruikar, Jhabwala and Khedgikar.76 The unions under the communist influence carried on an intensive campaign of propaganda for the general strike. On 8 April, processions were taken out from all the centres and a big meeting was held at Lalbaug. The general strike of the textile workers collapsed because of Government repression and internal squabbles between the ‘official’ communist party group and the Roy group of communists. The main reason for internal squabbles was the result of concrete application of the guiding principle that in the course of the struggle communists must make an endeavour to release the workers from reformist illusions and win them over to a revolutionary outlook. At a meeting of the Joint Strike Committee held on 9 June 1934, a resolution was passed by 29 against 75

HDP, File No. 18/9/35 FR (i). File No. 543 (46) of 1934 (MSA) and 543 (46) Pt. I (MSA). Between 4 March 1933 and 19 April 1934 about 11 Marathi leaflets were issued under the signatures of B.T. Ranadive, M. Shahid, Joglekar, Ghate, Bradley and G. Adhikari. Through these leaflets leaders urged the mill-hands to declare a general strike in Bombay on 23 April. About 20 Marathi leaflets were issued covering a whole range of issues. 76

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25 votes removing A.A. Alwe and G.L. Kandalkar from the committee on the grounds that they were reformists and were helping to break the strike. The GKU thereupon severed all connections with the Joint Strike Committee and formed an independent strike committee. A few days later the joint Strike Committee and GKU held a meeting with a view to compose their differences and presenting a united front but the meeting ended up in mutual recrimination.77 On 23 June the strike was called off. In spite of the miseries and hardships the workers underwent they did not gain any material benefit. ‘Militancy’ was considered as a solution to the task of extricating, the workers from under the influence of reformist leadership. The underlying assumption of this approach was that since the reformist leaders were not truly anti-capitalist they would not be able to give expression to the true militancy of the workers beyond a particular point while communists being more militant would be determined to take it to its logical conclusion. Like any peaceful mass movement, no strike can run permanently at a high pitch and must either compromise and get concessions or fizzle out. Those who would dare to compromise could be easily denounced. This would be the point where the reformists would beat a retreat thereby showing their true colours. The workers’ illusions would be shattered and from now onwards they would recognise their true leadership, i.e., the communists. Such a project could only be fulfilled if the loyalties of the workers could be broken from their individual leaders to programmes and demands. The Royist group in Bombay formed the Bombay Provincial Working Class Party on 26 October 1933. V.B. Karnik was the General Secretary of this party. S.H. Jhabwala, Alwe, Khedgikar, Lalji Pendse, M.R. Shethy, Ahmed Miya, B.R. Shinde, Mrs. Maniben Kara and V.H. Joshi were active members of this party. Members of the Royist group of Communists organised the Bombay Dock Workers’ Union.78 Kamgar Vangmaya Prasarak Mandal (Workers’ Literature Publishing Company) issued a series of vernacular publications translated from English books on Communism. Marathi translations of the following works were published: The Communist Manifesto, The First Raj of the Red or The Paris Commune, State and Revolution, Mother by Gorky, History of the 77

File No. 543 (53) of 1934 (MSA). Subodh Roy (ed.), Communism in India: Unpublished Documents 1925–34, Calcutta, 1972, pp. 276–78. 78

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Russian Revolution (Selections from Lenin and Stalin), The Communist Reply (Joint Statement of the Meerut Accused), Comrade Lenin and the Campaign of the Red Flag.79 In October 1934 Mirajkar and Joglekar visited Cawnpore and addressed meetings of the mill-hands. Earlier in March P.C. Joshi and Ajoy Ghosh were arrested in Cawnpore for making ‘inflammatory speeches’. Communists were trying to find a foothold in the Cawnpore working class when, in March 1934, a sudden strike took place in the Muir Mills.80 It was not difficult for Government observers to detect the beginnings of a communist activity because their militant methods of conducting the agitation and strikes and above all their diatribes against the other trade union groups and Indian National Congress set them apart from others. In Calcutta, various communist groups, led by Abdul Halim (CPI), Soumendra Nath Tagore, Niharendu Dutta Mazumdar (Bengal Labour Party), Rajani Mukherjee (Roy group) and Shibnath Banerjee (Royist AITUC group) were torn by dissensions. Royists, Labour Party and CPI group had small pockets of influence among the Calcutta working class. Similarly communists had a small pocket of influence in Jamshedpur (Bihar). Mangal Singh (a member of the Punjab Kirti group of Communists), Dharambir Singh and Phani Bhusan Dutt were organising the workers here.81 Calcutta Communists belonging to various groups had organised another body: League Against Gandhism. They organised a demonstration on 21 July 1934 when Gandhi addressed a public meeting at Deshbandhu Park. Abani Chowdhury, Son Nath Lahiri, Saroj Mukherjee, Gopen Chakarvarty, Ranen Sen and Mohammed Ismail were important members of the CPI group in Calcutta.82 The various trade unions organised by these groups were affiliated to the Red-TUC.83 79

lbid., p. 68. The Publishing Company was established in 1931. HDP, File No. 18/3/34 FR (i). 81 Subodh Roy, op.cit., pp. 243–44. 82 Some of the revolutionary insurrectionists organised themselves under the banner of Indian Proletarian Revolutionary Party. This party was also known as ‘Atma Sakti’ group. Dr Bhupen Dutta and Bankim Mukherjee were its leaders. Subodh Roy, op. cit., pp. 395–99. 83 The following unions in Calcutta were affiliated to it: (a) Calcutta Tramway Workers’ Union, (b) Bengal Jute Workers’ Union, (c) Match Workers’ Union, (d ) Port Trust Employees’ Union, (e) Motor Transport Workers’ Union. 80

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In December 1932 R.D. Bhardwaj and other communists of the Ranadive group holding office in the BB&CI Railway Employees’ Union were expelled from the Union on account of their ‘communist activities’. The All India Railwaymen’s Federation (AIRF) was established in 1924 and from its very inception it was under the control of ‘reformist leadership’ .84 Surveying the history of the railway trade union movement between the period 1925 and 1946, Nrisingha Chakrabarty concludes: This period will show how a section of the leadership in the trade union movement of our country collaborated with the British imperialists for paltry gains in order to keep their influence among the workers. It would also show that they did not hesitate to violate the decisions of the Indian National Congress too.85

Their collaboration with British Government continued till Independence. In other words, the author recognises the fact that through the ‘docile, non-political and a reformist leadership’ of the AIRF the colonial state was able to exercise its hegemony over a very large section of the organised working class. After 1928 Communist-led workers remained a very minor current in the railway trade union movement.86 The Red BB and CI Railway Workers’ Union was established by the B.T. Ranadive group in January 1933. The union under the leadership of R.D. Bhardwaj organised a few meetings of the railway workers in Andheri and Bombay city. In the beginning of March 1934, R.D. Bhardwaj was sentenced to two years’ rigorous imprisonment for delivering speeches at the meetings of the textile workers in Ahmedabad. The Union had its branches in Bombay, Poona, Dohad, Manmad and Sholapur. Between 1934 and the outbreak of the Second World War, there was a big strike in B.N. Railways which started on 15 December 1936 84

B.T. Ranadive in Nrisingha Chakrabarthy, History of the Railway Trade Union Movement, A CITU publication, June 1985, Foreword, p. viii. ‘By Independence’, writes Ranadive, ‘two or three generations of the railway workers were reared in pure economism and total lack of sense of responsibility towards the problems of the people and the nation’, p. ix. 85 Nrisingha Chakrabarty, op. cit., p. 22. 86 The following unions were under the Communist influence: (a) GIP Railwaymen’s Union, (b) Railway Labour Union, (c) NW Railway Workers Union. Ibid., p. 44. The GIP Railwaymen’s Union was led by D.S. Vaidya, a railway clerk, who was a central committee member of the Communist Party in 1943.

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and lasted till 10 February 1937, resulting in a loss of more than one million working days. The strike fizzled out due to repression and was withdrawn.87 Once thrown out of the Railways, Communists could not stage reentry and failed to influence the railway workforce in any significant manner. On 15 October 1934, V.B. Purandre and K.G. Kulkarni, the president and the general secretary respectively, of the GIP Railway Labour Union issued a pamphlet exhorting the railway workers to organise and not to trust Ruikar, Jhabwala and Khedgikar as they were reformists and pro-capitalists.88 When the working class led by the Communists was fighting determined battles against the Indian millowners in Bombay, the Railways owned by British companies remained more or less peaceful. It is an interesting phenomenon which needs detailed exploration why there was no countrywide general strike by the railway workers. A general strike on the railways with the communists’ participation and leadership would have placed them into the forefront of the antiimperialist struggle. The ‘Lal Bavta’ Sholapur Girni Kamgar Union, which was usually referred to as the ‘Sholapur Red Flag Union’, was established by B.T. Ranadive during his visit to Sholapur at the time of the Sholapur mill strike in 1934. The ‘Lal Bavta’ Union was formerly inaugurated at a meeting of about 5, 000 persons held on 22 March 1934. In the course of his speech BTR stressed the necessity of a new labour union and said that the ultimate goal of the ‘Lal Bavta’ SGKU would be ‘to bring the ruling power into the hands of the workers’.89 Unlike the Congress Socialist Parties in other parts of the country, the Andhra Congress Socialist Party became really effective once the Communist group moved in and used the platform of the party for their organisational and propaganda activities. Here, the process of radicalisation of the Congress youth from nationalism to socialism was intertwined with the Communists’ efforts to seek out ‘non-communist’ organisations to carry on their secret activities. But actually these secret activities were 87

Ibid., pp. 41–42. File No. 543 (46) Pt. I of 1934 (MSA). 89 File No. 543 (53) D of 1935 (MSA). The following were the office bearers: G.D Sane (President), S.M. Nandedkar (Vice-President), G.T. Mandle (Secretary). R.G. Karadkar (General Secretary), Mrs Minaxibai Karadkar (Treasurer), P.G. Beke, N.T. Bansode, Khojbhai Manak (members). 88

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not so secret and the police was fully aware of the details. Unlike the Bombay Communists, (the Andhra Communists, like the Kerala Socialists, had actively participated in the Civil Disobedience Movement. They had not snapped their ties with the Congress masses and especially the radical youth. This proved really an asset in their day-to-day activities. In the Madras Presidency the communist group and ‘Congress Socialist Party’ group shared a number of its cadre with each other. Madras Government reported to the Centre that the ‘menace’ of communism as yet had not assumed ‘emergent proportions’ but indications were not lacking that ‘communism had already obtained a footing in this province’. And if left to itself it had ‘every potentiality for dangerous development’.90 Revolutionaries in many jails of South India were able to convert many Congress inmates to ‘communism’.91 Periodicals and newspapers were propagating, indirectly or directly, radical or socialist views. They do not openly advocate communism, but readers are led to contrast idealistic conditions of life in Russia, as described, with the misery of life in India.’92 To curb this ‘veiled communist propaganda’ government was demanding securities. By May 1935 a Provincial Committee, with local committees in Madras, Nellore, Guntur, Kistna and West Godavari was formed in Madras Presidency.93 P. Sundarayya of Alaganipadu, Nellore district, was the secretary of the Provincial Committee of the CPI group. In this capacity he attended a meeting held in Bombay during October 1934 and was elected as a member of the newly-formed Central Committee of the CPI. A report of the Madras branch submitted to the party claimed that the total membership in the Presidency was 25.94 There was no party members in Tamilnadu and Kerala, and there were only four members 90 Under Secretary’s Safe, File No. 897, 20 December 1934 (TNA). From Madras Government to the Secretary to the Government of India. Home Department, No. 109-S, 7 March 1934. 91 HFM (AP) File No. 101. The Special Branch, Criminal Investigation Department, No. 1338C, 9 June 1934. 92 Ibid. Communism: Propaganda through the Press—A Note. Kudiarasu, Krishna Patrika, Subhodhini and Chitragupta were some of the periodicals. 93 Under Secretary’s Safe File No. 931, 1 September 1935. I.G. of Police, Madras to Chief Secretary to the Government of Madras, 24 May 1935. 94 Ibid. According to the Government sources the membership was around 46. The File contains a document which the Intelligence Police claimed was a copy of the report from the Secretary of the Madras Provincial Committee of the CPI to the Central Committee.

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in Madras city. Apart from this, four Andhra districts had their respective District Committees. Members of the Madras city party committee established contacts with the members of the Aluminium Workers’ Union, Madras Labour Union and M&SM Railway Employees’ Union. Study circles of workers were being held in Carnatic, Buckingham and Choolai Mills. In February–March 1935, members of the party in Guntur took part in two strikes, the Jute Mill Workers Strike and the strike of the handcart men of the Rice and Groundnut Factory. Three communists, namely, P. Rama Subbayya, J. Ramalingayya and D. Krishna Murthi were very active in the Labour Protection League of Guntur.95 The Congress Socialist Party in Andhra led a strike of the Jute Mill Workers at Ellore in September–November 1934. The Andhra CSP issued considerable amount of literature of which two publications entitled Life of Lenin and Russia Today were proscribed. The Andhra CSP started publishing a fortnightly paper entitled Prabha. Communists had started two Agricultural Labourers Unions in two districts. An Andhra Youth League having seven District Associations affiliated to it was also in existence. Apart from this, articles on Lenin and Russia were inserted in various periodicals. Communist Manifesto and Principles of Communism had been translated and published. Lenin’s writings such as Leftwing Communism and State and Revolution had been translated into Telegu and manuscript copies were being circulated. STRATEGY OF SUPPRESSION

After the Meerut Conspiracy Case, communist activities were stopped for sometime but towards the end of 1933 there was a ‘sudden revival of interest and activity’.96 At the beginning of 1934, for various reasons, unrest became apparent among industrial workers in Bombay. On 23 July 1934 the Government of India declared the CPI, its committees, subcommittees and branches to be unlawful associations under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1908 on the ground that they had for their object, interference with the administration of the law and the maintenance of 95 Memo No. 6-45-1-H-36, 20 May 1936. History of Freedom Movement Section, AP, State Archives, Hyderabad. 96 Roy, op. cit., p. 188.

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law and order, and constituted a danger to the public peace. As a consequence communist orgainisations in Punjab, Bengal, Madras and Bombay were banned. It was held judicially that the aims of the Communist Party of India were those of the Communist International. The action taken under the Criminal Law Amendment Act against Communist organisation in 1934 had ‘indubitably caused considerable disorganisation in the communist movement and driven it underground’. Most of the activities of the Communists in the year 1935 were confined to what the police called ‘the issuing of surreptitious leaflets and holding of poorly attended meetings’. Once the party was banned the government was determined not to allow the Communists to lead militant strikes. In Madras Presidency instructions were sent to all District Magistrates and Commissioners of Police that Section 7 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act XXIII of 1932 should be used to deal with strikes ‘Communist in origin and under Communist leadership which cannot be dealt with under the ordinary law’.97 The Bombay Government recognised the fact that the ‘Communists have not yet become actually effective’ but the logic of its strategy demanded that the movement must be ‘checked at an early stage’ before it becomes ‘a source of serious danger’. Therefore, it decided to deal with the Communists ‘immediately’ so that the movement was ‘permanently crippled’. 98 Meanwhile Communists were struggling to maintain their links and a number of letters were exchanged between them to build an underground network, especially about the work of the cells of the CPI. Despite repression the day-to-day activities, though at low key, were still being 97 Under Secretary’s Safe File No. 897, 20 December 1934, Letter No. 290 Public (G.I.), 5 April 1933. 98 File No. 543 (77) of 1935 (MSA). Head Police Office, Bombay to H.F. Knight, Secretary to the Government of Bombay, 8 August 1935. The names of the important communists to be dealt with were: K.N. Joglekar, S.G. Patkar, S.G. Tambitkar, K.A. Chari, S.A. Dange and S.S. Mirajkar. Many important activists such as G. Adhikari, S.V. Ghate, P. Spratt and S.V. Deshpande were already interned from Bombay under Bombay Special (Emergency) Powers Act. Fifteen communists of the Bombay Presidency outside Bombay were already under arrest: (a) G.D. Sane, (b) S.M. Nandedkar, (c) M.V. Vibute, (d ) R.G. Karadkar, (e) Mrs M. Karadkar, (f ) S.P. Limaye, (g) Hariprasad Desai, (h) Gulam Ahmed Khan, (i) Ram Chandra Mangal Singh, (j) Jugankhan Jamsankhan, (k) Mohamad H. Abdul Waheb, (l) Hafiz Abdulla Azmi, (m) Janmohammad Mohuddin. (n) Hariprasad Shatt, and (o)Mohamed Yusuf Abdulla.

Gathering Forces of the Left and Government’s Strategy of Suppression

carried on. Communists organised poorly attended meetings in connection with Lenin Day (21 January 1935), Independence Day, Unemployment Day (4 March 1935), Textile Workers Week (1–8 March 1935), Karl Marx Day (14 March), Paris Commune Day (18 March), Meerut Day (20 March), General Strike of 1934 Day (23 April) and May Day. Even the ruthless repression of the colonial state could not completely isolate the Bombay Communists from the working class. After successive arrests or internments whenever they would be allowed to come back, they would integrate themselves with the workers in a remarkably short span of time.99 From the very beginning of the Russian Revolution the colonial policy-makers in India carefully collected all the information about the Communist activities in India and abroad and gained valuable experience while suppressing their practical activities.100 Between 1920 and 1934 the colonial police published three books on Communist activities in India. These books contained meticulously documented material and a careful analysis from the point of view of the state. The books were widely circulated to equip the lower echelons of the bureaucracy and the police with an anti-Communist ideology and strategy. A cursory acquaintance with the archival material on communist activities is sufficient to show that colonial police was in full knowledge of whatever the Communists were thinking and doing. Assessment of various leaders’ capabilities and their ‘dangerous potential’ was systematically recorded in ‘Communist Directories’. The complex process and its various stages to evolve a strategy to fight and contain communism in India is beyond the scope of this work. But let this fact be emphasised once again that the most significant aspect of this strategy to counter communism was political in nature and was based on isolation or clear separation of Communists from the national movement, i.e., the Congress movement. So long as there was this organisational separation of a ‘Congressman’ from a ‘Communist’ and these two categories did not overlap to constitute a historically new category of ‘Communist or Socialist Congressman’, the Communist movement could be successfully contained and suppressed. The experience of the Communist movement, ‘revolutionary’ movement and the strategy of 99

File No. 543 (77) of 1935 (MSA). C. Kaye, Communism in India, 1919–24, edited by S. Roy, Calcutta. 1977, report (Reprint); D. Petrie, Communism in India, 1924–27, edited by M. Saha, Calcutta, 1972; H. Williamson, India and Communism 1927–34, 1934, National Archives of India. 100

99

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the government to counter these movements was incisively summed up by H. Williamson, Director, Intelligence Bureau, in his A Note on Subversive Movements and Organisations in India which he prepared in August 1933, much before the Communist Party was banned. What distinguished the Communist movement from a terrorist movement was that it could not be ‘eradicated’ easily by sheer repression because it was based on mass politics. If it were possible to destroy the communist movement root and branch by sheer repression then there would have been no revolution in Russia since no state would be a passive onlooker when the forces of revolution were being mobilised. What could prove fatal for a communist movement was the political line evolved to face that repression. Given the correct strategy and the conditions prevailing in India, the Communists/Socialists along with militant nationalists had every chance to become a powerful force, if not the dominant force in national life. Nobody recognised this better than the British bureaucracy. Williamson’s strategy was derived from an understanding of the practical policies of Indian communists and the recognition of this fact. It was considerably more difficult to deal with a communist movement in its infancy than with terrorist activities which, day by day, gave rise to some overt action necessitating and justifying immediate police interference. The final result of the Meerut Conspiracy showed that action against active Communists must not in the future be delayed. It appears obvious that the systematic weeding is preferable to allowing communist tares to grow till the time of harvest…. Speaking generally, the outstanding feature regarding communism in India up to the present time is the extraordinary lack of success obtained by the communists. In their judgement in the Meerut Case the judges, in effect, explained this when they called attention to the fact that the police were entirely cognizant of what the communists were doing and even of their most secret activities and correspondence. If this happy state of affairs continues, and if, as I have indicated above, the police are given facilities to enable them from time to time to extract the most poisonous communist weeds, there seems to be no reason why communism should amount to anything in the nature of a grave danger for a considerable time to come.101 101 A Note on Subversive Movements and Organisations (other than Terrorist) in India’, by H. Williamson, 30 August 1933, HDGOI, Under Secretary’s Safe File No. 843 (TNA). On the conversion of revolutionary insurrectionists to Marxism see Laushey, David Mason, Bengal Terrorism and Marxist Left, Calcutta, 1975.

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The Bombay Government was fairly successful in implementing the practical implications of this strategy. On the eve of the Second World War the Communist Party was completely paralysed once again. In fact, given the nature of the colonial state and its efficient administration, the path of building an independent, separate and underground Communist Party as an alternative to the Congress Party was historically closed.102 In fact by forming a separate Communist Party affiliated to the Third International, the Communists unwittingly drew the line between themselves and the Congress nationalists/socialists. This indirectly helped the police to find out who were really the ‘most poisonous communist weeds’. Once this was done the efficient and ever vigilant police of the colonial state could undertake ‘systematic weeding’ not ‘allowing Communist tares to grow till the time of harvest’. Till 1934 the government had already succeeded in containing the activities of the revolutionaries. In his note Williamson emphasised: ‘Generally speaking, however, it will, from this note, be recognised that police, aided by the courts, have never allowed a terrorist organisation to function actively and successfully for any length of time.’ But now, in 1933–34, a new combination, Williamson called it a combination of communism and terrorism, was emerging. But he was quite confident that … so long as the police can contrive to obtain inside information regarding these movements, as it may safely be claimed that they have done in the past, there is no great cause for anxiety but merely every reason for extreme vigilance and for refusal in any way to view such movements lightly.103

The lesson was clear and loudly proclaimed: any organisation which had as its object the forcible overthrow of the colonial state would be banned and driven underground and after this the weeding out operation would be carried on periodically. This was a vicious circle and the Indian Communists, given their politics, could not get out of this trap without dissolving the Communist Party as an independent and separate organisation. The implication of all this was that no organisation which was secret could flourish and influence the wider sections of the people. Naturally, over a period, the other competing politics would fill in the vacuum. The committed individuals in such organisations could carry on their activities 102 103

See Chapter 12. H. Williamson, ‘A Note on Subversive Movements’.

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under the constant vigil of the police but they would be sitting ducks when faced with the force of the colonial state. In other words the form of politics represented by these organisations did not stand any chance of attracting millions and millions to their fold. At the most, such a politics would attract only hundreds and thousands. And these hundreds and thousands would keep fighting unequal battles with the state. The Government policy to crush the left-wing was a long-term policy. It was not purely a repressive policy but also a political one. This ‘political aspect’ of the policy was extremely important and is generally missed by left commentators. One of the significant planks of their strategy was to split the Congress between ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ and then to carry on the suppression of the left, especially the Communists. The Madras Government fully agreed with this strategy of the Central Government.104 The socialists were an organic part of the Congress movement. This fact circumscribed the Government options of attacking them as any attack on them was certainly to be perceived by the vast nationalist opinion as an attack on the nationalist forces as a whole. Such an attack could easily become a double-edged weapon. It would have focused the nation’s attention on them and won for them the sympathies of vast nationalist sections. Also it would have forced the dominant leadership of the Congress to denounce this highhandedness. Thus the blind repression would have not only failed to serve its purpose but would have also ended up making the socialists stronger. Militancy and isolation from the Congress movement made the communists sitting ducks. Isolation from the national movement in the form of a separate party was the precondition for successful suppression of the Communists. Therefore the explanation for why the Communist movement remained ‘small and growing’ throughout the course of the national movement could not be the state repression. By counterposing themselves to the national movement and by attacking the nationalist leadership including its left-wing, communists were doing precisely what their enemies wanted them to do. The Communists had first to exist as a recognisable separate party before they could be banned, driven underground and made the target of suppression. 104 File No. 931 Under Secretary’s Safe. A note by Madras Government, 4 June 1935 (Tamilnadu State Archives, hereafter TSA).

Chapter 5

The Third International and Indian Communists Communist Party and the Disunited National Front

The history of the Indian communists during the period 1925–50 is the history of the tension between their blind adherence to abstract principles and decisions of the Comintern on the one hand and compulsions of Indian social reality on the other. The genuinely serious and honest attempts made by the communists to bridge the gap between the abstract principles and their experience of the Indian social reality constantly resulted in either imposing theoretical formulations on the reality or clipping the reality to fit into the parameters of ‘given’ propositions of theory. It was natural for such a dynamics to be resolved into two consecutive conjunctures of which one would ‘completely vindicate’ the ‘truth’ of communist positions while the other would completely bypass this ‘truth’ leading to complete demolition of their theoretical perspectives. For example, the Delhi Manifesto and Gandhi’s proposal formulated as Eleven Point Demands immediately after the Lahore Session ‘completely vindicated’ the communists’ understanding of the role of the Indian bourgeoisie. But once Gandhi started the Civil Disobedience Movement, communists declared it a sham fight, and refused to participate in it. Then came the realisation that reality had completely bypassed their already vindicated principles. This also resulted in another related phenomenon.

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In one case, they remained isolated from the mass movement by lagging behind the mass upsurge which they could not foresee because of the blinkers imposed by the ‘vindication of their principles’ earlier, while in the second case they remained isolated (though to a lesser extent as compared to the first) because of taking positions far ahead of the mass consciousness arbitrarily as the reality had already demolished their guiding principles which could have helped them to take more balanced positions. If in the first case, their actual (not verbal) activity was ‘less revolutionary’ than the situation required, in the second case it turned out to be ‘more revolutionary’ to compensate the earlier lag. This created the vicious circle, which the communists have repeatedly referred to as moving from ‘dogmatism’ to ‘revisionism’ and then back from ‘revisionism’ to ‘dogmatism’. The satisfaction derived from the fact of taking a firm stand on fundamental theoretical principles was mingled with the bitterness of getting completely isolated from the masses and of the squabbles of a sect. On the other hand, the success of pragmatic interventions (‘revisionism’) constantly generated the guilt that they were not being guided by a revolutionary theory. There was hardly any choice to make when being a sect and isolated became identified with being principled and being popular and successful was tantamount to dilettantism of the pragmatists. The accumulated experiences of the mass movements constantly generated paradoxes which at moments became acute, demanding a theoretical breakthrough from the shell of a ‘given theory’ and in turn streamlining and intervening in the mass movements in the light of these newly-acquired insights. The failure to evolve an effective politics by the communists has been explained in terms of their inability to work out ‘correct tactics’, i.e., apply Lenin’s guidelines creatively.1 Contrary to this viewpoint, our position is that distortions in the ‘sectarian’ or ‘reformist’ direction were precisely the result of the consistent application of what the Indian communists understood as ‘Leninist guidelines’. As we shall see, the actual experience of the United Front period was like a pendulum striking itself against these two guidelines of combining the support to the national liberation movement with a fight against the bourgeois compromising tendency and maintaining the independence of proletarian party and of the peasants and workers’ movement. 1 G. Adhikari, Documents of the History of the CPI, PPH, Vol. I, p. 170. For Lenin’s guidelines, see Shashi Joshi, Vol. 1 in this series.

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Because of the dogmatic commitment of Indian Communists to an a priori ‘given theory’ it was constantly reiterated that to fulfil its historic mission of establishing its hegemony within the national movement, the working class must have its own independent, separate class party—the Communist Party.2 Further, it was argued that the Communist Party, in order to be effective, must rally behind it considerable sections of the working class free from ‘bourgeois’ (Congress) illusions. The ‘historic necessity’of building the CP logically led the communists to oppose the Indian National Congress while the new idea of the United Front now required that Communists join hands with the INC to oppose their common enemy. This vicious circle was broken to an extent by the new policy derived from the proceedings of the Seventh Congress of the Comintern (1934). In 1934 a pamphlet was issued under 52 signatures from Bombay to call a conference of all genuine anti-imperialists to launch an ‘antiimperialist united front’, i.e., to actually implement a given theory of the united front elaborated by Lenin and the Third International in 1921 to solve the problem of creating mass communist parties in Europe.3 The workers and peasants and revolutionary middle class youth were asked to combine on an independent united front platform to organise the fight against British imperialism and one of the main tasks of the united front was to expose and counteract the treacherous manoeuvres of the Congress and its leadership.4 This idea of the anti-imperialist united front was not new but was a part of the draft platform of action (1931). If the alignment of workers and peasants against czarist autocracy was to be called an ‘alliance’, in the replica of this revolution in India the Indian communists gave it the modified name of ‘united front’. On the occasion of the Seventh Congress, the dig at the Indian communists by Wang Ming—that ‘our Indian comrades can serve as an example of how not to carry on the 2 ‘The struggle for the formation of a united, centralised and mass underground communist party is the first essential prerequisite for the realisation of the historic mission of the working class of India.’ Abridged Draft of Political Theses of the CC of the CPI, Inprecor, No. 40, p. 1024. 3 Fernando Claudin, The Communist Movement from Comintern to Cominform, 1975, p. 146. 4 ‘Call a Conference of All Genuine Anti-Imperialists to Launch the Anti-Imperialist League—For the Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist United Front of the Toiling Masses of India’. (Italics in original).

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tactics of the anti-imperialist united front’—should be understood in this context.5 The themes of Congress as an organisation of the Indian bourgeoisie working in alliance with landlords, Gandhi and Nehru as agents of the Indian bourgeoisie, and the ‘repeated betrayals’ of the Indian masses since 1922 were vigorously propagated to expose the Congress and to emphasise the need for an alternative, genuinely revolutionary front—the Anti-Imperialist League. This political line of emphasising exposure through participation and the distinction between the counter-revolutionary leadership and revolutionary but ignorant followers formed the basis of the united front within the working class, developed by the Third International in 1921–24 for the creation of mass Communist Parties in Europe.6 Instead of developing a theoretical conception of the ‘united front’ of conflicting classes under conditions of colonialism, as distinguished from the tactic of the united front within a class, the theoretical gap was now filled by raising the latter to the status of a theory of the colonial revolution. The implementation of this ‘given theory’ of exposure of the counterrevolutionary leadership through energetic participation in all anti-imperialist activities was to lead the Indian communists to face a number of problems. Was it possible in day-to-day struggles to participate in Congress meetings and demonstrations and denounce from the same stage Gandhi and Nehru as betrayers of the national movement and agents of imperialism? Was it possible to launch united struggles of the working class on an agreed programme and simultaneously accuse Joshi–Roy–Kandalkar as being counter-revolutionary and agents of the bourgeoisie? Here again life was to put a big question mark to the a priori theory which maintained not only the possibility of the simultaneity of ‘exposure’ and ‘participation’, but also declared it as the only correct method of building the hegemony of the working class. Thus, till the Dutt–Bradley Thesis arrived in India in 1936, the united front was to be formed outside the Congress and if possible on the ruins of the Congress. But was the united front to include the national bourgeoisie? To this question the answer in the document was an emphatic no. What was being suggested here was the replica of the party organisation, driving 5 G.D. Overstreet and Marshall Windmiller, Communism in India, Bombay, 1960, p. 158. 6 The workers’ united front theses were approved by the Plenum of the ECCI in December 1921. See Claudin, op. cit., pp. 146–47.

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forces and strategic-schema of the Russian Revolution though it was given a different name: ‘united front of workers, peasants and the urban petty bourgeoisie’.7 Soon the communists were to get an opportunity to test the validity of the principle of exposure through a united struggle. An example of how the implementation of the ‘exposure theory’ from the common platform was to meet with tough resistance was provided by the communist intervention at the All Maharashtra Political Conference held on 29 October 1933. The conference which was attended by 300 delegates was called to discuss the formation of the Democratic Swaraj Party. When a group of communists, who were present at the conference, moved certain amendments to the resolution submitted from the platform, they were not allowed to press for these amendments nor were the communist speakers allowed to address the conference. Mr. Mehta, president of the conference, retorted by saying: ‘If you call us agents of imperialism, I call you agents of Moscow.’8 Similarly, the All India Textile Workers’ Conference was held in Bombay from, 26 to 28 January 1934, under the Chairmanship of the AITUC President, Harihar Nath Sastri, a member of the Congress Socialist Party. It was at this conference that the communists joined hands with the Royists to prepare for an all-India general strike to meet the offensive of the employers. A Joint Council of Action including Sastri, R.S. Ruikar, A.A. Alwe, B.T. Ranadive, K.N. Joglekar, Maniben Kara and V.B. Karnik was formed. 23 April 1934 was fixed as the date of the strike and on that date 90,000 textile workers in Bombay downed their tools. There were strikes in Sholapur, Kanpur, Nagpur and Delhi.9 But when the communists tried to intensify the struggle to transform it into what they called the political general strike and at the same time to expose those who disagreed with them as agents of the capitalists, the dissensions began within the strike committee ultimately splitting the trade union leadership. Consequently, the strike collapsed and not a single demand of the workers was accepted. Two points became quite evident. Without destroying the entire movement, the communist leaders in the strike committee could not go further than the programme already agreed upon with the non-communists even if they were in a majority. During the struggle they could not afford to ‘expose’ their allies without 7

Ibid. Indian Front, No.1, 1 December 1935. 9 Karnik, Strikes in India, p. 256. 8

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alienating them and thus weakening the strike movement. Later, in the course of self-criticism, the conduct of this strike was declared as sectarian but pointing only to the crudity of the methods of conducting the strike rather than to the principles involved. Commenting on the sectarianism involved. The Communist made the following self-criticism: The general strike of 1934 was prepared and conducted at the first stage by the Communist Party and its supporters of the revolutionary TU movement on the basis of a correct Bolshevik application of the tactics of the united front. The strike signified a change in the workers movement in the direction of developing independent class fights against imperialism and capital. But though the preparation and conducting of the strike was correct at the first stage, the leadership of the second stage was just as grossly mistaken and sectarian. In violation of all the decisions of the CI the national-reformist union was declared to be a police union and the call was issued to form Communist unions. The sectarian conduct of the communists as expressed in the thoughtless expulsion of the representatives of the national-reformist union from the strike committee and in the condemnation of all the members of this union as traitors helped the national-reformists to break the strike.10

According to this self-criticism, the conduct of the strike was perfectly correct till the first stage (participation and unity) but became sectarian during the second stage (exposure) when the policy of condemnation and expulsion of the bourgeois agents was carried out. True, the Communist International never issued any instructions asking the communists to declare reformist unions as police unions but this was certainly in accordance with the principle and instructions of exposing the ‘true nature’ of the reformist leaders during the struggle. How else were they to be exposed, if they were to be exposed at all? Meanwhile, a Government notification (dated 23 July 1934) declared the Communist Party of India and all its mass fronts as unlawful associations. The need to turn towards the masses was now realised more acutely than ever before. After the ban and failure of the general strike, the emphasis was suddenly shifted. It was stated with alarm that not only the Government but also their opponents within the national movement were striving hard for their expulsion from the ranks of the Indian

10

The Communist, Vol. I. No. 3, April 1935.

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labour movement. The need to build defensive reserves was given the main priority and for the moment the whole idea of exposing others was quietly dropped. ‘These united front tactics must help to beat back the frantic attack of the enemies of the Communist vanguard. These tactics must ensure the broad and systematic utilization of all legal possibilities in order to increase and widen Communist influence.’11 The concrete experience showed that the attempts to build the united front and attempts to expose the ‘true nature’ of temporary allies were mutually exclusive. The communists could not implement both simultaneously. Instead of challenging the entire set of assumptions, from which the ‘exposure theory’ logically flowed, on the basis of their concrete experience and generalising this aspect as a problem of theory, the communists mechanically dropped the ‘exposure’ aspect of their programme. This was the beginning of making pragmatic adjustments without quarrelling with theory. Instead of using the accumulated experience of the ‘precise facts of reality’ to raise the problem to a theoretical level by questioning the theory, it was sought to be reconciled within the parameters of the given theory in the name of making tactics more flexible. Being closer to the actual situation, the consistent pursual of ‘flexible tactics’ would help to score successes. But, over a period, this dynamics would also make the movement and leadership deviate from the old theoretical assumptions to such an extent that a section of the party would completely lose sight of all mediations and hence all sense of theory. If earlier pragmatism carried the day, now the other side of the dialectic, the principled positions of dogmatic a priori theory, would assert themselves to arrest the drift towards unmitigated pragmatism. After the forty-eighth session of the National Congress and the first All India Congress Socialist Party (CSP) Conference in Bombay (October 1934), efforts were made to build a united front between the CPI and CSP. Joint action on specific issues was agreed upon between the All India Congress Socialist Party, the AITUC, National Trade Union Federation and the Red-TUC. The agreed conditions for the united front activities were:12 11

‘The sickness of sectarianism and sectarian self-isolation from the masses’, commented The Communist editorial, ‘is the most dangerous sickness of Communist movement in India’, The Communist, Vol. I. No. 3. April 1935. 12 L.P. Sinha, The Left-Wing in India: 1919–47, Muzaffarpur, 1965, p. 405.

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(1) There shall be no mutual criticism in speeches or by distribution of leaflets at joint functions. (2) There shall be no abuse of each other, no imputations on the motives or honesty of either party. (3) Before every joint action there shall be a joint agreement regarding the terms of resolutions and slogans, carrying of banners and flags, and distribution of leaflets and literature. (4) There shall be no advocacy of violence or non-violence by either party at joint functions. (5) At joint functions there shall be no appeal for support to either party or to control members or to draw any exclusive advantage to either party. Thus the ‘exposure theory’ as an inseparable part of united front efforts was now buried once and for all. New methods of winning over the masses to the communist side were being suggested.13 The liberation of the bamboozled masses, therefore, was to be carried on not by simple methods of ‘exposure theory’ but by the more patient and complex methods of ‘Bolshevik mass work’ within the bourgeois and reformist organisations. After 1933, the fundamental fact confronting international Communism was the rise of a powerful enemy in fascism. In response to this threat the Seventh Comintern Congress met in July 1935 to announce the new policy of people’s fronts.14 In spite of the fact that the people’s front policy had no precedents in the history of the Comintern, the Seventh Congress refrained from undertaking any theoretical analysis of the problems of imperialism, capitalism, the socialist revolution in the West and the anti-imperialist revolutions in the colonial countries.15 The implication of this general line for the colonial revolutions was worked out by the Chinese leader Wang Ming. As far as the following questions were concerned the Wang Ming report16 was either silent or hopelessly confused: what was the nature of this anti-imperialist united or people’s front in the colonial countries’? 13

The Communist, April 1935. For details, see Claudin, The Communist Movement, p. 182. 15 Ibid., p. 190. 16 The Revolutionary Movement in the Colonial Countries, Wang Ming’s Report to the Seventh Comintern Congress, delivered on 7 August, 1935, ACHI. 14

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Was it to be a front between various political parties or various antiimperialist classes? Was it similar to the conception of a united front within the class advocated by Lenin and the Third International between 1921–24? Were the strategy and tactics of the anti-imperialist united front similar to the united front within the class? Was the problem of the anti-imperialist united front only a problem of ‘changing tactics’ within the strategic goal of the democratic republic of workers and peasants as enunciated by the Sixth Congress? The article, ‘Problems of Anti-Imperialist Struggle in India’, which appeared in the International Press Correspondence one month before the Seventh Congress, categorically advocated a new tactic for the Communist Party of India, different from the one pursued till the end of 1934.17 It said that without neglecting the task of independently mobilising the masses in the struggle against imperialism the communists must win over the masses who were still under the influence of national reformists. With this aim in view the trade unions and organisations of the youth which included the communists must join the local organisations of the Congress on the basis of a minimum programme. If, from 1928–33, the main hindrance to the growth of the CPI was the ‘illusions of united national front’ among the working masses, it was now asserted that the CPI could grow only through the tactics of the united front.18 Till this point, though the idea of a united front was emphasised, all other elements of the earlier perspective except the ‘exposure theory’ were kept intact including the view that the Congress Socialist Party was the agent of the bourgeoisie. Now, after the Seventh Congress, due to the change in ‘objective circumstances’, the communists were obliged to take recourse to the tactics of a united front. But a united front with whom? However, in the beginning of 1936, the communists changed their estimation of the Congress Socialist Party. The following was the new assessment: ‘The Congress Socialist Party represents today a radical tendency within the Congress and cannot be described as a party. It is 17

Inprecor, 9 March 1935. Indirectly referring to the political positions of the earlier phase. Wang–Ming stated at the Seventh Congress: ‘Some people think that the participation of the Communist Party in the anti-imperialist united front signifies a weakening of its struggle for the hegemony of the proletariat and for Soviet power. This, of course, is absolutely incorrect.’ Report on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonial Countries. 18

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a platform which mobilises elements opposed to the present leadership of the Congress and its policy.’19 After the emphasis on the idea of a united front and the dropping of the ‘exposure theory’, this was the third significant change. On each occasion, when one element of the earlier perspective was changed, the rest of the perspective was authoritatively asserted as mechanically as the newly introduced element. The whole perspective of communist policy was changing but the objective was fixed and clearly defined: to shatter the mass influence of the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie. But what was meant by the masses being under the influence of the bourgeoisie? To pose and answer the question this way was tantamount to doing away with all the a priori suppositions. Clearly the masses were not behind the communists, and was it not sufficient proof of the fact that they were under bourgeois influence? Moreover, all those who shared common suppositions knew what was meant when it was said that a relentless struggle should be fought against bourgeois influence over the masses. As the Congress was the party of the bourgeoisie, being under the influence of the Congress, and more specifically, Gandhi, automatically meant being under bourgeois influence. The implications of the new Comintern line for the Indian communists in the form of a concrete policy were worked out by R.P. Dutt and Bradley in the Dutt–Bradley Thesis, which was printed in the Inprecor in February 1936.20 Though without going to the theoretical roots of the problems, the Dutt–Bradley Thesis did modify some of the earlier conceptions. It not only rejected the assessment of the CSP as a ‘manoeuvre of the bourgeoisie’ but also emphasised the important role which it could play in the creation of the anti-imperialist people’s front.’21 What was most significant about the Dutt–Bradley Thesis was its thoroughly pragmatic approach. While all the earlier articles about the anti-imperialist struggle in India began by asking the most fundamental question, what is the class character of the Congress, Dutt and Bradley dispensed with this question and instead asked: was not the National Congress, as many of its leaders claim, already the united front of the Indian people in the national struggle? Their answer was: 19

The Communist, Special Number, 8 March 1936. R.P. Dutt and Ben Bradley, ‘The Anti-Imperialist People’s Front’, Inprecor, Vol. 16, 29 February 1936. 21 ‘It is of the greatest importance’, stated Dutt and Bradley, ‘that every effort should be made to clarify questions of programme and tactics in the Congress Socialist Party.’ Ibid. 20

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The National Congress can play a great part and foremost part in the work of realising the anti-imperialist front. It is even possible that the National Congress, by the further transformation of its organisation and programme, may become the form of realisation of the anti-imperialist people’s front; for it is the reality that matters, not the name.22

Thus without taking a position on the question whether the Congress was a party of the bourgeoisie or not, they had cleared the cobwebs from the path of the practical policy of ‘making a united front with the Congress’. Here Dutt and Bradley were following none else but Stalin himself: ‘if the policy is correct, theoretical knowledge will come in due course.’23 Earlier, Congress influence was equated with bourgeois influence; now for the first time the possibility was recognised that one may be within the Congress and still be free from bourgeois influence. This new insight and its logical corollaries were to create a number of problems with the earlier sectarian beliefs. In spite of considerable modification, three basic formulations of the Sixth Congress as embodied in the Platform of Action were kept intact: the assessment of Gandhism as the ideology of the bourgeoisie, the counterrevolutionary character of the Indian bourgeoisie and the strategic scheme of the Democratic Republic of workers and peasants. Instead of identifying the classes which were to participate in the anti-imperialist front, the Dutt–Bradley Thesis remained at the level of identifying political organisations only.24 The new conception of the united front started from the premise of distinguishing between the revolutionary Congress masses and the reactionary leadership. But why were the revolutionary masses behind the reactionary Gandhian leadership and not behind the communists? The answer was the same as elaborated in the ‘sectarian’ documents of the earlier phase: the bamboozlement of the masses. What was the real meaning of the call for transforming the Congress into a full-fledged anti-imperialist front? Stripped of all verbiage it simply meant placing the working class (and thereby its party) at the head of the Congress: 22

Ibid. J. Stalin, Selected Works, Vol. 8, 1954, pp. 116–17. 24 ‘The unification of anti-imperialist forces will obviously start from the organisations already existing. The Indian National Congress the Congress Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the two All-India Trade Union Centres, Students’ and other radical organizations.’ Ibid. 23

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What does the building up of the Anti-Imperialist United Front mean? … The United Front is not a vague lining up of allied groups and organisations for passing pious resolutions. The Anti-Imperialist United Front is the spearhead formation of all our fighting forces. At the apex of this formation stands a consistently revolutionary leadership while its broad base is made of all the anti-imperialist forces in the country.25

Even though still ‘sectarian’, the policy of ‘sectarian united front’ was much closer to the reality than the naked ‘sectarianism’ of the earlier phase, 1929–35. Such a policy on the part of the communists was bound to strengthen the anti-imperialist movement and, naturally, the Government came down heavily on them to stop the formation of even such a ‘sectarian united front’. In a secret report (19 March 1936) to the Secretary of India Office, Hallett, Secretary to the Government of India, wrote: Here this (united anti-imperialist front) will mean a combined attack by Congress, Congress Socialists, M.N. Roy’s adherents and what we call the official Communists … . At present none of the parties mentioned is in a position to start a successful India-wide movement, but the events of 1930 and 1931 have shown how quickly a movement of this kind can flare up. On that occasion the Communists recently deprived by the institution of the Meerut Case, the followers of their leadership refrained (mistakenly as they now confess) from taking a hand; on the next occasion they propose to make no such mistake. And as the appeal which they make sounds attractive to the illiterate peasantry and, also (as the Bombay Strike in 1934 showed) to the industrial workers. Their coming in will make a big difference.26

Correction of ‘sectarian’ mistakes did not mean that the communists re-evaluated the past struggles of the Congress in a new perspective to draw significant lessons. The ‘sectarian’ assessment of the 1919–22 and 1930–32 movements was repeated even after 1934. This was another indication that the changes introduced by the Seventh Congress were largely superficial. If earlier the entire Congress organisation, especially its left-wing, was attacked, now Gandhism was attacked as an ideology which cramped mass movement.27

25

To All Anti-Imperialist Fighters: Gathering Storm, 1936 (CPI Publication). Home-Political File No. 716/1936, NAI. 27 To All Anti-Imperialist Fighters: Gathering Storm, 1936. ACHI. 26

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After 1936, apart from the consolidation of workers and peasants organisations, one other important reason for the sense of satisfaction the communists had was that there stood a man at the head of the Congress High Command, i.e., Jawaharlal Nehru, who was ‘the best exponent of the whole left-ward trend inside the Congress’. Hence the stage was set for bursting the fetters of the reactionary leadership—for freeing the forces of the national struggle. The very first step in the building up of the anti-imperialist people’s front meant ‘a sharp break with the constructive programme of Gandhian class collaboration’. Did the struggle against Gandhism mean that the communists wanted to split the Congress? ‘This is not what we propose.’28 But this would be the unintended but logical consequence of their policies. The ignorance of this fact meant that they were in for another shock. The Indian communists attacked all their critics who dared to point out that decisions of the Seventh Congress differed fundamentally from the Sixth Congress. Especially isolating Roy and his followers, one of the editorials of The Communist asserted: The Royists, the renegades from Communism … say that the Sixth Congress policy was sectarian and the Seventh Congress has set aside that wrong policy … to put the work of the Seventh Congress in contradiction to that of the Sixth is not to understand the written word and to lack any historical sense.29

For the Indian Communists the change involved in the Seventh Congress decisions was only a tactical change and this tactic was to be pursued only till fascism was defeated. Thus the communists conceived no relation between long-term strategy and concrete tactics, the latter being the result of purely pragmatic decisions, of course, subordinated to the aim of winning over the people to one’s side. Moreover, for the communists, the united front tactic was necessitated not so much by the antiimperialist struggle of the Indian people, i.e., by the internal conditions of a colonial country for a definite period till imperialism was overthrown, but by circumstances external to that particular country. During the united front period, unlike in today’s party history, the period between 1929–34 was never considered as sectarian from the point of view of 28 29

Gathering Storm. The Communist, No. 7, March 1936. (Italics in original).

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not making a united front,30 but only, as we have already clarified, from the point of view of not participating in the mass movement. It must be stated clearly that during the entire period of anti-imperialist struggle, the Indian communists had no notion of the conception of a united front as a strategy or even as a tactic necessitated solely by the colonial nature of the Indian society. They remained firmly committed to the guidelines of the Sixth Congress embodied in the Platform of Action, i.e., to the conception of making a Russian-type revolution in India. This was the reason why, once fascism was defeated in Europe, communists slowly reverted to the political line of the earlier period (1929–34), not without coincidence, under the leadership of B.T. Ranadive whose name was inseparably linked up with the earlier phase. Being a leading theoretician of the party, he fully grasped the implications of the theses of the Sixth Congress and under his leadership the party set out to implement this theory to achieve their unity in practice. As we have already pointed out, the tactic of a united front within the class was proposed at the Third Congress of the Comintern and the Indian communists were aware of this fact.31 Instead of showing any awareness of the specificity of the colonial conditions, they dogmatically followed the leadership of the Comintern in extrapolating the same tactic for the anti-imperialist struggle. The politics of ‘sectarianism’ had not only isolated the working class from the national movement but also kept the spirit of factionalism very much alive among the communists themselves. Even after the Seventh Congress, the Manifesto of the CC of the Communist Party of India admitted that ‘we are not yet a unified party’.32 The communists had not forgotten that ‘the rapid formation of the CP is the central task of the Indian revolution’, though, unlike the earlier period, the task of building a mass Communist Party was now to be carried out through the medium of the united front. But what was the relation of the Communist Party to the united front? It was noted in the party organ that many communists were confused about the relation between the ‘party programme’ and the ‘united front programme’, between ‘Soviet rule’ and the ‘Constituent Assembly’. And the roots of this confusion were traced by the leadership 30

Guidelines of the History of the Communist Party of India, issued by Central Party Education Department, CP Publication, October 1974. 31 The Communist, No. 9, June 1936. 32 Ibid.

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to the ‘lack of understanding of the relation of the united front movement to the party movement’.33 In actuality, in day-to-day struggles on all mass fronts, there was no distinction between strictly ‘Communist activity’ and ‘nationalist activity’. The line between Congress influence, Congress Socialist Party influence and Communist Party influence could only be drawn organisationally. The sphere of party work thus automatically became winning over the mass organisations and cadres of the Congress Socialist Party towards the side of the Communist Party. There was no other way to measure the growth of the party and its mass influence. It was through the notion of the separate independent party that the notions of ‘inside the Congress’ and ‘outside the Congress’ came into existence. Unlike the communists, the Congress Socialist Party was not a party which was ‘inside’ as well as ‘outside’ the Congress because it openly propagated its platform within the Congress with the hope of winning a majority first in the provinces and finally at the national level. Thus the logic of their perspective, though its full theoretical implications were never understood by the CSP leadership, stood for the transformation of the Congress from a people’s party under bourgeois hegemony into a people’s party under left-wing hegemony. However, many conceptions, especially the understanding of Gandhism, were common between the socialists and the communists. In fact this similarity of approach towards Gandhism was a very strong point of unity between them, and the Communists approvingly quoted the following analysis of Gandhism by Jayaprakash Narayan: Gandhiji’s views are essentially what in socialist history is known as reformism. Its language is Indian but its substance is international … . We find Gandhism to be serious body of timid economic analysis, good intentions and ineffective moralisings … . Gandhism may be a well-intended doctrine. But even with the best of intentions it is, I must admit—a dangerous doctrine. It is dangerous because it hushes up real issues and sets out to remove the evils of society by pious wishes. It thus deceives the masses and encourages the upper classes to continue their domination.34

33

The Communist, Vol. I, No. 10, July 1936. Jayaprakash Narayan, What is Socialism?, pp. 87–92, quoted in National Front, 16 July 1939. 34

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For the communists being ‘inside’ as well as ‘outside’ meant subjecting themselves to the democratic principle of a ‘majority decision’ of two separate organisations. This meant a constant organisational dilemma which could only be resolved in two possible ways. One, dissolving the separate organisational existence of the Communist Party like the Congress Socialist Party, not pragmatically as the socialists did but, instead, by creating a new theoretical schema which could have grasped the fact of the Congress Party being a new type of party—the party of the ‘historic bloc’. This meant getting out of the theoretical shackles which understood the Congress as a party of the bourgeoisie and saw the development of the national movement from the very beginning as being under the leadership of either the bourgeoisie or the working class. The other way out of this dilemma was to carry on the burden of two loyalties simultaneously till they came to clash with each other, and then choosing one. The communists in India followed the latter course. So long the Communists/Socialists belonged to the same organisation and their differences were purely ideological they could contest the influence of the dominant leadership as a loosely-knit bloc. In this case, on a particular issue, the possibilities of different socialists taking different political positions and temporarily joining hands with different sections of the non-socialists were always kept open. Here was a situation where ideological unity among socialists meant commitment to the overall project of the transformation of the Congress and not necessarily the unity of political positions on every issue before the Congress. But unlike the CSP, the communists’ primary organisational loyalty was to a separate independent party which jealously guarded the perfect unity between its ideological positions and political interventions, without which its very separate existence would have been under constant threat. The implementation of the communists’ programme of converting the CSP ranks to their organisational–political position presupposed silence on the part of the CSP leadership. In other words, looking from the point of view of the communists, the unrealistic situation created by the formation of a separate independent party becomes immediately evident when its very existence and forging ahead demanded the existence of another radicalised sphere (i.e., CSP) as a bridge between itself and the National Congress. The United Front experience was forcing the Communists to recognise the fact that the INC was not the party of the bourgeoisie. The new

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assessment of the Congress attempted by the communists can be summed up as follows: The Congress was both a party of the bourgeoisie as well as a mass organisation. These two characteristics were not contradictory. In fact they were supplementary to each other. A mass organisation did not necessarily mean an organisation that really fought for the interests of the masses or followed a correct mass programme. It signified mass membership, mass influence and mass following. Again, a party of the bourgeosie did not necessarily mean that all or even a majority of its members consciously served the interest of the bourgeoisie and subordinated the interests of the nation to that of the bourgeoisie. Even most of the leaders of such a party might not be conscious agents of the bourgeioisie, but, if in spite of their intentions, the organisation followed a policy which was in the interests of the bourgeoisie, if its programme be such that it sacrificed the interests of the masses for the interests of the bourgeoisie, if its leadership as a whole was bourgeois in character and ideology, then it was certainly a party of the bourgeoisie notwithstanding its mass composition. The National Congress must, therefore, be described as a bourgeois party with a mass base or mass organisation dominated by the bourgeoisie. While deciding the communist tactics with regard to the Congress this dual aspect of the organisation must be clearly realised. Emphasising the mass composition alone would lead the communists into opportunist underestimation of the importance of an independent political struggle outside the Congress while concentrating on the bourgeois character of the organisation alone would lead to their isolation from the anti-imperialist masses.35 Here, there was a precise definition of a modern bourgeois party; and the National Congress as it then existed could only be forced into this ‘groove’ by overlooking a number of its other specific characteristics. Interestingly, these specific characteristics were carefully noted for purposes of pragmatic politics but never allowed to challenge the existing theoretical conceptions. If the National Congress was really a bourgeois party as the communist theory described it, was it not contradictory on their part to demand, or even to think of, collective affiliation of mass organisations of workers and peasants to such an organisation? Would such an organisation allow a left-wing to crystallise within itself willing to join hands with the communists? Would such an organisation allow 35

The Communist, Vol. II, No. 11, August 1936.

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communist fractional activities within its ranks? Would such an organisation allow the known communists to capture important organisational positions? Would such an organisation allow its President to openly carry on a campaign in favour of socialism?36 Here again, their commitment to the premise that the national movement (and hence the Congress Party) had to develop under the leadership of either of the bourgeoisie or the working class, disposed them theoretically to fit their experience into two conceptions of mutually exclusive types of parties, one under the leadership of the bourgeoisie and the other under the leadership of the working class. Obviously, this could be done only by ignoring certain important aspects of the totality of their experience. The communists were confusing the National Congress—the party of the Indian people—with an ordinary bourgeois party. But despite their inability to reach out to a new theoretical conception to characterise the INC, for their pragmatic politics they clung to the correct view of the Congress rank and file being revolutionary. If the logic of ‘precise facts of reality’ was not being consistently worked out on the terrain of theory, they were also not willing to ‘give up’ these facts either, as in the earlier phase of 1929–34. Given their framework they rightly concluded that emphasis on the one would lead to opportunism, while on the other to sectarianism. As we have explained above, the paradox of the situation was that the necessity of building a separate, independent political party of the working class demanded the line of ‘sectarian’ politics, while the necessity of being inside the Congress demanded the dissolution of the separate organisation into an ideological tendency. The theoretical necessity of equal emphasis on ‘facts’ and ‘theory’, in actuality, differentiated the party into two polarities which represented contradictory tactics corresponding to their choice of priority. But both the polarities were held together by their commitment to the same strategic conception and the desire to build the mass Communist Party. As a result, first the entire party would implement the line of ‘pragmatic politics’ (i.e., realistic appraisal of facts) under the leadership of one group, and, when this line would be worked

36 ‘Today the Congress leaders do not speak the same language. While the President emphasises upon the anti-imperialist united front and class struggle, the right-wing led by the ex-president preaches the “constructive programme” as the panacea of all the troubles.’ The Communist, Vol. II, No. 11, August 1936.

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in practice to its logical conclusion where it threatened to obliterate the line of separateness and to make existing theory completely defunct, the other group would take over leading the entire party into reverse gear. Let us call these two tendencies by their real name: Joshism and Ranadivism. Thus the swings of Joshism and Ranadivism or what the communists call ‘right-wing opportunism’ and ‘left-wing sectarianism’ were the logical outcome of the policy of building a separate, independent mass CP and a united front simultaneously. When, after some initial reluctance, even the proposal for mass enrolment as individual members of the National Congress was accepted by the communists, it was maintained that individual enrolment did not necessarily hand over the workers and peasants to the bourgeoisie.37 The insight that Congress influence did not necessarily mean bourgeois influence was now used to point out the fact that, in U.P., the Congress was dominated by the left-wing. This was a clear acceptance of the fact that the National Congress was an extremely diversified body. If at the apex the dominant leadership was bourgeois, at the provincial level within the same organisation, the dominant leadership was left-wing. Why was such a development not possible in other provinces and at the central level? In fact a similar argument was put forward to point out the possibilities of winning the Congress committees to the programme of struggle with left-wing leadership being dominant within them. All these observations forced the communists to reject the view which projected the National Congress as ‘a homogeneous whole representing homogeneous class interests and characterised by a uniform ideology’.38 How did the Communists, of course within the given framework, struggle to capture the real essence of the process going on in the National Congress and how dissatisfied were they with their own understanding, becomes clear from the following formulation: In so far as the INC represented the class interests of the bourgeoisie up to the present and has played a counter-revolutionary role it might be called a bourgeois counter-revolutionary organisation but in so far as it is an organisation whose membership for the most part consists of the ‘people’ whose interests are objectively anti-imperialist it might be called a people’s organisation. Here again the definition is misleading 37 38

The Communist, Vol. II, No. 11, August 1936. Ibid.

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since it obscures the fact that INC is still for the most part dominated by the bourgeoisie despite the growing disillusionment of the masses with bourgeois leadership. The facts about INC cannot be stated in these static terms at all.39

Interestingly, the National Congress was now seen both as an organisation of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie and a people’s organisation. But the question which the communists could not answer, and hence never raised in a straightforward manner, was: how could an organisation of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie gather so much mass following over the years? Perhaps it was this glaring inconsistency in their understanding which was forcing them to tone down their criticism of the bourgeoisie. In the middle of 1936, it was clearly stated that ‘the bourgeoisie in India does not constitute an anti-imperialist class’,40 but towards the end of the same year the bourgeoisie was not denounced with the same vehemence.41 It was this a priori acceptance of the strategic conception and tactics suggested by the Sixth Congress that did not allow the Indian communists to raise the ‘precise facts’ of their own experience to a theoretical level even when in the end they came to the conclusion that National Congress was not a party of the bourgeoisie, and realised that ‘it would not be possible for the Communists to become a political force in the country unless we make a decisive turn in our whole attitude towards the Indian National Congress’.42 The new characterisation of the National Congress was the following: From a narrow parliamentary platform, it (National Congress) has grown into the central mass political organisation of the Indian people ranged against imperialism. The mass struggles of the Non-Cooperation days and Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930–32 set a process of transformation in motion. With the broadening of the Congress which came about during the course of the struggle and through subsequent developments, the characterisation of the Congress as a bourgeois organisation became more and more inadequate. We failed to understand, anticipate and guide this process because we isolated 39

Ibid. The Communist, Vol. I, No. 9, June 1936. 41 The Communist, Vol. II, No. 11, August 1936. 42 New Age, Vol. 5, No. 1, June 1938. 40

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ourselves from the masses under Congress influence who participated in this struggle led by the Congress. The formulation that the Congress is a bourgeois organisation and as such unsuitable to be the basis for building the anti-imperialist people’s front is wrong in the given situation, today.43

The struggle to build a mass Communist Party became the biggest stumbling block in the way of the Indian communists to come to terms with the specific nature of the Congress party as a party of the ‘historic bloc’. So long as they did not question the necessity of building a separate, independent Bolshevik-type party they willy-nilly had to accept other concomitant formulations about the movement even if the ‘precise facts of reality’ constantly militated against these formulations. The necessity of building the Communist Party and the united front simultaneously dictated the politics of being ‘inside’ as well ‘outside’ the Indian National Congress. In practice a party within a party could coexist easily only so long as their decisions on various issues did not differ. But a major difference on a significant issue would force the members to choose their priority in terms of organisational loyalty. In Bombay, both the working class and the national movement had reached great heights. But the pace of development of the ‘united front’ was extremely slow. Commenting on the state of the united front in Bombay The Communist remarked: United Front between Congress organisations and TUs today is mostly nominal. It has not yet proceeded beyond the joint demonstration phase. Even joint demonstrations are ‘joint’ in name only. The Trade Union organises a political meeting, the local Congress ‘lends its auspices’ and one or two Congress leaders come to the meeting held under tri-colour and the Red Flag and speak. Nothing beyond that. As far as Congress masses are concerned they seldom evidence any interest in the matter.44

In March 1937, the politbureau of the Communist Party issued a statement on the subject, ‘For the United National Front’, which like the Dutt–Bradley Thesis once again created confusion among the rank and file. In a clarificatory article it was stated that ‘when some new political 43 44

New Age, Vol. 5, No. 1, June 1938. The Communist, Vol. I, No. 18, June 1937.

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ground is broken (it) created a little confusion in our ranks’.45 What was this ‘new ground’ broken by the leadership? Fifteen months after the Dutt–Bradley Thesis the politbureau had realised that Dutt and Bradley ‘had not stated the class basis of the united front’.46 It was also pointed out that a sectarian tendency within the CPI identified the wide UNF with an exclusive ‘Toilers’ Front’.47 A new line of demarcation was drawn between the Toilers’ Front and the United National Front, with the latter including the national bourgeoisie in the camp of the people. Till this statement of the politbureau, the CPI was precisely trying to build a front of which the Indian bourgeoisie was not a part. Just as earlier Dutt and Bradley had not indicated the class basis of the front, similarly the politbureau in this statement forgot to raise the question of the leadership of this front. Obviously, such a front which included the bourgeoisie in the camp of the people could not be built under the leadership of the Communist Party and within the framework of the Sixth Congress decisions. This truth was realised by the communists once they were faced with the Gandhi–Bose confrontation at Tripuri. The ranks of the Congress were open to anyone who agreed with the aims and objectives of the Indian National Congress irrespective of ideological leanings.48 Before the Communists left the Congress in 1929, dismissing it as an organisation gone over to imperialism, many of them were members of the Indian National Congress and played an active role in its deliberations.49 Now, after the seventh Congress of the Communist International, they once again decided to go back and become members of the Congress. Many of them became AICC members and came to

45

The Communist, June 1937. Ibid. According to the P.B.: ‘They enunciated a policy which, in the conditions of today, would lead to our national liberation and was in the interests of the entire Indian people but did not point out which classes of the Indian people could be marshalled inside the AIPF.’ 47 ‘The Toilers’ Front in India, in terms of existing organisations, would mean unity between CP, CSP, AITUC and AIKC. Ibid. 48 Immediately after his release M.N. Roy journeyed to Bareilly to attend the UP Provincial Political Conference, where he joined the Congress Party. Later on, he was elected to the AICC. For details on the functioning of the Royist groups see, J.P. Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism in India: M.N. Roy and Comintern Policy, Chapter 9, pp. 215–38. 49 Shashi Joshi, op. cit. 46

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occupy important positions within the Congress organisation.50 Let it be emphasised here that as far Congress Party was concerned the idea of the United National Front was just a myth. Once it was recognised that various platforms could be formed within the Congress by its members, and ideologies were free to contend with each other within the Congress ranks there could be no question of United Front with any other anti-imperialist organisation outside the Congress. In fact, the Congress organisational framework itself was so designed as to embrace all antiimperialists. How could the Indian National Congress have a united front with its own members? As far as Congress was concerned it was having a united front neither with any political party nor with any of the so-called independent class organisations. The idea of a united front was talked about mainly by the leftists, i.e., the Congress Socialists, Kisan leaders, Communist Party and Jawaharlal Nehru. The confusion was caused by the Congress Socialist Party perhaps due to its eagerness to become acceptable to the labour and Kisan leaders and thereby to seek free access for its own activities to work within the already existing class organisations.51 But even then it was a very peculiar idea of united front. It was not a united front between two independent parties whose membership and areas of influence were separate from each other. The Congress Socialist Party first allowed the communists to become members of the Party and then the same party had a united front with its own members.52 Over and above that here was a political party, and claiming itself to be a Marxist Party, which was trying to forge a United Front with an independent trade union organisation, AITUC.53 A united front between two or more independent political parties or between trade unions belonging to two or more different political parties is understandable. But the Congress Socialist Party was doing something absolutely unique and thereby it sowed the seeds of its own destruction.

50 By 1939 twenty members of the AICC were communists. R.P. Dutt, India Today, Bombay, 1947, p. 397. 51 Acharya Narendra Dev, Socialism and the National Revolution, 1946, p. 117. 52 Anticipating a change in the Communist Party’s attitude towards participation in United Fronts as a result of the 1935 Seventh Comintern Congress, the national executive of the CSP at its Meerut Conference in January 1936 invited members of the CPI to join their party on an individual basis. It was not until April that communists began to enter the CSP. Jayaprakash Narayan, Socialist Unity and the Congress Socialist Party, p. 34. 53 CSP General Secretary’s report, 1935.

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From the very beginning within the CSP there was an earnest desire to join forces with the communists and Royists. In Jayaprakash Narayan the Party had an eloquent exponent of left-wing unity. In his presidential address before the Bengal CSP Conference in 1935, Narayan contended that had the communists not abandoned the Congress Party in 1929 on the eve of its launching of the civil disobedience campaign ‘the radicalisation of the Congress would have gone much further … .’54 He reaffirmed his conviction that the CSP ought not to remain separate from other Socialist forces in India.55 According to Jayaprakash Narayan the problem of socialist unity was ‘the problem of the coming together in one party of all those groups and individuals who stand by Marxism’.56 Interestingly, he wanted to unite all Marxists in a socialist party within the Indian National Congress. For communists and Royists a genuine socialist party of the working class had to be an independent party outside the Congress and such a party could not exist legally in India. It was hoped, according to Narayan, that because of their early association with the CSP, the Royists would eventually merge with the party. On the other hand, Roy directed his followers to join the CSP with the object, not of merging with it, but of splitting it and absorbing the ‘real proletarian elements’.57 To begin with, in practice the CSP was acting more or less as a left-wing platform for various left groupings while in theory it was claiming to shape itself as an independent Marxist Party. Over a period as its actual practice came to coincide with its theory, people having primary loyalities to other organisations had to be thrown out of the party. ‘United Front’, wrote The Communist, … is not a monolithic party. It is an alliance of different parties and sections for a common object—the overthrow of imperialist rule in India. All the parties to the United Front have their own ultimate objectives, their own forms of struggle, but for a common immediate objective they agree to unite. This is the essence of United Anti-Imperialist Front.58 54 Jayaprakash Narayan, Socialist Unity and the Congress Socialist Party, Bombay, 1941, pp. 3–4. 55 Jayaprakash Narayan, ‘Presidential Address at the Bengal Congress Socialist Conference, 1935’ in Jayaprakash Narayan, Towards Struggle, pp. 132–35. 56 Jayaprakash Narayan, Socialist Unity, p. 3. 57 Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism in India: M. N. Roy and Comintern Policy, pp. 230–31. Congress Socialist, 21 November 1936, p. 11. 58 The Communist, May 1937, p. 18.

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The Indian communists were legally functioning through their trade union organisations since the Communist Party was banned. Thus their trade union organisations were not just economic organisations; for them they also performed political functions by taking stands on all political issues. Once the unity was forged within the working class on the principle of class struggle they came to exercise overwhelming influence within the AITUC. Thus the CSP United Front with the AITUC became a code word for the United Front with the Communist Party. Therefore the matter of independence of peasants’ and workers’ organisations from the Congress got tied up with the independent role of the Communist Party which was to unite workers and peasants against imperialism under its own leadership. The United Front was not advancing along the lines the communists wanted it to. ‘Meanwhile’, told The Communist to the CSP comrades, ‘the ranks of the left are as disunited as at any time before, the United Front between CSP and the organized working class has virtually come to an end.’59 Though the things were not shaping well from the point of view of the communists nevertheless the process of radicalisation and transformation of the Congress was visibly forging ahead. In the middle of 1937 Communists noted the phenomenon of most extensive radicalisation in the country. ‘Perhaps never before in Indian history has there been such extensive mass radicalisation.’60 And in this process an important role was being played by Jawaharlal Nehru who had been ‘a big force throughout the year in radicalising the masses’.61 In the Congress elections of 1936 held in November and December the CSP and its allies (including a few communists) together gained more than 40 seats in the AICC in contrast with about a dozen seats in the previous year. At Faizpur the influence of the left was apparent in most of the resolutions. Many resolutions written directly under the inspiration of Jawaharlal Nehru (Spain, Anti-War, Detenus, Civil Liberties) were of a left nature as also the presidential address as a whole. The agrarian programme in spite of its halting character was an advance and some 59

Ibid., p. 27. The Communist, Vol. I, No. 18, June 1937, p. 1. 61 Ibid., p. 4. 60

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of its items (moratorium on debts, cancellation of arrears of rent) potentially revolutionary.62

There was a clear recognition of the fact that the grassroots radicalisation was being reflected at the top though the overall radical influence was yet far from being predominant. Thus from the point of view of the strategic conception of transformation of the Congress, things were pretty bright while from the communist strategic angle, things were not moving in the right direction at all. The characteristic features of the logic of one process could be distorted and arbitrarily fitted into the logic of another process. This is precisely what the Communists were doing. In Sholapur a joint Election Committee of the local Congress Committee and the trade unions ‘functioned with great success’. On May Day (1937) there was a successful joint demonstration in which the Bombay Provincial Congress Committee officially participated for the first time together with the Bombay Provincial Trade Union Congress.63 Interestingly the ubiquitous right-wing was nowhere seen as opposed to this action on the part of the BPCC. This only showed that the transformation process worked and workers could play their role within the multi-class Congress by activating the entire Congress. But for the communists these collective activities were instances of ‘joint front’ between two organisations, i.e., the Indian National Congress and the Communist Party through the independent working class organisations which of course were predominantly under their influence. Earlier also, during the elections the working class support to the Congress was seen as support from outside wrongly interpreted by them as AITUC having ‘agreed to collaborate with the Indian National Congress’.64 The participation of the working class and peasantry into the national movement through their specific organisations was being interpreted as the ‘collaboration’ of independent class organizations with another organisation (i.e., INC) which was exclusively the representative of some other classes. The misinterpretation led to distorted interventions. If the future developments were to be guided from the point of view of this ‘collaboration’ the further building of these class organisations by emphasising their 62

Ibid. The Communist, May 1937, p. 13. 64 Ibid. 63

The Third International and Indian Communists 129

independence from the Congress could not be avoided. Potential of the transformation process—precisely when there was a growing awakening in the peasants and workers—was being vitiated by emphasising the independence (from the Congress) of these emerging class organisations. Thus parallel to the process of transformation a process of alienation of the organised working masses was also being created under the leadership of the communists and Kisan Sabhaites in the name of preparing the masses for armed revolution. The discovery of the secret circular of the CPI group—‘Plan of Work—CSP’—further embittered the relationship between the communists and socialists.65 Shorn of its verbiage the document contained instructions to the communists inside the CSP explaining to them how to function concretely within the CSP. It had become clear to the CSP leadership that ‘unification between two parties or groups can come about only in one legitimate way, and that is by a merger or amalgamation of the two organisations arrived at by mutual agreement and in an open and straightforward manner’. That the Congress Socialist Party was prepared to consider such a step was stated publicly by Acharya Narendra Dev on the eve of the Lahore Conference of the Congress Socialist Party. There was no response from the communist side to this offer perhaps because the precondition of unity laid by Acharya Narendra Dev was the liquidation of both the parties.66 The National Executive of the CSP took strong objection to communist tactics, and at its meeting on 9 August 1937 held at Patna issued

65 The document was circulated to the CSP members by M.R. Masani under the title: ‘Communist Plot Against CSP’, 9 May 1938. 66 Ibid. Over a period many individuals who were either communists or became communists came to occupy positions of vantage within the CSP. Sajjad Zaheer was one of the joint secretaries of the CSP and a member of the All India Congress Committee. Later on he went to Pakistan to organise the Communist Party and was convicted in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case. Dr Z.A. Ahmed and Dr M. Ashraf occupied important positions in the office of the AICC. P. Sundarayya and his friends were in control of the entire Andhra Unit of the CSP. P. Ramamurthi, who later on became the leader of the CPI in the Madras Legislative Assembly, occupied a dominant position in Madras. P. Jeevanandam, a well-known communist, ran the Tamilnadu CSP till the United Front ended in 1940. In the Punjab the CSP was formed out of two distinct elements—the radical nationalists of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha and the dissident communists of the Kirti Kisan Party.

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a rejoinder, which was also published separately as a leaflet (The CSP, the Reds and Roy). No disciplinary action, however, was taken against the communists as such, except that the Executive of the Andhra Party, was suspended for serious deviation from the Party line. Subsequently, even this action was withdrawn, on the members concerned expressing regret.67 Dinkar Mehta, Joint Secretary of the Party, was suspended from the membership of the CSP for flouting the instructions of the General Secretary.68 In the presidential election to the UP Provincial Congress Committee, the CSP candidate was Damodar Swaroop, a member of the National Executive, President of the Bareilly District Congress Committee, Acharya Narendra Dev proposed his name. The communists decided to remain neutral. Sajjad Zaheer and Z.A. Ahmed, both members of the National Executive, decided to follow the lead of the communists, instead of voting for the CSP candidate.69 Earlier when the Annual Conference of the All India CSP was due early in 1938 at Lahore, the communists put out a draft thesis for acceptance by the party conference over the signatures of S. Zaheer, Dinkar Mehta and S.S. Batliwala. When the elections of the new Executive for the coming year came up, two lists were produced before the conference. One was put forward by Jayaprakash and the other by the communists. Jayaprakash’s list gave the communists no less than one-third of the seats. The communists’ list kept Jayaprakash in this position as General Secretary but otherwise gave the communists a clear majority in the Executive.70 Slowly the CSP leadership came to realise the real roots of its mistaken policy of uniting the Marxist groups without first asking them to dissolve their own separate organisations. In a circular letter addressed to the secretaries and members of the executive of provincial and other party branches, Yusuf Meherally informed:

67 Periodical Letter issued by Yusuf Meherally, Circular No. 3, Bombay, 12 April 1940. Fiie No. 800 (75) A-VII of 1938–42, MSA. 68 Dinkar Mehta, a socialist leader of Gujarat, later on leader of the Gujarat Communist Party group, tried his best to wean Jayaprakash Narayan away from the ‘anti-Communist’ CSF leaders towards the Communists. Dinkar Mehta to Jayaprakash, long letter, 29 October 1939. File No. 800 (65) A-VII of 1938–42, MSA. 69 Periodical letter issued by Yusuf Meherally. 70 Masani, The Communist Party of India: A Short History, pp. 70–71.

The Third International and Indian Communists 131

The Congress Socialist Party was the first to champion the policy of United Front in India. In its enthusiasm and devotion for that policy, it even allowed members of other socialist parties, like the Communist Party and the Roy group to become its members, without having to resign first, from their respective organisations. In this, the Congress Socialist Party has the distinction, of being the first and the only Marxist party in the world, to essay out such a policy … . Subsequent experience has shown that in the absence of genuine desire for unity among other groups this policy far from facilitating unity, has made even United Front difficult.71

71

Periodical letter issued by Yusuf Meherally.

Chapter 6

Marxisms and Marxist Practices

[T]he central task in India today is similiar to that which faced the Russian Bolsheviks before the overthrow of Czardom. In this phase of the revolution the main Leninist slogan was: against the main enemy—czarist autocracy. The task of the proletariat was to unify the people against the Czar and isolate the compromising bourgeoisie from the people’s revolution. Similarly in India uniting the entire people against the main enemy, i.e., imperialism becomes the central task of the proletariat till imperialism is overthrown. In other words our basic slogan of building the anti-imperialist people’s front holds good for the whole epoch of the colonial revolution and is determined not by the struggle of the rival classes within the national front but by the basic cleavage between imperialism and the colonial people.1

According to Jawaharlal Nehru: Scientific socialism itself teaches us not to follow slavishly any dogma or any other country’s example, which may have resulted from entirely different circumstances. Armed with a philosophy which reveals the inner workings of history and human relations, and with the scientific

1

This paragraph is picked up from a statement signed by P.C. Joshi, G. Adhikari, R.D. Bharadwaj, A.K. Ghosh, Some Nath Lahiri, Abdul Halim, S.V. Ghate, Muzzafar Ahmed, B.T. Ranadive, S.G. Sardesai, S.S. Mirajkar and S.S. Yusuf. New Age, Vol. 6, No. 2, July 1939, p. 66.



Marxisms and Marxist Practices 133

outlook to guide him, the socialist tries to solve the problems of each country in relation to its varied background and stage of economic development, and also in relation to the world. It is a hard task. But then there is no easy way.2

The above two quotations are symptomatic of two qualitatively dif­ ferent attitudes towards Marxism and Marxist practices. In the first is embodied the ‘method of parallelism’, i.e., solving concrete problems by drawing analogies with the help of Marxist theorems available in the works of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. While in the latter the hard but inescapable task of concretely analysing a specific problem informs the spirit of an overall method. How did these Marxisms confront the problems of the national liberation movement in India, especially the role of Gandhi?2a How did they approach the problems of class struggle and leadership of social classes, etc.? How did Jawaharlal Nehru locate the national movement in concrete historical terms? Criticising the views of Saumyendranath Tagore on Gandhi and the Indian National Movement, Nehru wrote: It should be remembered that the nationalist movement in India, like all nationalist movements, was essentially a bourgeois movement. It represented the natural historical stage of development, and to consider it or to criticise it as a working class movement was wrong. Gandhi represented that movement and the Indian masses in relation to that movement to a supreme degree, and he became the voice of the Indian people to that extent. He functioned inevitably within the orbit of nationalist ideology, but the dominating passion that con­sumed him was a desire to raise the masses. In this respect he was always ahead of the nationalist movement, and he gradually made it, within the limits of its own ideolog y, turn in this direction. Economic events in India and the world powerfully pushed Indian nationalism towards vital social changes hovering somewhat undecided, on the brink of a new social ideolog y.3

What was meant when Nehru said that Indian National Movement was ‘essentially a bourgeois movement’? Was he not agreeing with the 2

Jawaharlal Nehru, Selected Works, Vol. 7, p. 61. ‘Every realistic student of history’, wrote M.N. Roy, ‘must appreciate the role of Mahatma Gandhi as such, unless they would allow emotionalism to mislead them into wilful misinterpretation of history’. Independent India, Vol. 11, No. 29, 16 October 1938. 3 Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘Mahatma Gandhi’, Selected Works, Vol. 7, 20 January 1936, p. 76. 2a

134 A History of the Indian Communists

Communists but shirking from the consequences and ‘rigorous logic’ which flowed from this understanding? What was he trying to do by becoming the president of a bourgeois movement? Unlike the com­ munists, for Nehru this way of approaching the problem did not mean that the national movement was the creation of only the bourgeoisie’s conflict with imperialism, nor that it was led by the bourgeoisie or predestined to serve the narrow interests of the bourgeoisie. The mean­ing of the movement having a bourgeois character was understood in the epochal sense of ‘natural historical stage of development’ when society as a whole could only be imbued with democratic ideals. The character­istic feature of this stage was the transformation of the Indian people from ‘a people demoralised, timid, and incapable of resistance, into a people with self-respect and self-reliance, resisting tyranny, and capable of united action and sacrifice for a large cause’.4 This level of conscious­ness of ‘amazing psychological change’ did not represent a socialist consciousness but an awakening of democratic aspirations, a state of affairs which led to the path of ‘thinking of political and economic issues’.5 This was the beginning of a process of consciousness formation, but the great beginning without which the groups with a more advanced ideology would have functioned largely in the air or would have failed to wield the significant influence they came to acquire. But the content of a social movement is not fixed for ever. Depending upon the circumstances, democratic revolutions could lead both to the consolidation of essen­tially a bourgeois regime as well as become the prelude to a socialist revolutionary transformation. In actuality, between these two extremes (French Revolution to Russian Revolution) there was room for a number of combinations resulting from concrete syntheses of various contra­dictory elements drawn from these two extremes and fused into a single whole. After the First World War mass movement in India was emerging in a completely new context of changed co-relation of political forces on a world scale. The socialist revolution in Russia had opened up another alternative developmental perspective before these emerging forces than hitherto available to them. This had a powerful impact on the ideology, politics and internal dynamics of the mass movement. The processes behind the flowering of non-socialist democratic conscious­ness 4 5

Nehru, Selected Works, Vol. 7, p. 76. Ibid.



Marxisms and Marxist Practices 135

in India could not be artificially separated from this impact and this newly awakening mass consciousness could not but orientate itself towards this perspective. Thus a political leader performing the task of raising the masses to democratic consciousness did not willy-nilly become the leader of the bourgeoisie. The question needs to be posed differently: why could this emerging democratic consciousness not be developed further, transformed and orientated towards socialistic perspectives? And as it really happened the remaining task of developing this consciousness further could not be performed by the Socialists/Communists thereby leaving the first half of the process in mid-air. This had objective consequences which were neither intended by Gandhi nor by the socialists. The failure of the communists to locate Gandhi his­torically led them to study him as a bundle of intentions, focusing on his inherent diabolical urge to serve the bourgeoisie. Objectively, in the historical sense, Gandhi was a natural ally of the forces interested in the welfare of vast millions, clearing the path for their rise and growth. This Marxist method of locating Gandhi was grasped by Nehru alone.6 The Communists kept parroting the ahistorical formulas: The policy of Gandhism, on which the programme of the Congress is founded uses the cloak of vague phrases about love, meekness, modest and hardworking existence, lightening the burden on pea­santry, the national unity … But under this cloak it preaches and defends the interests of the Indian capitalists, the inevitability and wisdom of the division of society into rich and poor, eternal social inequality and exploitation.7

To begin with, the qualitative difference between the fact of eco­ nomically well-off sections having democratic consciousness and the 6

Referring to the ‘amazing psychological change’ brought about by Gandhi’s leadership, Nehru explained: ‘Gandhi has played a revolutionary role in India of the greatest importance because he knew how to make the most of the objective conditions and could reach the heart of the masses; while groups with a more advanced ideology functioned largely in the air because they did not fit in with those conditions and could therefore not evoke any substantial response from the masses.’ Ibid., p. 76. And again: ‘But the main contribution of Gandhi to India and the Indian masses has been through the powerful movements which he launched through the National Congress. Through nation-wide action he sought to mould the millions … .’ Selected Works, Vol. 7. p. 76. 7 Draft Platform of Action of the CPI, Inprecor, 18 December 1930. International Press Correspondence was a political organ of the Third International.

136 A History of the Indian Communists

working masses having the same level of consciousness needs to be emphasised. In the case of working masses this consciousness is not only open to the possibilities of growing over towards socialist consciousness but also a necessary prerequisite for the penetration of socialist ideas. It is not the growth of this level of consciousness which inevitably leads to the sustenance of bourgeois hegemony and establishment of a predominantly bourgeois regime but rather the failure on the part of the socialists to extend, deepen and transform this consciousness towards its logical inner thrust—the socialist perspectives. The basic assumption of the communists, rooted in simplistic ‘class approach’ that from the very beginning the national movement would grow either under the leader­ ship of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, predisposed them towards the understanding that the very birth of socialist consciousness is qualitatively different from the growth of democratic consciousness, rather, the two grow quite independently and are opposed to each other. This was nothing but a restatement of M.N. Roy’s fundamental perspective that from the very beginning the two movements—one ‘revolutionary’ and the other ‘bourgeois’—existed independently in a state of contradiction with each other.8 It was because of their conflicting understanding of this concrete historical process of consciousness formation that communists and Nehru arrived at opposing conclusions on the role of Gandhi and the methods of relating with him politically. Many of Gandhi’s ‘conservative’ and ‘naive’ ideas were attributed by Nehru to what he called his ‘historical limitations’ and not to his conscious or unconscious intentions. While for the Communists, reactionary ideas were the real core of Gandhism. Thus by tracing the ideas of dissociation from class antagonisms, sentimental reconciliation of contradictory class interests and a visionary elevation above the class struggle to Gandhi’s historical limitations, Nehru was able to grasp the fundamental difference between Gandhi’s ‘preachings’ and wishful thinking and the objective influence of his ‘concrete action’ over the oppressed people. This is what he wrote: ‘Gandhi and the Congress must be judged by the policies they pursue and the action they indulge in.’9 8

G. Adhikari (ed.), Documents of the History of the CPI, Vol. 1. 1972, p. 184. Jawaharlal Nehru, Selected Works, Vol. 7, p. 77. Defending Gandhi against Communist criticism, Nehru had written: ‘But the little fact remains that this “reactionary” knows India, understands India, almost is peasant India, and has shaken up India as no so-called revolutionary had done.’ An Autobiography, 1962, p. 406. 9



Marxisms and Marxist Practices 137

The ‘messianic moment’ of the Mahatma’s first confrontation with the peasantry in Champaran, long before the communists appeared on the scene, was shrewdly grasped by a civil servant W.A. Lewis at Bettia, when he wrote: ‘They (peasants) credit him with extraordinary powers. He moved about in the villages asking them to lay their grievances before him, and he is transfiguring the imagination of masses of ignorant men with visions of early millennium.’10 A specific type of Marxism, however scientific it might proclaim itself, reveals nothing but its own obtuse doctrinairism when it constantly fails to understand and analyse correctly a phenomenon of supreme social importance. This was not for the first time that Marxists were confronted with such a complex personality and ideology. By situating them in their proper historical context Lenin was able to separate the ‘husk’ of such ideologies from their ‘sound kernel’ when he analysed with meticulous care the ideologies of Narodnism, Tolystoyism and Sun-Yat-Senism. Using this difference as a guideline Lenin arrived at the distinction between ‘revolutionary programmes’ actually practised by these ideologies and their ‘reactionary’ theorisation. Describing the views of Sismondi and Proudhon as ‘utopian’ and ‘reactionary’, Lenin wrote: This term (‘reactionary’) is employed in its historico-philosophical sense, describing only the error of the theoreticians who take models for their theories from obsolete forms of society. It does not apply at all to the personal qualities of these theoreticians or to their pro­grammes. Everybody knows that neither Sismondi nor Proudhan were reactionaries in the ordinary sense of the term. We are explaining these elementary truths because the Narodnik gentlemen have not grasped them to this day.11

Unlike Nehru, Indian Communists did not always underline this crucial difference between the ideology and practice of Gandhism. But even when they did so the ‘husk’ was declared as ‘sound kernel’ and vice versa. Distinguishing Gandhi from the pacifists, who inevitably become ‘upholders of an unjust system’, Nehru emphasised the central thrust of Gandhi’s views:

10 11

Geoffrey Ashe, Gandhi: A Study in Revolution, New Delhi, 1968, p. 163. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Moscow, 1963, Vol. 2, p. 217.

138 A History of the Indian Communists

In considering his methods one should not be diverted by a discussion of his views on science or modern industry, or asceticism, or birth control. The technique and the method of approach stand quite apart from those particular views though they might sometimes be coloured by them. That approach is the psychological approach … .12

There were in Nehru’s paradigm two distinct but interconnected domains—the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’. This economic orientation was the result of a new stage of development in the national movement and also provided concrete linkages between the perspectives of nation­alism and socialism. Time and again he emphasised that the struggle in India was not for socialism but for Swaraj, i.e., national independence. But if this Swaraj was to acquire its real meaning it must start absorbing socialist ideas and the movement as a whole must orientate itself towards socialism. To a Congressman in Andhra, he wrote: ‘… in India today as in every country under alien domination the national problem over­shadows social problems and nationalism is more revolutionary than the social struggle.’13 The theoretical construct of antagonistic class contradictions does not tell us anything about the degree and the form of awareness of classes in a particular society at a particular juncture of history. It cannot tell us how in the process of struggle classes absorb their multidimensional experience, separate themselves and define their attitude and power rela­ tions at various levels and in various ways. The complexities of this could only be grasped through concrete analysis though never losing sight of the theoretical constructs. Instead of this way of approaching the problem the Indian communists did exactly the opposite. They substituted the structural–analytical categories for the actual analysis of the historical experience. This was the method of pigeon-holing the experience in already given slots. The underlying assumption behind this method was that consciousness of the oppressed people from the very beginning was of a clearly defined nature. It did not see consciousness–formation as a complex process—sometimes vague, confused and contradictory— slowly unfolding through successive stages and only approximating the ‘grey theory’. 12

Selected Works, Vol. 7, 24 February 1936, p. 125. Emphasis added. Nehru to R. Srinivaslu, 1 October 1933, Nehru Papers Correspondence, Vol. 95. Emphasis added. 13



Marxisms and Marxist Practices 139

In Nehru’s theoretical universe the conception of ‘national revolution’ was linked to the agrarian programme quite differently. The political involvement of the people was bound to make them sensitive and aware of their economic problems. Thus the national movement itself was a powerful factor to orientate the masses towards their social problems. This would help them to bring their economic grievances in front of the entire movement thereby demanding a social content in the universal category of swaraj. Thus the political programme of the national move­ ment would be forced to add an economic dimension to it by spelling out the economic measures to ameliorate these grievances. This would further inspire the masses to assert their weight in the anti-imperialist struggle raising it to a new stage of development and then by further intensifying its economic orientation. The working masses did not already exist as ‘classes’ but as scattered and disaggregated strata characterised by narrow local identities of caste, religion, language or region. The change from particularistic levels to a universal level could happen only through the transforming experience of the national movement. Only through the nationalist struggle by developing a powerful emotive experience could the meaning of these identities be changed and a psychological basis of secularism created. Only after passing through this experience these strata could acquire a degree of ‘classness’ and a class instinct. One could not blindly presuppose the existence of already formed classes and then put forward economic programmes for their liberation. As a convinced communalist would not understand the logical argu­ ments of a secularist, similiarly oppressed people with particularistic forms of consciousness would not understand a class programme and its implications. Thus the concrete problem of economic programme was not telling the working class and peasantry what kind of maximum demands and their realisation could end their oppression and establish their Raj. The problem in India was of devising an economic programme which could be viewed by the Indian masses as a ‘class’ as well as a ‘national’ salvation, i.e., a radical national programme. Looked from this angle the economic programme of a people’s movement could only be a moderate one. From 1928 onwards Nehru evolved a distinct theoretical framework where ‘class’ and ‘nation’ were neither coalesced into one nor counterposed, but were organically linked. A new conception of ‘nation-class’

140 A History of the Indian Communists

was at work behind the edifice of his thought. And this was the real theoretical problem which he thought every socialist must confront in India. In a message outlining this problem before the Meerut conference of the Congress Socialist Party, Nehru wrote from Europe: I have mentioned the two ways that have moved me, and I take it that they move also, in varying degrees, many of my countrymen. These are: nationalism and political freedom as represented by the Congress and social freedom as represented by socialism. But India being unhappily still politically a subject country, nationalism is the dominant urge of most of her politically minded classes. But no socialist need be reminded that nationalism by itself offers no solution of the vast problems that confront the country and the world. To continue these two outlooks and make them an organic whole is the problem of the Indian socialist … . It is a hard task. But then there is no easy way.14

It is in this context that Nehru gave so much importance to the idea of ‘developing’ a new ideology. While for the communists this conception remained an enigma, as in their own view they already possessed the scientific ideology of Marxism-Leninism and the task was to propagate this ideology. The absorption of the economic dimension within the national political programme and its redefinition ‘in favour of the masses’ would be accompanied by ideological, political and organisational conflicts within broader political unity in order to shift the centre of gravity of the national movement left-ward. The left-wing in India was faced with the difficult and complex task of concretely synthesising the ameliorative economic programme with national aspirations and making it acceptable to the large sections of the Congress movement. In short, this was a project of establishing a contending hegemony over the majority of the nation. This was a task of ‘developing new ideology’ for the majority of Congressmen, if not the entire movement keeping in view the prevailing moods and inclinations within the actual movement. Keeping in view the atmosphere of ‘vague idealism demanding justice for the underdog’, the form in which Marxism could reach out to the broadest possible sections of the movement had to be an inspiring and passionate ‘pro­gressive ideology’ and not abstract formulas of an ‘academic ideology’. Another question on which the communists had a fundamental difference with 14

‘The Congress and Socialism’, Selected Works, Vol. 7, 16 January 1936. p. 60.



Marxisms and Marxist Practices 141

Nehru was non-violence. ‘Mr. Nehru accepts non-violence in theory and in practice. And one of the main principles of Gandhist treacherous policy is propagation of non-violence—aimed at disarming the toiling masses and preserving the slavish, submissive mentality.’15 In a letter Purushottam Tricumdas wrote to Sri Prakasa: I met along with others, Jawaharlal. I must confess that I was rather disappointed. He is trying to reconcile two totally uncompatible positions, i.e., emotional, spiritual, nationalistic programme of Gandhi with the national and practical programme which he had been advo­cating since his release. He feels that the leadership of Gandhiji with all its implications and vagaries is essential to the cause. In this not only myself but most of us on this side profoundly disagree. Senti­mental grounds apart, we feel that a clear enunciation of our points of view and the breakaway from the official Congress policy is absolutely essential to any systematic planning on different lines for the future.16

In his Autobiography Nehru had written that ‘the method of non­ violent, non-cooperation or civil resistance is a unique and powerful contribution of his (Gandhi’s) to India and the world, and there can be no doubt that it has been peculiarly suited to Indian conditions’.17 In 1937 Communists reacted very sharply to this kind of assessment of the Gandhian method. They asserted: ‘No, this cannot be said.’18 Gandhi was deliberately employing this method because it was a lower form of struggle. ‘What is of utmost importance to us’, argued the Communists, ‘is that the struggle of the masses should not stop at passive resistance, that this struggle should pass over from lower forms to higher, more active and effective forms—from boycotts to mass demonstrations, from demonstration to strikes, from strikes to mass action by the people’.19 And finally they concluded: What do the Communists object to? The Communists object to the Gandhian propaganda of the inadmissibility of violence in 15

Inprecor, Vol. 14, No. 17, 16 March 1934. Quoted in Sashi Joshi, op. cit., p. 96. The letter is dated 30 September 1933. File No. 800 (75) A Political, M.S.A. Purshottam Tricumdas was one of the joint secretaries of the CSP. 17 An Autobiography, 1962 edition, p. 406. 18 ‘Why we oppose Non-Violence?’ The statement of the Politbureau and Central Committee of the CPI. The Communist, Vol. 1, No. 15, March 1937. 19 Ibid. The logic of the ‘paradigm of insurgency’ is clearly spelt out here. 16

142 A History of the Indian Communists

principle... . We Communists consider that it is necessary to make the people conscious of the fact that violence against violence, against the oppressors is just and necessary for there is no other path to free­dom.20

Unlike the Communists, socialists were not committed to any principled position on the question of violence. Their attitude was an ambivalent one. Yusuf Meherally summed up this attitude when he wrote: ‘… a Marxist cannot be dogmatic about violence and non-violence.’21 M.N. Roy and his followers continuously argued in the pages of Independent India that the idea of non-violence was not a fundamental principle of the Congress. Gandhi was unnecessarily confusing his own creed with a clear-cut programme of national independence.22 The object of Indian National Congress is the establishment in India of a Government of the people, by the people, which is conditional upon the capture of power by the masses. It does not believe that imperialism will ever abdicate real power voluntarily. Therefore, it does not entertain any illusion regarding the possibility of attaining its goal through gradual transfer of power.23

Royists pointed out that Gandhian emphasis on non­-violence was not allowing the Congressmen to act with a clear vision. ‘The cult of nonviolence,’ wrote Independent India ‘is confusing our political thoughts and vitiating our activities.’24 Gandhi had labelled his method as a ‘change of heart’ and ‘conversion’. Nehru was not deceived by the harmless appearance of this label and refused to dismiss at face value the ideas which had stirred millions of his countrymen. Nehru realised that Gandhi was working with a definite idiom to reach out the Indian people.25 ‘… in practice,’ he wrote, ‘it has 20

Ibid. Yusuf Meherally Papers. Letter to Jayaprakash Narayan. 22 Independent India, Vol. 2, No. 1, 3 April 1938; No. 3, 17 April 1938; No. 11, 12 June 1938; No. 19–20, 14 August 1938; No. 24, 11 September 1938; No. 26, 25 September 1938; No. 27, 2 October 1938; Vol. 2, No. 2, 8 January 1939: No. 3, 15 January 1939. Independent India was started by M.N. Roy as a weekly in 1937 from Bombay; V.B. Karnik was its working editor. 23 ‘A Declaration of Principle’, Independent India, Vol. 2, No. 23, 4 September 1938. Editorial. 24 Independent India, Vol. 2, No. 2, 10 April 1938. 25 And this he thought was of utmost importance. He told the socialists that unless they are able to discover new language of communication—a new idiom for expressing their thoughts—their theories would not grip the minds of the masses. 21



Marxisms and Marxist Practices 143

been a powerful weapon of compulsion … . Indeed, it is interesting to note that Gandhiji actually used the word “compel” in his early writings’.26 The idea of non-violence evoked different reactions from different people. ‘Vast number of people’, wrote Nehru, ‘have repeated it un­thinkingly but with approval; some have wrestled with it and then accepted it, with or without reservation, some have openly jeered at it.’27 Nehru himself was one of those who constantly wrestled with Gandhi’s ideas and in the process came to accept many of these but with reservation. But the acceptance of these ideas raised more problems than they really solved. Nehru’s mind was troubled with a host of doubts as he was constantly in search of some consistent philosophy of action. ‘But, in theory, if it is possible to bring about a great political change by a non-violent technique’, he asked, ‘why should it not be equally pos­sible to effect a radical social change by this method?’28 Starting from this premise the left-wing, especially the communists, argued that since ‘Gandhism’ emphasised the ‘change of heart’ and ‘conversion’, therefore, it was of no use to them. This superficial inter­ pretation of Gandhi’s ideas suited the right-wing leadership and left’s attitude reinforced right’s interpretation of Gandhism. Right-wingers defended and preached this interpretation of ‘Gandhism’. ‘Class conflicts’, they argued, ‘must not be mentioned because they jar on the vision of perfect co-operation and a non-violent progress to whatever goal might be in the future.’29 Gandhi’s ideas as a living ideology were no use to the left-wing as well as the right-wing. Both ‘agreed’ on a common inter­ pretation of his ideas and characterised it as ‘an inflexible’ dogma to justify their respective policies and programmes. Nehru was able to see how the right-wing was transforming Gandhi’s socially subversive ideas into a toothless ideology. Once these ideas with their passionate spiritual appeal were converted into ‘pigeon-holes of faith and religion’ they could easily become ‘a sheet-anchor for vested interests’.30 Interpreta­tion, logical extensions and development of Gandhi’s ideas and methods were the terrain of ideological struggle within the Congress for organ­isational hold over the rank and file. This is precisely what Nehru was trying to

26

An Autobiography, 1962 edition, p. 540. An Autobiography, p. 537. 28 Ibid., p. 547. 29 An Autobiography, p. 547. 30 Ibid. 27

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do when he asserted: ‘If we can get political freedom and the elimination of British imperialism from India non-violently, why should we not also solve the problem of the feudal princes and landlords and other social problems in the same way, and establish a socialist state?’31 It was the conception of ‘non-violent mass movement’ which acted as an umbilical cord between nationalist Gandhi and socialist Nehru. And this is precisely the conception which is missing in Marxist theory and politics. Contemporary radical political activists did not grasp the deeper ideas behind this ‘umbilical cord’, and therefore, resorted to psycho­ logical theories to understand Nehru’s relationship with Gandhi. We would like to preface our discussion with a detour just to give a glimpse to the reader of the ‘deeper ideas’, we have hinted above. Based on the force sanctioned by the consent of civil society, the modern constitutional state on the one hand bestows legitimacy on the forces opposed to it by allowing them to operate within legal political parameters while on the other hand it invokes the same legitimacy to destroy those particular forces which reject the existing democratic institutional modalities and seek to employ violent methods to over­throw this state. The more stable the institutions of democratic and civil liberties of a state the greater is its strength to repress and destroy those forces which advocate fundamental systemic opposition outside its democratic framework. This contradiction lies at the heart of the modern constitutional state apparatus. Modern capitalism, without evolving this kind of state apparatus, could not have built its sprawling network of industrial complexes and vast metropolitan centres simul­taneously without evolving a political mechanism to keep it safe from being destroyed through civil wars resulting from internal class struggles. The very structural logic of its continued reproduction seems to be rooted in a strategy of selfpreservation whereby its omnipresent watch­ful eyes it shows tremendous sensitivity in detecting and annihilating any outside threat with all the methods of modern warfare. Therefore, against those who choose to operate outside the domain of civil liberties and democratic modalities, it employs all the ruthlessness at its com­mand. This experience might further convince the forces frontally attacking such a state that there are no civil liberties and democratic modalities. They might declare it as a fraud and those who seek to operate within them as living in bourgeois illusions. 31

Ibid. The original edition was published in 1936.



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Thus the modern constitutional state itself offers to its opponents two terrains of politics organically linked to two sets of mutually exclusive strategies. Thereby, it counterposes a self-enclosed space of democratic constitutional activity vis-à-vis its complete rejection and invites the forces of opposition to choose either one of these. To ‘choose’ any one of these two mutually exclusive alternative strategies is to fall into the trap of the state. One choice is liable to be defeated by absorption within the existing set-up while the other is liable to be vanquished outside the very gates of this citadel. What is the way out? One possible, but false, way out could be to practise one strategy by constantly holding the other in abeyance and genuinely believing that the time for its practice is not yet ripe. The other way was discovered and practised by Gandhi. By rejecting either choice offered to him by the colonial state he put forward a nonconstitutional as well as non-insurrectionary conception of peaceful mass movements. Gandhian insights when extrapolated seem to project a conception of the modern state against which it is impossible to fight through any form of insurrectionary perspectives.32 To resort to violence is to invite destruction at the hands of the repressive apparatus. Gandhi wrote in 1921 in Young India: Let it be remembered that violence is the keystone of the government edifice. Since violence is its sheet-anchor and its final refuge, it has rendered itself almost immune from violence on our side by having prepared itself to frustrate all violent effort by the people. We there­fore cooperate with the government in the most active manner when we resort to violence. Any violence on our part must be token of our stupidity, ignorance and impotent rage. To exercise restraint under the gravest provocation is the truest mark of soldiership. The variest tyro in the art of war knows, that he must avoid the ambushes of his adversary. And every provocation is a dangerous ambush into which we must resolutely refuse to walk.33

The question of violence was no longer a tactical question. So unlike Marx and the Marxists, Gandhi absolutely rejected the idea of an armed overthrow of this state including violent action in the name of self-defence vis-à-vis the state. In other words, implied in Gandhi’s con­ception was 32

‘The state represents violence in a concentrated and organised form.’ N.K. Bose, Selections from Gandhi, 1948, p. 42. 33 Ibid., p. 204.

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the fact that the state apparatus could never be smashed; it could only be transformed implying thereby that there would be transfer of power through a shifting equilibrium of power relations and not forcible seizure of power. To say that a crucial defining feature of the governments in the parliamentary democratic states is that they rest on the consent of the masses is not to say very much. The crucial task was (and remains) of devising a strategy by which the consent to these governments could be broken and an alternative system of consent for a new social order is organised. Gandhi rejected, not tactically, but fundamentally the ‘para­digm of insurrection’ to overthrow such a state. This was his great contribution to human history comparable to the contribution of Karl Marx. As an alternative to this he formulated and practised the ‘para­digm of mass movements’. It emerged from an instinctive grasp of the fundamental nature of the modern constitutional state and a certain philosophical conception of human nature.34 Since non-violence is also an inseparable part of all mass movements, it could not but be a ‘dogma’ with him. Even after the execution of Bhagat Singh, at the Karachi Session of the Congress Gandhi did not vacillate from his conviction in non-violent mass movement despite the tremendous pressure brought upon him by the younger generation. The roots of his conviction did not lie in Hinduism, rather, it was his conviction in non-violent action which led him to interpret Hinduism in a novel way. In the face of a non-violent mass movement a modern constitutional state is confronted with a dilemma. Whatever its methods of tackling such a movement it stands to lose both ways. If the state chooses to placate the mass movement it must give concessions. If it chooses to crush it, it lowers its prestige thereby transferring the same to its opponents. There­fore, instead of the state creating the dilemma before its opponents, the ‘paradigm of mass movements’ wrested the initiative from the state forcing it to respond to its own strength and choice of the terrain of struggle. 34 The philosophical point implied in Gandhi’s conception of human nature seems to be one of the man’s basic concern about ‘life’ (survival) and ‘death’. ‘It is a fundamental principle of satyagraha that the tyrant whom the satyagrahi seeks to resist has power over his body and material possessions but he can have no power over the soul. The soul can remain unconquered and unconquerable even when the body is imprisoned. The whole science of satyagraha was born from a knowledge of this fundamental truth.’



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The tyranny and injustice of the colonial state enslaving the Indian people was embodied in its laws which governed the populace. Not to challenge these laws was tantamount to giving one’s consent to them and thereby to the state whose will was embodied in these laws.‘Even the most despotic government cannot stand except for the consent of the governed which consent is often forcibly procured by the despot.’35 Gandhi understood very clearly the military might of the colonial state and refused to fight ‘commando action by commando action’. This is how Gandhi summed up his view on the theme: You have great military resources. Your naval power is matchless. If we wanted to fight with you on your own ground, we should be unable to do so, but if the above submissions be not acceptable to you, we cease to play the part of the rules. You may, if you like, cut us to pieces. You may shatter us at cannon’s mouth. If you act contrary to our will, we shall not help you; and without our help, we know that you cannot move one step forward.36

This statement goes straight to the heart of the contradiction of the modern constitutional state which cannot rule without taking into consideration the will or the consent of the ruled. It is here that it constantly seeks its legitimacy for its acts of repression through consti­tutional modalities. Thus the aim of satyagraha or countrywide mass movements was not to seize power but to crystallise an alternative national will, moral force, i.e., hegemony in order to force the existing government to abdicate. In the context of Civil Disobedience Movement, he wrote: ‘The present campaign is not designed to establish Independence but to arm the people with the power to do so.’37 And again: ‘Civil disobedience is the method whereby the nation is to generate the strength to reach her formulated goal.’38 In a most revealing address to both houses of the Indian Legislative

35

Young India, 30 June 1920. Quoted in Bose, Selections from Gandhi, p. 116. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, p. 100. Quoted in Gene Sharp, The Politics of Non-Violent Action: Part I, Boston, 1973, p. 84. 37 Young India, 24 April 1930. Quoted in Sharp, Gandhi as a Political Strategist, 1979, p. 13. 38 Ibid., 20 March 1930. The same view was formulated by Nehru though in a different language: ‘There is no question of getting any power without developing the sanction for it. It is that sanction we are developing and I can assure you that I am quite certain about success.’ Selected Works, Vol. 5, 26 September 1933, p. 548. 36

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Assembly in July 1930, the Viceroy Lord Irwin, almost confirmed the correctness of Gandhi’s method of building counter-force. He declared: In my judgement and in that of my government it (civil disobedience movement) is a deliberate attempt to coerce established authority by mass action, and … it must be regarded as unconstitutional and dangerously subversive mass action even if it is intended by its pro­moters to be non-violent, is nothing but the application of force under another form, and when it has as its avowed object the making of government impossible, a government is bound either to resist or abdicate … .39

Nehru recognised the elements of Gandhi’s genius despite their pro­found differences with each other. Unlike Gandhi, he did not fully comprehend the nature of the colonial state and the philosophicalpsychological implications of ‘slavery’ for human nature. For the communists at the other end and the Third International there was no difference between the colonial state operating through limited consti­tutionalism and the military feudal state of czarist Russia. However, like Gandhi he did not reject outrightly the idea of achieving freedom with violent means though he did not think it suitable to the peculiarities of the Indian situation. But again unlike the communists Nehru fully grasped the revolutionary potential of peaceful mass move­ ments to coerce the vested interests to submission.40 Of course Nehru agreed that the vested interests did not surrender their privileges without the use of force. But Nehru could comprehend Gandhi’s idea of ‘peaceful force’ while for the communists it was always ‘armed violence’. For them, to believe in ‘peaceful force’ was to disarm the masses and only vested interests talked of such things to maintain status quo and exploitation. The strategy of the communists was also the strategy of mass action but one of militant mass revolutionary movement inevitably growing towards an insurrectionary situation. Deducing their ‘logic’ from Lenin’s conception of smashing the state apparatus they argued that when the masses in their millions are on the move, the fact of imperialist oppression would drive them towards an armed uprising without which British rule could not be overthrown. 39 40

Quoted in Sharp, Gandhi as a Political Strategist, 1979, p. 11. Nehru, Selected Works, Vol. 9, pp. 25, 51–52.



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The Communist Party declares that the road to victory is not the method of individual terror but the struggle and the revolutionary armed insurrection of the widest possible masses of the working class, the peasantry, the poor of the town and the Indian soldiers, around the banner and under the leadership of the Communist Party of India.41

They opposed terrorism in order to organise the masses and then helping them to adopt militant forms of struggle with the ultimate goal of staging a nationwide insurrection. Between the non-violent and violent strategy they were actually committed to the latter but wanted to make a ‘tactical use’ of the first till the ‘conditions’ for the operation of the other became ripe. The emergence of a powerful mass movement was also necessary to create conditions where the other strategy could be oper­ative. For the Communists, the ‘war of position’ and the ‘war of man­oeuvre’ were not two mutually exclusive strategies. They were logically connected though ‘war of position’ was supposed to precede the ‘war of manoeuvre’. Communists were absolutely sure that such conditions were lying dormant in the future and would certainly appear ‘one day’ as they marched ahead. From the Communists’ point of view Nehru was rightly emphasising militant mass action and advocating socialism, but was following rigorously the ‘logic’ of his own positions and was illogically and irrationally clinging to the Gandhian dogma of nonviolence. He was persisting in this ‘left nationalism’ stubbornly refusing to become a really revolutionary Marxist. By not making a fundamental break with Gandhian dogma he was obfuscating clarity and was neither interested in leading the united left nor helping the radical masses in the Congress to cross over to the ‘next logical stage’ of really revolutionary strategy. He was defending non-violence and criticising the left. Instead of becoming a bridge he was acting as a shield. The true revolutionary path before the radical Congress could be cleared only by breaking this shield of illusions. Nehru’s socialism must be exposed as phony and petty bourgeois romanticism. For Nehru, on the other hand, both the strategies were mutually exclusive and not only was there no logical connection, but, in fact, there 41

‘Draft Platform of Action of the CPI’, Inprecor, 18 December 1930. Xeroxed copy ACHI. This perspective was never abandoned by the Communist Party till 1948. In 1923, M.N. Roy had said: ‘If India will not have freedom conquered by violent means, she will have to go without it.’ Roy, The Aftermath of Non-Cooperation, 1920, p. 118, ACHI.

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was a deep-seated logical antipathy between them. It was a question of fundamentals and one could not fool around with both in the name of tactics. The revolutionary left could not afford to create confusion by arbitrarily positing a ‘logical connection’ where there was none since this was a question of life and death. Thus he saw ‘dogma’ where his opponents on the left saw ‘logic’ and vice versa. Over the years, the entire left came to harbour a grudge against Nehru and fought hard to develop this ‘logic’ in the mass movement. Rallying round Bose in 1939 was their last but desperate attempt. It seems that Nehru was constantly under pressure from the socialists to lead their party. In a letter written to Nehru in 1940. Jayaprakash Narayan wrote: All of us here expect you and beseech you to lead the opposition in the AICC and the country … . You must leave the Congress and form another political organisation to fulfil the remaining part of the political task and the main part of the social task of the Indian revolution. Will you do it? This has not been written in passion or anger, but coolly and deliberately.42

Apart from the role of Gandhi the other crucial issue on which Nehru differed from the communists was the character of the Indian National Congress and its concomitant implications. When their respective Marxisms confronted this reality they could not but repel each other. For Nehru the arena of ideological struggles was within the Congress. It was not between the Congress and the ideologically advanced groups acting as independent political parties parallel to the National Congress. Unlike the communists and socialists Nehru did not divide the Congress into two ideologically neat categories of ‘left’ and ‘right’. There were ‘left’ and ‘right’ tendencies within the Congress but they were separated by an expanse of grey ‘centre’ and ideological struggle between these two extreme currents was precisely to influence the ‘centre’ in order to shift the ‘centre of gravity’ of the entire Congress towards its own side.43 Unlike any other Marxist in India, he was fully aware of the problems of mass mentalité. Since ‘messages’ are always filtered through the prevailing cultural consciousness of the recipients the question of the language of socialism, therefore, was of utmost importance. 42 43

Jayaprakash Narayan Papers, J.P. to Nehru, 20 July 1940. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Unity of India, 1944, pp. 121–22.



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In a message (20 December 1936) to the Meerut Session of the Congress Socialist Party, he stated: But two aspects of this question fill my own mind. One is how to apply this approach to Indian conditions. The other is how to speak of socialism in the language of India. I think it is often forgotten that if we were to be understood, we must speak the language of the country. I am not merely referring to the various languages of India. I am referring much more to the language which grows from a complex of associations of past history and culture and present environment. So long as we do not speak in some language which has that Indian mentality for background, we lose a great measure of our effective­ness. Merely to use words and phrases, which may have meaning for us but which are not current coin among the masses of India, is often wasted effort. It is this problem of the approach to socialism that occupies my mind—how to interpret it in terms of India, how to reach the hearts of the people, with its hope giving and inspiring message. That is a question which I should like a socialist to consider well.44

44

Quoted in B. Pattabhi Sitaramayya, op. cit., p. 15.

Chapter 7

Of Political Issues and Ideological Conflicts Colonial Constitution, Council Entry and Office Acceptance

The Government was following a two-pronged policy of reform and repression vis-à-vis the second phase of Civil Disobedience Movement.1 In order to prepare the ground for its systematic implementation the political disadvantages of the other policy—the policy of negotiations with the Congress, of repeating the Gandhi–Irwin Pact—were spelt out in great detail by the bureaucrats. The opponents of the tough policy were constantly warned of the political consequences if the Government failed to go ahead with the policy suggested by them. The object of this dual policy was to crush the mass movement and then impose a new constitution upon the demoralised population supposed to be a big concession in the form of a major instalment in the process of constitutional reforms. Once again, Gandhi by following the path of negotiations and compromise was trying to accomplish something extremely important, i.e., ‘the creation of the belief in the minds of the vast sections of the population that the ‘success of the Congress is inevitable’. In the aftermath 1

For details see the section ‘The Dual Policy’ in Rajendra Prasad’s Presidential speech at the 48th session of the INC in Bombay. Included in Valmiki Choudhary (ed.) Dr Rajendra Prasad: Correspondence and Select Documents, New Delhi, Vol. 1, pp. 232–49.

Of Political Issues and Ideological Conflicts 153

of the Gandhi–Irwin Pact, the pros and cons of negotiations with the Congress could now be clearly weighed and the bureaucracy went through this exercise coldly and dispassionately.2 By August 1931 the government had already armed itself with Ordinance Powers. The time had come to restore the confidence of those who were perceived as allies, and to demonstrate to the other vacillating sections of the population the strength of the government. To restore already eroded hegemony, the very logic of hegemony demanded that the state must now push itself to the other extreme. On 4 July 1932, an Extraordinary Gazette of India promulgated the first comprehensive Emergency Powers Ordinance the British ever issued in India.3 Once the government had failed to exact Congress consent for their new instalment of constitutional concessions via the Round Table Conference they decided to impose those concessions on the Congress by crushing the mass movement through repression. The ‘psychological occasion’4 was also to be used to make the government intentions known to every section of public opinion. On 3 January 1932, along with the note of Sir G. Schuster, Emerson submitted his own draft of the proposed statement to the Viceroy’s Council. His draft stated: The real issue now before the country is whether to proceed with constitutional advance by constitutional, peaceful and orderly steps along lines, agreed at RTC between His Majesty’s Government and a very representative body of Indians, or whether to plunge the country into a revolutionary struggle, the only excuse for which can be a refusal to trust the honesty of the intentions declared by the Prime Minister on behalf of the British people. Is Congress to dictate the future of India or is that to be settled in agreement between His Majesty’s Government and all the sections of the Indian people? This is the question.5

Emerson not only clarified the intentions of the government but also asserted that … the Government of India and His Majesty’s Government are determined to press forward with constitutional method of advance as quickly

2

HDP, File No. S/45/31 & K.W. For the impact of Gandhi–Irwin Pact see Shashi Joshi, Struggle for Hegemony in India 1920–47, Vol 1, Chapter 9, 1992. 3 Home Political HDP, File No 13/14/32 & K.W. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. Italics in original.

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as possible—undeterred by the threats of the Congress. That is what they pledge themselves to do, and that is what all right-thinking men must recognise as the course most conducive to the peace and happiness of the people of India and to construction of a sound and well planned constitution … . Let those who trust the British government and who believe in advance by constitutional methods in contrast with revolution boldly declare their faith and cooperation with the government in this supreme crisis of India’s history.6

This theme was incorporated in the long statement issued by the Secretary to the Government of India on 4 January 1932.7 Through this statement the bureaucracy wanted to warn the various constitutionalist forms of politics (nationalist as well as pro-British) that the battle for the ‘principle of constitutionalism’ was not their battle alone but of all such future governments who would be faced with the threat of mass movements.8 The Government of India was aware that their tough policy towards the Congress might cause ‘embarrassments’ in England but yet according to them there was no other means to deal with the Congress. ‘When the foundations of Government’, wrote Haig, ‘are threatened, and very seriously threatened, we must do what is possible to protect them … . ’9 If the British were to rule this country the process of erosion of British hegemony must be arrested. Indian population must be stopped from drawing their own conclusion from the situation, i.e., the Congress was in a position to dictate terms. That the Indian public would draw this conclusion would itself be indicative of the fact that the Congress prestige was on the ascendancy. In order to diminish the Congress impact on the public opinion it ought to be the Government and not the Congress which must be seen as dictating the terms. It was in this broad context of hegemony that Harry Haig systematically propounded the basic 6

Ibid. Notification. Political statement, 4 January 1932, HDP, File No. 13/14/1932 & K.W. 8 Ibid. 9 Haig Papers, Harry Haig to Mieville, Private Secretary to the Viceroy, 13 April 1932. Comments on the P.M.’s letter. Earlier the Prime Minister had written to the Viceroy: ‘Will a point come when Mr Gandhi will be allowed to enter into political conversations for the purpose of reaching an agreement; or must we go on keeping him in prison, whilst a policy of smashing Congress is being pursued by Ordinance methods?’ Prime Minister to the Viceroy, dated 31 March 1932. Ibid. 7

Of Political Issues and Ideological Conflicts 155

assumptions of the British policy vis-à-vis the second phase of the Civil Disobedience Movement. He wrote: When government this year for the second time mobilised its resources against this movement, all classes in India, whether well or ill disposed towards us, educated or uneducated, Hindu or Muslim asked themselves whether Government intended to see the matter through. On the whole the belief was that government was in an earnest, and so long as that belief persists, the extent of the movement will be limited, particularly in the rural areas … . We are being watched very narrowly in India. It is mistake to regard our power as overwhelming and our resources as limitless. At the moment we are in a strong position, because the army and the police and large sections of the population, including probably the majority of the Muslims, believe that we should persist in our struggle with civil disobedience. But it would take little to shake that confidence and the results of its being shaken might be very formidable. We must, I am afraid, see the struggle through to the point at which Congress realises that civil disobedience has failed. Psychological factors are vital … . I do not believe that this is an impossible or, even in present circumstances, a difficult course. It has been done before. The non-cooperation movement of ten years ago was worn down and ended in a state of discouragement which lasted for two or three years. In 1931 I think it may be said we were within fairly close distance of reaching a similiar position and that it was a realisation of this fact which induced the Congress to come to terms. I think we are well on our way towards some such result now, but it must take a little time, and it requires continuous pressure.10

Haig was of the view that the situation was improving from their point of view and as far as the ‘sullen resentment below the surface’ was concerned it ‘rested on suspicion that when civil disobedience has been beaten the British Government will not carry through the promised reforms.’ ‘I venture to urge,’ he emphasised, ‘the enormous importance of going ahead as quickly as possible with the draft of the new constitution.’ Putting forward the policy perspective, which was later on followed by the Government, Haig summed up the line of action in the immediate future: First and foremost every effort should be made to reach practical conclusions about the constitution. It was the only thing that could 10

Ibid.

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be expected to bring any contentment to political India. It was the constructive side of the ‘dual policy’ and it was vital that it should be pushed on. Side by side with this the government must maintain the other wing of the ‘dual policy’; it must defeat the menace of civil disobedience. The government could not afford to blow hot and cold in this matter or to break off without reaching a conclusion. That would be interpreted all over India as a victory for the Congress. Moreover, the government must not enter into conversation with the Congress. It must first show that the civil disobedience had failed. Once that was appreciated, the government had no wish to remain in conditions of permanent hostility with the Congress. On the contrary, it must look to Congressmen coming in immediately or gradually as one of the most important elements, if not the most important, in the working of the new constitution. He did not at all despair of the government reaching that position at not a very distant date, if only it could get on rapidly with the introduction of the constitution. As that was seen to take practical shape, the civil disobedience movement, apart from the results of direct action against it, would lose much of its vigour, and many in the Congress ranks would feel increasing doubts whether it was worthwhile persisting with their policy of opposition, in preference to grasping the power that was being offered to them. The government would be too glad to welcome their assistance.11

This assessment and the tactics to deal with the Congress were based on the assumption that Congress could be forced to follow only one form of struggle either constitutional or non-constitutional, i.e., the form of direct mass action. And once the mass movement was effectively crushed Congress could be convinced of the futility of mass action. Thus the Congress could be forced to surrender and ultimately made to cooperate with the bureaucracy. This assessment was also based on another wrong assumption, i.e., the Congress was constituted of mainly two wings—the right-wing and the left-wing. Government should so devise its policies, argued the bureaucracy, as to widen the already existing rift between them and encourage those who worked for the split. By the end of 1933 the mass movement had already been suppressed and the government was in a position to forcibly impose a constitution on the people of India. The government was quite correct in its assessment that similar to the aftermath of non-cooperation the suppression of civil disobedience 11

Ibid.

Of Political Issues and Ideological Conflicts 157

would be followed by a phase of ‘psychological depression’. Majority of the Congressmen and especially the leading right-wing Congressmen were able to grasp this fact. The left-wing as a whole could not understand these dynamics of the mass movement. For them, earlier, the non-cooperation movement had failed simply because Gandhi had withdrawn it and not that it was ‘worn down and ended in a state of discouragement’ due to government repression. The years 1932 to 1936 were years of intense imperialist repression. Open air meetings, processions and demonstrations were prohibited. There were, in July 1936, over 2,000 detenus in Bengal alone and yet repression was being pursued with ever more vigour and persistence. The first thing that the President of the Congress addressed himself to after the Lucknow session was therefore the formation of the Indian Civil Liberties Union with Sarojini Naidu as the head of the organisation and Dr Rabindra Nath Tagore as the Honorary President.12 The Congress Working Committee at its Delhi meeting on 21 March 1936, passed the following resolution: The Congress notes that at no period since the great Revolt of 1857 has the suppression of civil and personal liberties and the repression of the Indian people, which is the normal feature of British administration in India today, been so great as it is now.13 All the resources of the government were mobilised to crush the movement and pressure was continuously applied according to a wellthought-out policy, to convince the Congressmen and their supporters that civil disobedience had failed completely and it had achieved nothing. A state of general paralysis as prophesied by the policy-makers, followed the fizzling out of the mass movement. Socialists demanded that the Congress should prepare for the next round of the struggle. But before the mass movement could ever be attempted, there must exist a general political atmosphere of vigour and enthusiasm; a widespread desire itching for action. It had taken almost six years for the mass spirit to revive itself after the non-cooperation movement was withdrawn. But unlike the noncooperation, which was withdrawn by Gandhi and therefore escaped complete suppression, the Civil Disobedience Movement was fought on a much wider basis and with a sense of determination that it appeared to the policy-makers as a ‘moment of supreme crisis’ in India’s history. The background of the receding mass movement had brought to the fore what 12 13

B. Pattabhi Sitaramayya, op. cit., pp. 19–20. HDP, File No. 4/6/36. The Hindustan Times, 26 March 1936.

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Gandhi called the ‘parliamentary mentality’. The existing situation of complete suppression of civil liberties and the atmosphere of suffocation made the acceptance of offices look tempting. To those who had not yet recovered from a sense of defeat and were suffering from an acute sense of helplessness, the acceptance of offices promised an atmosphere where they would be able to regain control over their lives and once again be able to breathe the air of civil liberties. The Congress-type of open and peaceful mass movement could not be created in the absence of civil liberties. Congress could not conceive of creating a mass movement in the immediate future as the constitution itself was forcibly imposed on India by ruthlessly suppressing the mass movement and moreover the suppression was still being continued. Obviously masses needed a phase of respite and the working up of the mass movement needed an atmosphere of minimum civil liberties where demonstrations could be organised, meetings held and the newspapers published openly. Given the nature of declared ‘safeguards’ and the Special Powers of the Governor the constitution had very little to offer to the Indian National Congress in terms of state power. But by accepting offices under this constitution Congress could escape from the rule of Ordinances and once again enter into the domain of limited civil liberties. The results of dual policy, of suppression and simultaneous imposition of the new constitution had caught the Congress in a trap. The colonial authorities would not allow even a minimum of civil liberties unless the Congress was willing to accept offices thereby indicating that it no longer entertained the idea of organising a mass movement in the near future. Office acceptance was left open as the only escape route to ‘liberty’. On the other hand, only the acceptance of offices could create the preconditions for the emergence of a Congress-type mass movement. But to accept this realism without a sense of surrender and hopelessness was not an easy thing to do. Congressmen were to grasp this reality through a protracted process of thought and debate. Tempers slowly cooled off. Earlier emotional reactions gave way to calm and calculated moves. Congressmen could not create the type of movement which the Socialists demanded of them in the very near future. Therefore, for many Congressmen, who could not put up with the existing conditions and at the same time were not feeling inspired enough to prepare for the next round of struggle, acceptance of offices was a natural choice. In reality they did not perceive the choice, as posed by the Socialists and Nehru, one of cooperation with

Of Political Issues and Ideological Conflicts 159

or struggle against imperialism. In this existing state of demoralisation under the rule of Ordinances they simply could not perceive of struggle in the near future. What they were yearning for was to obtain a political situation without the Ordinances without which the mass spirit could not be revitalised. But the British were willing to create that situation only if the Congressmen agreed to accept the constitution. Once the Congress won majorities in the provinces it gave legitimacy to their yearnings for civil liberties. The right-wing was driven to accept offices not because of the motives of personal gain or political compromise which were attributed to it by the left but because of its being more in tune with the specific political reality of the Indian struggle against an imperialist state which was not an autocratic state. The fears of the right-wingers were not unfounded that if they did not accept the offices, communalists and pro-government vested interests would make use of the ministries to harass the Congress and would attract the attention of the masses by flaunting their reformist programmes.14 On 7 April 1934, Gandhi issued a statement and suspended Civil Disobedience as a mass movement. ‘The decision and every word of the statement’, he wrote, ‘are in answer to intense introspection, searching of the heart, and working upon God.’15 Referring to multifaceted programmes in the context of Swaraj Gandhi commented: ‘Great causes like these cannot be served by intellectual equipment alone, they call for spiritual effort or soul force’.16 Many a time contemporary critics of Gandhi lampooned certain Gandhian conceptions such as ‘change of heart’, ‘inner voice’, etc. In all crucial decisions at the turning points the Mahatma was guided hy his inner voice. But what was this ‘inner voice’? This was nothing but the faculty of instinctive intuition developed amidst mass movements to sense the moods of the masses and flowed from a deep-seated commitment to advance the national cause with the best possible means available in the given circumstances. It was through his ‘religious’ terminology that the Mahatma derived his moral strength and the legitimacy of his decisions in his own eyes. Such an intuitive response—‘inner voice’ or ‘subjective spontaneity’—on the part of a 14

M.L. Setalvad, Bhulabhai Desai, Builders of Modern India Series, 1968, pp. 168–70. 15 B. Pattabhi Sitaramayya, The History of the Indian National Congress, 1885–1935, Vol. 1, New Delhi, 1969, p. 568. 16 Harijan, 21 November 1936; Bose, Selections, p. 216.

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leader is actually a product of numerous complex processes going on in a human mind. ‘It would be absurd’, wrote Herzen, … to regard man as a exception to the general laws of nature and attribute to him a subjective spontaneity outside law. However, this in no way prevents man from cultivating in himself a faculty, composed of reason, feeling and memory which ‘weighs’ the possibilities and decides on the choice of action to be performed. This happens not through divine grace, nor through an imaginary spontaneity, but is developed by man’s organs, his innate and acquired faculties which are shaped and combined in a thousand ways by social life.17

There was a basic similarity between the conjunctures of 1923–25 and 1933–34 in terms of receding mass movements, the tendencies of politics thrown up and Gandhi’s location of his own role vis-à-vis these tendencies. It was in almost similar circumstances resulting from the ‘withdrawal’ of non-cooperation that the Swaraj Party had emerged within the Congress. Changed circumstances necessitated changed methods of struggle and hence new tactics involving new orientation, a new tone, and a new way of approaching the masses. The most precious fundamental quality of a political party is its unequalled aptitude to orient itself rapidly, to change tactics quickly and to renew its armament, in a word, to carry out abrupt turns. Only a leadership which possesses initiative, critical thinking and ideological courage can implement this policy of brusque turns. It is in such conjunctures of sharp turns when the rank and file of a particular party is thrown into confusion, that the ability of a leader is put to the severest of tests. These dramatic situations not only demand from a leader an absolutely undogmatic attitude but also the creativity of incisive insights into the nature of objective circumstances and men with qualities most suited to act in such circumstances. Parties led by medicore leaders when faced with such sharp turns get either paralysed or split. As in the conjuncture of 1923–25, in the background of receding mass movement, from his earlier position of opposition to pro-changers Gandhi slowly veered around to a position of active support for them, similarly in 17 A.I. Herzen, Letters on Free Will, quoted in Roy Medvedev, Samizdat Register, No. 1. Merlin Press, London, 1977, p. 9. For a similar interpretation of Gandhi see Nehru, An Autobiography, 1962 edition, p. 85.

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the conjuncture of 1928–29, sensing the rising tempo of mass discontent and radicalisation of the Congress, Gandhi, who was earlier a supporter of the Nehru report, slowly shifted to a position of allowing the younger generation and radical forces to assert themselves within the Congress. Since 1920 the national movement had abandoned the single track of constitutional agitation, the National Congress got differentiated— not to be misunderstood in the sense of a hostile division—into two broad inclinations, parliamentary and extra-parliamentary. At the time of nationwide and prolonged direct action, i.e., the Civil Disobedience, the two wings merged with each other. Boycott of councils was common both to the ‘1920’ and ‘1930’ movements and each time on the eve of mass upsurge, the parliamentary or constitutionalist wing dissolved itself into the extra-parliamentary or non-constitutionalist wing. After the withdrawal of the mass upsurge, in both cases, the parliamentary wing emerged again and demanded its right to expression. In both the cases, the emergence was attended with mutual hostilities. At the reappearance of the parliamentarians or constitutionalists in the year 1934, Gandhi, who had learnt from experience that the pro-changers and no-changers were in fact harmonious parts of a single strategy, acquiesced in the changed situation with greater ease. About one month prior to the Bombay Session Gandhi issued a long Press statement on 17 September in which he clarified his position. He said, ‘I am convinced that in the present circumstances of the country and in the absence of any general scheme of civil resistance, a Parliamentary Party within the Congress is a necessary part of any programme that may be framed by the Congress … .’ 18 He also underlined the fact that there were ‘sharp differences of opinion among us’ on that point. In the same statement he went on to say that he had welcomed the formation of the socialist group. Many of them were respected and self-sacrificing co-workers. But yet he had fundamental differences with them on the programme published in their authorised pamphlets. But he would not, by reason of the moral pressure he might be able to exert,

18 B. Pattabhi Sitaramayya, op. cit., p. 581. ‘I also realise’, Gandhi wrote to K.M. Munshi, ‘the dangers which you refer to, which beset the entry into the councils. Still, I believe that the thing will remain with us for ever. Such a parliamentary party is sure to be in the Congress fold. I have come to believe that to disregard it is both impossible and improper.’ K.M. Munshi, I Follow the Mahatma, Bombay, 1940, pp. 126–27.

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suppress the spread of ideas, propounded in their literature. He would not interfere with the free expression of those ideas, however distasteful some of them might be to him. But if these ideas gained ascendancy in the Congress, as he thought they might well, he could not remain in the Congress.19 Let it be emphasised that it seems unthinkable that Jawaharlal Nehru, as the president of the Indian National Congress and other Congress Socialists could have been allowed by the right-wing to carry on their activities within the Congress if Gandhi was really opposed to them. Through this statement he made it perfectly clear to many of his followers that he would not allow his prestige and moral authority to be used against the socialists and propagation of socialist views. It almost tantamounted to telling the socialists that he had no objection to their ascendancy within the Congress but they should not expect from him to fight their battles for them since he generally disagreed with the programme published by them. Gandhi was not a constitutionalist and he did not believe that Indian masses could achieve liberty through constitutional struggles. ‘Never has anything been done on this earth without direct action.’20 But yet he did not believe in artificially ‘creating mass struggles’. He would not ‘take a single step in non-cooperation’ unless he was satisfied that ‘the country is ready for that step’. 21 Gandhi was clear that boycott of legislatures was ‘not an eternal principle like that of truth and non-violence. My opposition to them has considerably lessened, but that does not mean that I am going back on my former position. The question is purely of strategy.’22 M.N. Roy continued to confuse non-violence with constitutionalism. He continued to assert that ‘in the last analysis, Gandhist politics is constitutionalism’. ‘The fundamental principle of Gandhism’, he wrote, is non-violence. Practised according to this principle Congress politics can hardly be distinguished from constitutionalism.23 19

Ibid. Gandhi in Bose, Selections, p. 153. ‘I shall retain my disbelief in legislatures as an instrument for obtaining swaraj in terms of masses.’ M.K. Gandhi, The Collected Works, Vol. LXIII, pp. 109–110. 21 Ibid., p. 197. 22 Gandhi quoted in The Indian Triumvirate: A Political Biography of Gandhi, Patel and Nehru by V.B. Kulkarni, Bombay, 1969, p. 129 (emphasis added). 23 Independent India, Vol. 3, No. 3, 15 January 1939; No. 8, 19 February 1939. 20

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The period between 1933 and 1937 was a period of intense debate and discussion within the ranks of the Indian National Congress. In this changed context, what was to be the form of struggle against imperialism? Two different and contending perspectives were put forward by Congressmen to not only comprehend and explain the situation but also to suggest the most viable way for the advancement of the national movement. These two perspectives drew their inspiration and were in conformity with the two overall strategies contending to capture the imagination of rank and file Congressmen.24 Many Congress nationalist leaders, not all of them right-wingers, advocated change in the Congress programme from mass action to council entry and attributed this need for change in programme to the changed circumstances. They were undogmatic, hard-headed realists who refused to be cowed down by the sharp retorts of the socialists. For them, the need for suspension of civil disobedience and a new programme of council entry was dictated by the changed situation. Socialists doubted their motives; they in turn accused them of dogmatism and irresponsibility. Socialists had too much faith in the notion that if they unitedly made an effort they could create a mass movement. They overemphasised the element of ‘voluntarism’, while their opponents emphasised more the push of seismic tremors in mass psychology. ‘Let us correct,’ wrote one of the champions of the new programme, … another common error. It is a mistake to suppose that the Congress or any other organisation or individual gives a particular political ‘lead’ to the masses. It is just the other way. The masses first attain a particular political level, and in their turn lead both the leaders and the organisation. It would be psychologically an impossible phenomenon, even if it were tried, to endeavour to push back by artificial or unreal means, mass psychology … .25

Interestingly, Gandhi himself based his leadership on this understanding of mass psychology. He could lead the masses because he could correctly sense the moment when they were willing to be lead. Herein lies the secret 24 As referred to in the preface and explained in the introduction these contending strategies were: The strategy of building counter-hegemony through non-violent mass movements and the strategy of insurrection. 25 K.F. Nariman, What Next?, Bombay, 17 October, 1934, K.F. Nariman was a radical Congressman. He joined hands with Bose after he founded the Forward Bloc in 1940.

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of his hold over the masses. How clearly he understood this dialectical relationship between the leader and the masses becomes clear from his following comment: We (referring to himself and Ali brothers) have ear of the masses because we voice their sentiments. The masses are by no means so foolish or unintelligent as we sometimes imagine, they often perceive things with their intuition, which we ourselves fail to see with our intellect. But while the masses know what they want, they often do not know how to express their wants and less often, how to get what they want. Herein comes the use of leadership.26

These realists within the Congress were convinced that ‘a half-hearted blow or failure or fiasco may cause national reaction and depression and result in greater disaster and setback’. Just before the Bombay session of Congress in 1934, K.F. Nariman,27 one of the champions of the new line, wrote a book, What Next? In this he systematically argued why Congress needed to change its tactics. He discussed the Bolshevik attitude towards the Duma in Russia and quoted from the writings of Lenin and Stalin to drive home his point. But in the very beginning he warned against blindly copying the Russian experience. Arguing against a ‘straight line’ politics and politics of ‘permanent militancy’, Nariman quoted Lenin on his side and argued that in their onward march they might have to adopt a zigzag course with occasional halts at times even reversing a little in search of a better path of ascent as climbers of steep ascent always found it more difficult to keep in a straight line but always found it physically easier and bodily less exhausting to adopt a serpentine path but never swerving from the straight moral course. Practical, feasible and attainable politics always kept into account the strength, power and resourcefulness of its opponent as well as its own limitations and capacity. But historical analogies were dangerous if an attempt was made to follow blindly any foreign programme in all its details and particulars regardless of the circumstances and environment of the country concerned. If this was not taken into account then instead of serving as a guide, these references might prove to be total and disastrous pitfalls. 26

Young India, 3 November 1920. K.F. Nariman was the Chairman of the Reception Committee of the Congress Session held at Bombay from 26 to 28 October 1934. The book was released on 17 October 1934. 27

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Both the points, of similarity as well as of dissimilarity must be carefully studied and weighed so as to enable them to discriminate and decide each case according to its merits. In other words, it could have preventive as well as positive effects.28 K.F. Nariman, although a firm believer in the efficacy of the policy of council entry, had the fairness to admit in clear terms the great danger connected with this policy. ‘When men without proper political stamina and backbone launch into this venture’, he very correctly observed, ‘they usually consider these bodies not as mere halting places but as the final goal and destination, and their ideology and mentality are so transformed as to convert the most ferocious firebrand into a halting and hesitating chatterer, preferring the comforts and glamour of well-bedecked council chambers to the rigours and hardships of prison-cells.’29 But did the remedy lie in turning away from this danger—a purgatory where ‘revolutionaries’ are transformed into ‘moderates’? ‘The essential condition to save any parliamentary party from such a pitfall’, observed Nariman, ‘is the selection of the proper type of men strong enough to withstand the effect and resist the infection of this poisonous atmosphere.’30 In a survey of the contemporary situation K.M. Munshi underlined the sense of demoralisation which had overtaken the country after the civil disobedience was suppressed. Therefore the main object of the Congress, he argued, ought to be to ‘revive the spirit of resistance as large sections in the country after the last movement lost their vigour and loyalty and would be lost to the Congress for a long time to come’.31 Surveying the Congress movement in a historical context and pinpointing the mechanism whereby it gathered its strength, he stated: The history of the Congress during the last thirty years shows how this strength has grown out of the rhythmic movements of our national life. A lull has followed the storm and in its turn has been followed 28

K.F. Nariman, What Next?, National Archives. Amrita Bazar Patrika (Calcutta) wrote an editorial on the book dated 4 January 1935. 30 Ibid. 31 K.M. Munshi, Office-Acceptance: A Survey of the Problem (Pamphlet), Rajendra Prasad Papers, File No. 1/36, Collection 6. M.A. Ansari and B.C. Roy, in a joint statement, urged that the Congress should not only enter the legislatures under the new constitution, but ‘should also occupy all places of power, intiative and vantage in its struggle for freedom’. AICC Papers, File No. 2/1935. 29

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by a still more powerful storm. Every succeeding upheaval has been characterised by an increasing wider basis and sterner resistance. This was achieved by the Congress, not by shouting impossible slogans or making impatient gestures, but by acquiring a wider control over the life of the people during every period of lull. The real object of the Congress, therefore, is to prepare the country for a new life by gaining greater control over all forms of social organisations, governmental and non-governmental.

Turning to the leftists, he remarked: ‘Their strength lies in their faith that they are destined to be torch-bearers of a new order, their weakness in their inability to appreciate realities in the country.’32 Similarly, in the course of a speech delivered at Vishakapatnam, Acharya Kripalani, General Secretary of the Congress, expounded at length the logic of the mass movement for the benefit of the left-wing critics, especially the Socialists. The Congress understood it perfectly well, he argued, that it could not arrest power from government through constitutional action. But the Congress cannot always be fighting. As was clear from history that every nation in its struggle for freedom had had periods of comparative quietness—periods in which they consolidated and gathered fresh strength—so also here in India, it was not possible for the nation to put forth at all times sufficient energy and sacrifice to carry on a fight to the finish. To a superficial observer it might appear that the fight had been abandoned, but a national fight could never be abandoned until the national aim was achieved. The Congressmen were waiting for ‘another uprising of the nation’s spirit’. ‘A nation,’ he concluded, … is like the sea. It has got its ebb and flow. We cannot artificially create a tide and we cannot go forward during the ebb. We started the non-cooperation movement in 1920 and had to wait till 1930 for another effort. We are today gathering strength and waiting for another inflow of national spirit.33

This understanding of the dynamics of mass movement in terms of ‘ebb’ and ‘tide’ or ‘lull and storm’ seems to have been fairly widespread among the Congressmen. M.S. Baburao compared the Civil Disobedience movement to ‘a huge wave rising and falling, and at last dashing 32 33

Ibid. AICC News Letter, Letter No. 31, 14 November 1935.

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against the rocks with a tremendous force.’ ‘If we analyse the huge wave,’ he continued, ‘it comprises small ripples which unite together, join other ripples, and dash against the stones on the shore with such tremendous force which makes the adamant granite lose its particles in course of time.’34 For example, at a meeting at Kadiyapulanka (Rajamundry) Dr B. Subrahmanyam, while responding to the question whether the non-cooperation movement was dead, observed: ‘Every great movement in the world has to ebb to be followed by a tide again.’35 Recalling the Civil Disobedience movement, Sardar Sardul Singh Caveeshar observed: ‘It could never be expected to be in the high tide always. It had its ebb and flow.’36 Since they did not think in terms of ‘mass movement leading up to insurrection’ followed by a capture of state power, the right-wing leaders judged the success of the movement by different standards, i.e., by the ‘moral’ impact it had left behind and not by the number of economic demands conceded. In the eyes of the left the civil disobedience had failed to achieve its purpose but in those of the right-wing it had succeeded considerably in advancing the cause. Addressing the Bombay Suburban District Political Conference Bhulabai Desai remarked that the civil disobedience, notwithstanding its suppression, had left India with the legacy of a strong moral foundation, of the conviction of the utility of satyagraha’s new force in the fight for freedom. Undoubtedly the way in which the resources of the organised government had to be utilised for a period of three years was sufficient acknowledgement of the strength of the struggle and the conviction that it was only a question of time when it would inevitably succeed.37 Addressing a meeting of about 5,000 persons at Ahmedabad Vallabhbhai Patel assured the audience that ‘war’ was only closed for the purpose of taking rest and that the fight once begun would never end.38 In the statement regarding his withdrawal from the Congress Presidential election for the Lucknow session, Sardar Patel frankly aired his differences with Jawaharlal Nehru on the question of capitalism and 34

Nehru Papers, Correspondence, Vol. 95, M.S. Baburao to Nehru, 7 October 1933. Hindu, 16 April 1923. 36 The Bombay Chronicle, 30 October 1934. 37 HDP, File No. 18/4/35 FR (ii). 38 HDP, File No. 18/9/34 FR (i). 35

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socialism. But as far the immediate tasks were concerned there were no differences. ‘All of us,’ he stated, ‘want to destroy the imposed constitution. How to destroy it from within the legislatures is the question.’39 Without disclosing the source of its information, the Fortnightly Report from Bihar stated that on the issue of re-entering the legislatures, Rajendra Prasad’s view was that a revolutionary party such as the Congress should not assume office until it had captured the state. Moreover the decision to re-enter the legislatures committed the Congress to the further step of taking up office. He was clearly of the view that as soon as the Congress took power and had to implement promises and disappoint hopes that it could not fulfil it would lose at once the immense advantage which it had hitherto as an opposition and would henceforth be subjected to the reactions which periodically set in against a parliamentary party.40 Rajendra Prasad denied that the Congress was sliding back to the old path of constitutionalism. In a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru he wrote that all big struggles necessarily came across such situations where the individuals ‘however much they may chafe and fume’ would have to lie low working and waiting for better times. Directly facing the accusation of Nehru and other socialists, he added that he did not ‘believe that any one has gone back to pre-non-cooperation mentality’.41 At the Lucknow Session, addressing those who were opposed to office acceptance, Rajendra Prasad concluded: ‘They should not believe that Congressmen would work the Act as Government wished them to work it.’42 To begin with even the strongest protagonists of council entry were convinced that, whatever the mode of fight, the Act of 1935 would be opposed tooth and nail. Satyamurthi said to the finance member: … if you think by accepting office we are going to settle down to work the Government of India Act, you are making the mistake of your life. This Act must go and the earlier it goes, the better; and if we accept office, it will be to break the Act at the earliest possible moment.43 39

Sitaramayya, The History of the Indian National Congress, Vol. 2, p. 32. In a letter to Dr Ansari (26 December 1934) in B.N. Pande (ed.), The Indian National Movement, 1885–1947: Select Documents, 1979, London, pp. 75–76. The letter was intercepted by the police. 41 Jawaharlal Nehru, A Bunch of Old Letters, Bombay, 1958, p. 156, 19 December 1935. 42 Indian Annual Register, January–June 1936, Vol. 1, p. 283. 43 Quoted in the editorial of The Eastern Times, 30 March 1937. HDP, File No. 4/16/37. 40

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In May 1935 Satyamurthi wrote a letter to Vallabhbhai Patel in connection with a statement made by Patel that ‘rejection of the reforms cannot, in any case, mean acceptance of ministerships under the constitution’. The Congress Party, he emphasised, had to capture the majority of the seats in the legislative council and then to accept ministerships and carry on the fight for swaraj. In any case, he suggested, the Congress policy of capturing the legislatures by Congressmen clearly included capturing all positions in the legislatures. Satyamurthy also emphasised the need to guard against those who were advocating acceptance of office ‘from unworthy and personal motives’.44 At the Lucknow Session (April 1936) two amendments were put forward against the official Working Committee resolution to postpone the decision on office acceptance. Sardul Singh Caveeshar’s amendment was rejected by a majority of the delegates, approximately 250 to 450. Sampurnanand’s amendment was declared lost by 255 to 487 votes.45 Interestingly, in the history of the Congress, on any political issue, there were always two opinions.46 All decisions were preceded by debate and discussion, sometimes on a very wider scale. In one of his speeches Kripalani, the General Secretary of the INC, summed up the reasons for this mode of functioning of the Congress. ‘In politics,’ he said, ‘a hasty or a wrong generalisation may involve a setback, spelling misery and ruin to thousands. It may not jeopardise the ultimate achievement of the goal, but it may dangerously retard progress towards it.’47 Socialists recognised the fact that ‘today we are demoralised and dejected. A defeatist mentality has overtaken the Congress.’48 But they were not willing to accept the ‘ebb’ and ‘flow’ theory of the mass movement as put forward by the non-leftist Congressmen and majority of the Congress leadership. ‘The policy,’ stated Acharya Narendra Deva, ‘of alternating between direct action in a revolutionary situation and

44

HDP, File No. 32/3/35. As far as office acceptance was concerned there were ‘advantages and disadvantages’ in whatever course was adopted. AICC Papers, J.B. Kirpalani’s views, File No. G-19/1934. 45 The Indian Annual Register, January–June, 1936, Vol. 1, p. 284. 46 Report of the Violence Inquiry Committee, AICC Papers, File No. P–6/1939–40; PL–3 (i)/1937. Part II. 47 Kripalani, Gandhian Thought, p. 95. The statement was made in 1934. 48 Why Congress Socialist Party? Text of Acharya Narendra Deva’s Presidential Address at the Foundation Conference of the All-India Congress Socialist Party held at Patna on 16 and 17 May 1934. Also see HDP, File No. 18/9/34 FR(i).

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constructive or legislative work, according to one’s temperament, in a period of reaction, does not commend itself to us. The situation continues to be revolutionary.’ A certain notion of the deepening crisis of the capitalist system was being made the sole basis of political logic. The belief was firmly rooted in the view that this deepening crisis would force the people to awaken to the realities of life around them and seek a progressive solution to their problems. Economic crisis was permanently propelling the masses by fuelling their discontent. ‘The industrial crisis,’ Narendra Deva told his audience: … is not over and there are no signs of a return to industrial prosperity. The agrarian crisis in India is also deepening. Given proper leadership, therefore, we should carry the masses with us and march from victory to victory. We can, with confidence, look forward to the future … . The next revolutionary wave will be much bigger and mightier. And let me assure you, it is not as distant as some people think.49

The relationship between human motivations and economic crisis is necessarily a complex one. The notion that the poor and the exploited are not moved by ideologies but only by an appeal to their ‘economic interests’ seems to have been fairly widespread during the thirties among the Indian left.50 This was a standard left critique of the Congress that it was unable to widen its base because of its abstract concepts such as national unity, political independence and democracy. Instead of integrating the ‘economic dimension’ within the existing ideological appeal, the left sought to replace the primacy of ‘ideology’ with the primacy of ‘economies’. Following the lead given by Jawaharlal Nehru, socialists were opposed to what they defined as the orientation towards constitutionalism and demanded from the Congress leadership that it should be made clear that no Congressman should accept any ministerial office. Why did the socialists think that Congress was reverting to the old path of constitutionalism? Until the period of Gandhi’s leadership the independence movement had been conceived in two possible and mutually exclusive forms: constitutionalism and armed revolt. Before 49

Ibid. Narendra Deva, ‘The Task Before Us’, Congress Socialist, Vol. 1, No. 1, 29 September 1934. 50

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Gandhi appeared on the scene, the first alternative crystallised in the Congress, the only large-scale organisation of the Indian people. Gandhi transcended this traditional dichotomy between constitutionalism and armed revolt and evolved the foundations of a new paradigm—the paradigm of mass movements. The political perspective based on this paradigm was basically non-constitutionalist and non-insurrectionary though it subsumed within it the ‘moment’ of constitutionalism. But socialists, though they admired Gandhi’s role in mobilising the masses, did not understand this basic contribution of Gandhi’s in constructing a new type of paradigm. They were still looking at the developments in the Congress through the old prism of ‘Reform vs. Revolution’. Since they saw themselves as revolutionaries within the Congress, this fact in itself bestowed upon their opponents the epithet of reformists. Socialists also denied that the government policy was a dual policy—a clever mixture of reforms and repression. The Congress Socialist editorial asserted that the government policy was single-track and pursued steadily the course of what, in government language, was known as the preservation of law and order. ‘Should the country’, it asked, ‘still plan out its course of action in accordance with a dual policy of the government which existed only in the fanciful realms of Dr. Ansari’s thought?’51 On the contrary the dominant Congress leadership recognised this dual policy of the government as a fact. ‘Like the dual programme of the British repression and reform, coercion and coquetry’, writes Pattabhi Sitaramayya, ‘the Congress had its dual programme of fight and national reconstruction … .’52 The Congress socialists failed to make any realistic appraisal of the realities of the conjuncture. They showed no knowledge of the dynamics of the mass movement in terms of ebb and tide and its other concomitant implications. They also did not appreciate the complex nature of the colonial state which was expressed in the framework of ‘dual policy’. Many other Congressmen, whom the socialists characterised as ‘nationalist circles’, wanted to frame the Congress policies taking into consideration the dual policy of the Government. They were impatient with the slow tempo of the Congress. For them the Congress leadership was not only mismanaging things but also dragging its feet as far as preparations for 51 52

Congress Socialist, Vol. 1, No. 6, 30 December 1934. Sitaramayya, The History of the Indian National Congress, p. 6.

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the next struggle were concerned. ‘If things had been managed properly’, wrote B.P. Sinha, ‘this should have been a time of rising tempers in India … . What we need is political audacity and yet greater audacity is the principle for us if we are serious about complete independence.’53 He spoke of the workers and peasants’ participation in the coming struggle on the basis of the Karachi programme. This he argued could be done by immediately starting propaganda against the Indian Bill and in favour of the Constituent Assembly by tackling on to it specific economic demands of the working masses. ‘We shall soon be’, he said, ‘in the midst of a crisis, and we should now be preparing for it, unless, of course, the Congress is prepared to accept office.’54 Throughout the thirties the left continued to criticise the Congress demand for transfer of power. This criticism of the left was rooted in their belief in classical Marxism that power is never transferred by the rulers to the people over which they rule. ‘If history has any significance, any meaning; if historical factors are any guide, then it must be clear to all that power is always captured.’55 The unwillingness of the Congress leadership to respond to the left’s demand to start immediate preparation for the struggle was proof enough of its class bias. Jayaprakash Narayan underlined this when he wrote that the dominant Congress leadership was opposed to a mass movement and was likely to desert if it could not check the movement as a whole.56 Forty-three years later, recalling these times. Jayaprakash Narayan wrote that Sardar Patel was ‘an impeccable commander who would not compromise on any terms with British imperialism’.57 On the other hand, like the socialists and communists, Nehru was convinced that some of the Congress leaders were feeling ‘tired’ and ‘hunger for rest and quiet’ while the ‘elemental forces and economic necessity’ were driving the masses ‘to their inevitable goal’.58 Not in the very distant future, because of the ‘grip of dynamic forces’, he visualised India moving towards ‘a semi-revolutionary situation.’ This would create the conditions for the emergence of a Constituent Assembly. The allusion 53

Congress Socialist, Vol. I, No. 9, 27 January 1935. Ibid. 55 Congress Socialist, Vol. I, No. 12, 24 February 1935. 56 Ibid., Vol. 1, No. 6, 30 December 1934. 57 ‘Sardar Patel—A Reappraisal’, The Indian Express, Chandigarh, 31 October 1977. 58 ‘The Presidential Address’, Lucknow, 12 April 1936, Selected Works, p. 185. 54

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to the Bolshevik experience becomes noticeable when he further argued: ‘Such an assembly, in order to be fruitful, must have previous thought behind it and a definite scheme put forward by an organised group.’58a Addressing a crowd of 40,000 on the Triplicane beach (6 October 1936) Nehru stated that he had not changed his views on the subject of office acceptance by the Congress. He held as strongly as ever that it would be a fatal error for the Congress or for any Congressman to accept office for that would inevitably involve cooperation with British imperialism giving it a moral backing.59 The Congress decision to enter the councils, was based on the assessment of harsh realities, i.e., suppression of the Civil Disobedience movement and one-sided imposition of the constitution. The dominant leadership knew that they could not artificially whip up a mass movement when the tide was on the ebb. Given these ‘harsh realities’ Congress could not put forward a perspective of immediate struggle. Since for the left, struggle meant permanent mass movement leading to capture of power, therefore, the moment they saw the Congress settling down for council entry, they jumped to the conclusion that Congress had abandoned the struggle for freedom and was sliding back to the rut of constitutionalism. While for the Congress council entry and constructive programme was not an end in itself but an attempt to revive the national spirit by constantly coming into touch with the masses. But as far as the question of office acceptance was concerned the Congress Socialist Party planned a campaign to create an opinion against office acceptance among the Congressmen. They were also fully aware of the fact that persistent propaganda was being carried on by a section of very vocal Congressmen for office acceptance.60 Meanwhile, those who felt very strongly on the question of office acceptance formed the Anti-Ministry Committee under the Presidentship of Sardul Singh Caveeshar. M.R. Masani and Rafi Ahmed Kidwai were the Secretaries of this Committee. A pamphlet, namely, Acceptance of Offices under the New Constitution was published under the name of Sardul Singh Caveeshar.61 Caveeshar distinguished between two mutually 58a

Ibid., p. 184. File No. 4/6/36. 60 The Times of India, 9 October 1935. 61 Sardul Singh Caveeshar, Acceptance of Offices under the New Constitution, Pamphlet published by the Anti-Ministry Committee (MSA). 59

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exclusive mentalities within the Congress ranks: those who thought that India could achieve swaraj through Parliamentary methods alone and those who believed that Parliamentary methods had only a limited scope as regards pushing forward the country’s march towards swaraj and that the goal would never be reached without mass action. Again this simplistic categorisation of two mentalities was being derived from the notion of Reform vs. Revolution. It was in the light of this perspective that Congress was divided between right-wing and left-wing and, further the right-wingers were declared to be possessing a definite mentality—the result of a certain ideological–psychological class complex. This approach to the new constitution was based on the denial, while the overall policy of the Congress was precisely based on the recognition, of the fact that colonial rule in India was being perpetuated through the dual policy of reform and repression. Concluded the anti-ministry pamphlet: ‘The new constitution perpetuates autocracy under the guise of a democratic form; by destroying the chances of the formation of a ministry you tear down that democratic veil and leave autocracy in its ugly nakedness.’62 The second conference of the All India Congress Socialist Party met at Meerut on 19 and 20 January, 1936. In a resolution the Party demanded that in provinces where the Congress secured a majority, it should abstain from forming ministries as that would, among other things, be a step towards the working of the constitution, and would create illusions among the public and dissipate the forces of direct action.63 These ideas were not confined to paper only. They were widely disseminated by the left-wing and other radical Congressmen in provincial conferences, and local level meetings. The Anti-Ministry Committee organised a meeting in Saraspur which was attended by 500 persons. Similiarly a public meeting was organised in Bombay to celebrate the ‘All-India Anti-Ministry Day’ on 22 March 1936. The Meerut Session of the CSP appealed to delegates to the Lucknow session of the Congress to support the policy set out in the party resolution and to secure its acceptance by the Congress. The party also decided to join hands with the Anti-Ministry Committee of Congressmen and the AITUC to launch a campaign against office acceptance. At the Andhra Provincial 62

Ibid. All India Congress Socialist Patty. Second Annual Conference. File No. 800(75) A-IV of 1936 (MSA). 63

Of Political Issues and Ideological Conflicts 175

Conference (9–10 February 1936) resolution on the acceptance of ministries was passed by 93 votes to 35. The resolution was opposed by Congress Socialist Party members and Dr Pattabhi Sitaramayya.64 Later on Dr Pattabhi Sitaramayya issued a statement opposing office acceptance. 22 March was observed all over the country as the Anti-Ministry Day. In UP, the Provincial Committee of the CSP had instructed constituent committees to observe the Day. At the Faizpur Congress in December 1936 the Working Committee resolution to again defer the decision on office acceptance until all the election results were available was passed without difficulty. M.N. Roy believed that the creation of deadlocks would sharpen the conflict between the people and the colonial state. The struggle for the capture of power, he emphasised, was ahead of them and the entire national movement should prepare for this. The left should support the formation of the ministries. Given a majority in the legislature, the acceptance of offices could be the most effective method of developing the anti-imperialist struggle to a higher level where the slogan of the Constituent Assembly would be a matter of practical politics.65 He criticised the Congress Socialists for making non-acceptance of office as the sole token of radicalism. What was the position of the Communist Party group on the question of participation in the elections and acceptance of offices? According to the communists British imperialism was ‘redecorating itself, with the unreal democratic tinsels of the new constitution, to hide the barbarous autocracy of its rule in India’.66 The party declared that wrecking the slave constitution was its first and immediate task. And this could be done, believed the party, only through a widespread and militant mass movement. The CPI rejected the policy of boycotting the elections as sectarianism, because it allowed ‘loyalist reactionary parties’ to ‘bamboozle the masses’ and lead them into the camp of imperialism. Disagreeing with the Congress assessment CPI asserted that beneath the surface of 64

Congress Socialist, Vol. 1, No. 10, 22 February 1936. Later on in 1939 during the presidential elections Bose was to label Pattabhi Sitaramayya as the candidate of the right-wing. 65 Independent India, Vol. 1. No. 5, 2 May 1937; No. 6, 1937. 66 ‘Communist Party and the coming Elections’, Editorial, The Communist, organ of the Central Committee of the CPI (Section of the Third International), Vol. 1, No. 10, July 1936.

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apparent lull in the political movement a new mass upsurge was brewing. Continued the editorial: ‘… CP declares that it is incorrect to hold that a mass movement is not possible today. A new mass movement is impending, we can have it—here and now—through our efforts.’67 Taking this basic assumption as their point of departure communists held that their task was ‘to develop and build the mass movement’, based on the partial demands of the toiling masses, and for the ‘destruction of slave constitution’. The elections should be transformed into a large scale anti-imperialist mass mobilisation. It was necessary, stated the communists, that all the existing anti-imperialist organisations must function as a united team. Communists also declared that they would actively support the Congress candidates against the loyalist zamindar candidates with all the force at their command. The other most important issue of the day was the issue of ministry versus anti-ministry. Communists were of the view that the approach of the entire ‘left nationalist camp’ under the influence of the Congress Socialist Party on this issue was ‘narrow and abstract’. The Communists, like M.N. Roy, were also critical of the CSP approach. What the right-wing was really afraid of, argued the communists, was not their general propaganda for socialism so much as their clear-cut anti-imperialism which followed necessarily from their socialist faith and Marxian understanding. All the reactionary parties were coming forward with their programmes of doing something for the masses. In this imperialism would help them actively as its present policy was to give whatever petty concessions it could give to the masses through loyalist reactionaries. Given this kind of scenario, the left should concede the right the issue of ministry acceptance. After the right-wing had accepted the ministries, the united left should undertake the task of exposing their reformism and liberate the masses from under their influence.68 The irony of this entire exercise in hammering out a complex tactical line on the question of office acceptance was that it could not be put into practice by the communists. The communists emphasised that their tactical line was the only line which could save the left from isolation and 67 68

Ibid. Ibid.

Of Political Issues and Ideological Conflicts 177

avoid unfruitful splits within the national movement. Also they constantly underlined the fact that it was the wrong tactical line of the socialists which would lead to the isolation of the left. But strangely enough at the end they argued for abandoning their own correct line because its very implementation would isolate them from the Congress Socialists. The dilemma was that the political line of National United Front could only be advanced through the tactical line worked out by the communists while the immediate goal of left-unity could only be achieved by abandoning this tactical line. It may be stated that this dilemma between the much required political line to cement the National United Front and the political line to maintain the unity of the left forces was to confront the communists once again during the Tripuri session which led to the Gandhi–Bose confrontation. Thus the debate was between two sets of Congressmen to determine the best course of advancing the cause of swaraj as a whole in the given circumstances irrespective of the class inclination. But the debate was not seen by the socialists and communists as a clash between two sets of views on a politico-tactical issue of supreme importance. It was seen as a clash of ideologies and class inclinations, as an expression of inherent class attitudes in terms of compromising the anti-imperialist stand of the bourgeoisie and the militant anti-imperialist stand of those who assumed themselves to be representing the workers and the peasants. Views of many of the right-wingers, for instance Rajendra Prasad, were no different from the leftists in their assessment of council entry and office acceptance. Gandhi, and those who were willing to follow his lead, were as strong disbelievers in the path of advance through parliamentary tactics alone as the leftists. But once the perspective of Reform vs. Revolution was brought to bear upon the reality its dogmatic application would not permit a complex understanding of the issue involved. For instance it would not permit that as far as anti-imperialism was concerned the right-wing would be as militant and as mass action oriented as the leftists. It would not permit the understanding that given the objective circumstances both the right-wingers as well as others including leftists could choose the parliamentary tactics purely as the only realistic and viable method of struggle. Actually the left was a prisoner of its own false assumption, i.e., the belief that right-wingers were not interested in mass action; rather they were fearful of mass action. They did not want wholeheartedly to oppose imperialism and were always looking for easy options and compromises

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with imperialism. On the contrary the self-image of the left was that it was uncompromisingly anti-imperialist and stood for mass action. Masses of course were always ready to plunge into struggle against imperialism but they were being hampered in this process by the right-wing leadership which exercised influence on the masses and kept them politically backward by not giving them the necessary lead. And this assumption was an inseparable part of their overall understanding concerning the strategy and tactics followed by the Congress to oppose the colonial state and class analysis of the Congress movement. The, socialists’ position, though brave, reflected impatience, unreasonableness and want of foresight. The argument of their opponent was forceful: Had we been so strong as to begin another mass movement of a larger extent than those of 1930 and 1932, and had we been sure of bringing the Government to its knees, there would have been some sense in creating a wilful deadlock all at once. But it can be frankly admitted without any demur, that the nation will not be quite ready to take up cudgels and begin the fight all at once in 1937.69

In fact in March 1936, the views of the provincial Congress Committees had become known. Of the eighteen Congress Provincial Committees, who replied, thirteen expressed themselves as fully in favour of office acceptance. When the results revealed the triumph of the Congress in the majority of the provinces the pro-office Congressmen became more vocal than before. They argued that the opportunity could be used to carry on ameliorative measures for the peasantry and the working class and to undo the evil effects of years of repression and to give a fillip to the national movement. The consequences of the ‘office temptation’ could be resisted by showing character, by upholding duties and ideals and by not behaving like the ‘medieval saints who believed not in overcoming temptation but in running away from it’.70 The logic of the political events dictated that Congress could not oppose the unwanted constitution except by working it out, though in a manner quite unanticipated by the framers of the constitution. Gandhi observed:

69 70

AICC Papers, File No. G-39(i)/1937. N.S. Venguswami, Congress in Office, Bombay, 1940, p. 16.

Of Political Issues and Ideological Conflicts 179

I detect in the Act a profound distrust of the nation’s capacity to rule itself running through every section and the inevitable desire to perpetuate British rule but at the same time a bold experiment of wooing the masses to the British side, and failing that, a resignation to their will to reject the British domination ... . The Congress could advance the cause of independence by lawfully using the Act in a manner not expected by the framers, and by refraining from using it in the way intended by them.71

According to Gandhi, it was possible to construe the Government of India Act of 1935, as an attempt, however limited and feeble, to replace the rule of the sword by the rule of the majority. The creation, he said, of a big electorate of three crores of men and women and the placing of wide powers in their hands could not be described by any other name. He felt that the Congress could use this Act to make it yield contrary results.72 The All India Congress Committee met at Delhi on 17–18 March 1937 to take a final decision. After a prolonged debate over two days, the office acceptance resolution was passed by a majority of 127 to 70 votes.73 The Congress election campaign had created a tremendous stir, roused enthusiasm and kindled new hopes in the masses. Disappointment and demoralisation resulting from the fizzling out of the Civil Disobedience Movement was transformed into victory of the masses. The provincial elections were indeed an eye-opener to the British Government and had a powerful impact on the bureaucracy. The Indian masses had given their consent to the Congress to govern the country and not to the supporters of the Raj. The real question was: Would the office acceptance place the Congress in a position enabling it to extend and deepen nationalist hegemony, i.e., enhance Congress authority and prestige? ‘We are firmly of the opinion,’ wrote the National Call, ‘that this will help, and what is more, will enable the Congress to undermine the prestige and morale 71

Ibid., pp. 69–70. Also see AICC Papers, File No. G-39(i)/1937. Congress Socialist, 24 July 1937. In a statement he issued on 30 March 1937, Gandhi wrote: ‘I am the sole author of the office-acceptance clause of the Congress resolution and the originator of the idea of attaching a condition to office acceptance.’ Collected Works, Vol. LXV, p. 36 73 AICC Papers, File No. 60 to 66/1937, p. 8. 72

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of the bureaucracy on the one hand, and strengthen the position of the Congress in the country on the other.’74 In Congress practice, democratic centralism was the method of providing direction and making final decisions only on political issues. This method did not apply to settling ideological issues and discussions. Unlike the dominant leadership of the Congress the left-wingers did not distinguish between ideology and political issues. They invariably transformed political issues into ideological issues as expressions of a class bias, tending to harden the once temporary alignments into permanent antagonisms. The left’s method of conducting the debate on the issues of council entry and office acceptance cleared the way for the creation of ideological factions and their struggles. Now the majority of votes on a particular issue, one way or another, indicated victory or defeat for a particular ideology and its faction. In the earlier situations ideology permitted at least two alternative political choices if not a range of such choices; but now ideology would permit only one choice as commitment to an ideology meant a uniform attitude on a political issue. As pointed out above the majority of Congressmen had voted for council entry and office acceptance. The inference which the left and right fringes drew from this was that in this battle the left-wing had lost and the right-wing had won. But there were many battles ahead and both the fringes now began to prepare themselves for the future factional strife. The left was determined from the very beginning not to allow the experiment of office acceptance to be conducted smoothly as, according to them, this would go a long way to strengthen the right-wing. On the other hand the right-wing was equally certain that leftists would obstruct the implementation of their programme and would not hesitate to discredit them in the eyes of the masses. Therefore, they wanted to utilise this period not only to extend and consolidate nationalist hegemony but also to weaken the left. As would be clear from the next chapters, many of them were willing to use the state apparatus against them in the same way the colonial state had used it earlier. Thus the way the debate was conducted on the issues of council entry and office acceptance could not but have injected the entire rank and file with a factional spirit. The stage was set for a bitter ideological and organisational factional war within the Congress.

74

National Call, 12 February 1937. Haig Papers, Haig to Linlithgow, 7 April 1937.

Chapter 8

The Ministries and the Left Experiments with Class Adjustment

The rise and growth of the national liberation movements in the colonial countries raised new problems—theoretical as well as practical—for Marxism. The discussions on the colonial question at the Second Congress of the Third International were limited by the perspective of actuality of world revolution in the immediate future. But once the world revolution as anticipated by Lenin and the Third International did not materialise, the theses on the colonial question as formulated by the Second Congress lost their validity and became redundant.1 The theory of ‘class adjustment’ was to be the new Marxist principle to relate class struggle to the national struggle while attempting to unite the ‘whole nation’. The idea behind class adjustment was to consciously soften class struggle rather than sharpen it. Moreover it also implied the rejection of the idea that class struggle could be transformed into struggle against imperialism. The land policy of the Chinese Communist Party after 1937 was designed keeping in view this new point of departure.2 1

Shashi Joshi, Vol. I. Mao Tse-Tung, Selected Works, Vol. II, 1975 (Third Printing), Peking, pp. 200, 215, 318, 319, 446. Also see Chao Kuo–Chun, Agrarian Policy of the Chinese Communist Party, 1921–59, New Delhi, 1960, p. 39; Roger Howard, Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese People, 1977, p. 167. 2

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Similarly in the Vietnamese liberation struggle the ‘watchward’ was not agrarian revolution but ameliorative measures or agrarian reforms to ‘adjust class struggle’ in order to unite the entire nation.3 The point was further elaborated theoretically by Amilcar Cabral. In one of his seminal essays ‘Brief analysis of the social structure in Guinea’, he stated: ‘What commands history in colonial conditions is not the class struggle. I do not mean that the class struggle in Guinea stopped completely during the colonial period; it continued, but in a muted way. In the colonial period it is the colonial state which commands history.’4 Amilcar Cabral conceived the so far separate struggles of ‘nation’ and ‘class’ in a completely new way and introduced the new conception of ‘nation-class’. In one of his well-known essays ‘The Weapon of Theory’ he emphasised the specificity of the colonial situation ‘in which the nation-class fights the repressive forces of the bourgeoisie of the colonising country’.5 This conception of Cabral has been further clarified by Torres Rivas. ‘In the problem class-nation,’ writes Torres Rivas, ‘the pertinent question is not to seek the determination of one over the other, but to find the relations which are established between classes for the determination of the nation.’6 This new theoretical conception is necessary to understand the dynamics of an anti-imperialist struggle without ignoring either its overall unity or its inner tensions. Earlier perspectives either ignored class and subsumed it within the ‘nation’ or counterposed ‘nation’ to ‘class’. The national liberation movements were democratic revolutions in the sense that they were opposed to feudalism ideologically though tactically not attacking it frontally at the level of economic relations keeping in view the strategic conception of building a national alliance against foreign invasion or domination. In no liberation movement, especially the movements in which the communists were in the forefront, the leaders emphasised the 3

Ho Chi Minh, Selected Writings, 1920–1969, Vol. 3, Hanoi, 1973, p. 107. Quoted by Christine White, ‘Peasant Mobilization and Anti-Colonial Struggle in Vietnam: The Rent Reduction Campaigns of 1953’, Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 10, No. 14, July 1983, pp. 187–213. Also see Truong-Chinh, Selected Writings, Hanoi 1977, p. 27. In May 1941, the Eighth Session of the Party Central Committee met at Pac Bo, was presided over by Ho Chi Minh. Truong Chinh was made party Secretary-General. 4 Amilcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts, London, 1969, pp. 46–61. Emphasis added. 5 Ibid., p. 86. 6 Quoted in Ronaldo Munck, The Difficult Dialogue: Marxism and Nationalism, Delhi, 1986, p. 158.

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‘necessity to simultaneously develop the anti-feudal peasant movement’. Neither in China, after the Japanese invasion in 1937, nor in Vietnam did the communists try to make the agrarian revolution ‘an axis of the anti-imperialist revolution’.7 In the case of all the national liberation movements feudal relations were liquidated through land reforms only after imperialism had been overthrown and national governments formed. However, in the pre-independence phase the ascendancy of democratic ideas led to a considerable erosion of these power relations ideologically. The character of these agrarian reforms brought in to liquidate feudal relations was naturally determined by the character of the forces which came to control the state apparatus after the national struggle reached fruition. The status of peasant revolution in the context of national liberation struggles lies at the heart of many a debate. Contemporary Indian communists/socialists took the necessity of simultaneous agrarian revolution and national liberation movement as their point of departure. The Indian communists continued to analyse the Indian liberation struggle through this perspective.8 In India, the programmes (long-term as well as short-term) of the left-wing were derived from their strategic conceptions of carrying on a violent revolution. Even during the ‘United Front’ phase there was tremendous confusion about the classes which were to be included into the United Front against imperialism. For instance the agrarian programme of the All India Congress Socialist Party included the following items:9 (1) Elimination of landlordism in zamindari and talukdari areas without compensation. (2) Liquidation of arrears of rent. (3) Reduction of rent and land revenue by at least 50 per cent. Similarly the Draft Election Platform of the Indian communists included:10

7

R.A. Ulyanovsky, V.G. Khoros, V.V. Vavilov, Y.N. Vinokurov, and A. Yuriev, Fighters for National Liberation, Moscow, 1983, p. 12. 8 See B.T. Ranadive, ‘The Role of the Communists in the Freedom Struggle in India’, Social Scientist, No. 136, September 1984, pp. 3–32. 9 Programme of the All India Congress Socialist Party. Reprinted in Fifty Years of Socialist Movement in India, Smata Era Publication, October 1984, New Delhi, pp. 106–10. 10 The Communist, July 1936, p. 16.

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(1) Confiscation of large estates. Land to the tillers of the soil. (2) Repudiation of working-class and peasant indebtedness. The most important point about these programmes was that they were designed not from the point of view of uniting the entire nation against imperialism, including the landlords. They were designed from the long term point of view of solving the land problem in India or as partial demands serving as a link to the ultimate demand of abolition of landlordism. CONGRESS AGRARIAN PROGRAMME

The agrarian programme which the Congress evolved over time was a programme of adjustment of class contradiction between the tenants and the landlords. It implied that the discontent of the tenantry was to be recognised and understood but was not to be worked up to arouse feelings of intense anger and hostility. The approach corresponded to Gandhi’s views and practice on the theme of tenant–landlord relationship. ‘The correspondent’, Gandhi wrote in 1935, ‘is wrong in suggesting that I do not believe in the existence of class struggle. What I do not believe in is the necessity of fomenting and keeping it up.’11

As pointed out by Jawaharlal Nehru the word ‘landlord’ was a rather misleading one. For example, he argued in the United Provinces there were a million and a half so-called landlords. Probably about 85 per cent of them were no better than the tenant class, and many were worse off than the better off tenants. Going into the nitty-gritty of the agrarian structure he concluded that there ‘can be no question of depriving them of anything; they stand in need of further help and of a reduction of their burdens—debt, revenue, etc.’ Of the remaining 15 per cent, only a tiny fraction (1 per cent) were really biggish landlords—about 5,000 in all—and about 1,000 of these, according to Nehru, could be considered the big landlords whose incomes from land varied from about ` 12,000 to 50,00,000 per annum. Those whose incomes ran into millions were a mere handful.12 11 ‘Do I believe in the existence of class-war?’ Harijan, 16 October 1935. Quoted in A. Appadorai, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 535. 12 Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘Indian Problems, 1936’, in India and the World, London, June 1936, pp. 259–61.

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No other left-wing intellectual or group, except Nehru and the CSP leader Acharya Narendra Dev, showed an awareness of this complexity of the agrarian structure and realised its importance for anti-imperialist mobilisation. If the change could be brought about by peaceful and democratic methods, it would be desirable, he stressed, to give some compensation and so avoid a conflict ‘which is likely to be wasteful and more costly than the compensation itself ’. It was since 1930 that Nehru had been evolving his views on the agrarian question around the notion of ‘fair rent’ in the context of the need of the anti-imperialist struggle to unite the entire nation. Therefore the notion of differential compensation to the landlords was the result of this long-drawn-out process of consideration on the twin problem of strengthening national unity and avoiding internal strife due to class war. ‘Probably the compensation,’ he wrote ‘would be proportionately less higher up in the scale—the middle landlords getting proportionately more than the bigger ones.’13 In 1934, J.B. Kripalani became the general secretary of the Indian National Congress. In that capacity, he had to explain the official policies of the Congress. ‘The Congress knows,’ he wrote in 1934, ‘that in adjusting the economic relation of the future, it will have to undertake a good deal of divestment of vested interests to serve the nation in conformity with the new ideas and circumstances created.’14 Similarly the President of the Congress, Rajendra Prasad, remarked in one of his speeches in 1935: ‘The Congress believed in its capacity for adjustments between the classes and masses in India.’15 In 1936 the Congress was convinced that the final solution to the agrarian crisis involved the removal of British imperialistic exploitation and a radical change in the antiquated and repressive land tenure and revenue systems. It felt, however, that the deepening crisis had made the burden on the peasantry an intolerable one—and immediate relief was urgently called for. Therefore, the first item in the agrarian programme accepted by the Faizpur session of the Congress emphasised that ‘rent and revenue should be readjusted having regard to present conditions and there should be substantial reduction in both’.16 13

Nehru, India and the World, p. 261. ‘Class War and Congress’, 1934. Speech at the Congress Session. Included in Kripalani, Gandhian Thought, pp. 78–79. 15 The Bombay Chronicle, 8 May 1935. 16 The Indian Annual Register, Vol. II, July–December, 1936, p. 206. 14

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The general secretary of the Karnataka Provincial Congress Committee issued a leaflet in July 1938 which explained the evolution of the Congress policy on the agrarian question.17 It mentioned that the Karachi resolution had emphasised ‘an equitable adjustment’ in the system of land tenure and pointed out that it was confirmed by the AICC in its meeting held in Bombay in August 1931.18 The Congress Election Manifesto prepared by the All India Congress Parliamentary Committee and confirmed by the AICC on 23 August 1936, reiterated its declaration made at Karachi. Similarly the resolution of the Working Committee passed at Wardha in February 1937 once again stressed ‘a substantial reduction in rent and revenue’.19 As far as the agrarian question was concerned the INC leadership was the first in the Third World to have evolved a programme of ‘class adjustment’. TWO CONTRADICTORY APPROACHES

The above-mentioned two approaches within the Congress, of the leftand right-wing including Nehru, spoke two different political languages. Ultimately these two approaches derived their logic from two different strategic perspectives—one included substantial sections of landlords in the camp of the nation while the other clubbed them with imperialism. An important Kisan Conference was held at Allahabad in April 1935 under the auspices of the Congress. Vallabhbhai Patel presided over the conference and Purshottamdas Tandon was the Reception Committee President. Eighty delegates from twenty-four districts were represented in the conference. An open session was attended by an audience of 3,000, one-third of which were tenants.20 Sardar Patel was not in favour of the zamindari system but he did not advocate dispossessing any class of its rights illegally. He told the tenants that they should not remain in fear 17 ‘The Proposed Tenancy Bill and the Congress Policy’. A leaflet issued by the General Secretary of the KPCC, 15 July 1938. AICC Papers, File No. P-11, 12- Part I and II/1938. 18 Ibid. The resolution had stated: ‘The system of land tenure, revenue and rent shall be reformed and an equitable adjustment made of the burden on agricultural land, immediately giving relief to the smaller peasantry, by a substantial reduction of agricultural rent and revenue now paid by them.’ Emphasis added. 19 Ibid. 20 HDP, File No. 7/5/35.

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but unite to assert themselves. His approach to the zamindars was put forward in the shape of a resolution which was moved by P.D. Tandon and seconded by Mohanlal Saksena. The resolution stated that the zamindari and talukdari system was harmful to village life, that no improvement was possible until it was abolished. The kisans should be enabled to become the owners of their lands, for which purpose compensation should be paid to zamindars by means of loans at three per cent interest rate granted by the government and repayable in 30 to 50 years. A resolution demanding reduction in rent and land revenue (to the level prevailing in 1895) was also passed. Extension of the first resolution was that occupancy rights should be given until zamindari system was abolished. Number of Congress Socialists and Communists attended the conference with the idea of propagating their views among the kisans.21 Two pamphlets ‘Kisan Kya Karen’ and ‘Communist Party Ka Elan’ were distributed. They exhorted the kisans to start an agitation against the zamindars, capitalists, government and their helpers under the red flag. The Congress assurances were hollow and the kisans should not trust the Congress. As far as abolition of zamindari was concerned, no compensation should be given to the zamindars.22 For the left, to abolish zamindari through compensation was not really an abolition of the zamindari system. On the other hand, for Patel, Rajendra Prasad and many other Congressmen, i.e., for a dominant section of the leadership of the Congress, the best way to abolish zamindari was to do so through the legal process. And if zamindars (if not all at least significant sections) were to be considered as a part of the nation’s all-out unity against imperialism, there could be no other bloodless way of liquidating them as a class. Contradictions within the camp of national unity could not be solved by resorting to any other method. Therefore by asking for the compensation, the dominant leadership was certainly defending the legal right of the zamindars but by no stretch of imagination could it be assumed as a defence of the zamindari system itself as asserted by the leftists. At the most it was a defence of the bourgeois right to property but not a defence of the feudal social relations. The crucial questions were: 21

Ibid. Ajoy Ghosh, Bhupendra Nath Sanyal, Jayaprakash Narayan, Sampurnananda, B.D. Tripathi, Harihar Nath Sastri, Onkar Nath, Rajendrapal Singh and H.D. Malviya attended the conference. 22 Ibid.

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Whether the peasantry was to be organised with the immediate aim of abolishing feudalism to solve the land problem or it was to be organised as an anti-imperialist force? Whether the idea of agrarian revolution was to be central or peripheral during the stage of anti-imperialism? Congress approach to the peasantry was to organise the mobilisation in such a manner that it lowered the prestige of the colonial state, i.e., undermined its hegemony by mediating either between the landlords and peasants or between the peasantry and the colonial state. The left’s approach meanwhile was to mobilise the peasantry against the landlords so as to sharpen and accentuate the class struggle. MEDIATION AND HEGEMONY

How did hegemonic politics concretely function at the grass-roots levels? One of the basic principles implied in the practice of hegemonic politics of the Congress, especially of Gandhi, was to strive always to acquire a position of mediation between the conflicting interests, i.e., (a) between the colonial state and the Indian people or any section of the Indian people, and (b) between the conflicting interests within colonial society. Gandhi successfully experimented with this principle much before he became the accepted leader of the Indian National Congress. The two social laboratories he chose for his experiments were Champaran and Ahmedabad. To achieve the desired results, from the practice of this principle many other conditions were required. One of the conditions was that the lines of communication were kept open with both the conflicting interests and both were willing to negotiate/ compromise and agree to accept the status of an individual/organisation as a mediator. Such an arrangement always results in the enhancement of the prestige of the mediator (individual or organisation) in the eyes of the public. Second, the negotiating leaders representing the conflicting interests had to be fully backed by their respective constituencies and there could not be major contending currents within their respective camps to question their authority and dispute their respective leadership. The successful mediation between the internal conflicting interests required that Congress enjoyed the confidence of both sides and both sides were willing to accept the verdict of the Congress as if it were a law. Such a mediation implied two things:

The Ministries and the Left 189

1. The colonial state was replaced as a mediating authority by the Congress organisation and to that extent colonial state’s authority was subverted. 2. This raised the Congress to the level of an alternative authority, a kind of a de facto state power. The idea of the Congress being above interests, almost as if it was the state, was expressed clearly in 1927: Congress should aspire to act not as a propagandist for one particular view of national salvation, much less for any particular interest in the country. It should be … taking upon itself the duty and responsibility of reconciling as far as possible the growing conflict of different interests in India.23

This role of a mediator or an arbitrator could be performed only by evolving a programme of mutual adjustment of conflicting interests. The right-wingers based their politics on the correct conception that the national movement was to be a movement of all the social classes and strove to build this unity in practice from their own ideological angle, by projecting themselves as national leaders and by consciously taking up the job of mediators or arbiters between conflicting economic interests in Indian society. To do this job of arbitration and mediation was to put up a real political challenge to the colonial state in terms of undermining its hegemony among the social classes, by actually showing to these classes that colonial state and its bureaucracy was superfluous—an unwanted institution by the whole of Indian society; and that a real alternative to it existed. It was quite natural that colonial authorities should have perceived the very act of arbitration, irrespective of the issues involved, as the biggest political challenge posed to them. For example a Fortnightly Report from Bombay commented: ‘In the Surat District, Congress agitators in Bardoli have taken up the work of arbitration in civil, criminal and social disputes, an activity ostensibly unobjectionable, but tending towards a parallel government.’24 Any act or move which gave the Congress an opportunity to project the impression or claim that it was an ‘intermediary’ was to 23 24

S. Bhattacharya, in Bhattacharya and Thapar, Situating Indian History, p. 192. HDP, File No. 18/6/35 FR (i).

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be squashed. Even the hoisting of Congress flag was objectionable in the context of claims made by the Congress. Stated the Sub-Magistrate of Kuppam: … a fundamental principle of the Congress creed is that the Congress must be recognised as intermediary between the people and the government; and whereas the display of an alleged new ‘national’ flag by the Congress Party in these circumstances is likely to give colour to the above false claims and to deceive the public into thinking that the Congress assumed governmental authority and that they can owe allegiance to the Congress Party rather than to the king Emperor …25

Similarly during the Gandhi–Irwin Pact in the context of agrarian crisis in UP, the Congress organisations in the tehsils acted as agents of the peasants in negotiations with the landlords. The government, however, though they recognised the economic distress and realised that there was nothing objectionable in the attitude of the Congress, ‘feared that its mediation would strengthen its hold in the rural areas and refused to recognise that the Congress had any role in this matter. It seemed to them a matter of prestige.’26 The India office was informed that the procedure adopted by the Congress was well-chosen and difficult to meet. Congress announced that it was really a peasants trade union and could not desert the tenant in his hour of distress. It no longer pursued the no-rent campaign as a political measure, but it demanded the right to judge between landlord and tenant and to decide what rent the latter could pay. ‘We ourselves find it difficult to meet the new position without recourse to ordinance.’27 The Congress led by Nehru was usurping the right of the colonial state—‘the right to judge as between landlord and tenant’—and this was not to be tolerated. Once the Congress had accepted the offices its capacity to play the role of an intermediary had increased manifold: … the tendency to impress upon the public … that the Congress are their sole intermediaries in securing fair treatment or redress of grievances from the officers of Government. Congress as you know have always 25 Proceedings of the Sub-Magistrate, Kuppam, CMP 4/31, Order under Section 144, Cr.P.C, 27 August 1931. Pub. (General) Dept. G.O. No. 1033 (Ms.), 7 October 1931 (Confidential T.S.A.) 26 Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, pp. 155–56. 27 Ibid., p. 156. To Sir Findlater Stewart of the India Office, 25 April 1931, Hailey Papers, Vol. 20.

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aimed at establishing themselves in this position … . There is no doubt that this method is one of the devices intended to prepare the way for parallel institutions … a position of this kind is not, as I am sure you will agree, one which we can even by implication accept.28

Obviously this job of arbitration could not be performed by those who advocated the abolition of zamindari and that too without compensation. This job could only be performed by those who wanted to win over the sympathies of an important section of the landlords. It was not enough to play the role of a mediator on different issues; it was also necessary to locate the terrain of legitimacy while playing this role between the colonial government and any section of the Indian people, say the peasantry. The Congress was able to locate the terrain of legitimacy where the peasant movements originated. The demands had to be those which appeared to the peasantry as its legitimate demands and their redressal could not be denied. Mobilisation was to be organised by picking up precisely those grievances the genuineness of which could not be questioned even by the colonial bureaucracy. This, in actuality, was an attempt to question the ‘justice’ of the colonial authorities, one of the pillars of their hegemony over Indian society, i.e., the belief in the minds of the peasants that the British were just rulers. By taking such issues the Congress tried to emerge in the eyes of the peasantry as a champion of their rights, as an organisation which stood for meting out justice to them against the injustice of the colonial state. One of the most important resolutions passed at the Lucknow session of the Congress dealt with the agrarian problems. The draft resolution originally put forward on the agrarian problems contained a reference to the abolition of landlordism. But later on during the discussion it was recognised that this would alienate many of the small landlords who hitherto had given much support to the Congress.29 To avoid this difficulty it was decided to refer in general terms to the improvement of the land tenure system and the resolution ultimately passed was framed 28

Haig Papers, Viceroy to Haig, 24 December 1937. Emphasis added. There was a sharp differentiation within the class of zamindars and landlords. ‘The majority of rent receivers were in their incomes and even life styles not distinguishable from the rich or even middle peasants. They were impoverished and were getting further impoverished.’ Bipan Chandra, Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India, New Delhi, 1979, p. 331. 29

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in comparatively moderate terms. ‘It is in its very moderation’, noted the Governor-General in Council, ‘that its danger lies.’30 But a moderate programme need not necessarily be an inadequate programme to serve a particular objective, the objective here being the unity of the entire nation. ‘It is obvious’, commented M.G. Hallett, ‘that what will appeal to the rural population will be a reduction of rent far more than the abolition of landlords.’31 In a note on the ‘Congress and the Agrarian Problem’ M.G. Hallett carried on a historical survey of the Congress interventions into the agrarian issues in order to ‘see what have been the activities of the Congress when they have not been openly engaged in Non-Cooperation or Civil Disobedience’.32 He pin-pointed that the Congress method of mobilising the peasantry was to catch hold of ‘grievances’ of the agricultural classes and ‘make capital out of them’. The Governor-General-in-Council also noted that … in the past Congress has never been slow to exploit and make capital out of grievances … of the peasantry and in some cases though action would in any case have been taken by a local government, Congress has intervened in the matter, has acquired credit for securing redress of a genuine grievance and has thereby largely increased its prestige in the local area.33

The ministries had given the Congress an opportunity to redress the grievances of the peasantry and the working class and to further increase its influence and prestige. In order to underline the Congress method of peasant mobilisation Hallett pointed out the instance of Bardoli in 1928 and the UP fair-rent campaign in 1931–32. In both these cases, he emphasised, the peasants had a legitimate grievance and in both cases the Government was somewhat slow in giving the relief which was necessary while the ‘Congress exaggerated the grievance and created in the agricultural population a revolutionary mentality’. Also … much the same thing happened when Mr. Gandhi first came into notoriety over the agrarian trouble in Champaran in Bihar. The tenants had legitimate grievances against the planters; the settlement 30

HDP, File No. 4/8/36. Ibid. A note by M.G. Hallett, 6 May 1396. Emphasis added. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. Emphasis added. 31

The Ministries and the Left 193

officer made proposals to rectify those grievances; Gandhi stepped in and government at last gave effect to the settlement officer’s proposals which were not very different from Gandhi’s demands.

Interestingly the policy-makers within the bureaucracy also recommended a hegemonic approach. To deal with any form of agrarian agitation a twofold policy was suggested: (a) to rectify legitimate grievances; and (b) to deal firmly with illegal, subversive or seditious activities carried on under the cloak of bona fide action for meeting local grievances. The specific feature of the terrain of legitimacy was that demands or issues raised by the Congress were not very different from the demands and issues which the government could not but recognise as genuine grievances.34 It is only in the context of this legitimacy that we can understand why all the peasant movements in British India originated around the demands either on the question of illegal exactions above the legally recognised share or reduction in rent within justified and fair limits. These issues could only generate powerful mass movements and thereby enhance the political prestige of the organising party but not armed insurrections.35 Congress evolved its agrarian programme from the viewpoint of building the unity of the entire nation and that too through the method of building counter-hegemony by removing the various layers of the penumbra of British hegemony over the Indian society as a whole. If the left along with others was to come forward to unite the entire nation and build counter-hegemony even their economic programme could not be very different. Let it be emphasised that it would be wrong to look at the Congress’ agrarian programme from the point of view of full-fledged agrarian revolution which abolishes feudalism by confiscating landed estates. Moreover this would be examining the Indian national movement through the paradigm of ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’ of the Russiantype where the struggle was not against imperialism and a modern state but against a feudal autocratic state. When viewed through the prism of this paradigm, the Congress programme would indeed look very conservative and further it would then be difficult to resist the temptation to trace the lack of agrarian radicalism to the mass base of the Congress, 34

Ibid. Bhagwan Josh, ‘Review: Peasant Movements in India, 1920–50’, Studies in History, Vol. 1, No. 1, January–June, 1985. 35

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i.e., the rich peasantry and smaller zamindars. This was precisely how the Indian communists looked upon the Congress and accused the Congress leadership for using the peasantry for the interests of the bourgeoisie. What the left was trying to create was a distinct and separate peasant movement under the ‘peasant leadership’ while the Congress was trying to build a peasant-cum-Congress mobilisation. But a separate class movement of the peasantry could not be built without coming into conflict with the Congress. ON THE EVE OF ELECTIONS

Throughout the year 1936 tension was building up between landlords and tenants in rural U.P. and Bihar. The U.P. Provincial Political Conference was held at Unnao from 6–8 June 1936.36 A resolution on the agrarian problem which suggested that the zamindari system should be abolished on payment of reasonable compensation caused a long discussion, an amendment being moved that the zamindari system should be abolished without compensation. The decision was shelved by adopting a resolution moved by Nehru to the effect that a full enquiry should be made into the agrarian problem. Speakers, including Baba Ram Chandra advocated the repudiation of debts which could not be paid and suggested payment as rent of only so much as the tenant could afford after he had made provision for the maintenance of himself and his family. According to the government estimate four thousand tenants attended the conference. The next political conference organised by the Congress was held at a village, Sirsa, in Allahabad district on 25 and 26 June 1936. The conference was attended by a large number of tenants. The most important resolution concerning the demands of the tenants included a demand for an immediate reduction of rent. Ejectment for non-payment of rent should be prohibited and all tenants should be given occupancy rights. Finally it was stressed that the zamindari system, ‘the root of many evils’, must be abolished though reasonable compensation should be given to the expropriated landlords. The resolution had ‘not unnaturally caused alarm among zamindars’. 37 36 37

HDP, File No. 18/6/36 FR (i). HDP, File No. 18/6/36 FR (ii).

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The rent reduction demand was also raised in Bihar. In January 1933 a meeting of the representatives of 32 villages was held in village Nakri in Lau Kaha Police Station (district Darbhanga) and passed a resolution for rent reduction. The Congress Kisan Enquiry Committee, led by Rajendra Prasad and Sri Krishna Sinha began its tour of the province on 1 June 1936.38 The committee recorded the statements of tenants and the speeches of its leaders were ‘all frankly political in nature’ exhorting the tenants to ‘resist illegal exactions’. The mere tour of this fact-finding committee was having considerable impact on the imagination of the peasants. Though the tour of this committee, said the government report, was evidently not intended to excite the agricultural classes to violent measures, it was significant that immediately after the committee had visited Gaya, the authorities had to take action in three places to prevent outbreak of violence in connection with previous disputes between landlords and tenants.39 And as far as the complaints were concerned they were ‘almost entirely’ about the landlord’s amla who made illegal exactions and sold up tenants who were in arrears with their rent. When the Kisan Enquiry Committee was appointed Bihar Congress Office wrote to the Bihar Landholders Association and to a large number of individual zamindars to cooperate with the Committee. Not to speak of cooperation on the part of the zamindars even these letters were not acknowledged. The first phase of the Enquiry Committee tour ended with a rather long meeting at Niamatpur in Gaya district. A good deal of counterpropaganda against the committee was being conducted by the Indian Nation, a paper of anti-Congress and pro-landlord line.40 On 29 May 1936, in a speech at Chhapra Rajendra Prasad condemned socialism. The rift between the socialists and the orthodox wing of the Congress was becoming more pronounced. At Sialo in the Patna district, some tenants announced that they would forcibly cultivate the landlords’ khudkasht land. Two Congressmen who took part in this agitation were proceeded against under Section 107, CPC. Similar troubles occurred in Gaya also. The policy was, reported the Bihar Government, to effect a settlement

38 History of the Indian National Congress in Bihar, 1885–1985, Published on the occasion of Congress Centenary Celebrations, Patna, 1985, p. 419. 39 HDP, File No. 18/6/36 FR (i). 40 Ibid., FR (ii).

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where possible, but to take legal action against tenants who took the law into their own hands. In many cases the efforts of the local officers to settle such disputes appeared to be successful.41 The Commissioner of Patna division submitted a report on the effects of the visit of the Congress Kisan Enquiry Committee. On the one hand it had the effect of reassuring those who had been frightened by the more extreme propaganda of the Kisan Sabha and had been afraid that the Congress would endorse that programme. On the other hand it also drew the attention of landlords ‘to the new political power of the tenants and to the need for conciliating them’. Apart from this, the ventilation of grievances undoubtedly had a disturbing effect on the uneducated raiyats and made them more ready to take the law into their own hands. This had been done as much by ‘secret propaganda by underlings’ as by the open meetings of the committee itself.42 Swami Sahajananda addressed nine Kisan Sabha meetings during the month of October. There was a ‘fairly large’ kisan conference at Monghyr on 17 and 18 October. The speeches consisted chiefly of attacks on zamindars. On their victory in the elections of 1937 the leaders of the Congress Parliamentary Parties were invited to form ministries in the second week of July 1937. Soon after, Congress ministries were formed in seven out of eleven provinces. These provinces were Madras, Bombay, United Provinces, the Central Provinces, Bihar, Orissa and North West Frontier Province. One of the positive aspects of the office acceptance was the fact that Congress had now acquired governmental authority to mediate between the social classes by lawfully passing legislations. This enhanced the prestige of the Congress in the eyes of those who were to be affected by this mediation. The time had come when the Congress could utilise this opportunity to completely extricate the landlords and peasants from under the hegemony of the colonial state only if it could mediate successfully between these classes. This position of mediation or arbitration between the classes with conflicting economic interests could only be acquired by an individual or a political group if this individual or the group was always willing to conduct negotiations to reach an honourable compromise.

41 42

HDP, File No. 18/5/36 FR (ii). HDP, File No. 18/7/36 FR (i).

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The coming of the Congress ministries had given new hope and new life to the peasantry. On the other hand, the big zamindars and taluqdars, specially in Bihar and United Provinces, were organising to resist any substantial relief to the peasantry. ‘We see here the class struggle in action’, wrote Nehru, ‘not on the side of the peasantry so much but on the part of the big zamindars’.43 This sharpening class struggle coupled with the role of left-wing and the colonial government’s ambivalent attitude towards the landlords made the task of mediation between the social classes an extremely difficult one. Because of this scenario, in the long run, the unforeseen disadvantages of office acceptance turned out to be considerable. THE LANDLORDS AND THE MINISTRIES

United Provinces

Immediately after accepting office Congress Government released all the political prisoners convicted under section 124-A of IPC. The ban of illegality from associations was lifted. Steps were taken to stay proceedings for ejectment of tenants, for enhancement of rent, for the realisation of rent due for periods prior to and including kharif 1344 fasli generally. On 2 August 1937, a statement of Government policy emphasised: ‘There is no more important or urgent problem than the readjustment of the relations between the government, the landlord and the tenant on a basis which will make the relief of the suffering peasantry and the promotion of their prosperity the first and foremost consideration.’44 Haig predicted that the orders for stay of proceedings in connection with suits for recovery of arrears of rent ‘would produce an impression among the tenants that rents were no longer to be paid’. Soon after reports from Commissioners began to come in indicating that these results were in fact being produced. Later on the government issued a communique making it quite clear that while they thought it necessary to suspend proceedings for recovery of arrears of rent it was an essential part of their policy that current rents should be paid and appealed to the tenants to pay their current rents willingly. But whether the current rents could be collected or not depended upon the men on the spot—‘the 43 44

Jawaharlal Nehru, Selected Works, Vol. 8, p. 335. Haig Papers, Statement of Government Policy, 2 August 1937. Emphasis added.

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ordinary Congressmen in the villages’45—Katju told Haig that in their Tenancy Legislation they would much rather get 12 annas by agreement rather than 16 annas by force. This represented, according to Haig, ‘their genuine approach to the problem’. According to Haig, the real difficulty was that Congressmen, or those posing as such, were still going about in the villages declaring that rents were not to be paid, and the ‘official organisation seems to have only an inadequate control over these local firebrands’.46 The office acceptance had stirred the peasantry as a whole though the situation varied from district to district. If Etah and Mainpuri had settled down to tranquil conditions, Lalitpur sub-division still remained an ‘acute storm-centre’. The local officer, as reported by Haig, felt that ‘government has been weak and that the cultivators have been allowed to go too far in asserting their claims by show of force’.47 The relations between the tenants and landlords in this sub-division were very strained and ‘trouble there has been deliberately stirred by certain Congress workers’. As far as Agra was concerned ‘left-wing influence in the Congress is growing, and that eventually it is sure to overpower the right-wing’. In Jhansi Division there were ‘troublesome left-wing people’, but on the whole they were far from having any significant influence. In some other districts leading Congressmen were ‘exceedingly friendly’. In contrast to this the communal relations in the Rohilkhand Division were relatively more strained. It seems that unlike Bihar the left-wing could not organise a ‘peasant movement’ in UP counterposed to the Congress. Between 1934 and 1937 the UP Kisan Sabha was defunct. An attempt was made to revive it in 1937 under the guidance of Babu Purshottam Das Tandon. On 27 December 1939 H.D. Malaviya wrote to Swami Sahajanand that in UP the Kisan Sabha movement was at a standstill. Most of the Kisan units had gone defunct. There were only 15 to 16 districts which ‘just keep up the Kisan Sabha structure. In these places you will find the kisan sabha files intact, some enrolment and occasional meetings’.48 45

Haig Papers, Haig to Linlithgow, 23 August 1937. Ibid., 6 September 1937. It was peace time and Congress organisation was unable to control its lower ranks. How did Gandhi control the masses during the mass upsurge is anybody’s guess. 47 Haig Papers, Haig to Linlithgow, 23 October 1938. 48 Jayaprakash Papers, ‘UP Kisan Committee Circular No. 3, 23 August 1937. Issued by K.M. Ashraf, convenor of the Committee.’ Swami Sahajanand Saraswati Papers, Roll No. 5. 46

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The effect of the Congress victory in elections on the big landlords in UP was tredmendous. ‘They are,’ wrote Harry Haig, ‘in varying degrees bewildered, frightened and angry … . They are very apprehensive of what the Congress may do to them.’49 He reported that there was a section of landlords who were thinking of tendering their ‘submission to the Congress’. In Haig’s view such people did not understand that this would ‘ensure their downfall, for the Congress after using them and reducing them to practical impotence would then finish them off ’. Haig had analysed the Congress strategy carefully and drawn his own conclusion. In all his meetings with the representatives of landlords on the issue of Tenancy Bill he consciously exhibited an ambivalent attitude which had its roots in this sharply defined analysis. Haig predicted that after the elections Congress would pursue in UP a two-pronged policy: (a) To make spectacular concessions to the tenants and establish their influence with them; and (b) to pursue more vigorously the whole programme of attack on the constitution and the British connection. Drawing conclusions from Nehru’s speeches in Meerut district, Haig emphasised: ‘The line of approach both to the Muslims and to the landlords would certainly be … our primary quarrel is with the British Government, join us in condemning and attacking it and we will be prepared to make certain terms with you.’50 This was a perfect understanding of the Congress strategy though communists/socialists never understood this. A meeting of the Agra Province zamindars at Allahabad authorised a negotiating committee and armed with this authorisation Chhatari and other leading landlords of Agra sent a communication to the Working Committee accepting their proposal. Meanwhile the taluqdars of Oudh adopted a more intransigent attitude. Haig advised the landlords that ‘their interests definitely demand that they should reach a settlement now’.51 Earlier G.B. Pant had told Haig that the Working Committee was willing to arbitrate if the landlords so desired. But Haig himself was considerably doubtful whether the landlords care to put themselves in ‘such a position of subservience to Congress authority … . I am inclined to think that it will

49

Haig Papers, Haig to Viceroy, 17 February 1937. Ibid. 51 Haig Papers, Haig to Linlithgow, 23 October 1938. 50

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come to nothing.’52 Accepting hegemony for any individual, group or class was not an easy task. They had opposed the Congress till now and it was very difficult for them to accept Congress authority. If Congress was willing to accept landlords within the Congress ranks it did not mean that Congress was becoming the party of the landlords. Landlords were to be there, and they were to be given economic concessions only after they were willing to place themselves in a ‘position of subservience to Congress authority’. The sheer physical presence of a class behind a party with a certain ideology does not automatically make that party the representative of that class only. A political party striving for hegemony does not represent a particular class but relations of classes. From this follows the inevitable conclusion: No party claiming to represent a single class can evolve a hegemonic politics. When the UP Tenancy Bill was placed before the Legislative Assembly and had not made much progress in the third reading, the Parliamentary Sub-Committee of the Congress was approached by the Nawab of Chhatari to intervene and bring about amicable settlement.53 The Parliamentary Sub-Committee subsequently met a deputation of the representative zamindars of Agra and Oudh at Delhi in the presence of the Prime Minister and Revenue Minister of the province. The points of difference were brought out and the Parliamentary Sub-Committee suggested that if the zamindars agreed to accept its decisions it might intervene and look into the matter in detail. This suggestion was considered by the landholders of the province and they were sharply divided amongst themselves. While the zamindars of Agra in a way had accepted the suggestion the taluqdars of Oudh by a majority rejected the offer.54 On 26 October 1938, at a preliminary meeting of the most important taluqdars it was decided that they would definitely reject the idea of arbitration. The publicly declared meeting was to have taken place on 27 October at 10 a.m. At 9.30 a.m. that day the Raja of Jahangirabad had an ‘interesting talk’ with Haig. He informed Haig that opinion against arbitration was decisive and some of the taluqdars were still hoping for 52

Haig Papers, Haig to Linlithgow, 10 October 1938. Emphasis added. This was the crux of Congress hegemony vis-à-vis the landlords. 53 In UP the tenancy problem was treated in one comprehensive Act passed in October 1939. During the different stages of consideration in the Assembly, nearly 3,000 amendments were tabled, of which 850 were actually moved and 370 were accepted. 54 Rajendra Prasad Papers, Rajendra Prasad to Maharajdhiraj Bahadur, 28 May 1939.

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intervention by the British Government. Haig told him quite definitely that in his opinion there was no possibility of the Governor, the GovernorGeneral or the Secretary of State intervening in connection with this Tenancy Bill to save the taluqdars from making sacrifices which after all were not very unreasonable.55 Nothing was more contradictory to the style of hegemonic politics than the stance of unreasonableness. Haig advised the Raja against taking up an intransigent stand. It was of ‘utmost importance’ that they should in their resolution express themselves as anxious to negotiate further with the ministry and make this resolution ‘as non-contentious as possible’. On 28 October, after the resolution had been published, Haig had a ‘remarkably frank and friendly talk’ with the Premier who made it clear that in the light of the taluqdars’ resolution he saw no possibility of the Parliamentary Sub-Committee being prepared to take any action. He said that individuals constituting the Parliamentary Sub-Committee were not anxious to participate and that they would come in only if they were satisfied that both parties trusted them, and were prepared to accept their decision which would be given in a strictly judicial spirit.56 The Bill was to come up in the Assembly on 10 November 1938. The class of landlords was undergoing an acute crisis. The time to sever their loyalties with the British and accept the verdict of the forces of democracy had arrived. On the request of the landlords once again there were discussions between the ministers and the landlords on the evening of 7 November. The landlords wanted that the government should not enhance taxation and the current principles and limits of land revenue should be left unchanged. In its earlier proposals Government wanted to subject the more wealthy landlords to a higher rate of land revenue. The discussion on the Bill (on 10 November) revealed that no settlement had been reached. On 13 November the zamindars held a meeting at Barabanki and passed the ‘usual strong resolutions’.57 On 16 November Pant made a speech in the Assembly which, as Haig told Linlithgow, was ‘uncompromising and threatening’58 and now the Governor was ‘surprised and disappointed at this development’. On 17 November,

55

Haig Papers, Haig to Linlithgow, 23 October 1938. Ibid. 57 Haig Papers, Haig to Linlithgow, 22 November 1938. 58 The Pioneer published the speech, 17 November 1938. 56

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Nawab Sir Mohammed Yusuf who was opposed to a compromise and had played a crucial role at the Barabanki meeting, told Haig: ‘Speeches and resolutions were merely a demonstration, but that the main body of the landlords realised the importance of reaching a settlement and not carry on a struggle, the result of which would be likely to be their virtual destruction.’59 The Raja of Jahangirabad was ‘deeply affected’ by the Premier’s speech. Apart from the attacks on landlords and threats to make the Bill worse the Premier had reproached the taluqdars for their past attitude of loyalty to the British and made it clear that ‘they were being punished for having sided with the British’. He further added that ‘the Premier had now thrown off the mask, and revealed his real feelings. He might speak in a moderate way to me, but his true desire was to destroy the landlord class.’ What were the ‘real feelings’ and ‘true desire’ of the Premier, who according to Haig was a representative of the right-wing in the UP Congress? Different quarters had different answers to this extremely important question. The Premier’s conversation before 10 November had created, in the minds of the landlords, the impression that he did not really want a compromise. This was certainly contrary to Haig’s personal assessment of the Premier’s attitude. The intransigent attitude of the landlords, though adopted to put pressure on the ministry, had left them hamstrung. Landlords could come to an honourable compromise with the Congress but could not dictate terms. Landlords felt that approaching the Parliamentary Sub-Committee ‘might not only be humiliating but useless’.60 The response of the right-wingers in the central leadership was equally interesting. Meanwhile Chhatari contacted Bhulabhai Desai who said that the ‘matter was out of his hands’. When he rung up Patel at Wardha he gave ‘a noncommittal answer, saying that he would have to consult his colleagues’. And finally Patel told him that it was necessary to know what was the attitude of the Premier to these ideas. The Bill was yet to go through the upper house and events seemed to be steadily leading up to a trial of strength. Haig still half-hoped that the Parliamentary Sub-Committee, being right-wing, would do something to safeguard the interests of the landlords. But the Parliamentary SubCommittee, argued Rajendra Prasad, could not think of intervening unless the ministry desired that it should do so.61

59

Ibid. Haig to Linlithgow, 22 November 1938. Emphasis added. Ibid. 61 Rajendra Prasad Papers, Rajendra Prasad to Patel, 29 May 1939. 60

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Personally, Haig was convinced that the Tenancy Bill would be ‘on the whole a valuable measure, and will greatly improve the position of the tenants’. At the same time ‘the landlords may perhaps count themselves lucky to escape with nothing more drastic’. A compromise could not be reached and the landlord class was undergoing an ideological crisis. In the election of the British Indian Association, organisation of the Oudh Taluqdars, Raja of Salempur lost to the Raja Bahadur of Taloi. The election was very closely contested and Taloi was successful by 147 votes to 145. Haig attributed his success to the ‘strong support he received from the Congress’.62 The issue on which the election was fought was ‘primarily the issue of reaching a settlement with the Congress or putting up a vigorous opposition to them’.63 The Bill was taking all the time of the ministry as there were 300 clauses to be passed and till February 1938 only 45 clauses were passed. Till August 1939 the discussions on the Tenancy Bill were narrowed down to the single point of the formula to govern ejectment in default of payment of rent. Meanwhile negotiations were once again progressing between the ministers and the representatives of the landlords in Nainital. Haig’s own personal judgement was that the ministry would not allow the Bill to hang on till April 1940 and would try to satisfy the landlords with ‘comparatively few reasonable concessions’.64 The Tenancy Bill was referred to a Select Committee of the Legislative Council on 7 July 1939, and this committee was to report by 10 August. The committee acted ‘throughout as a negotiating committee’ and the government finally made an offer of improvement in the provisions about ejectment in default of payment of rent. The report of the Select Committee was laid before the Council on 10 August and consideration postponed till 21 August. When the Legislative Council met on 21 August it was clear that the government had a majority and that the opposition would not be able to get the Bill referred to another Select Committee. ‘They have discredited themselves’, wrote Haig, ‘and thrown away a chance of getting a valuable concession by agreement while preserving their unity as a party. They have also lost the opportunity of claiming credit for accepting the Bill.’65 62 The zamindars of Agra had agreed to Congress arbitration while of Oudh had not been equally enthusiastic, Independent India, Vol. III, No. 31, October 1938. Notes: ‘Congress High Command and UP Zamindars.’ 63 Haig Papers, Haig to Linlithgow, 23 December 1938. 64 Ibid., 12 July 1939. 65 Haig Papers, Haig to Linlithgow, 12 August 1939.

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Even this moderate Tenancy Bill had shaken the entire landlord class and for the first time they felt that ‘the whole foundation of their position is swaying beneath them’.66 Now they were feeling that the British administration had not defended them at the critical moment and that ‘their loyalty in the past has been ill-required’. Despite Haig’s encouragement to take a less despairing view of the future many of them felt ‘that their position is slipping away from them the whole time’.67 In economic terms the peasantry did not get much and for those who always measured things on the economic scale it was natural to miss the most significant aspect of office acceptance, i.e., the undermining of the hegemony of the landlords over the peasantry and entire rural life. With the advance of the democratic revolution their old authority was ‘slipping away from them the whole time’. The dismantling of the ideological superstructure of ‘feudalism’ was preceding the actual dismantling of the structure of economic relations. ‘The masses think’, wrote Haig, ‘in terms of “Raj” and it was quite clear that Congress “Raj” had come.’ It is always easy to measure visible economic gains than ‘invisible’ political gains, especially the gains which form series of links in the process of a long chain of building a counter-hegemony. A hegemonic politics constantly ensures that struggle is always fought for these ‘invisible gains’, sometimes even at the cost of suffering economic disadvantages voluntarily (‘sacrifice’). Writing about the advantages of office acceptance, Nehru, who had strongly opposed office acceptance, emphasised: ‘The greatest effect of office acceptance is the remarkable change it has brought about in the psychology of the people and the atmosphere in the country. There are certain things which cannot be weighed accurately in any scale. They are courage, sorrow and such feelings.’68 Speaking on the UP Tenancy Bill in the Legislative Assembly on 12 November 1939, Nawab Sir Muhammad Yusuf reminded the Congressmen that the general impression created by the Congress Party on the zamindars, especially on those zamindars who had helped the Congress Party in the elections had been that their interest would be ‘fully watched’.69 But now it was clear from the Bill, he said, that the whole 66

Ibid., 24 January 1939. Ibid. 68 Jawaharlal Nehru, Selected Works, Vol. 8, pp. 351–52. Also see pp. 365 and 367. 69 Nehru Papers, UP Tenancy Act, 1939. Subject File No. 54 to 56. Proceedings of the UP Legislative Assembly, p. 222. 67

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procedure encouraged misunderstanding and tension between the zamindar and the tenant. The fact that ‘adjustment of the interests of the zamindars and tenants’ had a bearing on politics was emphasised by the landlords. The landlords wanted the ‘parties to come to an adjustment’ without the Congress playing the role of an arbiter and a regulator.70 Implicit in the Bill as it was framed was also a sense of direction and shrewd representatives of that class could see this despite the fact that the revenue minister had ‘assured’ the zamindars that ‘so far as the fundamental rights of the zamindar are concerned, he will be fully protected’. ‘… in the Tenancy Bill itself ’, observed Sir Muhammad Yusuf, ‘all kinds of ingenious subtleties and various other methods have been resorted to frame the Bill in a form which is ultimately likely to lead to the expropriation of the zamindars.’71 Bihar

Unlike the agrarian scene in UP the representatives of the big landlords in Bihar were willing to compromise. The first major item taken up by the Bihar ministry was the Bihar Tenancy Amendment Bill, 1937. Later on in 1938 the Ministry also introduced the Bihar Restoration of Bakasht Lands Bill and the Bihar Moneylenders Bill. These measures included such items as cancellation, on application of the tenant, all enhancements of rent between 1911 and 1936; reduction of all rents commuted between the same period in proportion to the fall in prices of staple food crops and the stoppage of every form of illegal exaction. The Congress victory in the elections could not but affect the Bihar landlords too. This was reflected in their changed attitude towards the Congress once it was clear that the Congress was ready to accept offices. In 1936, when the Kisan Enquiry Committee started its work and began touring the various districts to collect evidence the zamindars, ‘as a class, barring a few exceptions, did not come and participate in the enquiry’.72 But now their organisation had come to the conclusion that as far as ‘grievances of the tenants’ were concerned it was not ‘impossible to get some formula to settle the matter amicably’.73 The ‘class warfare’, they 70

Ibid., p. 209. Ibid., p. 248. 72 Dr Rajendra Prasad: Correspondence and Select Documents, p. 60. 73 Ibid., p. 290. The resolution was passed by the Central Zamindars Association in a meeting held on 11 July 1937. 71

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felt, would ‘widen the gulf between the independence and the motherland (sic)’. Rajendra Prasad responded to this resolution very positively and told the Honorary Secretary of Central Zamindars’ Association that ‘the Congress will continue to strive for such amicable settlement’.74 In order to facilitate the quick passage of the above-mentioned measures the Congress ministry, in November and early December 1937, met the representatives of the large landlords in order to come to a compromise on the key issues of rent reduction, arrears of rent and bakasht. Before these laws were passed the earlier legal provisions of Batai provided 11/20th to the landlord and 9/20th to the tenant. The ratio was reversed by the new Tenancy Bill. Rajendra Prasad claimed that on an average the reduction in cash rent would come to about 25 per cent.75 On 25 December 1937 Vallabhbhai Patel wrote to Rajendra Prasad that ‘Tenancy Act will go a long way to help the tenantry as well as landlords and zamindars. It was your personal influence which had induced the vested interests to agree to a compromise. It is a great success.’76 Rajendra Prasad informed T. Prakasam that the ‘settlement is fair although it does not concede all that the tenants wanted or needed but in a compromise that has always to be the case’.77 Towards the end of November 1937 Rajendra Prasad informed Nehru about the zamindar–Congress agreement. Later on explaining to Nehru about his and Azad’s negotiations with the representatives of the landlords, he added that he himself together with Maulana Azad, Kripalani and Patel approved of these terms.78 Attempts at mediation presupposed that on behalf of the tenantry Congress could ensure the landlords that the terms of the settlement would be implemented. However, the Kisan Sabha had torpedoed the Congress project to extend its hegemony over large sections of the landlords. Many of the landlords could agree with one big landlord’s view that ‘Congress Ministers are not their own masters. Their hands are being

74

Ibid. Letter to Shah Mohammad Masood, 20 July 1937, p. 60. Rajendra Prasad Papers, ‘Agreement between zamindars and Congress’ File No. 1-A/38. Let us recall that the agrarian programme of the Chinese Communist Party had also fixed rent reduction at 25 per cent. 76 Rajendra Prasad Papers, Patel to Rajendra Prasad. 77 Rajendra Prasad Papers, Rajendra Prasad to T. Prakasam, 27 December 1937. 78 Rajendra Prasad Papers, Rajendra Prasad to Nehru, 18 December 1938. 75

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forced by a vocal and virile section of their adherents who are carrying on a whirlwind campaign against the zamindars, painting them in the blackest colours.’79 The Kisan Sabha, by refusing to rally to the Congress, compromise was forcing the landlords to retaliate. The multi-class mass base of the Congress was being ripped apart. In a letter to the Maharaja of Darbhanga Rajendra Prasad requested him to issue a statement under the signatures of prominent and leading zamindars which ‘will clear the atmosphere to a great extent and will act as a deterrent to those zamindars who still carry on in the old way’. The following points were to be included in the statement: (a) All illegal exactions should cease. No zamindar or his amla should realise anything in excess of the legally assertained rent and cess. (b) Tenants should not be compelled to sell any article without price or at less than the market price. (c) No payments should be accepted without grant of a receipt in the prescribed form. The Maharaja of Darbhanga wrote back that it was their duty now to ‘give effect to the terms of the agreement’ to ease the acute agrarian tension in the province. He spoke of ‘great economic sacrifices that the zamindars have already made’. The Maharaja in turn demanded that ‘Provincial Congress Committee on its own part, will give definite instructions to the members of its organisations to respect the understanding’. About eight months after the Congress–zamindar agreement the Maharaja of Darbhanga wrote to Rajendra Prasad: ‘I take it’, he pointed out, ‘that it is not the intention of the Congress to wipe the zamindars of the day out of existence.’80 One of the landlords wrote to Rajendra Prasad that ‘the rent reduction proceedings are being carried on at a rather fast speed … the lawlessness is spreading and unless the question is tackled immediately it will be very difficult to bring about good relationship between the zamindars and the tenants’.81 On 20 March 1939, the Maharaja of Darbhanga met Rajendra Prasad and pointed out that ‘the agrarian situation was becoming very tense and he was apprehending much trouble all over the province’.82

79 Quoted by G. Macdonald in D.A. Low (ed.), Congress and the Raj, London, 1977. p. 308. 80 Rajendra Prasad Papers, Maharaja of Darbhanga to Rajendra Prasad, 21 April 1938. 81 Ibid. K. Singh to Rajendra Prasad, 29 March 1939. 82 Rajendra Prasad Papers, Rajendra Prasad to Sri Babu, 25 March 1939.

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The Bihar Tenancy (Amendment) Act, 1937, was brought into force with effect from 10 March 1938. A government press note stated that in the Patna district the existing rent of tenancies (involving 40,642 tenants) had been reduced as a result of the new settlement from ` 909,968 to ` 690,125; in the Gaya district (involving 14,400 tenants) from ` 624,853 to ` 476,300; and in the Shahbad district (involving 15,430 tenants) from ` 247,760 to ` 206,601. The above figures showed that the overall percentage reduction of rents was 24 per cent in the district of Patna, 24 per cent in the district of Gaya and 18 per cent in the district of Shahbad. In the great majority of rents fixed by commutation and new settlement, the reductions had been between 25 to 37.5 per cent.83 Swami Sahajanand also accepted, though reluctantly, that ultimately rent reduction might come to 25 per cent.84 Unlike UP the compromising attitude of the landlords in Bihar had made it possible to pass the agrarian bills in February and July 1938, respectively. 200 special officers had been appointed to give effect to the provisions of the Bill in the matter of reduction of rent. Out of some 15 lakh cases which had been filed for relief about 2 lakh had already been disposed of till July 1939. After its complete implementation the law was supposed to give a permanent reduction in the income of zamindars to the extent of something like two crores annually. Rajendra Prasad told Patel, that he had secured concessions and relief which no other province had so far succeeded in getting for the tenants. He got this with the ‘consent of the landlords’ and the necessary legislation was passed quickly within a year of the Congress Ministry taking office.85 Orissa

Like UP and Bihar, the Congress ministry attempted to evolve a compromise between the tenants and the landlords in Orissa also. Biswanath Dass, Premier of Orissa, wanted to give ‘relief ’ to the peasantry according 83 Ibid. Press note on Rent Reduction under Section 112 of the Bihar Tenancy Act, 7 November 1938. 84 Sahajanand Saraswati, The Other Side of the Shield: A Reply to Rajendra Prasad, December 1938. The kisan leader had tried to show that the Congress had not fulfilled its promises. In order to underline the ‘growing pro-zamindar tendency’ of the Bihar Congress Swami Sahajanand wrote another pamphlet: ‘Rent Reduction in Bihar: How it Works—An Exposure of the Government Claim’, 1939. 85 Rajendra Prasad Papers, Rajendra Prasad to Patel, 22 July 1939.

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to ‘the notion of fair and equitable rent’. While continuing ‘negotiating with the zamindars’ he found on their part the lack of ‘an attitude for adjustment’.86 Ultimately ministry came to the conclusion that it had to go ahead without their consent. Not a single amendment, out of about 100 amendments, tabled by the opposition was accepted by the Orissa Congress government and the Bill was passed by government majority. After the Tenancy Bill had already been passed in the Orissa Legislative Assembly and submitted for approval of the Viceroy, the Prime Minister was directed by Sardar Patel to have a conference with the zamindars concerned.87 The object of this conference was to point out to landlords that the Bill gave them ‘a concession of two annas more than the Ryotwari system’.88 Representatives of the Orissa landlords wanted Mahatma Gandhi to intervene but their ‘request was replied by silence’.89 The Vice-President of Orissa Landholders’ Association told Rajendra Prasad that the landlords would be prepared to make reasonable sacrifices in the interest of the tenants and in turn they expected that the landlord class would receive such fair treatment as would enable them to ‘join in the national struggle for independence’. He further stated that most of the small landholders and village mahajans helped the Congress but they now find to their dismay that the legislative measures were being introduced in a way to bring about their extinction. ‘If socialism be the ideal of the National Congress,’ the letter emphasised, ‘the landholders of Orissa should like to know where they will be. The legislation of Orissa Government seems to emanate from the socialistic programme; the landlords claim they have as much right to protection by the Congress as the tenants. Do the Congress contemplate to wipe them out?’ 90 On 3 May 1938, the Assembly passed the Bill after the third and final reading. Even on that day, the representatives of the zamindars opposed the motion in vehement and bitter terms. 86 Correspondence and Selected Documents, Vol. 1, p. 140. Biswanath Das to Rajendra Prasad, 7 December 1937. 87 Rajendra Prasad Papers, Patel to Prime Minister Biswanath Das, 12 August 1938. Before this letter was written the matter was discussed with Gandhi. This is clear from Patel’s letter to Rajendra Prasad, 31 July 1938. 88 Ibid. Patel to Biswanath Das, 12 August 1938. 89 Ibid. Vice-President of the All Orissa Landholders’ Association to Rajendra Prasad, 14 August 1938. 90 Ibid.

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All Tenancy Bills passed by different legislatures were finally enforced as laws with due approval of the respective governors. Only one Bill, i.e., the Madras Estates Land (Orissa Amendment) Bill, 1937, passed by the Orissa Legislature was held for the consideration of the Viceroy who finally withheld his assent.91 Andhra Desa

The zamindari system was prevalent in some of the Andhra districts. The Provincial Congress Committee was involved in zamindari–ryots conflict at two places, Kalipatnam and Munagala. The ryots led by the socialists and ryot-workers ‘transgressed’ the law and were proceeded against by the Magistracy. T. Prakasam, the revenue minister, secured the release of those in custody and the Collector of West Godavary was directed to make an enquiry into the claims of the ryots. Earnest efforts were made by the President of the APCC ‘to effect a compromise between the contending parties but without any tangible results’.92 In the case of the Munagala Estate the APCC achieved a partial success. After a long-drawn-out process of consultations and negotiations the arbiters succeeded in thrashing out a pact which was read out in the form of a proclamation in a meeting of the ryots on 6 November 1939. Observed the APCC Report: ‘… the success that has attended the labours of the General Secretary, the Office Secretary and notably of Sri Erneni Subrahmanyam of the Komaravol Ashram should be enough to encourage the Provincial Congress Committee in undertaking the task of reconciliation on a wider scale’.93

91

Kishori Mohan Patra, ‘The First Congress Ministries: Problems and Prospects 1937–39’ in B.N. Pande (ed.), A Centenary History of the Indian National Congress, 1935–1947, Vol. I–III, Delhi, 1985, p. 171. 92 ‘The Year’s Work: 1939. Annual Report of the Andhra PCC, 1940’, AICC Papers, File No. P-3/1939–40, p. 7. 93 Ibid.

Chapter 9

The Left and the Ministries Experiments with Class Confrontation—I

In the great debate which occurred in the Congress ranks on the question of council entry and office acceptance, the CSP continued to assert that it was a debate between reformists and revolutionaries, between those who intended to follow the constitutionalist path which the Congress had already rejected in 1920 and the non-constitutionalists, the uncompromising fighters against imperialism. After the Bombay session (1934) the right-wing within the Congress had to undertake the responsibility of fighting the impending Central Legislative Assembly elections. In the process they implemented the general policy of the INC which had been decided by a majority vote in the Bombay session. However, the left-wing persisted in their criticism even after the right-wingers had protested vehemently and had explained their point of view in detail. Given their framework, it was perhaps natural for the CSP to perceive the efforts of the Central Parliamentary Board as an attempt by the right-wing forces to consolidate themselves. From its very birth important individuals within the CSP were fired with the zeal to create a united left within the Congress ranks not only to influence its long-term politics but also to stem the immediate tide of ‘disastrous constitutionalism’.1 Perhaps the 1 Yusuf Meherally Papers, File No. 6. Letter from Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, 24 October 1935.

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general feeling prevalent among the Socialists could be summed up in the words of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya: ‘The right-wing is organising so systematically, how long shall we let our side drift?’1a The Socialists were of the view that the right-wing was definitely trying to form alliances with groups outside to strengthen themselves. In the years 1934–36 the Socialists’ criticism of the right-wing was pungent and sharp. At the Faizpur session in December 1936 they characterised the dominant leadership of the Congress as ‘bourgeois’ and asserted that under no circumstances would Congressmen elected to the legislatures serve as agents of imperialism by accepting ministerial offices or share responsibility for carrying on the foreign administration and the repression and exploitation of the people which that system necessitates. They emphasised the need for ‘revolutionary parliamentarianism’ which was backed by ‘simultaneous mass action’.2 It was during 1935–36 that Swami Sahajanand embraced the political perspective articulated by the CSP at that time. While a Communist resolution on Congress ministries declared that mass enthusiasm and mass mobilisation during the elections had generated a momentum which needed to be developed further but by accepting ministries ‘the right-wing leadership began to move backwards’. For this purpose they needed to popularise the following two slogans: ‘Fulfil our demands, redress our grievances or resign.’3 It was with these perspectives in mind that the left began to pressurise the ministries to implement its promises immediately after they were installed. The right-wing leaders perceived the activities of the left as an attempt to discredit them in the eyes of the masses and dislodge them from their positions in the Congress. The EC of Champaran DCC had passed a resolution asking Swami Sahajanand not to tour in that district and also prohibiting Congress workers from cooperating with his tour.4 The resolutions were passed on the ground that the Bihar Kisan Sabha was following an anti-Congress 1a

Ibid. Jayaprakash Narayan Papers, File No. 121D. Resolution for the United Front Rally at Faizpur, 1936. Type copy, 18 December 1936. Also see Dinkar Mehta, ‘Revolutionary Use of Legislatures’, Congress Socialist, Vol. II. No. 7, 20 February 1937. 3 Jayaprakash Narayan Papers, File No. 32. An undated Communist document which includes party resolutions on a number of topics. 4 For the full text of the resolution see Rajendra Prasad: Correspondence and Select Documents, Vol. I, p. 306. 2

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policy and the peasant leaders were preaching violence. Later on the DCC of Saran also passed a similar resolution,5 Seeking Patel’s advice on this problem, Rajendra Prasad commented: I think our people have done much less propaganda than people of Swami Sahajanand’s views and I have no doubt that if they worked as hard and as systematically as the latter has been doing there will be no difficulty. I also feel that that is certainly the better way of meeting the situation and it will not always be easy however desirable to invoke disciplinary jurisdiction of the Congress.6

The decisions of the Champaran, Saran and Monghyr districts Congress Committees were endorsed by the EC of the BPCC. Also it asked the Congress members working in the Kisan Sabha to dissociate themselves from the Kisan Sabha activities. Not only that, they were also supposed to keep an eye on these activities and to report them to the PCC office. Out of 36 members of the AICC from Bihar, 14 were Kisan Sabhaites including 8 socialists. In the BPCC the number of Kisan Sabhaites and socialists was 50 out of 250. Referring to the strong stand taken by the Bihar Executive Committee Sardar Patel wrote to Rajendra Prasad that such action in fact should have been taken long ago. ‘We shall not’, he added, ‘be able to hold on any longer if we will continue to allow them to always throw the blame of all evil things on us, in the name of common front.’7 There were only three or four districts where the Kisan Sabha leaders exercised considerable influence. District Gaya Congress Committee was entirely in the hands of Kisan Sabha. Patna came next in order and then came Monghyr and Muzaffarpur.8 A resolution adopted by the Bihar Provincial Kisan Council expressed the view that actions of the Champaran, Saran and Monghyr DCCs if not ‘immediately rescinded, will precipitate a severe crisis in the Congress which may not be confined to Monghyr or the province. It is a policy which will lead to disruption and ruin.’

5

Circular issued by the Secretary, District Congress Committee, Saran, to the Secretaries of all Thana Congress Committees asking them not to organise or attend meetings of Kisan Sabha, Correspondence and Select Documents, Vol. I, p. 305. 6 Ibid. Rajendra Prasad to Patel, 6 December l937. 7 Rajendra Prasad Papers, Patel to Rajendra Prasad, 16 December 1937. 8 Searchlight, 17 December 1937.

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A meeting of the reception committee of the fifth Bihar Provincial Kisan Conference held on 19 December appealed to the Working Committee of the AICC to remove the ‘ban’ put on Congress workers taking part in the Kisan Sabha.9 At Gopalganj, Kuchaikot and Chapra black flags were shown to Swami Sahajanand and slogans of ‘Swamijee go back’ were shouted. But despite this the Swami was able to address about one lakh kisans in twenty-one meetings in his eight-day tour of Saran district.10 At Chapra he told his audience: ‘I have, in my speeches, exhorted the Kisans to stand on their legs, to be fearless, and to organise themselves with a view to resist peacefully all illegal exactions and oppression. If that is tantamount to creating violent atmosphere, I have no explanations to offer.’11 In a statement Rajendra Prasad claimed that the resolution of the BPCC did not impose any ban on the Kisan Sabha as such but only on Congressmen who participate in the objectionable activities of the Sabha. All that the resolution desired, said Rajendra Prasad, was that Congressmen should desist from activities which aimed at sapping the foundations of the Congress itself.12 Because of Jawaharlal Nehru’s distinct political perspective, as discussed in an earlier chapter, both the sides thought it necessary to explain their side of the case to him. On 18 December 1937, Rajendra Prasad wrote to Nehru explaining the resolution of the BPCC: … they have freely carried on propaganda on their own lines. This propaganda was in favour of demands which were in excess of the Congress decision but there was no objection to that. But recently they have started preaching directly violence and the cult of the danda has been openly advocated at mass meetings.13

9 Ibid., 22 December 1937. Six members of the Monghyr DCC were also the members of the Kisan Council. 10 Searchlight, 23 December 1937. 11 Ibid. 12 ‘Their speeches have been openly encouraging violence in one form or another and have been responsible for the development of a situation fraught with dangerous potentialities.’ Searchlight, 19 December 1937. 13 A ICC Papers, G–98/1937. Rajendra Prasad to Nehru, 18 December 1937. The Kisan Bulletin of 14 January 1938 (copy available in this file) contains a note on ‘Congress–Kisan Sabha Differences in Bihar’ in which Swami Sahajanand gave his exposition of ‘the right of using danda in self-defence’. The Kisan Sabha described the BPCC resolution as a ‘ban on Bihar Kisan Sabha’.

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Earlier, referring to the resolution passed by the WC of the Champaran DCC Swami had written to Jawaharlal: … there is a deliberate move in the province to check and cripple the activities of the Kisan Sabha by applying the Congress machinery. It is, therefore, a very serious question and according to me touches the very foundation and well-being of the National Congress.14

The one point, on which Rajendra Prasad and Sahajanand agreed, was that the way the Kisan organisation related to the Congress was of fundamental importance for the Congress organisation. Thus, the confrontation between the two contending strategies had crystallised in actuality as a confrontation on the issue of Kisan Sabha—its mode of functioning and organising the peasantry. Once the dominant leadership of the Congress was perceived by the left-wing as going back to the constitutional path and making peace with imperialism its criticism of the Sabha was also seen in a different fight and essentially motivated. Therefore, the defence of the Sabha and its underlying positions became an immediate issue of political prestige. As a result attitudes began to harden and passions were aroused. One of the resolutions of the first meeting of the All India Kisan Committee held at Niamatpur (Bihar) on 14 and 15 July 1937, had categorically stated that ‘the existence of a separate and independent Kisan Sabha is most essential and can in no circumstances be dispensed with’.15 The resolution reminded Congressmen that the National Congress in its sessions at Karachi, Lucknow and Faizpur had ‘unequivocally accepted the fundamental right of the peasants to form their unions’.16 The meeting also denounced ‘all efforts made in various quarters’ to subordinate the Kisan Sabhas to the control of the Congress Committees. The attitude of defiance on the part of Kisan leaders and left-wing and imposition of repressive measures by the ministries created mutual distrust and suspicion. The resolutions passed by the Champaran, Saran and Monghyr DCCs and the approval of these resolutions by the BPCC made the Kisan Sabha an issue of utmost importance for the rank and file Congressmen, on which, sooner or later, they were expected to take 14

Ibid. Swami Sahajanand to Nehru, 28 November 1937. Kisan Bulletin, 26 November 1937. Indulal Yagnik Papers, File No. 8. 16 Ibid. Also see Kisan Bulletin, 10 December 1937. 15

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a position. The ideological debate between the two fringes, left and right, was acting as a pressure on the middle groups of the ideological spectrum.17 ‘Why has the Bihar Congress suddenly decided to disrupt the harmony between the Congress and the Kisan Sabha?’, asked an important editorial in the Congress Socialist. The following answer was given to this question: ‘The capitulatory policy implicit in the present Parliamentary “line” of the Congress demands the curbing, ultimately crushing of the class organisations, particularly of the peasants.’18 Lathi charges, arrests and imposition of Section 144 and Section 124-A by the ministries only further convinced the left that the correctness of their analysis was increasingly being vindicated. This growing conviction on their part was expressed in the struggles which they launched with the explicit motive of discrediting the right-wing in the eyes of the peasants and workers. Actually the question of conducting an ideological struggle against the right-wing was an extremely complex question. The ideological struggle was to be conducted against those who were ardent champions of independence and were mass leaders of considerable stature. But this is not how the leftists, except Nehru, had approached the problem. For them, it was an ideological struggle against those who were not even genuine anti-imperialists and were looking forward to strike a deal with imperialism on something less than compelete independence. The right-wing, naturally, perceived such a campaign as a deliberate attempt to discredit them and capture the organisation of the INC. The question was not how to conduct an ideological debate against those who were not ardent nationalists; it was a question of how to conduct an ideological debate against those who were as self-sacrificing and committed to the cause of India’s independence as the socialists and communists themselves. In a meeting held on 4 June 1938, Bihar Kisan Sabha passed a resolution stating that ‘the Ministry should enact further legislation setting aside the Congress–zamindar agreement as it does not serve the purpose of the kisans … .’19 In accordance with the decision of the Bihar Provincial Kisan Council, the Anti-Agreement Week was observed throughout Bihar from 25 to 31 July 1938. Hundreds of thousands of handbills 17

For details see the diagram in Chapter 1. Congress Socialist, Special issue on Bihar Kisan Sabha, Vol. III. No. 4, 22 January 1938. 19 Kisan Bulletin, 1 July 1938 in Indulal Yagnik Papers, File No. 8. 18

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were distributed all over the province calling upon the kisans to protest against the Agreement by rallies on 8 August. On the same-day 2,000 rallies were organised all over the province. Over 20 lakh kisans participated in these rallies and recorded their protest. On 15 August 25,000 kisans marched into Patna. The procession passed before the Assembly chamber and a gaint rally, was held at the Bankipore Maidan. Swami Sahajanand, Jayaprakash, Yadunandan Sharma, Awadhesh Prasad and Yamuna Karji (MLA) addressed the kisans. All these leaders emphasised the question: ‘Why was it necessary to enter into such an agreement with the zamindars who had opposed the Congress?’20 The Kisan Bulletin of 10 December 1937, claimed that more than one lakh kisans attended the rally in response to the call of the Bihar Kisan Sabha. And then added: ‘Meanwhile Government and Zamindari repression goes on unchecked.’21 But the repression only added to the determination of the kisan leaders. When the Congress ministry had assumed office in July 1937 they discouraged the earlier practice of reporting of the speeches. In September, however, when ‘violent speeches by agrarian agitators began to threaten the public peace’, the Government ordered that full reports of the speeches of eight prominent leaders belonging to Kisan Sabha or left-wing organisations be regularly submitted to the Government. ‘Reports are accordingly being taken and are studied by Government on their receipt.’ 22 The activities of the Sabha were gaining ground in Gaya, Monghyr, Saran, Muzaffarpur, Darbanga, Bhagalpur, Patna and Shahbad. The membership went up steadily from 80,000 members in 1935 to 250,000 in 1938.23 It seems that towards the end of 1937 the right-wing within the Congress had come to the conclusion that if they were to implement their programme of office acceptance they would be obliged to maintain their grip over the Congress organisational structure, especially the All India Congress Committee.24 In December 1937, we find Rajendra Prasad

20

National Front, Vol. I. No. 28, 28 August 1938. Kisan Bulletin, 10 December 1937. Indulal Yagnik Papers, File No. 8. 22 Linlithgow Papers, Secretary to Governor of Bihar to Secretary to the Viceroy. Telegram, 6 January 1938. 23 Walter Hauser, op. cit., p. 92. 24 Correspondence and Select Documents, Vol. I, Patel to Rajendra Prasad, 21 November 1937, pp. 12, 123. Also see pp. 127, 139. 21

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actively organising the forces of the right-wing in Bihar. He told the Prime Minister Sri Krishna Sinha, … all our friends should act in a concerted way at the next elections of the Congress which are going to take place within the next three weeks. Wherever, any differences exist they should be composed so that if at all necessary there may be a clear and clean contest between the orthodox programmewallas on the one side, and socialists on the other … . The matter is urgent and unless we all work in a concerted manner and let the Congress organisation take a correct attitude we may have to face great difficulties in future.25

In another letter to a local influential Congressman, Rajendra Prasad reminded him that it was time ‘we all acted with expedition and determination’. What was at stake was ‘Gandhiji’s programme’, the only programme which ‘can lead us to success’. Any other programme, he underlined, would lead us to ‘ruin and disaster’.26 Two weeks before the elections, Patel wrote back: We may have a fixed struggle at Haripura. Please see that in the selection of delegates, eliminate all the anti-Gandhi elements. We must no more tolerate the forces of disorder in the name of United Front. They have taken undue advantage of our toleration, but the time has come for a definite stand.27

Interestingly even in December 1937 Patel and Rajendra Prasad were still debating the wisdom of the course to be taken, whether to resign from the Working Committee, the course they had adopted in 1936 on Gandhi’s advice or to fight it out. The cause of the dilemma was that they were not sure what position Nehru was likely to take in this coming battle.28 It was against this backdrop that the Working Committee resolution of the BPCC was passed on 14 December 1937, in the midst of the campaign for the election of delegates to the Haripura Congress. During the election of delegates to the Haripura session of the INC ‘acts of violence’ were witnessed ‘on a large scale’.29 This almost 25

Ibid. Rajendra Prasad to Sri Krishna Sinha, 2 December 1937, p. 131. Also see p. 133. Ibid. To Ramdayalu Sinha, 7 December 1937, p. 138. 27 Ibid. Patel to Rajendra Prasad, 12 December 1937, p. 141. 28 Ibid. Rajendra Prasad to Patel, 21 December 1937, p. 147–48. 29 AICC Papers, File No. P–6/1939–40. Report of the Violence Enquiry Committee. For Bihar election disputes also see File No. P–6 and P–6(i)/1937. Haripura (Gujarat) was the venue of the 51st Annual Session of the Congress. The session was held on 19 to 21 February 1938. 26

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frightened the top leadership and they seem to have come to the conclusion that if stern measures were not taken the organisation might go to pieces. ‘Non-violence’, observed the Report, ‘has been defended as violently as it has been attacked.’ Also it was found that ‘most of the exhibitions of violence were witnessed in those constituencies in which a Kisan Sabha leader was opposing an orthodox Congress candidate’.30 Nehru took a very serious note of these developments but was unable to make a positive intervention. As the retiring president he submitted a report to the Haripura session in which he criticised both the ‘fringes’— left as well as right—in the INC. Without mincing words he also underlined the point that in recent months attempts had been made to drive out the left-wing.31 The AICC meeting was held at Haripura on 16 February 1938. It was in this meeting that Subhas Bose was elected the President of the INC. Speaking on this occasion Nehru had observed: ‘We should make a determined effort to prevent the growing factions.’32 Tripuri was still far off. The first trial of strength between the ‘fringes’ had already taken place. The ideological struggle between the left and the right fringes had begun to tear down the organisational structure of the Congress Party. So long as the left did not make a distinction between ideology and strategy and accept the fact that the right-wingers were equally determined patriots and their moves conformed to a definite strategy it could not pose the question of ideological struggle in a framework which advanced the cause of socialism as well as strengthened the unity of all nationalists against imperialism. The bakasht struggles in Bihar and working class struggles in other provinces further accentuated ideological divisions within the Congress leadership. This ideological organisational strife within the Congress once again revived the favourite vision of the bureaucracy—the vision of the left-wing causing an organisational split. After the AICC elections, Maurice Hallet, the Governor of Bihar wrote to Linlithgow: ‘The signs of a split between the left and the right grow daily clearer.’33 The left as well as right were fighting their ideological battles totally oblivious of another phenomenon which proved to be of great importance. 30

Ibid. Nehru Papers, Articles/Editorials, Sr. No. 162, Report submitted to the Haripura session, February 1938. 32 AICC Papers, File No. G-27/1938. 33 Linlithgow Papers, Hallet to Linlithgow, 7 January 1938. 31

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‘What was not popular in Bihar last year is most popular today, namely the influence of the All India Muslim League and as such, as one belonging to the community knows in which direction the wind is blowing.’34 The apparent struggle between the left and the right on ideological positions contained an inner logic for the overall strategic-cum-organisational conception of how the Congress was to lead a united struggle. It was basically the conflicting conceptions on this question which lay at the heart of the tension between the left and right at this time. A leader like Jawaharlal Nehru whose ideological sympathies lay with the left-wing could nevertheless see that the methods adopted by the left-wing were creating organisational problems for the whole movement. This he felt would also have unfortunate repercussions for the left in the long run. THE LOGIC OF FORMING ‘AN INDEPENDENT AND SEPARATE’ KISAN SABHA

The leftists believed that though the right-wing talked of complete independence it actually stood for dominion status. For them acceptance of offices was the road to constitutionalism and compromise with imperialism. ‘It is necessary that we mobilise all the forces against this compromising policy.’35 The formation of ministries was characterised by the Communists as Mahatma’s ‘alternative line of reformism’. It was also stressed that the unity in the ranks of the left was the crying need of the moment to ‘resist this dangerous drift towards conciliation and cooperation’ with imperialism. Therefore, the struggle against the ‘new line of Gandhism’ must be intensified both in ‘words and in deed’. It was with this perspective in mind that the Congress Socialist Party and the Communists were organising the workers and peasants into their own class organisations. Also during the period 1936–38, despite dissensions, both the organisations were working as a United Front. Both the parties had forged a close alliance with the Kisan leaders Sahajanand Sarswati, Indulal Yagnik and N.G. Ranga to organise the All India Kisan Committee in 1936. From 1936–37 onwards the CSP was working in close cooperation with the 34 Correspondence and Select Documents, Vol. I, Khan Bahadur Mohammad Ismail to Rajendra Prasad, 17 October 1937. 35 Jayaprakash Narayan Papers, File No. 37, 38a, ‘Unite for Struggle Against the Slave Constitution’. Typed article. ‘The spirit of reformism has gained ground to eclipse the idea of revolutionary struggle’, Independent India, Vol. II, No. 1, 3 April 1938.

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Communists and before AICC and other important meetings there always used to be consultations between them and often joint amendments and resolutions were agreed upon.36 The seriousness of the agrarian situation had made the job of mediation an extremely difficult one. Rajendra Prasad wrote to Khan Bahadur Mohammad Ismail that the Congress people were ‘really between two stones, each equally relentless’. ‘You must have seen’, he added, ‘the criticism levelled against the Congress proposal and the charges of betrayal brought against the Congress by the other side. We have, therefore, to act with caution but at the same time with speed and firmness.’37 Swami Sahajanand’s propaganda against the terms of the Congress–zamindars compromise was creating misgivings in the minds of the landlords about the Congress intentions as Swami was a member of the All India Congress Committee. The Congress could not hope to carry on its mediation successfully and thereby command ‘universal support’ unless it was willing to do something about it.38 The Congress was faced with a real dilemma: either Sahajanand and his Kisan Sabha must be stopped from carrying on their anti-settlement propaganda or the agreement with the zamindars must be scrapped. On 4 December 1937 Patel wrote to Rajendra Prasad: ‘We shall have to resist the excessive demands of the tenants who have been worked up and expect too much from the Congress ministries. The reports of Kisan demonstrations in your province are disquieting.’39 Earlier, on 23 August, a big demonstration was organised in Patna. This was followed by Kisan Day celebrations on 1 September when more than 2,000 meetings were held in the province.40 The crucial question involved in this agreement was: Who was the representative of the peasantry? This had fundamental implications about 36

Jayaprakash Narayan Papers, ‘The Problem of Left Unity’, Typed manuscript, 17 pages, p. 4. Among the regional peasant organisations which made the emergence of All-India Kisan Sabha possible, the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha (BPKS) was by far the most significant. For details see Walter Hauser, ‘The Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha, 1929–42: A Study of an Indian Peasant Movement’, Ph.D. Thesis, (NMML) University of Chicago, 1961. 37 Correspondence and Select Documents, Vol. I, p. 111. 38 Ibid. Thakur Bimla Prasad Singh to Rajendra Prasad, 10 November 1937. Also see p. 151. 39 Rajendra Prasad Papers, Patel to Prasad, 4 December 1937. 40 Correspondence and Select Documents, Vol. I, p. 300. According to another source 50,000 peasants participated in the 23 August demonstration Congress Socialist, Vol. III, No. 4, January 1938.

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the kind of peasant organisations which could be built without their coming into conflict with the Congress. By concluding this agreement the Congress leadership had established its right to speak for the peasantry. This created a dilemma for the Kisan Sabha leadership as it had always claimed that it was not the Congress but the Kisan Sabha which could speak for the peasantry. On 20 November 1937, in a lengthy statement Sahajanand made it clear that the Kisan Sabha ‘which claims to serve and represent’ the Kisans was not given an opportunity to place its viewpoint clearly ‘before the preparation of the Bill’.41 Clarifying the relationship with the Congress Sahajanand asserted that ‘throughout these years since the Sabha’s coming into being ours has been the united front with the Congress in matters political’. The notion of united front implied that politically it was not the National Congress but the Kisan Sabha which represented the peasantry. Similarly the united front with the trade union organisation AITUC implied that the workers were politically represented by those parties which claimed to be the parties of the working class. ‘We find ourselves’, declared Sahajanand, ‘between two horns of dilemma and, to be frank, we are not ready to nullify our existence, liquidate the Sabha and give the kisans legitimate ground for suspicion about our claims … .’ ‘We do not want’, he added, ‘to embarrass the Congress Ministry. But then we don’t want to liquidate ourselves too.’42 The claim of the Congress to represent the kisans was being challenged very seriously for the first time. The Congress under Gandhi’s leadership could not afford to surrender this claim to the Kisan Sabha and continue to speak for the Indian masses. To accept this, as Mahadev Desai rightly pointed out, was to ‘conceive the possibility of the Congress breaking to pieces’.43 According to the Congress leadership the ‘legitimate’ interests of zamindars and kisans could be reconciled and both could be represented through the Congress. The Congress represented the masses as well as it was an arbiter between the conflicting interests in the camp of the people. But this is not how the left looked upon the organisational framework of the Congress.44 41

Ibid., p. 299. Ibid., p. 298. 43 Mahadev Desai on Bihar Dispute, AICC Papers, G–98/1937. 44 ‘We cannot fight’, declared Sahajanand, ‘for the interests of the kisans simultaneously with our regard for the class interests of the zamindars. The two sets of interests are in deadly conflict to each other and cannot be reconciled under any circumstances.’ 42

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In the context of Bihar the dominant leadership of the Congress knew that it was giving economic concessions in order to ‘purchase the consent of the zamindars’.45 But the left and Kisan Sabha leaders looked upon it differently. The peasantry was told that ‘zamindar or pro-zamindar elements are very strongly entrenched inside the Congress high command in Bihar and in fact the Cabinet is manned by them’. That was pinpointed as the reason why the Ministry’s Tenancy Bill had only ‘scratched the surface of their misery and fell short of the solemn pledges given to them’.46 Rajendra Prasad had anticipated that Swami Sahajanand ‘may raise objections’ but on the whole he hoped they would be able to ‘satisfy the Provincial Congress Committee and the bulk of the people’. After the agreement, he wrote to T. Prakasam: ‘The Kisan Sabha is not likely to be satisfied with it, we shall see.’47 Barely two weeks before the agreement was accepted by the landlords, Kisan Sabha and leftists organised a massive demonstration in Patna on 26 November 1937. The Congress Socialist claimed that one lakh peasants participated in their demonstration. ‘By 26th morning the whole of Patna was one surging sea of humanity.’ It was BPKS’s ‘biggest and best organised demonstration’.48 The logic of events was unfolding towards a show-down between the Congress and the Kisan Sabha. Commenting on the Congress–Zamindar Agreement Searchlight wrote: It is true that the raiyats have not got all that they would like to but that was possible only when the zamindari itself was abolished. This, however, is not a practical proposition immediately, however much one may desire to see it an accomplished fact. With the zamindari being still an established fact, the only question that can arise is that of a just adjustment between the interests and rights of both the zamindars and the raiyats. That has been the policy of the Congressmen which has not yet Presidential Address, All India Kisan Sabha, 3rd Session, Comilla, 13 to 15 May 1938. ‘… the Congress cannot at one and the same time retain the faith and confidence of both the zamindars and the peasants.’ Independent India, Vol. III, No. 31, October 1938. 45 Ibid., p. 130. Rajendra Prasad to Sri Krishna Sinha, 2 December 1937. Emphasis added. 46 Congress Socialist, Special Issue on Bihar Kisan Sabha, Vol. III, No. 4, 22 January 1938. Section: ‘The Kisan movement and the Congress Ministry’. 47 Correspondence and Select Documents, Vol. I, p. 157, 27 December 1937. The agreement was reached on 13 December 1937. 48 Congress Socialist, Vol. III, No. 4, 22 January 1938. Section: ‘Offensive against the Kisan Sabha’.

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committed itself to the abolition of zamindari system. In the circumstances, the Congress leaders could do nothing better than try to bring about the necessary adjustment between the interests of the raiyats, on the one hand, and the interests of the zamindars on the other, and that is what they have attempted to do through this agreement … . If any other course had been followed, it is possible that in one or two respects slightly more could have been obtained but it would have been so obtained only by the force of numbers in the legislature and even then not before a year or so more had elapsed. And then there would have been determined opposition and every inch of the ground would have been contested by the zamindars.49

Within the strategic perspective and agrarian programme of the Congress there could be no other way of criticising the Congress leadership in Bihar except in the way pointed out in the Searchlight comment. But this is not how the left and the kisan leaders were criticising the Congress. Their criticism flowed from a different strategic perspective and the agrarian programme conceived and implemented within its parameters by the method of accentuating and sharpening class struggle. There is no evidence to show that Bihar landlords looked upon the Congress as their own party as asserted by the left-wing. Inherent in their compromise with the Congress was the assumption that Congress represented the interests of the tenantry in these negotiations and after mutual concessions it would be the legitimate authority to regulate the relation between them and the tenants. That is why their representatives kept complaining to Rajendra Prasad to intervene and regulate their relations according to the terms of the settlement. By compromising with the Congress they were giving the Congress the same status which till now had been the prerogative of the colonial state. By acting as an ‘impartial’ arbiter, i.e., by not fully attacking the economic status of the landlords Congress intended to gain the status of an alternative authority. It wanted to gain on the ideological political dimension by ‘losing’, if at all it can be called losing, on the economic–political dimension. Without giving such economic concessions and assurances to the landlords it could never aspire to achieve this hegemonic status. The left wanted an immediate struggle for abolition of zamindari which the Congress could not agree to. Also it could not but resist those excessive demands of the tenantry 49

Searchlight, 23 December 1937. Emphasis added.

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which hindered the achievement of its desired goal, the goal of emerging an alternative political authority. These two stances of the Congress were cited by the leftists to prove that the Congress was shielding the interests of the landlords. We conceive of ‘class interest’ as composed of two dimensions: ideologico-political and economico-political. If a social group or a political party fights to defend or even extend its economic gains alone it remains at the level of economico-political. Only a party striving to build hegemony gives primacy to the ideologico-political dimension or plane. With this aim in view it conducts negotiations, makes compromises and calculated concessions on the economico-political dimension in order to buy the passive allegiance and consent of the opposing party, group or class. Obviously it was a complicated form of politics more difficult to conduct than the ‘straight line’ politics where the ‘class interest’ was sought to be defended by inflexible and stubborn militant attitudes. BAKASHT STRUGGLES

If we carefully look at the course of the important bakasht struggles led by the Bihar Kisan Sabha we shall see that they too were all either withdrawn or settled through the intervention of the District Congress Committees or individual Congress leaders. It is possible that in these settlements the peasants got little more in economic terms than what they would have got through peaceful settlements or voluntary arbitration under the Congress leadership. But the point which we want to underline is that ultimately when it came to the crunch, despite radical slogans. The Kisan Sabha’s method was equally one of class adjustment though these struggles were supposed to abolish landlordism. In other words the leftists were compelled by circumstances to follow the Congress method but without any conscious attempt to build an alternative hegemonic politics. Even when the end result of bakasht struggles was arbitration and settlement the kisan leaders and Kisan Bulletin continued to speak the language of confrontation and revolution. For example the Kisan Bulletin observed: It is nothing but a fallacy to talk of cooperation among different classes of conflicting interests. Long talks of class cooperation are simply meant to surrender the interests of the weaker section to those of the stronger section. These ridiculous efforts on the part of the leaders remind us

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of the frantic task undertaken by some simpleton to keep safely a goat and a panther in one cage.50 Barahiya Tal

In 1936, bakasht dispute arose in Barahiya Tal for about eighty thousands of bighas. In 1937–38 these disputes increased at a rapid rate; however, the struggle was limited to few places and localities.51 Towards the latter half of 1938, zamindars began to oust the kisans from their bakasht lands. The Government despatched mounted police to the rural areas to help the zamindars and to ‘demoralise the kisans who were engaged in bakasht struggles’. It was in December 1938 that the Sabha decided to conduct the bakasht struggles in an orderly fashion. According to Awadhesh Prasad Sinha, a well-known leader of the Bihar Kisan Sabha, the zamindars ‘some of whom are Congressmen, have gone to jail during civil disobedience campaigns, have paid the punitive tax during the last civil disobedience campaign and are well-known to Congress leaders’.52 On 23 January 1939, a representative committee, which included a representative of the Kisan Sabha, met at the Collector’s bungalow to explore avenues of settlement. This conference, however, proved futile. According to the Kisan Bulletin, the main reason was ‘the obstinacy of the zamindars’.53 Later on, the leader of this struggle Karayanand Sharma, declared that the ‘tenants will have nothing to do with this arbitration committee’. In March 1939 the Barahiya Tal struggle was suspended. On 6 May addressing a big gathering of peasants Swami Sahajananda explained the reasons for the withdrawal of this much publicised struggle.54 Once again to settle the Barahiya Tal struggle an arbitration board was constituted in which Rajendra Prasad was to play the role of an arbiter.55 But it becomes clear from the Bihar Governor’s letter to the Viceroy, even Rajendra Prasad’s award in this dispute had not been accepted.56 It seems that both the sides were finding it difficult to trust an individual, 50

Kisan Bulletin, December 1938. Available in Indulal Yagnik Papers, File No. 8. National Front, 7 May 1939. ‘Our Bakasht Struggle’ by Awadhesh Prasad Sinha. 52 Ibid. 53 Kisan Bulletin in National Front, 12 February 1939. 54 Kisan Bulletin in National Front, 28 May 1939. 55 Ibid.,23 June 1939. 56 Linlithgow Papers, Hallet to Linlithgow, 13 April 1939. 51

The Left and the Ministries 227

the justness and fairness of whose decision could be perceived above question and suspicion. In this connection, apart from a large number of peasants, Rahul Sankritayan, a well-known scholar and peasant agitator, was arrested twice. Both times he resorted to hunger strike and reports of his being mistreated by the police were published in the press.57 In the meantime the dispute in regard to which he was undergoing imprisonment was ‘referred by the parties to an arbitration’.58 Darbhanga Raj

On 2 July 1939, the Bihar Provincial Kisan Council, after surveying the whole field of activity in Bihar, decided to concentrate its full strength and energy on the bakasht struggle in Darbhanga district. The Maharaja of Darbhanga was perhaps the biggest landlord in India. In June–July 1939, the kisans of Pandual thana, led by Jamuna Karjee, and Ramanandan Mishra were carrying on agitation against the Maharaja of Darbhanga. Every day jathas of 25 kisans used to march to the disputed land to plough. About 700 persons were arrested in this struggle.59 On 24 July 1939, Jayaprakash Narayan, a member of the Bihar and All India Kisan Council, intervened to reach a settlement on behalf of the Kisan Sabha. The matter was thoroughly discussed at a conference attended by the District Magistrate, Additional District Magistrate, Chief Manager, Darbhanga Raj, President of the DCC and Jayaprakash Narayan. ‘It was agreed’, reports Kisan Bulletin, … that as regards the four plots under dispute in the villages Sakri, Sagarpur, and Ajodhya, Mr Raghunandan Pandey (District Magistrate) should decide on the legal claims and his decision would be binding on both the Maharaja and the tenants. It may be added that Mr Pandey had succeeded in settling some agrarian disputes to the satisfaction of the kisans. The struggle was naturally suspended forthwith.60

On 29 July this agreement was ‘ratified’ by the Darbhanga Kisan District Conference which was attended by 10 to 15 thousand tenants. 57 Nehru Papers: Correspondence, Vol. 85, Jawaharlal Nehru to Rajendra Prasad, 8 July 1939. 58 See Kisan Bulletin in National Front, 14 May 1939. 59 Kisan Bulletin in National Front, 13 August 1939. Also see Kisan Bulletins in National Front, 30 July 1939 and National Front, 12 March 1939. 60 Ibid.

228 A History of the Indian Communists Reora

As pointed out earlier it was in December 1938 that the Bihar Kisan Sabha had decided to take the lead in the matters of bakasht struggles at the Waini Conference. Soon after this conference Reora peasants took resort to ‘satyagraha’ for a thousand bighas of land.61 The struggle here was led by Jadunandan Sharma. In 1936, Jadunandan Sharma occupied the position of Secretary of District Congress Committee and President of District Kisan Sabha. In 1937, he became the President of the District Congress Committee and Secretary of the District Kisan Sabha. Few days after the struggle began, Mr Sharma and a number of his colleagues were arrested by the police.62 The zamindars authorised the District Magistrate of Gaya to open negotiations with the kisan leaders on their behalf. The District Magistrate saw Jadunandan Sharma in jail and tried to find out avenues of restoring peace. After sometime ‘an agreement was arrived at according to which 850 bighas of land went to the kisans’.63 Jadunandan and others were released and the agitation came to an end. Describing the Reora agreement a ‘brilliant victory’, Indulal Yagnik gives the following details of the concluding phase of this struggle: Negotiations were then started by the leaders of the District Congress Committee with the zamindar. But he refused to concede anything … . A truce was then called at the instance of some friends who wanted time to settle the dispute. The truce was announced at a mammoth meeting when thousands of kisans offered to join the struggle.64 Chhitovli and Raghopur

The arbitration committee appointed to settle the bakasht dispute at Chhitovli (District Saran) gave its award, which gave 200 bighas out of 273 bighas in dispute to the kisans and the rest to the landlord. The Kisan Bulletin described it as ‘another kisan victory’.65 In Raghopur, 61 ‘On Bakasht Struggle’ by Awadheswar Prasad Sinha in National Front, 7 May 1939. Also see Hallet to Linlithgow, 8 December 1938, Linlithgow Papers. 62 National Front, 7 May 1939. Also Hallet to Linlithgow, 24 November 1938. Linlithgow Papers. Also see Swami Sahajanand, Mera Jeevan Sangharsh, 1985, pp. 319–20. 63 Ibid. 64 ‘A Brilliant Victory at Reora’ by Indulal Yagnik in National Front, 14 May 1939. 65 Kisan Bulletin in National Front, 27 August 1939.

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Mr Raghunandan Pandey, Government appointed special officer, gave his award in favour of the kisans restoring 1,000 bighas of land to them. Detailed terms were agreed upon between the representatives of the zamindars and kisans.66 It was not only during the Congress Ministry period that the Kisan Sabha, like other Congressmen, was settling disputes on behalf of the tenants. Even before the ministry period it participated in local settlements at many places. For example, in February 1936, settlements made between the zamindars and tenants led by the Kisan Sabha in Tikari estate of Gaya led to ‘considerable enhancement of the Kisan Sabha’s reputation in the area’.67 During the year, the Congressmen in many Bihar districts were also carrying on their mediatory activities. According to the Kisan Bulletin, even in August 1939, ‘Congress Committees and Ministers were making belated efforts to effect settlements between the zamindars and the tenants’.68 In accordance with the goal of agrarian revolution the left-wingers demanded of the Congress to ‘declare immediate abolition of zamindari, Khoti and other forms of landlordism … . ’69 The third session of the All-India Kisan Sabha was held at Comilla (Bengal) on 14 and 15 May under the Presidentship of Swami Sahajanand Sarswati. One of the resolutions of the All-India Kisan Sabha declared: ‘The Sabha however desires to express its considered opinion that the goal of the peasant movement can be nothing short of an agrarian revolution.’70 But as far as Congress was concerned ‘settlement approach’ formed an inseparable part of its long-term strategy of building counter-hegemony to the colonial state. The leftists, however, read into it a pro-landlord bias of a right-wing leadership. The Congress leadership believed that it was not a legal but political question and only the Congress could play the role of impartial arbiters. 66

Ibid., 19 March 1939. Lata Singh, ‘The Congress and the Bihar Kisan Sabha Movement, 1934–39,’ M.Phil dissertation, CHS/JNU, January 1987, p. 51. 68 Kisan Bulletin, in National Front, 13 August 1939. 69 Ibid., 19 March 1939. All India Kisan Committee meeting was held at Tripuri on 7–8 March 1939. This meeting was attended by Sahajanand Saraswati. N.G. Ranga, B.P.L. Bedi, Indulal Yagnik, J. Bukhari, Mohanlal Gautam (Secretary, U.P. Kisan Sangh), P. Narayan Nair (President, All Malabar Peasants Union), Dr. G. Adhikari, S.G. Sardesai and ‘Kisan Comrades’ from various provinces. 70 Kisan Bulletin in Congress Socialist, 28 May 1938. 67

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Of course the weakness and limitation of the Congress in Bihar was that it had not created enough influence over the tenantry, a necessary precondition for a successful attempt at arbitration. This vacuum could be easily filled by the radical slogans of the Kisan Sabha whose logic of expansion within its perspective of agrarian revolution invariably turned into a political challenge to the influence of the Congress. However a point that needs to be emphasised in this context is that it was mainly because of civil liberties under the Congress rule that the left was able to rouse the tenants in the countryside. With the resignation of the ministry rural Bihar fast returned to ‘normal’ conditions. Tenants as well as left-wing workers knew that they could not afford to behave the way they behaved during the Congress Ministry. ‘And in January 1940, the condition of the countryside was officially estimated to be “unusually quiet”. The bakasht campaign, which at one stage had caused “grave anxiety” in official ranks, had come to an end.’71 The policy of the Congress was to build a national alliance by adjusting class struggle between the contradictory economic interests. Even in the absence of a left grouping preaching class struggle the task would have been a very difficult one. However the attitude of the Kisan Sabha left-wing in Bihar made the Congress task of mediation extremely difficult. To the extent it alienated the peasants from the Congress by trying to convince them that Congress did not serve their interests, it succeeded in lowering the prestige of the Congress among the rural population. Given the hegemonic framework of the colonial state the Kisan Sabhaites could not and did not lead the discontented peasantry anywhere since no peasant revolution was on the agenda.

71

Stephen Henningham, Peasant Movements in Colonial India: North Bihar, 1917–42, 1982, p. 165.

Chapter 10 The Left and the Ministries Experiments with Class Confrontation—II

The contradictory strategic and programmatic perspectives of the INC and the left were resulting in a clash not only on the question of organisation of the peasantry but also on the question of civil liberties. In November 1937, the arrest of Soli Batliwala by the Madras Congress Ministry raised once again the issue of suppression of civil liberties.1 While touring various places in Andhra, Batliwala, in his speeches at various places, had used ‘intemperate’ language against officialdom, the zamindars and capitalists. He had also lionised the ‘rebel’ Alluri Sitaramaraju who was the leader of the Rumpa rebellion. It seems that under instructions from the Madras Ministry Batliwala was arrested for inciting his audience to violence.2 This was for the first time that a Congress government was sanctioning a prosecution under Section 124-A. The Rajagopalacharya Ministry was hostile to the leftists. Perhaps the motive behind Batliwala’s arrest was that the other militants would learn a lesson and exercise restraint on their utterances. Earlier, in an official 1

Soli Batliwala from Bombay was one of those Congress socialists who very early had secretly joined the Communist Party but were still operating from the CSP platform. 2 AICC Papers, File No. PL-18/1937. Statement of the Public Prosecutor V.L. Ethiraj. The Hindu, 10 November 1937. Also see for 13 November 1937.

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communique, in the context of another case in which socialists/ communists were involved, the Ministry had declared that ‘they cannot tolerate and will take steps to prevent dissemination of class-hatred and ideas …’ .3 E.M.S. Namboodiripad, in a letter to Nehru and the Working Committee, complained that the Rajagopalacharya Government thought it justified to keep a tab on the activities of certain activists through the Provincial CID. While, in marked contrast to this, the UP Government had abandoned the practice of shadowing political workers.4 Throughout the country, Kisan Sabhas, Workers’ Unions, Youth Leagues and Civil Liberty Unions criticised the Madras Ministry for encroaching upon the domain of civil liberties. Later on Batliwala was released by the orders of the Premier of Madras.5 Soon the Bombay Government was following in the footsteps of the Madras Ministry. S.G. Patkar, a communist trade unionist, complained to Nehru of K.M. Munshi’s drive against the communists.6 In a communique the Bombay Ministry declared that ‘while it would try its best to maintain the civil liberties of the people it is its primary duty to prevent the dissemination of class hatred and ideas involving the use of organised or unorganised violence’.7 The date 14 February 1938, was observed as the Political Prisoners Release Day at Sholapur under the auspices of the Girni Kamgar Union, the Bidi Workers Union and the local Congress Socialist Party. The police arrested 13 left-wing activists. Nine of the accused were sentenced to nine months of rigorous imprisonment (R.I.) and three to six months’ R.I. Mrs. Menakashi Karhadkar was awarded six months’ simple imprisonment.8 After passing the Trade Disputes Bill the Bombay Government continued to be hard on the communists. 3 Ibid. ‘Official Communique’, 28 July 1937. Kottapattam summer school case. This school was organised on 1 May 1937, to teach the ‘science of socialism’. About 200 youths including 18 girls attended the classes. ‘Most of the Guntur Congress leaders, though not socialists themselves, sympathised with the school and encouraged the venture in every possible way.’ The earlier non-Congress government had disbanded the school and arrested the participants. They were all released by the Congress Ministry. M. Annapurniah to Nehru, 25 May 1937. AICC Papers, File No. G-47/1937. 4 Ibid. E.M.S. Namboodiripad to Nehru, 22 December 1937. 5 AICC Papers, File No. G-38 to G-42/1938. 6 Ibid., File No. 21-Part II/1936–37. The exact date of the letter is not clear. 7 Ibid. The communique was issued on 1 August 1937. 8 Ibid. G-38 to G-42/1938. G.D. Sane, President, Lal Bawta G.K.U. to Jawaharlal Nehru.

The Left and the Ministries 233

Nehru came to know from a press report that the Bombay Government had not recommended the removal of the ban on the Communist Party as the Minister concerned was of the view that the party stood for violence. In a letter to B.G. Kher, the Premier of Bombay Presidency, Nehru observed: I read this report with considerable surprise. To say that the Communist Party stands for violence is far from correct. But quite apart from this it seems to me that the Bombay Government’s answer is in direct contravention of the Congress policy in regard to such matters. So far as I remember, Congress members in the Central Assembly have asked for the removal of the ban. At the Ministers’ conference held last year in Bombay it was agreed that this attempt should be made. In the Working Committee this has also been pressed and numerous leading Congressmen have expressed themselves strongly on this subject. I should like to know, therefore, whether the answer of the Bombay Government reflects its own particular policy, which is different from the policy of the other Congress Governments and Congress policy, or whether it has some further justification. The matter raises vital issues and before I speak or write about it in public I should like to have your views on the subject. For me the policy laid down by the Bombay Government is totally indefensible and is opposed to the general Congress policy of civil liberties.9

B.G. Kher replied back but the answer was completely evasive. He told Nehru that the Government had not recommended the removal of the ban as the party stood for violence. He further added that in the absence of K.M. Munshi, Morarji Desai had answered the question on lifting the ban in the Assembly. Morarji had stated that ‘it is not in the public interest to do so’.10 Nehru could get agitated on such questions with the right-wingers but he could not join hands with the left to launch an all-out attack on them, especially when he was convinced that the leftists were adopting a wrong approach. Through the years 1938–39 Kisan Bulletin and other left-wing journals continued to speak of ‘violence, and terror let loose by the zamindars’ and condemned the lathi charges, arrests and imposition of section 144 by the

9

Nehru Papers, Correspondence, Vol. 40, Nehru to B.G. Kher, 17 March 1939. Ibid. B.G. Kher to Nehru, 30 March 1939.

10

234 A History of the Indian Communists

Congress Ministries.11 On 27 October 1938, the All-India Kisan Committee passed a resolution which condemned the repressive policy of the Punjab, Bihar, Bengal, UP, Bombay and Madras ministries ‘displayed so shamelessly in their arresting a large number of kisan comrades, banning kisan conferences, promulgating section 144 and confining a large number of kisans in their villages’.12 In December 1937, Jayaprakash spoke of a ‘nation-wide offensive’ that the right-wing leaders of the Congress had ‘launched upon the growing left’. ‘The right-wing’, he added, ‘wants to divorce parliamentary activity from mass agitation and struggle. The left is proving an obstacle. Hence this drive in the name of non-violence.’13 The ministries faced with the opposition from the left were resorting to repressive measures and soon they realised that it was proving to be counter-productive. As is clear from Rajendra Prasad’s letter to the Prime Minister of Bihar, Nehru was upset and he sent a circular to the Working Committee members regarding this. Throughout these years (1937–39) Sahajanand was free though local level workers were occasionally arrested. Swami continued to move from place to place ‘co-ordinating the struggles and directing the workers from one phase of the struggle to another’.14 No wonder the Governor of Bihar constantly complained to the Viceroy that the Bihar Government had failed to take any action against the ‘irresponsible agitator’ and was tolerating ‘disorder’ created by the ‘open sedition on the part of Kisan and socialist leaders’ even while the bakasht disputes were under arbitration.15 Once the Congress accepted the ministries, a section had grown almost in every province within the Congressmen (communists were in the Congress) which indulged in what their opponents called an ‘unbridled licence’. In a warning to those who made ‘irresponsible speeches’ the UP 11

For example see Kisan Bulletin, 26 November 1937; 24 December 1937; 14 January 1938; 4 February 1938; 11 July 1939; 27 August 1939; 8 September 1939. 12 Resolutions were published in a pamphlet form, p. 10, Indulal Yagnik Papers, File No. 8. 13 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18 December 1937 in AICC Papers, File No. G-98 to 100/1937. 14 National Front, 7 May 1939. ‘Our Bakasht Struggle’ by Awadesh Prasad Sinha, Secretary, Bihar Kisan Sabha. 15 Linlithgow Papers, Hallet to Linlithgow, 5 November 1938; 24 November 1938. T. Brett, I.G. of Police, Patna to Hallet, 26 March 1939, enclosed in Hallet’s letter to Linlithgow, 14 April 1939.

The Left and the Ministries 235

Government stated that the Congress stands for full civil liberty but ‘it should be clearly understood … that it does not give the individual the unrestricted right of saying and doing whatever he pleases … . After all, even a Congress Ministry has to govern. It cannot afford to sit quietly when the conditions are developing leading to the spread of a spirit of violence.’16 The left had always wanted to mobilise the broad masses for the revolution which they were contemplating in their mind but so far the government repression had always checked their access to the masses. Earlier the communists could be interned and picked up immediately and removed to the jails. Now thanks to the Congress Ministries the radical ideas could be preached and masses could be approached freely. For the first time after 1928 Indian Communists started publishing their journals openly and with a degree of regularity. For instance National Front (weekly) from Bombay started its publication in February 1938. Kirti Lahar (Punjabi) had to be shifted to Meerut (UP), as the Punjab Ministry under Sikander Hayat made its publication almost impossible. The left had looked upon the office acceptance and its relation to extra-parliamentary activities in a different context, the context of paradigm of insurrection. Their notion of extra-parliamentary activities was quite different from Gandhian type constructive programme the objective of which was to enhance the nationalist hegemony. By their extra-parliamentary activity the left-wingers meant the sharpening of internal contradictions by mobilising the peasants and workers on their economic demands so that the mass support could be gathered to move towards their ultimate goal of mass armed insurrection. National Front wrote in its editorial: Congress Ministries became the instruments of securing civil liberties which further unleashed the mass movement … . During the last year peasant movements and organisations have developed beyond recognition and occupy the largest place in the extra-parliamentary front … . The leadership has not been able to achieve the immediate interlinking of the extra-parliamentary movement with the parliamentary movement … . We do not want the ministries to keep the imperialist peace, but we want them to enlarge our civil liberties and encourage the growing mass movement which can make the extension of 16

Leader, 3 January 1938.

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these liberties possible, and create the backing behind the ministries, to break the bureaucratic resistance. Our leadership has failed to see this.17

Given the Congress strategy of building counter-hegemony the only kind of extra-parliamentary activity which could be linked to parliamentary activity was constructive programme, though the conception of this constructive programme could be broadened. But the kind of extra-parliamentary activity which the left had in mind did not stand any chance of being linked with the so-called parliamentary activity of the ministries. Obviously in the context of the kind of movement Congress was leading, ministries could not afford to ‘encourage the growing mass movement’ by sharpening class contradictions the way communists wanted them to. At the Haripura session the left assailed the record of the ministries: ‘Our ministries obviously could not sit quiet, break their pledges, suppress the movement, and become the instruments of imperialist violence rather than the champions of democracy. Mass demonstrations for political prisoners are condemned, our comrades behind the prison bars, the heroic hunger-strikers are repudiated.’ On the other hand, the dominant note in the speeches of Sardar Patel, Premiers Pant and Sinha was that the Congress Ministries alone could preserve peace and implement the Congress programme. This provoked the left further: ‘Peace in India so long as imperialist domination exists, means peace for imperialism which leads to peace with imperialism, and not to the struggle against it.’18 According to the overall Congress approach the Congress Ministries were also trying to mediate between labour and capital, especially in the cities of Kanpur and Bombay where the organised labour was under the influence of Socialists and Communists. The ideologically right-wing Ministry of Bombay however, not only implemented this aspect of the Congress approach but also thought of using it as an excellent opportunity to attack the Communists. COMMUNISTS AND MINISTRIES

UP (Kanpur)

The labour force in Kanpur was about 50,000, of whom 10,000 were out on strike on 1 November 1937. The strike wave began on 26 June 1937, when workers of New Victoria Mills came out on strike. In the 17 18

National Front, 27 Feburary 1938. Ibid.

The Left and the Ministries 237

coming two weeks the workers of Kanpur Cotton Mills, J.K. Jute Mills, and Maheshwari Devi Jute Mills also joined the strike. On 18 July G.B. Pant visited Kanpur and as a result of his intervention it was arranged that work would be resumed on 21 July 1937.19 A section of the Mazdoor Sabha refused to recognise this settlement and the strike was continued. Between 26 July and 7 August there were strikes in the Muir Mills, Swadeshi Mills, Kanpur Textiles, Elgin Mills, New Victoria Mills, Kanpur Woollen Mills and Kanpur Cotton Mills. On 5 August, the managing committee of the Employers’ Association met the Minister for Industries and he directed the deputation to recognise the Mazdoor Sabha as representing labour. The strikers in the J.K. Jute Mills rejected the settlement secured through the mediation of G.B. Pant and accepted by the president of the CSP-led Mazdoor Sabha and the Trade Union representative in the UP Legislative Assembly. Out of 26 office bearers of the Union 17 belonged to the CSP while 9 were communists or sympathised with the communists. The communists led by Arjun Arora and S.C. Kapoor criticised the dominant leadership and supported the workers in their rejection of the settlement.20 On 6 August, with the intervention of the local Congress Committee, the Employers’ Association showed willingness to recognise the Mazdoor Sabha on the condition that work would be resumed in all the mills and no further strikes would take place without due and reasonable notice. On 8 August the Premier and a deputation of citizens conducted nightlong negotiations between the Employers’ Association and the Mazdoor Sabha and eventually terms were agreed on by both sides for complete resumption of work on 10 August. On 9 August, at a meeting, the workers refused to endorse the terms of the settlement. Though the employers did nor want to recognise the Mazdoor Sabha as constituted but ‘in view of 19 HDP, File No. 12/1/38. About 40,000 workers had participated in the strike. Following were the grievances: (1) Wage rates not displayed; wages are paid in closed envelopes and base coins are not taken back. (2) Absence without permission was wrongly counted as grounds for dismissal. (3) No proper arrangement for drinking water and to eat food. (4) Jobbers, mistries and managers abuse workers. (5) Workers were compelled to work overtime. (6) Members of the Mazdoor Sabha were specifically selected for victimisation. (7) Wages had been reduced and work increased. The statement of grievances of Kanpur mill workers was prepared by the Communists. On 7 August 1937, 30,000 men were on strike. G.W. Gwynne to Pant, 7 August 1937, Nehru Papers, Correspondence. 20 AICC Papers, File No. 21-Part II/1936–37. The Pioneer, 25 July 1937: also 23 July 1937.

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the pressure brought to bear by the Premier, it was ultimately agreed that in view of this virtual compulsion by government the Mazdoor Sabha would be recognised’.21 Meanwhile a printed leaflet was circulated over the signature of S.S. Yusuf, the Communist General Secretary of the Mazdoor Sabha. He called upon the workers to carry on the struggle and give a determined battle to the police. Between 31 August and 6 September 1937, there were strikes in a number of mills. By 19 September employers perceived ‘a complete change of front on the part of the Mazdoor Sabha’ and it was reported that ‘the officials had now recommended the workers to resume work’.22 As a result of these strikes communists were able to marginalise the CSP leadership and extend their influence over the workers. If on the one hand the employers were acting tough, on the other workers were equally very restive and were not willing to extend their complete loyalties to the Mazdoor Sabha leaders.23 Harihar Nath Sastri, President of the Mazdoor Sabha, maintained that he certainly believed that previous intimation should be given to the employers of a strike but strikes could only be regulated if the employers cooperated with the Mazdoor Sabha effectively by putting a stop to summary dismissals and by consulting the Sabha before introducing changes in the conditions of work and payment.24 In such a situation compromise as a result of mediation became extremely difficult because the very act of mediation presupposed that leaders of both the parties were fully trusted by their followers. For twenty-five years there was no serious strike in Kanpur mills except in 1936. In 1938 the strength of the Sabha was 12,000 members. Before the general strike the membership was only 3,000. The cumulative effect of the past history of industrial relations in Kanpur was bursting forth with its fury once an atmosphere of civil liberties was ensured by the Congress ministry.25 21

Ibid. ‘Most of the labour in Kanpur is unorganised, not more than five per cent being members of any union.’ G.B. Pant to Nehru, 7 August 1937. Nehru Papers Correspondence, Vol. 79. 22 Ibid. Earlier leaders of the Mazdoor Sabha, Harihar Nath Sastri and Raja Ram Sastri were CSP members. Sant Singh Yusuf was one of the prominent Communist agitators in Kanpur. Moonis Raza was also a Communist activist in Kanpur. 23 On 17 September Rajendra Prasad informed Patel that the Kanpur situation had become very complicated. ‘I was anxious to have a settlement so that the general enquiry may proceed in a calm atmosphere. But this attempt failed.’ Correspondence and Select Documents, Vol. 1. p. 96. 24 The Pioneer, 25 January 1938. 25 HDP, File No. 12/1/1938. A note by A.G. Clow, 22 November 1937.

The Left and the Ministries 239

In a letter R.D. Bhardwaj, a well-known Communist, informed Jayaprakash Narayan that the two Sastris had cut themselves aloof from the strike—disrupted the strike when the workers refused to accept the compromise reached by them. While urging him to take action against Harihar Nath and Raja Ram, he remarked: ‘Are you willing to allow the ministries to become a lever to drag us to the right or we are to drag the ministries to the left?’26 From the beginning of the year 1937 it was not the Mazdoor Sabha but the mill committees which practically controlled the workers in their mills. These mill committees had begun to feel that they were competent to take necessary action which the situation might demand from time to time. ‘The communist element, in the Mazdoor Sabha’, said a Report, ‘which has been definitely on the ascendancy in the councils of Mazdoor Sabha for sometime, has been conniving at this attitude of the workmen.’ These mill committees refused to surrender accounts of their realisations from members to the Mazdoor Sabha. ‘Under the circumstances’, wrote the Labour Officer, ‘the employers are naturally reluctant to concede any point to the Mazdoor Sabha which they think has little influence with the workers and is divided in its councils.’27 Jawaharlal Nehru made very serious efforts to curb the impatience of the Kanpur workers advising them to realise the government’s limitations, think in terms of broader forces at work in the country and not to get bogged down in ‘unnecessary strikes’.28 Warning the workers he said that even the Congress Government would be compelled to put down violence by violence. A committee to report on the conditions of life and work of the labourers employed in the factories in Kanpur was appointed by the UP Government with effect from 30 August 1937. Rajendra Prasad, Professor S.K. Rudra and B. Shiva Rao were the members of the committee. Acharya Narendra Dev was also asked to serve on the committee but he declined. Unlike Bombay, in Kanpur the attitude of the employers from the very beginning was hostile. Even when the appointment of the committee was declared workers were being victimised. The process of 26 Jayaprakash Narayan Papers, File No. 20, R.D. Bhardwaj to Jayaprakash, 27 July 1937. 27 Report of the office of the Labour Officer, Kanpur, 5 November 1937. Rajendra Prasad Papers, File No. IX/1937, Collection No. 2. 28 See Hindi letter published in Pratap, a Hindi newspaper of Kanpur. Speech at Kanpur, 9 November 1937. Selected Works, Vol. 8, pp. 328–34, 351–53.

240 A History of the Indian Communists

enquiry and then settlement was taking a lot of time. The agreement of 9 August stipulated that the Enquiry Committee would submit its report within two months. For six months the proceedings were going on and the basic question of wages was not yet touched. While opening the proceedings of the Committee the Premier pointed out that there was really no genuine conflict of interests between the employers and the employees because the success of one depended upon the prosperity of the other, that a satisfied, well-organised and strong labour force was a great asset to industry. An intelligent, well-equipped, well-fed, well-housed and efficient labour force would increase the general efficiency of industry and promote both the quality and the quantity of goods produced. On 9 March 1938, Vallabhai Patel wrote to Rajendra Prasad: ‘You must have seen that interim report of the Bombay Textile Enquiry Committee of which Sjt. Jairamdas was the Chairman. This report has been accepted by the Bombay Government and its recommendations have been given effect by the mill-owners in this Presidency.’29 But the Kanpur mill-owners were not willing to implement the recommendations of the Kanpur Enquiry Committee. After the publication of committee’s report, B. Shiva Rao wrote to Rajendra Prasad: ‘I understand that the employers are adopting a very stiff attitude and do not seem inclined to accept any of our recommendations.’ Meanwhile the Birlas had given an increase in the wages of the various categories of their workers in Gwalior Mills ranging from 6¼ per cent to 12½ per cent. On 2 May 1938, Rajendra Prasad informed Professor Rudra: The more I think about our recommendation the more I feel that we have not suggested anything revolutionary or unjust. In Bombay and Ahmedabad, mill-owners have accepted the recommendation of the committee and granted increase and yet I read even in the yesterday morning Chronicle a speech by a gentleman criticising the recommendation for increase. We should not be upset by these oppositions.30

The Kanpur Employers Association had submitted to Government a note which was characterised by Rajendra Prasad as containing ‘nothing but abuse of the committee and government’. The memorandum submitted by the Employers’ Association almost suggested that the committee 29 30

Rajendra Prasad Papers, Patel to Rajendra Prasad, 9 March 1938. Ibid., Rajendra Prasad to S.K. Rudra, 2 May 1938.

The Left and the Ministries 241

was influenced in its judgements by instructions from the government and partiality was shown to the other side. Meanwhile there was a general strike in Kanpur. Thousands of the strikers, informed a CSP newsletter, were fed everyday in soup kitchens opened by the Kanpur Congress Committee, which had behind it the support of the United Provinces Congress Committee. The Bombay PCC made an appeal to citizens of Bombay for funds for the Kanpur strikers and donated a token grant of ` 100 for the purpose from its own funds. ‘It is for the first time in the history of the Indian working class movement that the Congress has so openly associated itself with the struggle of the workers.’31 The employers’ attitude created serious resentment in the minds of the workers and even the office-bearers of the Mazdoor Sabha could not convince the workers to postpone the strike. In a situation like this the government could not blame the strikers but could also not allow a violent outburst on the part of the working class and abdicate its duty to maintain law and order. Repressive measures and confrontations between the police and the workers however lowered the Congress prestige among the working masses. The Communists on the other hand could provide channels for the resentment and militancy of the workers and preach revolution to them. But given the framework of the overall struggle they could not and did not lead the workers anywhere. Against this backdrop the communal situation in UP began to deteriorate from March 1939 onwards. Earlier also there were communal riots in Kanpur and Lucknow. Riots in Kanpur started on 11 February 1938 and were over by the evening of 12 February. About 42 persons were killed in Kanpur alone. A constant refrain in Haig’s correspondence with the Viceroy was that the left-wing in this province was gathering strength and the P.M. was finding it difficult to stand up to left-wing pressure. ‘His attitude about communism’, continued Haig, ‘and particularly the activities of the communists in Cawnpore is unsatisfactory, and indicates an unwillingness or fear to take action against a comparatively small body of men, who do not belong to the Congress and are doing a good deal of mischief ’.32 In fact 31

Independent India, Vol. II, No. 13, 26 June 1938. ‘Notes of the Week’. Haig Papers, Haig to Linlithgow, 19 December 1938; also see Haig to Linlithgow, 22 November 1938. The ‘gathering strength’ of the left-wing in UP led Haig to return to one of his familiar exercises in ‘future projections’. It must be pointed out that this was the specific feature of the colonial bureaucracy’s overall political approach and none matched 32

242 A History of the Indian Communists

the communists were very active among the workers and regular meetings were being held at the mill gates. The employers were very critical of the government and said that it would require little action on their part to put down this communist agitation. They complained particularly that this communist movement was being definitely encouraged by the attitude of the ministry, and maintained that if it were not for this attitude the communists would lose support rapidly. The UP Ministry had already issued orders that Magistrates might take action under Section 107 or even Section 108 of the CPC to check speeches advocating violence. Section 144 was declared during one of the strikes because of the fracas at the gate of one of the most important mills as a result of a communist demonstration. Soon after Haig met the Premier and conveyed to him his appraisal of the situation. But he found Pant’s attitude disturbing. ‘As to the prosecution of speakers he was not prepared to let the DM a free hand. Premier … was afraid of opposing the extremists in Kanpur.’ After the general strike in Kanpur in August 1937 Pant told Haig that ‘their way to deal with communism is by argument and not by restraint’.33 In a letter to Patel G.B. Pant informed him that there were ‘elements who believed in indiscipline and violence’. Taking this into consideration Patel wrote to Rajendra Prasad about the common thread between the left-led working class strikes in Sholapur, Kanpur, Bombay and Calcutta: ‘They are trying to discredit the Congress Ministry …’34 As we pointed out above, the formation of the ministries gave a tremendous fillip to the workers and peasants’ movements and left-wing Congressmen, making use of the civil liberties, were attempting to give this upsurge an organisational shape. UP was the home province of Jawaharlal Nehru. Here the Congress movement was radicalised to a considerable extent in the early thirties. As a result of this, left-wing elements were quite predominant in the Congress Party. The Statesman had described UP as the ‘reddest spot on the Congress Party map … .’35 In such a situation when the Kanpur mill-owners refused to bow before the the ability of Haig in this field. Writing under the heading ‘possible developments if left-wing gathers strength’ he visualised a scenario where a left-wing government could come to power in UP even within the colonial constitutional framework. 33 Ibid., 23 August 1937. 34 Correspondence and Select Documents, Vol. I, Patel to Prasad, 22 September 1937, p. 97. 35 Statesman, 6 September 1937.

The Left and the Ministries 243

Labour Enquiry Committee’s Report there was an expression of sympathy for the ‘reasonable’ attitude of the working class and the Mazdoor Sabha. It was a clear proof of the fact that wherever the process of transformation of the Congress as a whole was fairly advanced the ‘reasonable’ interests of the working class could not be ignored by the vested interests. And if they did so to defend their short-term economic interests they only galvanised and united the left within the Congress giving a further fillip to the transformation process and thereby weakening the right-wing in the eyes of the public. If this was the basic aim of the united left-wing, then they had achieved it immensely. But the impatient working class, driven by its misery and poverty, was more interested in getting economic gains. In the absence of a long-term perspective they could not be taught immediately how temporary economic concessions and self-inflicted sufferings because of restraint served their long-term interests politically as well as ideologically. When the CSP leadership of the Mazdoor Sabha, in their own way, attempted to restrain the workers they were deprived of the leadership by the communists through their advocacy of militancy. Nevertheless because of its radicalism the Kanpur Congress Committee and UPPCC gave active support to the working class movement in Kanpur despite the fact that the earlier Mazdoor Sabha leadership of the CSP was characterised by the communists as ‘reformist’. When looked through the paradigm of insurrection the success of the Kanpur working class ‘yielded’ the following lesson: It is obvious that what has been accomplished in Cawnpore was something new, new to a strike, new to proletarian movement and new to the national movement—UNITY OF ACTION—between the Congress organisation and the proletarian organisation, the Mazdoor Sabha, unity of the Congress masses and the proletariat masses in actual struggle. It was not an isolated phenomenon but the proletariat through all its recent major struggles has been working up towards this end … . Support of the INC Ministry for the strikers’ demands meant an unprecedented moral isolation of the mill-owners and pressure upon them from quarters to which they had been accustomed to look for unstinted support. The Provincial Headquarters of the government not acting as the executive of the owners imperious will was something new, it benumbed the owners. Support of the President of the UPPCC meant that the disruptive propaganda of right elements inside the Congress that the strike was a bolshevik device to discredit the Ministry was successfully scotched. Support of the local Congress meant

244 A History of the Indian Communists

the assured sympathy of democratic Cawnpore for the strike … . The Cawnpore strike was a glowing example of UNF in action. Cawnpore Congress has given the National Congress the way to transform itself into a real UNF. Cawnpore workers have shown the Indian workers the method of transforming the INC into the UNF of the Indian people. The proletariat as the builder and initiator of UNF should mean something more than a phrase to us now, after the Cawnpore strike … . Its historic significance has to be clearly grasped if we are to lead our movement to victory.36

The Kanpur strike was not a glowing example of the United National Front as claimed by Communists. It simply showed the consequences of the process of transformation of the Congress which had been going on in the UP for a long time. The Kanpur working class was not so highly organised or politically conscious that it could impress the other sections of society with its disciplined strength. Terrible economic conditions had contributed a lot towards its elemental militancy. The radicalised sections of the Congress and the Provincial Congress led by Acharya Narendra Dev supported the genuine strike of the working class for higher wages, especially when the mill-owners were not willing to trust men like Pant and Rajendra Prasad, known for their moderation and judiciousness. The process of transformation of the Congress was sufficiently advanced in UP and it provided an umbrella to the working class to fight for its genuine economic demands. Therefore, superficially it looked as if the communists were realising their cherished ambition of transforming the Congress Party into a ‘real’ United Front and building the Communist Party simultaneously. According to the analysis of the colonial bureaucracy the United Front had given the Indian communists two major advantages:37 1. Communists now got a wide field for ‘legal’ activities to serve the Party’s purpose. 2. The previous communist tone in propaganda was suppressed and ‘nationalism began to be exploited as a means of furthering communist aims’.

36 37

New Age, Kanpur Settlement, 17 December 1937, pp. 32–33. HDP, File No. 7/7/37.

The Left and the Ministries 245 Bombay

In UP and Bengal the authorities saw an evidence of ‘a marked communist consolidation’. Communists played a considerable role in the Calcutta jute strikes in March–April 1937. These strikes lasted for six weeks and involved more than 170,000 workers.38 From now onwards ‘the Red Flag and the Tricolour flag must be made to fly together. One cannot march forward without the other.’39 But the decisive battle was still ahead in Bombay. ‘Cawnpore has become a historic landmark in our struggle already, will it become a model or remain a symbol?’40 The character of the Congress Party in Bombay was very different from the UP Congress. Here was not a Congress led by men such as Nehru, Pant, Narendra Dev and Balkrishna Sharma. In Bombay the leaders of the Congress were K.M. Munshi, B.G. Kher, Morarji Desai and S.K. Patil. Bombay was also the home-town of ‘national capitalism’ and the mill-owners here were quite different from the Kanpur mill-owners. Many of them were not narrow-minded and were quite capable of looking into the future.41 Because of the above two factors there was a greater degree of symbiosis between the Bombay Congress leadership and the capitalist class. Also, the perspective of the national Congress, unlike the communists, was not one of struggle against capitalism. While at the same time the attitude of the right-wing was of an ideological opposition to socialism. From its very birth the working class movement in Bombay under the communist leadership had pitted itself against the capitalist class. It was not in the Railways, a colonial concern, but here that the Indian communists fought their most uncompromising and militant battles. Because of this background it was natural for the mill-owners that what they should have expected from the new ministry was the restoration of industrial peace by attempting a long-term solution to this ‘red menace’.42 The bitter ideological organisational struggle going on in the Congress had already set the stage for a dramatic conflict. True to their conviction the energetic Indian communists were equally duty-bound to test 38

Ibid. Independent India, Vol. I, No. 1, 4 April 1937. New Age, 17 December 1937, p. 40. 40 Ibid., p. 42. 41 Purshottamdas Thakurdas Papers. This point becomes absolutely clear from the letters exchanged between the leading capitalists and the important Congress leaders. 42 For the Communist-led strikes in Bombay in 1928 and 1929 see Shashi Joshi, Vol. I. 39

246 A History of the Indian Communists

the validity of their ‘Kanpur Praxis’ in Bombay and thereby give a convincing proof of the proletariat’s capability to lead the nation against imperialism. For the communists Congress ministries were not in power but in office only and their job was not to maintain law and order but to ensure an atmosphere of civil liberties to the extra-parliamentary movements against the bureaucracy and the administration. The Kanpur strike had led to the imposition of Section 144, including arrests and firing. Therefore from the very beginning the communists warned the ministry not to resort to such measures: ‘We appeal to the Congress Cabinet’, said the communists, ‘to keep the ring clear between labour and capital by withdrawing the order under Section 144 and unconditional release of labour workers.’ The government communique issued by the Ministry on 7 August emphasised the ‘maintenance of order and tranquillity’. Communist criticism was acidic: ‘In the conditions, when imperialist rule exists to accept “maintenance of order and tranquillity” as the “primary duty” of the Congress Ministry is to keep the peace for imperialism, is to make us accept however unwittingly, our own slavery and foreswear struggle.’43 The excellent situation created by the Congress Ministries was to be utilised by the communists to develop the UNF under the working class leadership by taking along the Congress rank and file to develop the insurrectionary politics of alternative. And if the ministries did not play the role allotted to them by the logic of the communist paradigm they only exposed their true character to the masses as defenders of the vested interests. The compelling logic of their paradigm convinced them that future events could not but vindicate them one way or the other. When the Congress Ministry assumed office on 19 July 1937, five communist associations in the Bombay Province and 27 individuals, most of them communists, were under a ban placed by the previous government in Bombay under Emergency Laws.44 On 17 August 1938 the Congress Ministry announced their policy in respect of the industrial workers. The ban on five associations and 27 individuals was also removed between August and October 1937. This encouraged the workers and soon there 43

New Age, 17 December 1937, p. 37. These five organisations were: (a) Lal Bavta Girni Kamgar Union, Bombay. (b) The Young Workers’ League, (c) The Kamgar Vangmaya Prasarak Mandal, (d ) The Marxist League, and (e) Mill Mazdoor Union, Ahmedabad. 44

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were lightning strikes in textile mills, docks and other industries in Bombay city. The Bombay Girni Kamgar Union (Red Flag) played a very important role in organising these strikes. There was a campaign of intensive communist propaganda by means of Red flag salutation ceremonies, cycle processions of volunteers and mass strikes.45 The communist weekly Kranti in Marathi was restarted in August 1937 under the editorship of S.A. Dange. In the special Lenin-number of the Kranti published on 21 January 1938, Dange said that while it would be wrong to agitate for the fall of Congress ministries, they ought to be warned that their policy of obstruction to the growing strength of the workers and peasants would be injurious to the fight for independence and would retard the progress of Indian revolution. Meanwhile in November 1937 the government appointed a Textile Labour Enquiry Committee to investigate into the question of the adequacy of wages and other matters in connection with the textile industry in the province. In an interim report published on 14 Feburary 1938 the committee recommended increases of wages on a sliding scale, the effect of which in the annual wage bill was estimated at about 9 per cent for Ahmedabad, 11 per cent for Bombay and 14.36 percent for Sholapur. Unlike the Kanpur mill-owners the Bombay mill-owners agreed to give effect to the increase. The communists also gave an active support to the peasants’ march to the Council Hall, Bombay, on 10 January which had been mainly organised by Dr Ambedkar’s Independent Labour Party. The communists mobilised about 2,000 mill-workers to join the march. Numerous meetings were held as a part of the agitation towards the release of political prisoners. A campaign was launched through journals and by holding joint meetings with other left groups demanding the lifting of the ban on the CPI. Workers were mobilised in the Congress meetings during the celebration of ‘national week’. Meanwhile negotiations had been going on for sometime for bringing about an amalgamation between the All India TUC and the National Trades Union Federation. The amalgamation took place in April 1938 at Nagpur.46 In February 1938 the first draft of the Industrial Disputes Bill was published by the Congress Ministry and opinions were invited from 45 Brief note on Communist Activities in Bombay City since the assumption of office by present (Congress) Ministry. File No. 550(25)-III-A/1937 (MSA). 46 Sen, Working Class of India, 1977, pp. 368–70.

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all bodies concerned. The aim of the Bill was to hit at the communists and the moves of the Ministry were carefully calculated in advance. The Bill made it obligatory on the parties to a trade dispute to endeavour to obtain a settlement by conciliation before resorting to a strike. This principle of compulsory arbitration was objected to by all the Trade Unions. The communists were to be released and the working class was to be given concessions through the appointment of an Enquiry Committee before the Bill was brought in because the ‘Government then would be credited with having redeemed its pledges, labour will have been favourably impressed with the bona fides of the government, and the work of the committee will have been rendered less difficult’. The entire thing was planned from the point of view of a long-term perspective. K.M. Munshi wrote to Lord Brabourne, the Governor of Bombay: On a broader issue it appears to me that a popular government in Bombay will always have to face communism in some form or the other as the Labour Government had to do in England and the socialist government in France. Government, therefore, cannot look at this from the point of view of merely maintaining order, but must be prepared to fight communists on their own ground by having a constructive and effective labour policy and one or more labour organisations upon whom it can rely. This is the reason why a Labour Enquiry Committee has been set up and if the orders are not cancelled now it will start with a serious handicap. At the end of the enquiry the Government propose to have labour legislation under which the right to strike will be exercised only subject to certain conditions. The communists are sure to object to this, and government will not be able to escape a struggle with the communists in any event.47

There had been some remarkable fluctuations in the membership of the GKU (Red Flag), the biggest of the unions, during the period 1928 to 1938. There was a sudden rise in the membership of this union in 1928, the total number of members on its roll being 54,000 which was the highest in its career. The membership was maintained round about this figure throughout 1929 but, after the failure of the general strike of that year, it came down to 800 in 1930. It steadily rose to 7,535 in 1932, but again declined to 4,655 later on that year. In 1934 it had an increase of 2,000 members. In 1935 the number suddenly fell to 47

Home Department Special File No. 543(44)-I of 1937 (MSA).

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2,000 from 6.000, but immediately rose to 6,700 in the same year. The year 1936 saw a fall in the membership by about 12,000, but rise was observed in 1938 when the membership rose from 5,000 to 8,000. The membership stood at 8,218 on 1 June 1939 and increased to 19,877 on 1 September 1939.48 At a private meeting of the BPTUC held in Bombay on 24 September Mr Nimbkar moved a resolution for a one-day strike to protest against the Bill and it was carried. A Council of Action was appointed to give effect to this resolution. The Kranti of 24 September demanded the withdrawal of the Bill and appealed for the observance of a day’s general strike all over the province in protest against the Bill. Many meetings were held under the auspices of the BPTUC and the Bombay Girni Kamgar Union (Red Flag) and the strike was first fixed for 17 October. Later on it was postponed to 7 November, the ‘Day of the Russian Revolution’. The Bill was passed by the Legislative Assembly on 4 November. According to the communists the notice provision together with the conciliatory proceedings made strikes impossible for a period of three to five months. Thus the Bill indirectly prescribed a notice of three to five months for every strike. The fundamental democratic right of direct action was thus paralysed under the Bill. The Bill created a permanent tribunal for arbitration—the Industrial Court. ‘The inclusion of this provision which was not to be found in the old draft clearly shows that the framers of the Bill still contemplate making arbitration more and more the dominant method of settling disputes.’49 ‘Eighteen propaganda meetings against the Bill and to make the strike successful were held in Bombay from 29 October to 6 November under the auspices of various unions.’50 All sections of the Trade Union movement which represented 195 unions and 325,000 organised workers had put in their entire weight against the Bill. On 16 October, 30,000 workers attended the rally at the Kamgar Maidan to protest against Bombay Labour Bill. On 23 October another

48 Report of the Textile Labour Enquiry Committee, Vol. II (Final Report, 1940). p. 370 (MSA). 49 National Front, Vol. I, No. 26, 14 August 1938, p. 13. 50 Brief Note on Communist Activities in Bombay City Since the Assumption of Office by the Congress Ministry, National Front, Vol. I, No. 32, 25 September 1938.

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mammoth meeting of workers protested against the Bill. On 30 October, Bombay witnessed the third giant rally against the Labour Bill.51 In the Harijan of 14 August Gandhi wrote that to prevent workers from going to their work by standing in front of them is pure violence and must be given up. ‘In the present phase of Congress ministries, Gandhism has entered its last and decadent phase. It has become the instrument of avoiding not merely revolution but also a reformist mass movement.’52 The Bombay Provincial Congress Committee had passed a resolution supporting the Bill and calling upon the local committees and Congressmen to join the campaign for the popularisation and support of the Bill. Bhulabhai Desai, President of the Bombay PCC, S.K. Patil, General Secretary and Govind Rao Deshpande. MLA assured the workers that the Bill was not against their interests and would not restrict their rights. Similar appeals were made by G.L. Nanda also. The BPCC asked the Congressmen working with the Trade Union movement not to associate with the strike. As a result V.B. Karnik, a follower of M.N. Roy, ‘had to resign his membership of the Council of Action.’53 For the first time the call of the Congress evoked no response.54 Except for the Bombay CSP the entire TUC movement declared itself against the Bill. The Ahmedabad CSP also condemned the Bill. The Royists had at first joined the strike preparations but later withdrew faced by the threat of disciplinary action from the Congress. ‘As the 7 November draws near tension is increasing.’ The Bombay Chronicle carried in its issue of 7 November the banner headline: ‘Stage set for Trial of Strength’—and it summed up the general temper in both the camps. According to the National Front no less than 2 lakh workers of all trades came out on the streets. ‘Such a gigantic and extensive protest as took place on 7 November has no parallel in the history of the working class movement in India.’55 The working class of Ahmedabad (10,000) 51 National Front, Vol. I, No. 38, 6 November 1938. Bombay Chronicle, 29 October 1938. 52 National Front, Vol. I, No. 33, 2 October 1938. 53 The Times of India, 31 October 1938. 54 National Front, Vol. I, No. 39, 13 November 1938. 55 National Front, No. 39, 13 November 1938. According to Ashok Mehta 50,000 workers responded to the call. Congress Socialist, 13 November 1938. According to another estimate 80,000 workers participated in the protest strike. Independent India, 13 November 1938.

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and Sholapur (8,000) also observed the protest day. Thirty-five workers were arrested in Bombay and twenty-three in Sholapur. Repeated lathi charges were made on the workers by the police. The police opened fire three times, eleven received bullet wounds and one died the same night. Labour leaders and the communists were extremely jubilant at the success of the strike. ‘The 7 November strike was the greatest independent political action by the proletariat of this country. It shall prepare the proletariat for future actions on an even vaster scale.’56 For almost two months a powerful agitation was carried on in the working class of Bombay for the strike. The Bill was made a live issue among the workers. Mammoth meetings and rallies were organised by Dr Ambedkar’s Independent Labour Party and various trade unions. The strike showed that the government was ill-informed in dismissing the BPTUC as a negligible force. The opposition was pitched at a very high tone and Dr Ambedkar’s anti-Congressism added to the pitch. What was the outcome of this skirmish? Ironically for the first time under the leadership of the communists trade union unity was achieved against the Congress government which had never been achieved by them against imperialism. For the simple reason that the imperialist government would never have allowed the communists and others to carry on their preparations for two long months.57 Communists would have been picked up and thrown behind the bars as in 1934 and later in 1940. Second, they would have not been able to get the support of Dr Ambedkar and liberal trade unionists who were not willing to mobilise the working class against imperialism but were very vocal in their opposition against the Congress. Here was a united front of liberals, anti-Congress followers of Dr Ambedkar and communists against the Congress Ministry which was pushing through a Bill unpopular with the Trade Union movement. The need for such a stringent Bill to defend ‘national capitalism’ was felt because of the long-standing schism between the militant working class under the communist leadership and national capitalism. This confrontation further widened the schism. Partly, this resulted from the communist strategy which did not distinguish between ‘national capitalism’ and imperialist rule and had no notion of class-adjustment within 56

National Front, 13 November 1938. ‘Between the 24 September and 6 November 1938, over 40 public meetings besides a number of street-corner meetings of the workers were held to popularise the strike. At these meetings speeches were made by various members of the Council of Action.’ Report of the Bombay Disturbances Enquiry Committee, Bombay 1939, MSA. 57

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the nationalist camp. The main thrust of their struggles was against capitalism while the legitimate rights of the workers were to be defended, the struggle in colonial countries was not to be against capitalism. The preparation for the strike and the alignment of forces against the Bill convinced the dominant leadership of the Congress that there were forces which acted in the name of the Congress while actually they were outside the overall control of the Congress. The communists were, thus, forced into a situation by the right-wing where they could not afford not to oppose the Congress. In the eyes of the right-wing the doubts created by the behaviour of Kisan Sabha leadership in Bihar as ‘camouflaged congressmen’ had now been transformed into certainties. The forces of alternative strategic conception and agrarian programme were growing within the Congress and diluting the forces of Congress strategy of national alliance and hegemonic politics by loosening the internal structure of the Congress, by pushing it from the direction of a disciplined party which mediated between classes with the authority of its unified command towards the direction of transforming it into a negotiated federation. Communists could not remain in the Congress for long and follow their own strategy of anti-capitalism and sharpening of class contradictions. The determined persual of the logic of their own strategy was driving them to confront the Congress leadership while the logic of the need of United Front emphasised by Dutt–Bradley compelled them to state and restate that they were not against the Congress. The Congress was not being ideologically transformed within the confines of a single strategy as advocated by the Congress under Gandhi’s leadership. Its hierarchical organisational positions were being captured and it was being converted into a United Front of the communist conception—a platform of all anti-imperialist forces. A watershed had been reached. The Congress, as it was known to the Indian people, could not carry on its struggle of building a counter nationalist hegemony without confronting the forces of alternative strategy within its own ranks. ‘Tripuri’ was the symbolic clash between the forces representing two alternative strategies. The entire situation was moving towards a point of no-return and the dilemmas of those who vacillated between these two strategies programatically were being sharpened. They could not but blame both, the left and the right, for their problems. Leftists thought they were with right while the rightists thought they were with the left. Each side perceived

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them as siding with and encouraging the other.58 The Communists accused the socialists of playing the role of hostile spectators and vilifiers of the great proletarian action that the country had ever seen. Referring to the firing Jawaharlal Nehru said that though he did not know whom to blame for the tragedy an earnest attempt must be made to prevent any serious conflict in national ranks, as a United Front was absolutely necessary for winning freedom.59 At the Comilla Session of the All-India Kisan Sabha (May 1938) Swami Sahajanand declared: ‘I am afraid the Kisans are fast losing their confidence, and respect for the Congress. That is a danger signal the Congress leaders should do well to note before it is too late.’60 By August 1938, Sahajanand was openly denouncing the Congress for ‘betraying’ the kisans. ‘I dare to declare that to … enter into an agreement with the zamindars is a betrayal of the kisans. ’ The inherent logic of Sahajanand’s thinking was slowly unfolding and became clear by 1939. In a letter addressed to some leaders of the left he emphasised the need for building an alternative movement to the Congress movement: ‘[The left] is unduly and baselessly obsessed with the Congress being weakened because of independent political initiative taken without the consent of the Congress. Therefore, as far as the leftists are concerned, they cannot and should not accept any fight … under the leadership of the Congress.’61 Gandhi was carefully watching the way these forces were developing in the name of the Congress and within the Congress. We are living in Ahmedabad and Kanpur in perpetual dread of lightning or unauthorised strikes. Is the Congress unable to influence organised labour in the right direction? If in spite of honest efforts by Congressmen, forces of disorder cannot be brought under control … acceptance by Congress of the burden of office loses all force and meaning and is bound to prove detrimental to the Congress cause.62 58

Congress Socialist, 27 November 1938. Bombay Chronicle, 21 November 1938. 60 Sahajanand’s speech at Comilla Session of AIKS, Abdul Rasul, NMML Library, New Delhi. 61 Swami Sahajanand, ‘A letter to some leaders of the left’, November 1939, Sahajanand Papers, Roll No. 8. 62 Gandhi to Nehru, 18 December 1937, CW, Vol. 66, p. 258. For Ahmedabad see Sujata Patel, The Making of Industrial Relations, Oxford, 1987. 59

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The office acceptance was a remarkable feat of hegemonic politics but its success presupposed the unity in Congress ranks behind the political line of building hegemony through the strategy of national alliance and class mediation. Civil liberties had given the forces representing an alternative strategy a free hand to act in a big way and build themselves within as well as outside the Congress. This was not what the Congress had bargained for. Observed Gandhi: ‘If Congressmen are not sure of our own chosen aims, we need not wonder if one fine morning we discover that we had committed a blunder in embarking upon office-acceptance.’63 The forces of alternative paradigm had created doubts in the minds of the peasants and workers about the credentials of the Congress and thereby loosened the Congress hold over them. The pro-imperialist critics of the Congress were able to ridicule the Congress and propagated the idea that it was no different from the British. As we have seen earlier, left-wingers were emphasising internal contradictions in order to mobilise the workers and peasants to build an extra-parliamentary mass movement as directed by the requirements of their insurrectionist anti-imperialist strategy. Unlike the right-wing nationalists they had refused to play the role of the mediators between classes and groups with conflicting economic interests. The left could have approached the concrete problems of socially necessary compromises in a different perspective. But the left voluntarily surrendered this role to the right-wing because it had already a priori committed itself to a different paradigm of revolution which involved the sharpening of social contradictions consciously. Ultimately the individuals who intervened in the situation and whose decisions affected the daily lives of the peasants emerged as powerful leaders in the eyes of the social classes in the long run. While the politics of the left remained purely agitational and the ideas remained ‘utopian’. The reason for the tension within the ranks of the Congress was the fact that the political significance of office acceptance was not properly understood by the left. In the thirties the Congress was undoubtedly a national political force but not a political power. The problem was how to make the Congress a political power. Bitter opposition from the left-wing forces notwithstanding, the Congress decided to accept the ministerial offices. It did so with the

63

Gandhi, op. cit., Harijan, 21 November 1937, CW, Vol. 66, p. 300.

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sole idea of transforming its political force into a political power. To accuse the Congress of surrendering political fight because it decided to accept ministerial offices was to completely misunderstand its position. Office acceptance by the Congress was the historical culmination of a process which started with the non-cooperation. The Swaraj Party of the early twenties attempted to turn the political force of the Congress into a political power by capturing the legislative assemblies. It failed in its attempt because the Congress at that stage had not developed into a political force capable of capturing majorities. After the Civil Disobedience Movement the Congress had again reverted to the policy of turning its political force into a political power by the method of capturing the organs of the British Indian state machine. It was often forgotten that the provincial assemblies with decisive Congress majorities and provincial cabinets wholly manned by Congressmen represented much greater centres of real parallel authority than the left-led extra-constitutional Congress committees in the respective provinces. To counterpose the Congress committees supported by labour and kisan committees as parallel centres of authority in opposition to the provincial legislatures and provincial cabinets was to misunderstand the whole historical process and misjudge the particular phase of political development which the nation had attained in the late thirties. This was the logical conclusion of a movement which had been attempting to build an alternative hegemony when its development reached a stage where it began to acquire the shape and status of a state within a state. The greatest achievement of ministries was driving home the conviction—the crux of hegemonic struggle—that overthrow of British rule and establishment of Swaraj was a practical idea well within the reach of the Indian National Congress.

Chapter 11 The Divided Left Notes on Permanent Disunity

Complete socialist unity is a dream which many of us share. Many things, however, have to happen before it can come true.1

Disunity within the ranks of the Indian left is as old as the left itself. The common aim of socialism in no way resolved the organisational problems and conflict of loyalties. The failure to evolve a common strategy to transform the Congress, split the left into many currents each following its own strategy, eager to prove it as the only correct political line. What could unite the left was not the ideology of socialism but a common strategy to fight for the independence of India. The unique organisational framework of the INC was so designed that individuals within it could come together and act in unison provided the organisations they created within its confines were willing to subordinate themselves to the overall Congress constitution.2 Also they had to be willing to submit to the majority decision once they had agreed to join the process of taking such a decision. To posit the existence within 1

AICSP Chairman (M.R. Masani’s) Address: Fourth Annual Conference, 1938, p. 18. In one of the editorials of Independent India, it was observed: ‘An organisation like the Indian National Congress is not to be found in the history of revolution in any country’, Vol. II, No. 11,12 June 1938. Usually the editorials were written by M.N. Roy. 2

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the INC of other organisations based on different kinds of constitution and disciplinary rules with the clear intention of asserting their independence and separateness was to posit a basic contradiction between the INC and these organisations. Notwithstanding the advice of M.N. Roy, this is precisely what the Socialists had done when they floated the project of creating such an organisation within the Congress in 1934. Recapitulating his arguments against the formation of the CSP within the INC, Roy commented in 1938 that he had disapproved of the formation of a Socialist Party inside the Congress for two reasons: (a) formation of various political parties inside the Congress was bound to weaken the Congress by preventing its development into a centralised revolutionary democratic party; and (b) as an integral part of the Congress, a Socialist Party could not be really independent. By socialist/communist party Roy had always understood as ‘the political organisation of the consciously revolutionary vanguard of the working class’ and such a party, in order to play its role creditably, he insisted, must be an independent political organisation.3 The Socialists, especially Jayaprakash Narayan, were guilty of creating confusion, and as we shall see, the INC had to pay for it dearly.4 In a way, Nehru and Bose, by welcoming its formation but not joining it also added to this confusion.5 Apart from underlining the necessity of Gandhi’s leadership for the Congress, Nehru had also spelt out the perspective of ideological transformation of the Congress. What was to be the organisational form, if at all there had to be one, of the forces working for such a transformation? Were these forces to exist in the Congress as an ‘ideological forum’? That seems to be the suggestion implied in Nehru’s perspective. But, in the first place, why did this confusion occur? Socialists’ ardent desire to ‘transfer power to the masses’ sought its commitment in scientific socialism. Like the Indian Communists they too drew their inspiration from the Russian Revolution but they did not want to join the CPI as they had seen the alienation and marginalisation of the CPI during the period 1928–34 when it was outside the INC. This experience was sufficient to 3

‘Roy and CSP’, Independent India, Vol. II, No. 17, 24 July 1938. According to us the Tripuri affair was partly the product of this basic confusion among the ranks of the left. 5 For Bose’s comment on CSP see ‘The Haripura Address’ in Crossroads compiled by the Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta, 1962, p. 24. 4

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teach them the lesson that a socialist party outside the INC could not be built. It would not be able to escape the fate of marginalisation. But they ignored the lesson, repeatedly emphasised by Roy, that a Socialist Party built inside the Congress would never be an independent party. Experiment with building such a party was to show that Roy was correct in his understanding. Also, at that time the theory of scientific socialism as propagated by the Third International could not be separated from the notion of working class party physically rooted in the working class. Socialists, it seems, thought of combining (in the sense of adding) Marxist theory of the party with the practical lesson learnt from the attempt of the Indian Communists to build an independent Communist Party outside the Congress. The project of building the Communist Party in India as we have seen, was based on certain assumptions, but despite the fact that these assumptions were refuted and therefore abandoned, the idea of building the Communist Party itself was not abandoned by the Dutt–Bradley Thesis. Indian Communists, after the Seventh Congress of the Third International, had embarked upon a new project of building a Communist Party by using the INC as a platform. Once they had accepted the United Front approach they were faced with the twin problems of converting the Congress Party into a loose platform and simultaneously forcing the right-wing to surrender their ‘share’ in the leadership of the Front. The underlying assumption of the United Front approach was the same as upheld by the Communist Party and the Third International in the pre-1935 period. This assumption was that the dominant leadership of INC was a representative of the Indian bourgeoisie. After the Seventh Congress the Indian bourgeoisie was delcared anti-imperialist and was to be taken along in the anti-imperialist struggle by allotting it its due share in the united leadership. But for this goal to be achieved the right-wing must be forced to loosen its control over the leadership of the INC and made to accept that it was the representative of only one constituency, namely the bourgeoisie. Also it must be forced to recognise that the true representatives of the other constituency, i.e., the peasants and workers, were the left-wingers. Therefore, the Communists’ efforts to transform the INC into a real anti-imperialist front were, in fact, a struggle to convert the INC from a centralised party into a loosely structured federal party (UF) on a platform led by a united leadership. Their intention was to create conditions where the right-wing will give up its ‘monopoly of leadership’ of the Congress and share it with them by recognising them as the true

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representatives of the workers and peasants. They wanted the right-wing to remain in the Congress and willingly accept its legitimate share of the leadership as the representative of the bourgeoisie. Dutt–Bradley had wrongly characterised the INC as a united front (or a platform) and then declared that though it was so but it was not behaving as one due to the stranglehold of the right-wing leadership. The aim behind making the INC a truly anti-imperialist People’s Front was in actuality a struggle to force the right-wing to surrender a share of the leadership to the leftists. This objective could not be accomplished unless the right-wing leadership was willing to accept that it represented only the national bourgeoisie. But the right-wing could be forced to recognise this through another process though a bit complicated. And that was by actually acting in a manner in the Congress which was based on the assumption that only the leftists had the right to speak for peasants and workers. By insisting that Congress–Zamindar pact in Bihar be scrapped the left-wing wanted to establish precisely this assumption. Meanwhile Rajendra Prasad and Patel were struggling hard to implement it so as to prove that they in fact were already exercising the right to speak for the peasantry. This could be done by organising the peasants and workers into their independent (independent from the Congress right-wing but not from the left-wing) and separate class organisations and demanding affiliation of these organisations with the INC to create a United Front between INC and these class organisations under their leadership. If the Congress right-wing leadership had accepted this position, i.e., the notion of United Front, it would have recognised in actuality that in this United Front it was representing the national bourgeoisie. Interestingly, on the one hand, Jinnah was organising the Muslim constituency to force the right-wing leadership to recognise that it was representing only the Hindus while on the other hand, left-wingers were organising the constituency of the peasants and workers to force the right-wing to recognise the ‘fact’ that they were the sole spokesmen for this constituency. Caught in this crossfire the right-wing chose to fight back against the left-wingers and thwart their efforts to change the character of the INC. Left-wingers’ intentions were to build a united Congress under united leadership though the logic of their activities was leading towards the creation of a split within the Congress. Once they realised that their support for Bose was leading to unintended results they suddenly drew back from

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the brink. It was within this approach that communists had begun to move from the idea of being independent and outside the Congress to the idea of being independent as well as inside the Congress. While the socialists on the other hand had started from ‘inside the Congress’ and towards the Faizpur session of the CSP had begun to stress the idea of being independent.6 Both the groups met each other half way and their perspectives became complementary to each other.7 In other words, both leaderships had undertaken unrealistic projects which were riddled with the internal contradiction as we have pointed out above: A Socialist/ Communist Party could be independent only outside the INC but such a party was doomed to be marginalised while such a party inside the Congress could not really be an independent one. But both the leaderships were committed to these projects. Therefore, from the very beginning, by declaring itself a Socialist Party in the INC, Socialists had adopted a contradictory perspective. The membership of the Communist Party and Royists converted the CSP in actuality into a loose platform from the beginning. The CSP provided the much-needed entry to the Communists to come back to the INC without asking them to first dissolve their separate group. During the Lucknow session of the INC, S.V. Ghate along with P.C. Joshi met Jayaprakash Narayan and concluded what came to be known as the Lucknow Pact by which the two parties were to work together but keep their identity separate.8 CSP leadership was shocked when they realised that Communists and Royists were treating their ‘party’ as a platform to expand the influence as well as numerical strength of their respective groups. But this is not what the Socialists had set out to do. They had set out to create a Marxist Socialist Party within the INC. When they began to put their own house in order and did not permit ‘fraction activity’ to the other groups the so-called united national front began to crack only a year after its formation.

6

B.P. Sinha, ‘Socialist Strategy’, Congress Socialist, Vol. I, No. 44, 14 October 1936. Jayaprakash Narayan, ‘We are the pioneers of unity’, Congress Socialist, Vol. III, No. 16–17, 23 April 1938. 8 Immortal Heroes: Lives of Communist Leaders, C.P. Publication, 1965, p. 12. Incidentally this book does not include the sketches of P.C. Joshi and S. A. Dange, the two men who had left an indelible imprint on the history of the Communist movement in this country. 7

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The word ‘Congress’ prefixed to ‘Socialist’, claimed the Socialists, only signified the organic relationship—past, present and future—of the CSP organisation with the national movement.9 Socialists assumed that in the conditions of India the conscious leadership of the national movement fell on the socialist forces. But these forces were unfortunately still divided. If Socialists speak with a divided voice, they argued, there would be utter confusion and it would only retard the national struggle. Therefore, the Socialist groups should work together till the time they were in a position to form a united party.10 The immediate task before the Congress Socialist Party was to develop the national movement into a ‘real anti-imperialist movement’—a movement aiming at freedom from the foreign power and the native system of exploitation. For this it was necessary, to wean anti-imperialist elements in the Congress away from its present bourgeois leadership and to bring them under the leadership of revolutionary socialism. This task can be accomplished only if there is within the Congress an organised body of Marxian socialists. In other words, our party alone can, in the present conditions perform this task.

It was also emphasised that the party’s own programme must be a Marxist one otherwise the party would fail to fulfil its task and leadership. ‘Marxism alone can guide the anti-imperialist forces to their ultimate destiny. Party members must therefore fully understand the technique of revolution, the theory and process leading to the socialist society.’11 This task could be accomplished ‘only if there is within the Congress an organised body of Marxian Socialists’. Coordination of ‘all the other anti-imperialist forces’ in the country was declared as one of the tasks of the Party. It had also made some changes in its earlier stand. Earlier the mistake of placing a fully socialist programme before the entire Congress was corrected by this session. The formation of the Congress Socialist Party was the creation of a party within a party and there was confusion within the CSP ranks on this question from the very beginning. On the one hand, it was to be a minority group within the Congress struggling to become a majority by transforming the Congress through the participation of the workers and peasants and by carrying on socialist 9 All India Congress Socialist Party: Second Annual Conference, Meerut, January 1936. Statement on Party’s Nature, Task and Programme. 10 AICSP, Third Annual Conference Report, Faizpur, 23–24 December 1936. 11 Second Annual Conference.

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propaganda while on the other hand, the perspective of future development was the creation of an independent Marxist Party. To the extent, in day-to-day practice, it was ready to act upon the Congress resolutions decided by a majority vote to that extent its independence remained limited to the exercising of a democratic right of forming a left platform within the Congress. In such a situation the question of a conflict of loyalties was never to emerge as a critical issue for the party cadre. Alternatively those individual members or party branches which pursued the idea of making themselves or their units function as an ‘independent Marxist party’ could not but reach a point where the acceptance of CPI group’s political positions and organisation became for them the ultimate logical conclusion. This is exactly what happened in Kerala. Instead of removing the confusion and theoretically justifying what it was in actuality—an ideological group within INC—the ‘Congress Socialist Party group’ went to the extent of even declaring that it was ‘outside’ the Congress. This state of confusion resulted from the fact of a platform being treated as an independent party which was declared as an objectively necessary and desirable state of affairs.12 Jayaprakash Narayan had declared in 1934 in his ‘Report of the Organising Secretary’ that … the Congress Socialist Party is not the party of any one class. It is not the party of the working class alone. It is a political party uniting on its platform all anti-imperialist elements and its task is to lead such elements to an overthrow of British Imperialism and the establishment in India of a real swaraj for the masses.13

The ‘party’ was being projected as a platform of all the anti-imperialists. This made it possible for the anti-imperialists, owing their primary loyalties to the other working class parties, to join this platform floated by the CSP without dissolving their separate identities. On the one hand, he rightly asserted that ‘the alternative of forming such a body outside the Congress means sheer and foolish waste of energy’ while on the other hand, membership was given to those individuals who belonged to the parties outside the Congress. This contradiction, one day, was to lead 12 Draft Thesis for the Fourth Conference of the CSP, 1938. Narendra Dev, Kamala-devi, Achhyut Patwardhan, Asoka Mehta. 13 Report of the organising secretary, All India Congress Socialist Party. To the first All India Congress Socialist Conference held at Bombay, 21–22 October 1934.

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to serious consequences. Within four years of its formation Jayaprakash Narayan’s statement about the class nature of the CSP was turned upside down. The Draft Thesis to the Fourth Conference asserted: ‘CSP as a socialist party is a party of the working class.’14 The Congress had followed the path of negotiations and compromise apart from using alternatively the tactics of constitutionalism and non-constitutionalism. This convinced the socialists of all varieties that Congress was not ‘a truly anti-imperialist body’. By organising workers and peasants in their class organisation and linking them with the Congress and thereby ‘creating the proper basis for the rise of a real mass movement’ the socialists wanted to ‘accelerate the growth’ of the Indian National Congress ‘into an anti-imperialist body having the requisite ideological and organisational basis’.15 The idea of the strategy of transformation of the Congress first evolved by Nehru, was articulated in different ways. The development of the Congress was seen in a historical perspective—as an organisation which was continuously in evolution. Echoing the views of many, Purshottam Trikamdas argued that unless their appeal was wider, more broad-based, and directly addressed to the masses in a manner which would convince them that the end of foreign domination would mean an immediate and direct benefit to them and not to a few alone, they could hardly hope for rallying sufficient strength whereby the ending of foreign domination would become a possibility.16 It was possible by right efforts to convert the Congress rank and file and make them adopt an outlook which was a mass outlook. The Congress had changed in composition and outlook from time to time and there was nothing in its constitution or creed which prevented a further change. This ‘conversion of the Congress’ was to be carried on by mobilising thousands of Congress workers all over the country who were willing to take up the task of organising the labourers and peasants. The third annual session of the Congress Socialist Party asserted that the form of open struggle—disobedience of specific laws—that the Congress had so far used did not give the masses wide scope for participation. Moreover, the bourgeois leadership of the Congress was unable, within the framework of its conceptions and interests, to develop the 14

Draft Thesis, p. 10. Ibid. 16 All India Congress Socialist Party, 1934, Address of Purshottam Trikamdas, Chairman, Reception Committee, Bombay. 15

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struggle of the masses to a higher level. The Congress not only required a change of leadership but also a building up the organisation from the bottom upwards. It was the task of the socialists to see that the working class assumed its historic role in the multi-class national movement.17 According to the Faizpur session of the CSP the foremost task outside the Congress was to develop independent organisations of the peasants and workers. The chief task facing all anti-imperialists was the creation of a powerful national front against imperialism. The Dutt–Bradley Thesis, had defined transformation of the Congress into a true people’s front as one of the tasks before the Indian communists. After the Faizpur session CSP formulations had reached closer to the Dutt–Bradley Thesis.18 The only difference, and this was crucial, was that CSP did not accept that the vanguard of the Indian working class already existed in the form of CPI. FROM PLATFORM TO PARTY

Roughly after the Meerut session the CSP leadership had started thinking in terms of making their platform into a more cohesive ‘party’ organisation and no longer allowing it to be used as a common platform to carry on activities by different groups along the lines of strategic conceptions which competed and clashed with each other. The leaders of the party from now onwards began to refer to this mistake and thought it against all principles of party organisation. The Faizpur session of the party reiterated: ‘Our party is a Marxist party and its membership must therefore be restrictive.’19 The membership of the party had gone up during the year 1936 from 2,000 to 3,000. In order to create homogeneity of outlook worthy of a real ‘Marxist socialist party’ the fraction work by other left groups in the party was banned.20

17 All-India Congress Socialist Party, Third Annual Conference Report, Faizpur, 23–24 December 1936. 18 ‘The party’s approach to the Congress has at last become common to all left groups’. Draft Thesis for the Fourth Conference, 1938, p. 4. 19 Congress Socialist Party Circular No. 4, Patna, 31 March 1937. 20 Congress Socialist, Vol. II, 10 April 1937; ‘CSP’s Rejoinder to Reds’, Congress Socialist, Vol. II, No. 32, 1937; ‘CSP’s Reply to Royists’, Congress Socialist, Vol. II, No. 34, 28 August 1937.

The Divided Left 265 ROYIST CONCEPTION OF TRANSFORMATION OF THE CONGRESS

After his release from jail in late 1936, Roy began to issue a series of public statements attacking the policies of the CSP. Finally, at a meeting of the Royists in New Delhi in March 1937, a decision was reached to resign from the CSP. Furthermore, Roy instructed his followers to resign in groups at intervals, rather than en bloc, in order to create the impression of a collapse of the party.21 Meanwhile 25 Royist members resigned from the Maharashtra Congress Socialist Party on the eve of its Annual Conference. Their resignation was accompanied by a statement in which they said: ‘We are opposed to the idea of organising any party parallel or as a rival to the Indian National Congress.’ M.R. Masani accused Roy of disrupting the party.22 Royists groups in various provinces of India continued to resign, as planned, from April through August. As a result of these manoeuvres Roy and his group earned the undying enmity of the socialists. Unlike the Royists, however, the communists did not leave the CSP until they were expelled in March 1940. Communists also attacked Roy and called him an ‘unscrupulous liar’. ‘The left hated him for his unscrupulousness and the right would not have confidence in him.’23 CSP leadership felt that Roy’s behaviour constituted a betrayal of the socialist cause. ‘The entire responsibility’, charged Jayaprakash, ‘for disrupting the measure of unity that had been achieved must be laid at the door of the Royists, and above all of Shri Roy.’24 But M.N. Roy’s differences with the CSP leadership on the question of forming a socialist party within the Congress were long standing. Roy had from the beginning advised against the formation of the party and in a long letter addressed to the pioneers of the party stated his reasons which were purely political and organisational. In October 1937, M.N. Roy published his letters written three years ago setting forth the reasons for his objection to the formation of the CSP and suggesting the alternative method of radicalising the anti-imperialist struggle.25 21 Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism, p. 231; M.R. Masani, ‘General Secretary Indicts M.N. Roy’, Congress Socialist, 26 June 1937; Independent India, 4 July 1937, p. 9. 22 Bombay Chronicle, 5 June 1937; 26 June 1937. 23 The Communist, May 1937. 24 Jayaprakash Narayan, Socialist Unity and the Congress Socialist Party, 1941, pp. 6–8. 25 Letters of M.N. Roy: To the Congress Socialist Party written in 1934, Bombay, 1937. For wider circulation these letters were also translated into Hindi by G.K. Arora and A.P. Singh and were published from Lucknow.

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At the second congress of the Third International, it was M.N. Roy who had put forward the false idea of two parallel national movements in India. It was suggested that the bourgeois democratic nationalist movement was limited to the small middle class and it did not reflect the aspiration of the masses. Masses were not with the bourgeois nationalist leaders—they were moving towards the revolution independent of the bourgeois nationalist movement.26 Basing himself on such an understanding of the social reality in India Roy had advocated the formation of an independent and separate Communist Party. Though Roy was expelled from the Third International in 1929, his idea of building a Communist Party was taken over by others. Thus the workers and poor peasants were assumed to be outside the Indian National Congress and were made part of an imaginary movement led by an imaginary communist party in 1920.27 Between 1930 and 1935 Roy was able to evolve new points of departure about the national movement in India and he rejected his earlier assessment of the situation, especially the views in his supplementary theses. Now, in 1935, Roy drew the attention of the Third International to the following ‘outstanding facts’ and gave a general idea of the ‘situation as it really is’:28 (1) The working class as a whole is socially immature, politically backward, organisationally weak .... Proletariat as a class is not in a position to offer leadership yet (pp. 118–19). (2) It is an illusion to think that the workers and peasants are dissatisfied with the Congress. No mass movement can be organised in opposition to the Congress (p. 122). (3) To talk of an independent proletarian leadership is to indulge in a vain fantasy (pp. 122–23). The new perspective which Roy put forward to overthrow imperialism was the perspective of a transformation of the Congress. He was of the view that all radical elements should join the Congress and concentrate on strengthening the Congress and for transforming it into a consciously 26 Shashi Joshi, ‘The Ideological Origins of Development of the CPI, 1920–25’, M.Phil. Dissertation, New Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 1977. 27 Shashi Joshi, Vol. I. 28 ‘A letter to the Communist International’, written in 1935. Included in M.N. Roy, Our Differences in Independent India, Calcutta, September 1938, p. 118.

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revolutionary people’s party by the greater participation of the masses in its activities. With this perspective in mind Roy opposed the idea of formation of Congress Socialist Party within the Congress.29 The idea was to unite all the radical nationalist elements and not exclusively the socialists around the conception of a strategy of revolutionary seizure of state power. This unity was to be sought not exclusively on ideology but on a definite programme of anti-imperialist action because the great majority of these radical nationalists would not be prepared to stand under a Socialist flag. The right-wing could be opposed successfully ‘only on the platform of democratic anti-imperialism by an organised left-wing of the Congress, acting, as such with no other party label, advocating a concretely formulated programme of action, calculated to develop the anti-imperialist struggle.’30 Appearing as a Socialist Party, argued Roy, circumscribed the radius of action of the left and laid it open to the attacks of the right-wingers. The existence of CSP, according to Roy, tended to divide Congressmen into socialists and non-socialists, when it would be more appropriate to effect a division between militant nationalists on the one hand and Gandhians and constitutionalists on the other.31 ‘The line adopted by Congress Socialist Party’, wrote Roy, ‘if consistently followed, will inevitably lead not to the capture of the Congress by the radical democratic elements, but to the isolation of a small group of radicals inside the Congress completely dominated by the right-wing.’32 This is what more or less turned out to be the fate of the Congress Socialist Party. Roy warned the CSP leadership for making a mistake as regards the nature of the Congress organisation: The tendency is to regard it as the non-official parliament. On the basis of this appreciation, it is thought that there can be several parties inside the Congress. But it is a mistaken appreciation—a false analogy. The Congress is a political party. Its multi-class basis does not matter; because it is the instrument of a struggle which involves more than one class. A nationalist party is bound to be multi-class although dominated 29 Letters of M.N. Roy, pp. 40–41. Also see To Comrades: Circular Letter, 25 May 1938, Roy Papers. 30 Letters of M.N. Roy, Letter No. 3, ‘To the Executive Committee of the Congress Socialist Party’, p. 42. 31 Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism, p. 250. 32 Letters by M.N. Roy, p. 250.

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by one of the participating classes. So, we must function inside the Congress as a class, not as a party … . One party cannot capture the leadership of another party … . The fatal mistake on the part of the communists resulted from their theoretical inability to differentiate between the hegemony and the leadership of the proletariat. In the nationalist stage of the anti-imperialist struggle, the role of the proletariat must be hegemony because of the multi-class of that struggle.33

Roy’s advice was that in the field of nationalist politics ‘you refrain from functioning as a socialist party and merge yourselves in an organised left-wing of the Congress; that is to say, you operate on a broader social basis not to be restricted by a party label’. Once formed into a party Congress Socialists were not willing to act upon Roy’s advice.34 In fact, Roy had not yet abandoned his pet idea of the 1920s of forming dual organisations, one legal and the other illegal, one functioning openly on a democratic programme of revolutionary democracy, the other underground. Even when Roy was asking others to dissolve their separately organised ‘groups’ he was keeping his own group intact.35 He could not see the contradiction in his own argument, i.e., so long as the separate Socialist/Communist groups existed outside the Congress how could they act together as merely radical nationalists and revolutionary democrats inside the Congress. He failed to take his own argument to a logical conclusion because he still posed the problem of independence within the paradigm of insurrection and capture of power. And for this purpose the necessity of a leading revolutionary group willing to seize power could not be dispensed with in his eyes. Another contradiction in his thought was that on the one hand, he was advocating the idea of ‘all the genuine socialists organising themselves into a communist party independent of the Congress’ while on the other hand, he did not allot any meaningful role to the proletariat. Roy, in fact, went to the extent of dismissing the proletariat completely.36 Thus, Roy’s political perspectives were delicately balanced between Nehru and the communists and he criticised both from opposite angles. 33 34

Ibid., pp. 52–53. Bombay Chronicle, 30 August 1937. Statement of the Executive Committee of the

CSP. 35 V.N. Karnik to Ellen Roy, 4 June 1938; Karnik to Roy, 22 September 1938. Roy Papers. 36 Roy’s speech delivered at the Bengal Provincial Political Conference held at Bishnupur on 29–30 January 1938. M.N. Roy, Our Problems, Calcutta, 1938, Appendix II.

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Suspicious of Roy’s motives, the socialists, understandably, could find little merit in his proposal that the CSP be disbanded. Roy’s understanding of ‘transformation’ was still sectarian because it was based on the assumption that the right-wing, and he included Gandhi in this category, was not sufficiently anti-imperialist. Consequently his emphasis laid too much stress on the struggle against the right-wing and posited the dislodgement of this leadership as the necessary presupposition for a successful anti-imperialist movement. Even after he had reached relatively a more correct theoretical position, in the process Roy had done a lot of harm to his prestige among the noncommunist left in India, the only circle who was looking towards him for leadership. Roy opposed the efforts of the CSP and the Communists to organise peasants into their own separate class organisation. He felt that ‘it should not be difficult for a Marxist to grasp that nothing could be a greater obstacle to socialism than a peasantry organised in their independent class organisation—the classic Trotskyite position’.37 THE LOGIC OF TRANSFORMATION

Each left group wanted to work within the Congress to carry on its transformation according to the group’s own strategic understanding and in a manner which increased the membership of the group. It was natural for individuals committed to a particular strategic conception not only to organise themselves as a well-knit group but also to expand this group by carrying on recruitment from the newly-radicalised elements within the Congress as well as by convincing individuals in other groups. ‘The basic difficulty in the path of unity’ wrote Jayaprakash Narayan, ‘was the ridiculous idea held by every miserable little party that it alone was the real Marxist Party, and that every other party had therefore to be exploited, captured or destroyed.’38 Group patriotism and group passion grew as the natural by-products of such a phenomenon. Each strategic approach had to react to the day-to-day issues keeping in view the long-term logic of its political positions. The leadership of each group was expected by its followers not only to take its firm stand in order to keep its flock together but also dispute and denigrate the respective positions of other groups. Each wanted 37

Independent India, 9 April 1939, pp. 205–06. Quoted in Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism, p. 264. 38 Socialist Unity and the Congress Socialist Party, pp. 5–6.

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a bigger share of the ‘cake’ of newly-radicalised elements irrespective of the fact whether the ‘cake’ itself expanded or shrunk. Each group knew that it must grow and expand before it could expect the others to extend a ‘deadly’ hand of unity. Each wanted to unite with the other to dissolve the other. Unity became only a symbolic name for potential enmity. The Socialists/Communists could unite together only as an ideological group of radical Congressmen within the Congress movement and that too only after all of them had dissolved their separate parties in favour of a common conception of a strategy of transformation of the Congress. In Nehru they would have found their charismatic spokesman and national level leader. There was no other way in which these groups could remain united and fuse themselves into a single organisation or even a United front. This dissolution of separate parties would have certainly brought them closer to the reality and thereby strengthened them as an ideological current within the Congress. They would have played their dual role of propagating socialist ideas within the Congress as well as mobilising workers and peasants within it much more effectively. In this case they would have operated on a far wider social basis because only in this case would they have measured their success and achievement not in terms of increase of individual members in their respective group but in terms of how far they had been able to influence the Congress as a whole. But the left-wing, even united on a common strategy of transformation, would have still remained far from practising hegemonic politics. Without dissolving themselves as an independent party socialists in practice had unconsciously played precisely this role. Reflecting on the structure of the socialist party Jayaprakash wrote in retrospect: ‘The party grew up as a group within the Congress and even though it had an independent membership, its own constitution and rules, it never grew out of the role of being an ideological group within a great movement.’39 GANDHI ON ‘ALTERNATIVE STRATEGY OF THE LEFT’

The emergence and growth of forces of the alternative strategy within the INC was being carefully watched by Gandhi and his colleagues.40 39

Jayaprakash Narayan, Structure of the Socialist Party, 5 December 1948, p. 5. Socialist Party Pamphlet. 40 Mahatma Gandhi, The Collected Works, Vol. LXVI, p. 268; Harijan, 23 October 1937; letter to Nehru, 18 November 1937, p. 296 also see p. 300.

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The fifty-first session of the Congress met at Haripura from 19–21 February 1938 under the presidentship of Subhas Chandra Bose. In his presidential address Bose politely told the Working Committee that he differed with them on almost all the important issues. One of the important resolutions passed by this session was on the Kisan Sabha’s right to be an independent organisation. A policy to curb, what Gandhi called the ‘forces of disorder’, had been set into motion. Within a year, after the formation of the ministries, enough experience was gained which convinced Gandhi that both the organisations were working at cross purposes. ‘But my study of separate Kisan organisations has led me definitely to the conclusion that they are not working for the interests of the kisans but are organised only with a view to capture the Congress organisation.’41 Then, was Gandhi opposed to the leftists capturing the Congress? ‘They can do even this by leading the kisans along the right channels, but I am afraid, they are misleading them. If the kisans and their leaders will capture the Congress by doing nothing but authorised Congress work, there is no harm.’ So long as the left was willing to mobilise the workers and peasants within the ameliorative agrarian programme of class adjustment and strategy of the Congress (leading along ‘right channels’, doing ‘nothing but authorised Congress work’) their activities to capture the Congress were perfectly legitimate. But in that case they could only do so by first strengthening the Congress as a whole and desiring to remain united. But the ‘channels’ along which they were mobilising the peasantry alienated the peasants from the Congress without leading them anywhere. The growth and spread of the spirit of contending strategy within the Congress ranks was organically linked to the process of crystallisation of alternative leadership at the various levels. At the grass-roots level the political perspective inherent in this strategy was being interpreted as ‘extra-parliamentary’ mobilisation of workers and peasants on their economic demands by using the language (subtle or not so subtle) of class war. Congressmen doing this work at the local levels came to be clearly demarcated as Kisan Sabha workers as distingushed from other Congressmen. This generated an atmosphere which was not conducive

41

Gandhi, The Collected Works, Vol. LXVII, pp. 24–25; Harijan, 23 April 1938.

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for the implementation of Congress strategy of class adjustment. But winning over the allegiance of rank and file Congressmen to the alternative strategy was tantamount to the act of removing a whole train from one engine to be shunted to another engine on a different track and in a different direction. This could not be accomplished unless the Congress as constituted fell apart through acts of mutual quarrels, revolts and indiscipline against the dominant leadership. But Gandhi was convinced that India could win freedom only by following the Congress strategy.42 It was, therefore, natural for him to perceive the contending forces as ‘forces of disorder’ and ‘indiscipline’. By November 1937, Gandhi had already reached the conclusion: ‘The Congress organisation needs strengthening and purging.’43 ‘Violence’ and ‘non-violence’ were only the symbolic names for the contending strategies. ‘Everywhere in India there is a duel going on between the method of non-violence and that of violence.’44 THE LOGIC OF SUBHAS BOSE’S POLITICS

As we have tried to show, the conflict between the ‘left’ and ‘right’ was in reality a conflict between two mutually exclusive paradigms and the strategies based upon them which, in turn, demanded different styles of politics, methods of struggle and forms of mobilisation. Gandhi and his followers on the one hand, and the Communist group together with Kisan Sabha leaders and Socialists on the other, embodied in themselves the styles of two mutually exclusive forms of politics. The growth of the forces under the banner of Kisan Sabha within the Congress in consonance with the concrete political perspective of developing alternative leadership within the Congress as the common project of all the left groupings, was making a serious bid within the Congress for establishing its sway among the rank and file. The coming in of Bose, who also favoured the formation of separate Kisan Sabhas, to head these forces needs to be located in the political perspective he evolved, independent of the organised left groupings but similiar to them, after the ‘defeat and surrender’ of the Civil Disobedience Movement.45 42

Ibid. Mahatma Gandhi, The Collected Works, Vol. LXVI, p. 301. 44 Mahatma Gandhi, The Collected Works, Vol. LXVIII, p. 300. 45 Subhas Chandra Bose, The Indian Struggle, 1920–42, Calcutta, 1967, Chapter 14, p. 259. 43

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There was a rationale behind this act of Bose which was almost similiar to the political logic of the left-wing groups. The Karachi Congress was meeting under the shadow of great tragedy. The youth of the country felt very strongly that Gandhi had not served the cause of nationalism by concluding a pact with the government which did not include the commutation of Bhagat Singh’s death sentence. The principal resolution at Karachi dealt with the Delhi Pact and was moved by Nehru in the open session.46 Interestingly not Nehru but Subhas Bose was asked to preside over the conference of the All-India Naujawan Bharat Sabha which was also held at Karachi along with the Congress session. His sharp criticism of the Gandhi–Irwin Pact was preceded by a comment on the political perspective of the Congress in general. ‘The fundamental weakness in the Congress policy was that it was based not on radicalism but on adjustments—adjustments between the landlord and the tenant, between the capitalist and the wage earner, between the so-called upper classes and the so-called depressed classes, between men and women. I do not believe that the Congress programme can win freedom for India.’47 This speech also gave him the image of a bold, uncompromising rebel capable of confronting the greatest man of India.48 On the other hand, Bose’s attitude at Karachi and his subsequent criticism of the withdrawal of the Civil Disobedience seemed to have convinced Gandhi that he was not ‘dependable’. Gandhi was fully aware of Bose’s popularity among the public, especially the youth, and Gandhi’s proposal that he should be president of the Congress at Haripura was recognition of this fact. This also explains his determination to oppose Bose because nothing except the revolt of one of its own powerful leaders could destroy the Congress organisation. The autobiographies of two younger leaders of the Congress—Nehru and Bose—published in 1936 and 1935 respectively, clearly spelt out the two approaches to understand Gandhi’s leadership. Through the experience and analysis of the national movement Nehru, unlike all the other sections of the left, had come to the conclusion that only Gandhi 46

Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, p. 266. The Karachi Address, 27 March 1931. Included in Sisir K. Bose (ed.), A Beacon Across Asia, Calcutta, 1973, pp. 255–57. 48 Ibid. ‘With regard to the truce embodied in the Gandhi–Irwin Pact. I may say it is exceedingly unsatisfactory and highly disappointing.’ 47

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could lead the national movement to a successful final victory. In his autobiographical account, The Indian Struggle (1920–1942), Bose carried on a lengthy analysis to show that though the Mahatma was a great soul he was no good as a politician and certainly no match for British politicians. Bose argued that the Mahatma had committed a blunder in agreeing to sign a pact with Irwin. Later on he squandered the opportunity provided by the Pact by going alone to the Round Table Conference. At the end, in order to cover up his failure, he indulged in diversionary tactics. ‘India’s salvation will not be achieved under his leadership.’49 What were Bose’s calculations before he jumped into the fray? The political perspective projected by Bose in which he was to play his role as the leader of the radical forces was based on the assumption that Gandhi had already played out his role as the leader of the national movement. Second, and this he wrote while talking about ‘a glimpse of the future’: ‘During the next few years the inner conditions of the Congress will be somewhat unsettled, that is to say, no party will be sufficiently strong to be able to suppress the others.’50 A logical corollary of the above was that Gandhi, though extremely distressed, would remain more or less neutral in this struggle, at the most playing his traditional role as a mediator. Bose had no realistic understanding of how the various members of the Working Committee, despite their ideological differences, related to each other. But he seemed to have an image of this in his mind where Gandhi was seen more or less as a mediator between Nehru, for whom the Mahatma was supposed to have a soft corner, and the ‘right-wing’. He was willing to fit everybody in the Working Committee into the slots of ‘left’ and ‘right’ without bothering about the problems of analysing Gandhi in these terms. The greatest man of India seemed to him standing above all ideological conflicts. He was perceived by Bose more like a father figure whose main job had been to keep the warring brothers together.51 Bose took it for granted that Nehru would stand by him in this struggle and this to an extent would also neutralise Gandhi’s opposition.52 Like many others he approached the Gandhi–Nehru relationship purely in 49

Bose, The Indian Struggle 1920–42, pp. 250, 298. Bose, The Indian Struggle 1920–42, p. 311. 51 Ibid., p. 297. 52 Bose had written to Nehru from Germany: Gandhiji will never take a stand which will alienate you’, 4 March 1936. Nehru, A Bunch of Old Letters, p. 166. 50

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psychological terms. Bose seems to have convinced himself that Nehru had failed to give a bold lead to the left because psychologically he was unable to challenge Gandhi. Therefore, the responsibility of accomplishing this task had fallen on him. The presidential election was scheduled for 29 January 1939. Maulana Azad withdrew from the contest on the 20th and recommended Pattabhi Sitarammayya for the chair. Bose issued his first statement on 21 January 1939. On 24 January the old guard counter-attacked: ‘We believe that Dr Pattabhi is quite fit for the post of the president of the Congress.’53 Interestingly their statement began with the words: ‘Subhas Babu has set up a new precedent which he had a perfect right to do. The wisdom of the course adopted by him can be known only by experience. We have grave doubts about it.’ On the one hand, Bose referred to the ‘progressive sharpening of the anti-imperialist struggle’ and how it had given birth to ‘new ideas, ideologies, problems and programmes’ while on the other hand, he declared it as a ‘contest between two members of the Working Committee’ and he expected the other members of the Working Committee not to take sides because ‘that would obviously not be fair’.54 If Bose really believed in this he was being naive. If he thought it was a tactic he had very much underestimated the intellectual capacities of his colleagues in the Working Committee. Making a frontal attack on the majority of the Working Committee Bose declared in his next statement: ‘It is widely believed that there is prospect of a compromise on the federal scheme between the right-wing of the Congress and the British government during the coming year. Consequently, the right-wing do not want a leftist president.’55 This was repetition of the old theme that ‘Rightists’ were not genuine anti-imperialists and were not interested in struggle. They were more 53

Statement of Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Jairamdas Daulatram, J.B. Kripalani, Jamnalal Bajaj, Shankarrao Deo and Bhulabhai Desai, all members of the Congress Working Committee. Patel later revealed in a private letter to Nehru that this statement had been drafted at Gandhi’s urgings. Patel to Nehru, 8 Feburary 1939. Nehru, A Bunch of Old Letters, Bombay, 1958 p. 312. 54 Second statement of Subhas Chandra Bose, 25 January 1939. In a telegram sent to Patel, Sarat Bose stated: ‘Strongly feel no member of Working Committee should take sides in contest between colleagues’ Crossroads, Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta, p. 88. In a return telegram Patel stated: ‘Difference is not between persons but principles … . Re-election is held to be harmful to country’s cause’. Ibid., p. 88. 55 Ibid., 25 January 1939, p. 91.

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interested in negotiations and compromise with imperialism. But this was also a declaration of distrust in those members of the Working Committee who were opposed to Bose’s election. Bose declared that the real issue before the country was the federal scheme and he was prepared to withdraw from the contest ‘if a genuine anti-federationist like Acharya Narendra Dev for instance, be accepted as the president for the coming year’. Thus according to Bose, the credentials of the right-wing were not above suspicion and the only way they could prove them was by making ‘a gesture to the left-wing by accepting a leftist candidate even at this late hour’.56 This was quite an amazing statement. Never in the history of the Congress had a member of the Working Committee publicly censured his colleagues. On 27 January 1939, Rajendra Prasad clarified that by referring to an ‘imaginary difference on the question of Federation’ Bose was side-tracking the issue. ‘On that point there is absolutely no difference of opinion.’57 But Bose posed the issue in terms of suspicion and this could only be answered if the others were willing to do what Bose asked them to do.58 A leadership with conflicting ideological leanings could struggle unitedly for a common goal so long as they trusted each other’s patriotism and refrained from attributing motives. Working out consensus among individuals with conflicting ideologies presupposed an atmosphere of complete mutual trust and respect among themselves. Once the element of distrust and suspicion crept in, unity was bound to be under strain. Bose queered the pitch further in his third statement when he stated that Patel wanted a president ‘who will be a mere figurehead and a tool in the hands of other members of the Working Committee’. Further he added that Working Committee was ‘really controlled by a group within it and that the other members are there on sufferance’.59 Interestingly on the one hand, Bose was explaining the attitude of his opponents in political terms by calling them right-wingers who were interested in effecting a compromise on the federation issue while on the other hand, he made 56 Ibid. In his third statement Bose made an extraordinary accusation when he declared that ‘the prospective list of ministers for the federal cabinet has been already drawn up’. Crossroads, pp. 92, 192. 57 Statement of Rajendra Prasad, Crossroads, pp. 99–100. 58 ‘Can anybody challenge the fact that the belief is widely held that during the coming year, a compromise will be effected between the British Government and the right-wing of the Congress?’ Third statement of Bose, 27 January 1939. 59 Third statement of Subhas Chandra Bose, 27 January 1939, Crossroads, p. 101.

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the following statement: ‘It now appears that some important members of the Working Committee, for reasons which it is difficult to comprehend, did not approve of the idea. It cannot be doubted that my re-election would have been virtually unanimous if they had not sent out a mandate to vote against me.’60 Here Bose revealed another significant assumption behind his calculations. He was expecting that his re-election would be unanimous and he would not be opposed by other colleagues. This is perhaps the reason why his first statement does not cast any suspicion on his colleagues and does not employ the categories of ‘left’ and ‘right’. It seems Bose came to form this impression because in his calculations ‘a very large body of opinion within the Congress’ wanted him ‘to be elected for another term’.61 Another reason for forming such an impression was that since the Haripura Congress his ‘relations with the other members of the Congress Working Committee have been cordial and on the whole our work in the Committee has been conducted very smoothly’.62 Surprisingly, during that period he did not complain either about the lack of democracy in the Congress or the manipulation of the Congress by ‘a group within the Working Committee’. Nowhere had Bose claimed that he was fighting for alternative policies and programmes. He had raised only the issue of federation—and that too in the form of a suspicion—while the Congress position on this issue was definite and clear. Since Bose was not fighting for any alternative programme or policies, he did not have any clue why others were opposing him. ‘Do they object to me because I would not be a tool in their hands? Or do they object to me because of my ideas and principles? The arguments so far put forward are not in the least degree convincing.’63 This was also made clear by him after he was elected as a president. Either Bose was not clear what he was fighting for, which was not likely, or he was not willing to state openly that he was fighting for an alternative leadership within the Congress which stood for a different method of struggle and a different plan of action. 60 Fourth statement of Subhas Chandra Bose, 28 January 1939, Crossroads, p. 102. Emphasis added. 61 Fourth Statement of Subhas Chandra Bose, p. 102. 62 Ibid. 63 Fifth Statement of Subhas Chandra Bose, 4 February 1939. ‘Let me make it quite clear that there will be no violent break with the past in the parliamentary or in the extraparliamentary sphere.’

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But after the statement of the Working Committee members (24 January 1939), and especially the statement of Jawaharlal Nehru (26 January 1939), Bose realised that all his calculations had turned out to be wrong. The realisation dawned upon him that he had not assessed accurately the probabilities of the future. He was like a sailor who discovered in the midst of a stormy sea that his compass had gone haywire. Going back was as risky as going forward. The election of the president by the delegates to the 52nd session of the Indian National Congress was held all over India on 29 January 1939. Subhas Bose defeated Pattabhi Sitarammayya by a little over 200 votes.64 To Gandhi it was perfectly clear that the victory of Bose stood for the rising strength of the forces within the Congress which stood for a different kind of struggle. The time had come either to surrender Congress to a new leadership representing different strategy or to put up a decisive fight before he was overwhelmed. Bose had to be fought against not because his patriotism was in question but because he was a major Congress leader who had voluntarily provided a mobilisation centre to all those forces who were diluting the inner coherence of the Congress organisation as it existed and were committed to an alternative method of struggle and strategy of mobilisation. Two days after the election Gandhi issued a statement: I must confess that from the very beginning I was decidedly against his re-election for reasons into which I need not go … . And I am nothing if I do not represent definite principles and policy. Therefore, it is plain to me that the delegates do not approve of the principles and policy for which I stand. I rejoice in this defeat.65

It is possible, and his later statements are indicative of this that Bose and many of his supporters might not have understood the significance of the Mahatma’s reference to principles and policy. But that shows how little he understood the nature of the Mahatma’s leadership and his relationship with other members of the Working Committee. As we have seen above, the Mahatma was already planning a struggle against those forces within the Congress which were opposed to the Congress 64

A complete state-by-state list of votes was printed in Amrita Bazar Patrika, Calcutta, 30 January 1939. 65 Statement of Mahatma Gandhi, 31 January 1939, Amrita Bazar Patrika, 1 February 1939. Emphasis added.

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principles and policy. But the fact that an important member of the Working Committee was willing to provide them leadership gave an edge of vehemence and a sense of urgency to the Mahatma’s resolve. Bose, Gandhi continued, was now a president in his own right. He should form his own Working Committee and run the Congress. By standing at the head of the ‘forces of anarchy’ Bose had given a powerful blow to the Congress as it existed. Now, Gandhi was determined to force him to carry further the ‘logic’ of his own perspective. Nehru, because of his clear understanding of Gandhi’s role and nature of the Congress movement, could have an inkling about the consequences of Bose’s contest. This was his strongest point which saved him from doing what Bose agreed to do, i.e., lead the scattered forces of the leftists to project an alternative leadership to Gandhi. But in the eyes of the leftists this was precisely his weakest spot. After the election, in a long letter to Bose, Nehru wrote: ‘I thought it probable that you would win the election as against Pattabhi, but I doubted very much whether you could carry the Congress with you in a clear contest with what is called Gandhism.’66 But Nehru’s neutral stand before the election and Gandhi’s statement shook Subhas Bose badly.67 Matters had not shaped up as Bose wished them to. He had not bargained for all this. He had criticised the right-wing but had not made up his mind about challenging the Mahatma. ‘I do not know’, responded Bose, ‘what sort of opinion Gandhiji had of myself. But whatever his view may be, it will always be my aim and object to try and win his confidence for the simple reason that it will be a tragic thing for me if I succeeded in winning the confidence of other people but failed to win the confidence of India’s greatest man.’68 Perhaps this was an attempt to appease the Mahatma and wean him away to a position where he would have played his role as a mediator. The Tripuri session was scheduled for 7 March 1939. It was decided to hold a meeting of the Working Committee at Wardha on 22 February to discuss the agenda for the Tripuri session. Bose fell ill and sent a elegram requesting the postponement of the meeting. Meanwhile all nembers

66

Nehru, A Bunch of Old Letters, p. 346. From Nehru to Bose, 3 April 1939. Referring to Nehru an angry Bose wrote to his nephew Amiya Nath: ‘Nobody has done more harm to me personally and our (the leftist) cause in this crisis.’ Quoted in Bose (ed.), A Beacon Across Asia, Calcutta, 1973, p. 90. 68 Fifth Statement of Bose, February, Crossroads, p. 107. 67

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except Nehru and Sarat Bose resigned from the Working Committee.’69 Nehru did not resign immediately but he acted in a manner which made it clear to everybody concerned that he was not with Bose. This left the President and his brother Sarat Chandra Bose alone on the personnel of the Working Committee. With the Congress workers divided among themselves, there was confusion and conflict before and during the session. After all the amendments were defeated or withdrawn, the original resolution by Pant was carried by 218 votes as against 135 in the subjects committee meeting. The open session was held on the evening of 10 March. When the President-elect, who was known by all to be in ill-health, did not turn up, Maulana Azad was asked to deputise for him. The resolutions were moved, but discussion and voting was postponed to the following day. Next morning Pant’s resolution was taken up by the open session in which visitors were not allowed. Many delegates who had voted for Bose in the presidential election had on second thoughts changed their views. Jayaprakash Narayan made a statement on behalf of the Congress Socialist Party and declared that they did not wish to participate in the division and had decided to remain neutral in the voting. Roy and his followers stayed with Bose. The Communists had tabled a motion that diluted Pant’s resolution. The night before the open session they met to decide their tactics should their amendment fail. Bengal communists disagreed with P.C. Joshi who was opposed to Bose and they decided to vote against the Pant resolution in case their amendment was not accepted. This was the original decision of the communists but later on under Joshi’s pressure this was reversed. But at the last moment, once again due to the intervention of Dutt—Mazumdar, Communists reverted back to their original position.70 All amendments were defeated and the original resolution was passed by an overwhelming majority.71 A lengthy correspondence ensued between Subhas Bose and Gandhi after the Tripuri Congress session on the question of formation of the Congress Working Committee in accordance with the Pant resolution. 69 ‘Our resignation was meant to clarify our position and to avoid a situation in which the programme would be theirs and the responsibility of implementing it would be ours.’ Rajendra Prasad, Autobiography, Asia Publishing House, New Delhi, 1957, p. 482. 70 Bose, The Lost Hero: A Biography of Subhas Bose, London, 1982, p. 132. 71 The Pant resolution had requested the President to nominate the Working Committee in accordance with the wishes of Mahatma Gandhi.

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These letters only exposed how deep was the cleavage. ‘The situation before the country admits of no middle course … . Joint work is an impossibility where the workers distrust one another.’72 Again on 10 April, Gandhi replied: ‘The gulf is too wide, suspicions, too deep. I see no way of closing the ranks. The only way seems to me to recognise the differences and each group work in its own manner.’73 It was four months since the presidential election yet Bose had failed to constitute the Working Committee. When the AICC session commenced on 29 April in Calcutta, Bose tendered his resignation as president. Three days after this AICC session Bose announced the formation of the Forward Bloc—a party within the Congress. Thus, Bose who had started with the clear intention of bringing the left-wing groups together by giving a bold lead to the Congress ended up in forming another rival left group competing with the already existing ones. Before we see these groups splitting apart and attacking each other with hostility, towards December 1939 they passed through another transitory phase of the left consolidation committee which was formed in Bombay in June 1939.74 NEHRU’S POSITION

Apart from Bose’s circle there were many others who thought Nehru had left Bose in the lurch. Why did he evoke this feeling despite the fact that, all along, he had consistently differed with the other left-wing groups in his analysis of the national movement, especially the assessment of the role of Mahatma Gandhi? At Lucknow, Nehru had secured an important concession from the right, i.e., his freedom to propagate socialist ideas within the Congress. Though the right-wingers raised a hue and cry they were unable to do anything so long Gandhi did not oppose the left on this issue.75 Also, Nehru was the first person, and this was his important contribution, to establish a new Marxist principle—the principle of organic relationship 72

Gandhi to Bose, 30 March 1939, Crossroads, p. 133. Gandhi to Bose, 10 April 1939, Crossroads, p. 157. Earlier, in a letter, Bose had written to Gandhi, ‘There is no doubt that there is today a wide gulf between the two main parties or blocs in the Congress. But the gulf can yet be bridged—that by you’. Bose to Gandhi, 1 April 1939, Crossroads, p. 135. 74 Forward Bloc—Its Justification. Thesis written by Subhas Chandra Bose, The Indian Struggle, 1920–42, Calcutta, 1966, pp. 395–114. 75 Pandey, Indian National Congress, p. 76 Vallabhbhai Patel to Rajendra Prasad on the Congress Presidency, 22 November 1935. 73

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between nationalism and socialism. While the general orientation of his broad perspective was correct, on concrete political issues he tended to take sectarian positions. Opposition to council entry, office acceptance and the question of ‘collective affiliation’ of workers and peasants within the Congress were some such issues. These positions he shared with the other left currents even while he disagreed with them on such an important issue as the nature of leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. And during the campaigns on such issues he emerged as a powerful spokesman of these left groupings. Since there were serious differences on the question of general perspective between him and these groupings, he could not stick for long to these sectarian positions when the latter came into obvious conflict with the overall Congress strategy. Given the fact that his general orientation was more closely tuned to reality he was able to see the inadequacy and therefore ineffectivity of his own political positions on these issues. In an attempt to come to grips with real social forces at work he was, ultimately, willing to revise his assessments. His emotional instinct as a fighter and a socialist impelled him to take sectarian positions while his second thoughts of wisdom compelled him to moderate them to the point of almost abandoning them. For instance, he was very upset on the withdrawal of non-cooperation movement, but later he came to be convinced that in reality the time had come when it was essential to stop the movement because ‘our movement, in spite of its apparent power and widespread enthusiasm, was going to pieces’.76 Similiarly, in his speech at the AICC session at Calcutta, on 29 October 1937 he conceded: ‘My personal view was against office acceptance … . (However) in my opinion, office acceptance has benefited us. The country is pulsating with a new life and new vision.’77 Gandhi’s intuitive tuning with the tumults and twists of mass psychology made him an organic leader of the masses—a leader who could feel the pulse of the nation. More importantly, Gandhi’s strategic moves impressed him with their correctness after he saw their result which was often not visible to him before they were made. Nehru was the only individual on the left who was able to grasp this supreme quality of Gandhi’s leadership. He wrote in his autobiography: Gandhiji has often acted almost by instinct; by long and close association with the masses he appears to have developed, as great popular leaders 76 77

Nehru, An Autobiography, p. 85. Nehru, Selected Works, Vol. 8, p. 338.

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often do, a new sense which tells him how the mass feels, what it does and what it can do. He reacts to this instinctive feeling and fashions his action accordingly, and later, for the benefit of his surprised and resentful colleagues, tries to clothe his decision with reasons.78

Nehru was often a surprised though not a resentful colleague. This remarkable grasp of Gandhi’s unique leadership permeated his entire political being and distinguished Nehru from the entire range of left groupings so equally remarkable for lack of any creative insight into Gandhi’s style of leadership. Unlike other leftists who were busy evolving tactics to devise alternative leadership to Gandhi and considered him as a big stumbling bloc in their way Nehru was willing to trust Gandhi’s better judgement at critical times rather than putting some of his cherished dogmas, which he shared with the left, against him. Leftists, over time, came to perceive him as an individual who, at the beginning of a battle, took positions on their side but slowly surrendered his arms and veered around to the opposite side. They could not have understood Nehru’s dilemmas since none of them had grasped any of the peculiarities of the Gandhi-led mass movements. Nehru was a socialist and he naturally shared his world view with left groupings. But he had rejected the strategy being followed by these groups though he could not convince them of the irrelevance of such a strategy. He was the only socialist leader who had partly agreed and was partly resigned to work within the Gandhian strategy which naturally brought him closer to the right-wing. This ‘contradiction’ between ideology and strategy lay at the root of Nehru’s dilemmas. So many of these left-wing leaders came to formulate the following assessment of Nehru which is still prevalent in some circles: ‘He would froth and fume, and storm against the Gandhians, but would always yield to Gandhi after letting off steam.’79 Every time he took these sectarian positions he refused to move along the path logically leading up to a confrontation with Gandhi. Each time he belied the hopes of the other left groupings and the British bureaucracy since both were looking forward to his break with the Congress and above all Gandhi. In the context of the Tripuri affair, Bose wrote to Nehru: ‘You would generally hold forth for hours together and then succumb in the 78

Nehru, An Autobiography, p. 85. Sachchidanand Sinha, ‘Fifty Years of the Socialist Movement: An Overview’ in Fifty Years of the Socialist Movement in India, p. 63. 79

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end … . Rarely have I found you sticking to your point till the last.’80 On the other hand, some of the right-wing leaders came to form the view that Jawaharlal Nehru never made up his mind on anything until the last possible moment.’81 It was because of deep-seated, unresolved problems on the basic questions of strategy and organisation that Nehru was the only Working Committee member to take no clear-cut stand on such an important issue as the Bose–Gandhi confrontation.82 At the same time, he saw others’ opportunism and the way they distorted the issues. But he himself was by no means clear on those issues. In order to avoid the problems of getting caught in the crossfire he developed an attitude of aloofness. The assessment that ‘the roots of Nehru’s vague and unrealistic attitude to this whole affair lay … in his temperamental unsuitability for, and instinctive shrinking from, the cut and thrust of power politics’,83 is a surface observation that does not touch the heart of Nehru’s dilemmas. THE AFTERMATH

Great anxieties mixed with expectations were raised by the results of the Presidential election, which was hailed as a victory of the left forces.84 The left-wing groups, some of them reluctantly, had rallied round Bose’s attempt to polarise the Congress without giving much thought to the kinds of choices, including a split in the Congress, it would open up before them. The victory of Bose first pleased them85 but the choices with which Gandhi now confronted them utterly paralysed them. They now began to realise that the onus of splitting the Congress as well as preparing the country for the immediate struggle as promised by Bose in the Tripuri Address had fallen on their shoulders. M.N. Roy was an exception as he had already grasped the consequences of the left-wing’s political line and had assumed that the left leaders 80

Nehru, A Bunch of Old Letters, 1958, pp. 339–40. Rajendra Prasad Papers, Kirpalani to Rajendra Prasad, 7 February 1939, File No. 2-A/39. 82 Tripuri had left Nehru with a feeling of uneasiness. He wrote to Sri Prakasa: ‘I confess that I feel very helpless in the middle of two rival groups’. Nehru Papers, Correspondence, Vol. 96, 15 August 1939. 83 B.R. Tomilson, op. cit., p. 129. 84 Independent India, Vol. III, No. 12, 19 March 1939. 85 Yusuf Meherally, ‘Subhas Bose’, Congress Socialist, Vol. III, No. 7–8, 19 February 1939. Also see Crossroads, Bose to Amiya Nath Bose, 17 April 1939, p. 112. 81

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knew what they were doing and they would shoulder the responsibility of leading the Congress. It is difficult to believe that the left leaders did not anticipate the logical consequences of the ideological–organisational campaign they had been carrying on against the right-wing since 1934; that their activities could split the INC and they had to go ahead with half the national force and without the backing of Gandhi and the old guard. It were precisely such considerations which had stopped Nehru from supporting Bose. Faced with the tricky situation—one of their own making—left-wingers began to waver. The CSP and Communists abandoned their earlier assessment of the right-wing and began to emphasise national unity, especially the unity with the right-wing. The interests of the anti-imperialist movement ‘demanded not the exclusive leadership of one wing but a united leadership under the guidance of Gandhi’.86 Jayaprakash Narayan and Acharya Narendra Dev declared that at the present juncture only Gandhian leadership could take the country forward and ideological differences should not be pressed until independence was achieved.87 ‘On its own’, noted the National Front, ‘left cannot launch a nation-wide struggle against imperialism. The struggle must be launched by the Congress as a whole and conducted under the leadership of the Congress … . Though far stronger than before, the conscious left constitutes a minority in the Congress.’88 The supporters of Bose had melted away long before the fight started. ‘… it was not a defeat, it was a rout and that too before the fight’, was the apt comment by the old revolutionary, M.N. Roy. Bose was arbitrarily trying to separate Sardar Patel and Rajendra Prasad from Gandhi and seeking to destroy their influence. This showed how little he had understood the mutual relations between various individuals in the Working Committee. Roy saw on Bose’s part not only a lack of clarity but also lack of courage.89 Consistent with the stand he took during the election Bose should have formed his cabinet wholly or mostly of the representatives of those groups with whose support he had won the victory.90

86

National Front, 19 March 1939. Independent India, Vol. III, No. 12, 19 March 1939. 88 National Front, 11 June 1939. ‘Editorial: Unity of the Left’. 89 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 21 May 1939. 90 Independent India, Vol. III. No. 8, 19 Feburary 1939. 87

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The left had mobilised the peasants and workers against the right-wing and ultimately the INC. They had roused passions and whipped up emotions. But now they were not leading them anywhere. The internal strife within the Congress had absorbed all the energies of the Congress and left a debilitating impact on its organisation. In the first week of December 1939. Harry Haig wrote to Linlithgow: … it is probably the Congress and not the British who are really in a weak position at the moment, and I would say that we should face a break rather than make any further concessions … . If a break were to come, I do not myself think that the war effort of India would be greatly impeded … . I am confident that a Congress civil disobedience movement would not succeed, and its failure would greatly weaken the Congress.91

The AICC meeting at Wardha was called on 9 October to discuss the new situation arising out of the Second World War. Soon after, on 12 and 13 October, Bose called a meeting of the representatives of the left groups in Lucknow. Discussion continued for two days. At the end an agreed programme of work was drawn up. ‘But it was soon after’, states a CSP document, ‘that the Communist Party came out with a wonderful thesis in which they launched an attack on the party, and also talked of an armed insurrection. The Lucknow meeting … was in point of fact the last attempt at left unity.’92 In a letter P.C. Joshi told Jayaprakash that events were taking place ‘that would reduce us to pulp. And we are supposed to shape events. We are perhaps damned too puny and self-centred. Instead of riding the waves we are not even swimming together.’93 In the meanwhile, the Communists had launched a campaign against Bose for disrupting the Congress ranks. The National Front was of

91

Haig Papers, Haig to Linlithgow, 4 December 1939. Earlier, in a letter to Haig Viceroy had remarked: ‘The Working Committee are anxious to avoid civil disobedience as long as possible, partly because the country is not really prepared for it at the moment’. Linlithgow to Haig, 1 December 1939. 92 Jayaprakash Papers, File No. 7. A three-page document entitled ‘Left Unity’. 93 P.C. Joshi to Jayaprakash Narayan, 5 September 1939, Jayaprakash Narayan Papers, File No. 2.

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the view that war was an international event and the ‘left unity crashed’ in its face because it had not yet reached a stage where it could acquire the ability to ‘understand national events in their international setting’.94 In December a ‘War Circular’ of the CSP proclaimed that the Communists had destroyed left unity.95 The pursual of an alternative strategy by the leftists had led to disunity not only within the ranks of the INC but also within the various left groupings.

94

National Front, 22 October 1939. AICSP War Circular No. 2, 31 December 1939, Jayaprakash Narayan Papers, File No. 3. 95

Chapter 12 Politics of Transformation vs. Politics of Alternative

As we have tried to show in earlier chapters, the colonial state had evolved a two-pronged strategy to contain the activities of the Communists. In August 1933, DIB had even concluded that since the colonial state was in a position to implement this strategy, the Communist Party would not be allowed to become a threat in the future. It would be disorganised much before it could gather enough momentum. In its decade long struggle against Indian Communists the colonial authorities had formed the view that if not checked at an early stage the activities of the Communists could rapidly gain ground and become a source of serious danger. So, it was emphasised, the action against active Communists, must not be delayed if the movement was to be permanently crippled. This is what H. Williamson had stated in 1933: … the police were entirely cognisant of what the Communists were doing and even of their most secret activities and correspondence. If this happy state of affairs continues, and if, as I have indicated above, the police are given facilities to enable them from time to time to extract the most poisonous Communist weeds, there seems to be no reason why communism should amount to anything in the nature of a grave danger for a considerable time to come.1 1 ‘A note on subversive movements and organisations in India’ by H. Williamson, 30 August 1933. Home Department, GOI, Under Secretary’s Safe. File No. 843 (TNA).

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As is clear from the police records of the Bombay Presidency between 1934 and 1942 the police continued to be cognisant of what the Communists were doing and even of their most secret activities and correspondence. As discussed in earlier chapters, the Communists, on the other hand, had been pursuing, notwithstanding the twists and turns, a strategy the implementation of which, according to them, was to result in a nation-wide insurrection led by the working class and its party. They were committed to the view that only the implementation of such a strategy could generate an ‘alternative politics’ to the Gandhi-led Congress movement and liberate India. The Second World War, they thought, had created the opportune moment when this strategy would be put into practice and the struggle against the War be transformed into a revolution. Time had come to determinedly tread the proletarian path and give the nationalist forces the glimpse of an alternative method and politics. These preparations, as is clear from the records, were being carefully watched by the bureaucracy. On the eve of War, we find, these two strategies locked into a mortal combat to test their respective validity. Once the working class had come into existence as an economic category it was expected that sections of it would be involved in strikes to redress their genuine economic grievances. As pointed out earlier (Chapter 2 and Chapter 3), the British had introduced Trade Union laws in India in order to channelise the grievances of the working class within the confines of constitutionalist politics. By bringing in these laws an attempt was made to draw a sharp line between the sphere of ‘the economic’ and the sphere of ‘the political’. In the sphere of the economic all the working class strikes for redressing the grievances were legitimate. The leaders of such strikes were expected to limit their activities to constitutionalist form of politics thereby implying that workers will not be mobilised in any political mass movement against imperialism. This was a powerful measure against the working class being contaminated with nationalism. But once the legality of this sphere was constitutionally established, all trade unionists, irrespective of ideology, could legitimately organise the workers to get their economic grievances redressed. But the government was fully aware of the fact that Communists were organising the workers with the aim of ultimately mobilising them as a political force against the colonial state according to a preconceived strategy. At the same time, as we have seen, the authorities did not object to the Communists organising the workers on economic demands either alone or in alliance with other trade union currents. As far as Communists were concerned,

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they were organising the trade union movement on partial demands, the logic of which was believed to be leading up to the political involvement of the working class. Therefore, the communist politics also assumed the existence of two separate spheres—one economic and the other political—but their belief was that through the ‘bridge’ of partial demands working class could be made to transcend the limits of the economic sphere during militant strikes. Therefore, special emphasis was placed on militancy to distinguish communist-led strikes from the strikes led by the ‘reformists’. The measure of militancy itself became the criteria to judge whether a particular strike was ‘reformist’ or ‘revolutionary’. But given the legal framework of the colonial state and its policy towards the Communist Party militancy did not serve the purpose it was supposed to serve. Not only that, it also turned out to be costly from the point of view of economic concessions. Because the ‘reformist’ mobilisations and leadership could come to an honourable compromise and get concessions while militant mobilisations and leadership failed to get economic concessions for the workers. Therefore, the cycle of militant strikes would automatically reproduce its opposite category the non-militant ‘reformist’ strikes. Militancy and ‘reformism’ instead of being contradictory to each other, as was understood by the Communist leadership, turned out to be two sides of the same coin. It was because of this mechanism that the Bombay working class was militant and ‘reformist’ at the same time. It was because of this mechanism that militant B.T. Ranadive and reformist N.M. Joshi could co-exist in the AITUC. The strategy of the colonial state also made a distinction between the two types of activities of the Communists: one legitimate to secure redressal of grievances for the working class, and other illegitimate whereby they led the working class to transcend the limits, perceived to be the limits of ‘the economic’. The authorities would carefully follow the development of a strike led by the Communists and would initiate action against the workers as well as the leaders once it was perceived that the limits of ‘the economic’ were being transgressed. Attempts would be made to know at an appropriate stage whether the workers and their leaders were inclined for a compromise or not. This information was of crucial importance because the authorities knew that these intentions would be indicative of the fact which way the leadership was likely to lead the workers. Once the authorities came to the conclusion that the workers were being led with an uncompromising militancy with the clear

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intention of mobilising them politically, the strike would be suppressed and the Communist leadership be arrested. This is how the colonial state had suppressed the textile general strike of 1934 and, as we shall see, the same mechanism was at display during the general strike of 1940. Given the resources of the colonial state and the existence of this mechanism the path of transforming economic struggles into political struggles was organically closed. There were no chances for the Bombay working class to place itself at the head of the national movement by fighting militant and pitched battles against the Bombay capitalists. The Communists were knocking at the wrong door. This is what we intend to show in the second part of the chapter. In the first part of the chapter we will be discussing the ‘politics of the transformation’. THE POLITICS OF TRANSFORMATION

The logic of Politics of Transformation dictated that what was needed was not another party outside the Congress but united efforts of all leftists inside the Congress to extend the mass base of the Congress to the lower sections of the Indian society and in general to radicalise the Congress politics, for example, as happened in Kerala. While the logic of Alternative Politics to the Congress necessitated the building of a mass party constantly struggling against the Congress or against its effective leadership from an outside platform to expose its ‘true bourgeois character’ to the ‘revolutionary masses’ behind it. The political line of the Seventh Congress of the Third International required devising methods, modalities and above all a right kind of temperament to forge very close links with the Congress masses while the logic of building their own separate party forced them to clash with the Congress and the CSP at various levels and in various ways. In January 1940, the Kerala Congress Socialist Party leadership took the decision to convert the Kerala Congress Socialist Party into the state unit of the CPI.2 In his interview, explaining the process of how Kerala 2

E.M.S. Namboodiripad, How I Became a Communist, Trivandrum, 1976, p. 161. Writes E.M.S. Namboodiripad: ‘It was a year after the Bombay Conference of the CSP (1934) that the late Krishna Pillai and E.M.S. had the first contact with the Communist Party of India through Sundrayya. It took, almost two years after our first contact to form the first unit of the CPI.’ ‘Advance and Retreat from Congress Socialism’, Statesman, 16 April 1984.

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became one of the important strongholds of post-Independence communism, K. Damodaran made a remark which to some might sound paradoxical. ‘When people ask me’, he said, ‘why the CPI became so strong in non-industrialised Kerala as compared to Bombay, I reply that the main reason is that there was no CPI in Kerala in the 1930–33 period and so it was possible to start anew.’3 In Kerala, those Congressmen who openly declared themselves as an organised unit of the Communist Party only after 1940 did not gain their mass base and public influence as Communists—as members of a seperately organised party competing with the Congress. Many of them might have met Communists in other parts of the country, might have carried on secret deliberations with them and seeds of being Communist Party members might have been sprouting in their hearts secretly without the knowledge of the public.4 The first Communist group in Kerala was organised only in 1937 by five comrades including Namboodiripad, K. Pillai and K. Damodaran. They decided that they should not openly call themselves the Communist Party but win themselves a base inside the Congress as Socialists. But in the eyes of the public and their followers they were militant Congressmen till the day of 26 January 1940. ‘Mass of people in Kerala came to know that there is a party called Communist Party when they woke up on the morning of 26 January 1940 to see writing in tar on the walls from one end to the other of Kerala.’5 The crucial meeting of the leading cadres of the CSP was held in October 1939 near Tellicherry. It was attended by nearly ninety members. It was in this meeting that decision was taken to convert the Kerala CSP into the Kerala Unit of the CPI. Almost the entire membership of the CSP in Kerala approved of this decision and publicly joined the Communist Party.6 The fact that Castro and Che joined the Communist Party after their victory, could not be described in retrospect, as the victory of the Communist Party and its politics. Here we shall illustrate the point how the politics of transformation actually worked, though imperfectly, and ultimately succeeded in transforming the Kerala Pradesh Congress into a People’s Party under left-wing hegemony. 3

K. Damodaran, New Left Review, Sep.–Oct., 1975, p. 93. Ibid. 5 T.V. Krishnan, Kerala’s First Communist: Life of Krishna Pillai, March 1971, p. 72. 6 Immortal Heroes: Lives of Communist Leaders, CP Publication, 1975, pp. 117–18. 4

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This transformation was reflected in the fact that left-wing gained a majority in the KPCC election in 1938. The KPCC Presidentship went to Chunanghat Kunjaikavamma, a sympathiser of the Congress Socialist Party. The majority of the members elected for AICC from KPCC were also left-wingers. This process of transformation was not peculiar to Kerala but was a nation-wide phenomenon, notwithstanding the fact that in other places it was either slow or cut short and distorted by the intervention of the Politics of Alternative. The KPCC under leftist influence implemented proposals passed by the AICC which perhaps remained unimplemented in other provinces.7 ‘It was, however, after January 1938 (the date when the PCC came under leftist leadership) that the Congress in Malabar became a real organ of people’s struggle.’8 While the Communist group in Bombay ‘disrupted the trade union movement’ as well as ‘remained away from the third great wave of our struggle’.9 The Kerala left-inclined youth, those who were to lead the CPI unit after 1940, ‘were totally immersed in the civil disobedience movement’.10 Krishna Pillai, Kerala’s first Communist, started his political career by enrolling himself as a Congress volunteer in the Salt Satyagraha jatha to Payyannur in January 1930.11 Unlike the Communists in Bombay, for the left-inclined Kerala youth the famous Dandi March and beginning of the Civil Disobedience Movement were just not a sham struggle deliberately started to pre-empt the real struggle of the exploited Indian masses. ‘While we read the reports about these’, writes Namboodiripad, ‘we felt grateful that we were born in a generation that could bear witness to all these historical events. The emotional upsurge we had when the Salt Law was broken by Gandhi and other leaders, can never adequately be described in words.’12 Similarly, the Guruvayur Satyagraha in which A.K. Gopalan was the volunteer captain thrilled ‘thousands of young men like me’. ‘It was the very same youth’, writes 7

A.K. Gopalan, In the Cause of the People, Bombay, 1978, p. 85. E.M.S. Namboodiripad, Kerala: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, Calcutta, 1968, p. 157. 9 The Guidelines of the History of Communist Party of India, CPI Publication, October 1974, p. 32. 10 K. Damodaran, op. cit. 11 Krishnan, Kerala’s First Communist: Life of Krishna Pillai, p. 11. 12 E.M.S. Namboodiripad, How I Became a Communist, p. 112. 8

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Namboodiripad ‘who gave this bold lead, who subsequently bacame founder-leaders of the worker-peasant organisations that were free from the malice of religious or communal considerations.’13 ‘Gandhiji’s leadership’, adds Gopalan, ‘created in young people a new moral awakening and self-effacing spirit.’14 They also did not see the Gandhi–Irwin Pact as a betrayal; for them it was only a temporary respite. ‘We knew that before long’, reminisces Namboodiripad, ‘the Congress would be compelled to launch another powerful struggle, and it would be the duty of students like us to participate actively in it. That was what actually followed.’l5 The profound emotional experience of the Civil Disobedience Movement and orientation towards Nehru and not towards Indian Communists initiated the Kerala Youth along different lines of development. Namboodiripad tells us that his information about the Meerut Conspiracy Case was scanty while he had far clearer ideas about the left-wing in the Congress. This group, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Bose, etc., did not agree with the general approach of the Gandhian leadership. Nevertheless, they knew that in the national struggle against the British Government, the leadership and support of the old generation was essential. Personally, that approach seemed to me to be a practical one. Therefore, I took extra care to study the speeches and writings of the left-wing Congress leaders, particularly that of Nehru and Subhas Bose.16

This was nothing but an expression of an ideological transformation from a nationalist viewpoint towards a socialist world view, and Namboodiripad was not the only person undergoing this transformation. Towards the end of Civil Disobedience a widespread feeling arose that there was something fundamentally wrong with the nation’s independence struggle and a section of the Congress workers started thinking in terms of reorganising the national struggle on more purposeful lines. ‘Thus, Congress members with leftist ideas became numerically stronger than that of the old Communist–Socialist groups and they started to organise themselves and their own programmes.’17

13

Ibid., p. 123. Gopalan, In the Cause of the People, Bombay, p. 26. 15 E.M.S. Namboodiripad, How I Became a Communist, p. 114. 16 Ibid., pp. 110–11. 17 E.M.S. Namboodiripad, How I Became a Communist, p. 156. 14

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After the Civil Disobedience Movement, it was these would-be communists who were enrolling members for the Congress, who were organising political meetings, demonstrations, youth conferences and the first trade union organisations.18 A.K. Gopalan vividly describes in his autobiography how the message of Congress was carried to the far-flung villages of Kerala.19 Building the Congress organisation and spreading its influence to the new areas was a primary task for the Kerala leftists even when they were taking up class or sectional demands. This conviction, that workers and peasants movements would not be able to gain in strength and sweep unless Congress becomes a strong organisation, was driven deep in their minds. Unlike other places, in Kerala the left-wing Congressmen could not form Congress Socialist Party immediately after 1934 though their ‘activities were towards propagation of the socialist ideologies, strengthening the Congress organisation, and its left-wing forces’.20 A section of the Congress satyagrahis of 1932–33 period was converted to labour union activities.21 Kerala leftists felt that Fundamental Rights resolution adopted by the Karachi Congress could be used to agitate among the peasants and implementation of this resolution could go a long way in strengthening the relation between the Congress and the peasant population. While, in turn, ‘socialist activities in the Congress would also help to strengthen the Congress party itself on a much wider basis. Such mutually complimentary approach would have considerably contributed to the growth of workers and peasants’ organisation.’22 New unions began to appear after the workers of Tiruvannore and Feroke fought the struggle against wage reduction in 1935. Sections of the workers, many of whom were from outcaste communities, slowly realised that ‘we were a new kind of Congress and that we could appreciate miseries of workers’.23

18

T.V. Krishnan, Kerala’s First Communist, p. 24; Gopalan, In the Cause of the People, p. 601. 19 Ibid., pp. 20–21. 20 E.M.S. Namboodiripad, How I Became a Communist, p. 157. 21 Ibid. Also see Krishnan, Kerala’s First Communist, p. 15. 22 E.M.S. Namboodiripad, How I Became a Communist, p. 158. 23 Gopalan, In the Cause of the People, p. 63. Emphasis added.

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Youth movement, teachers’ movement, peasant movement and cultural movement mingled with each other. Summer camps were organised to train the cadre.24 Party workers of Chirakkal, Kasaragad and other taluks approached the peasants and held public meetings. Marches of peasant jathas were organised to awaken the peasant masses. A peasant jatha led by A.K. Gopalan and others covered 250 miles on foot, held 500 public meetings at which the leaders spoke to two lakhs of people. 500 new primary Congress Committees were formed. ‘And these were not merely paper committees. They were committees that really functioned.’25 In the Travancore peasant struggle at the end of 1937, the main sinews of the struggle were provided by the young Congress workers.26 Achutha Menon, who later on became the Communist Chief Minister of Kerala, Dr A.K. Menon who was to become a minister in the first Communist Government in Kerala and M.N. Govindan Nair, senior CPI leader were young enthusiastic Congress organisers in 1938. Summing up the results of these multi-sided activities of the Congress Socialist Party, A.K. Gopalan comments: There was on the whole a new zeal and awakening. The people knew that freedom was an avenue to socialism. Peasants and workers who had once opposed the Congress formed unions and peasant groups and implemented the Congress programme through these organisations. There was a far-reaching change in the people as a whole.27

The most important aspect which was crucial in the growth of leftwing in Kerala was their understanding of what Namboodiripad calls ‘mutually complimentary approach’ between the growth of the workers 24

K. Gopalankutty, ‘The Rise and Growth of the Communist Party in Malabar, 1934–47, M.Phil. dissertation, JNU, New Delhi, 1978. Also in Kerala the social movements played a very important role in radicalising the deprived sections of society. See M.S. Rao, Social Movements and Social Transformation, Delhi, 1979; P. Chandramohan, ‘Social and Political Protest in Travancore: A Study of the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam, 1900–1938’, M.Phil. dissertation, New Delhi, JNU, 1981. 25 This information about peasants and workers movements is given in Gopalan and Krishnan. Also see Gangadharan Nambiar, T.K., ‘Growth of Class Consciousness among the Peasantry of North Malabar, 1934–42’, M.Phil. dissertation, New Delhi, JNU, 1982; Prakash Karat, ‘Organised Struggles of Malabar Peasantry, 1939–40’, Social Scientist, October 1973. 26 Gopalan, In the Cause of the People, p. 85. 27 Ibid., p. 73.

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and peasants’ movements and growth of the Congress into a mass organisation. For instance, this complex approach was not understood by Swami Sahajanand Saraswati in Bihar who instead of following the two-track policy of strengthening Congress as well as organising the peasant committees only emphasised the latter. As everywhere else so in Kerala, it was the upper castes which first joined the Congress. Because of this, lower castes looked upon the Congress with distrust. Apart from the significant role played by the social reform movements, it were the left-wingers, who to some extent removed their prejudices and brought them within the fold of the Congress. It was as a result of such efforts that the peasants of Kandoth, who in 1931 had attacked Gopalan and Keraleeyan, afterwards participated in the Congress Political Conference shouting slogans like ‘Victory to Congress’. Describing the experience of the lower and oppressed sections in the Congress movement during the Payyanoor Political Conference, Gopalan remarks: ‘The Congress was theirs that day; it struggled for them; it strove to improve their very way of life. They felt that they too were Congressmen.’28 Before 1934, everywhere, including Kerala, the old guard, majority of whom were patriotic right-wingers, dominated the Congress. If Bihar despite its strong peasant movements failed to transform the Congress while Kerala with its relatively weak peasant movement was able to transform the Congress then the reason for this must be sought mainly in the approach of those who were organising the peasantry. By setting up volunteer forces, organising training camps and summer schools, holding political classes and through numerous other ways ‘the Congress was transformed … into a mass movement. The Congress Socialist Party can deservedly take pride that it was able to strengthen the Congress and turn it into a mass organisation.’29 In fact, in Kerala primacy was given to the transformation process and this in turn helped the mobilisation of wider sections of workers and peasants.30 What were the consequences of the left’s hegemonic influence within the KPCC? ‘The emergence of KPCC’, concludes Namboodiripad: 28

Ibid., p. 87. Gopalan, In the Cause of the People, p. 86. Emphasis added. 30 ‘The left-wing KPCC’ writes E.M.S., ‘was formed at a time when the worker-peasant movements were in their infancy’. E.M.S. Namboodiripad, Kerala, p. 154. 29

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… with a majority of socialist-led leftists and nationalist Muslims carried the mass movement several steps forward. The gigantic political campaigning of the period of general elections followed by the enthusiasm roused by the formation of the Congress Ministry, did, of course, lead to a tremendous mass upsurge: the trade unions, kisan sabhas, student unions, teachers’ unions, etc., grew up as never before.31

Were there no communists in Kerala during this period (1935–40)? A small group known as the ‘Communist League’ was already there in Trivandrum since 1931. Interestingly, their experience was no different from other communist groups in various parts of the country.32 Here was a clash between two paths approaching the question of organising the workers and peasants and preparing them for freedom and socialism. After the 7th Congress of the Comintern, members of the CPI rejoined the Indian National Congress through the CSP and adopted, though superficially, the political style of the ‘Kerala Path’ on a national level as a tactic to strengthen their Alternative Politics to the Congress. Even this internally contradictory attitude brought dividends to the communists. What would have happened if all the Socialists/Communists would have followed Nehru and his strategy of transformation instead of forming their separate parties inside or outside the INC? The threat posed by the transformation of the Congress Socialists in ideologically transforming the Congress, would have certainly made the right-wingers panicky. What could they have done? Responded like moderate Congressmen threatened by the Gandhian mass movement? Faced with the problem of transformation of the Congress through the mobilisation of illiterate masses, the moderates walked out to form their separate organisation. But the choice was left to the moderates either to come along or walk out of the Congress. In fact, two of the tallest leaders of the moderates—Motilal Nehru and C.R. Das—did come along and accepted Gandhi’s leadership. In the struggle for transformation the object is not to outmanoeuvre the opponents organisationally or politically but to create a dilemma before them which could force them either to come along, walk out or precipitate a split. Any of these three alternatives would result in lowering the hegemonic influence of the opponents. In late 1930s, and this is fully 31 32

Ibid., p. 157. Ibid., p. 160.

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illustrated by the experience of the Kerala Pradesh Congress, the rightwingers might not have hesitated from splitting the Congress. But by doing so they would have only left the Congress under the hegemony of left-wingers—a Congress which would have been a national party with socialist orientation (left-bloc or people’s party) and not a class party of the working class, a Bolshevik-type which the Communists were trying to establish. By 1940, Namboodiripad, A.K. Gopalan, Krishna Pillai and later K. Damodaran were all well-recognised leaders of the Kerala Congress: ‘It was our mass work’, says Damodaran, ‘coupled with the fact that we were identified with the national aspirations of the people which undoubtedly played a significant role in ensuring that Kerala became one of the important (Communist) strongholds of post-Independent India.’33 While comparing the attitude of the left or peasant leaders in Kerala towards INC two other points should also be noted. The first point related to the criterion for labelling the consciousness of the peasantry as lower or higher. For Bihar peasant leaders this criterion was furnished by the extent to which the peasants were enthusiastic to participate in exclusive Kisan Sabha meetings and enrol themselves into independent and separate kisan committees. While in Kerala the formation of the Congress committees and the Karshaka Sanghams went hand in hand. The peasants were enrolled simultaneously as Congress members when they were enrolled as members of the Karshaka Sanghams.34 A.K. Gopalan, a well-known Congress leader at that time, told the volunteers in a ‘study class’ that ‘peasants will not attend if a meeting is organised under Congress auspices. They will attend only if they know that it is a peasants’ meeting. Congress meetings will be attended only by peasants and labourers who are class conscious.’35 For the Kerala leadership the degree of class awareness of the working masses was indicated by the extent to which they were willing to transcend their own sectional grievances and were mobilised into the Congress on a political programme. The second important point about peasant mobilisation in Kerala was that the leaders did not raise the demand for abolition of landlordism 33

Damodaran, ‘Memoirs of an Indian Communist’, New Left Review, 1975. K. Gopalankutty, ‘The Integration of Anti-Landlord Movement with the Movement Against Imperialism: The Case of Malabar, 1935–39’, in Bipan Chandra (ed.), The Indian Left: Critical Appraisals, Delhi, 1983, p. 206. 35 Ibid. 34

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as an immediate demand. The ‘centre of the peasants’ demands’ was a ‘proper amendment’ of the Malabar Tenancy Act 1930 in order to protect the legitimate interests of the verumpattamdars (tenants-at-will). In other words, the mobilisation was seeking a new adjustment of conflicting interests. It was this which had ‘fired the imagination’ of the peasant masses and given birth to the ‘Congress-cum-kisan sabha movement’.36 In fact, in Kerala the tenancy movement was closely linked with the activities of the Congress from the very beginning in 1915. It was under the pressure of this Congress-cum-kisan mobilisation that the Malabar Tenancy Act was passed in 1929–30. But this Act did not protect the interests of the verumpattamdars.37 The new Congress-cum-kisan movement was a continuation of the earlier movement now being fought by an ideologically transformed Congress of ‘a new type of Congress cadres’.38 It was through the Congress Committees that peasant demands were popularised. ‘Although peasant conferences were held and even peasant committees set up in some places, it was the Congress that took, the lead.’ The Malabar mobilisation drew the attention of the people in Cochin State. Slowly the movement for ‘fixity of tenure and fair rent’ for verumpattamdars began to gather momentum. This movement was particularly ‘remarkable because one of the founders and the present President of the Cochin Karshaka Sabha is a Gandhite and the Secretary is a Communist’.39 To avoid rifts in the Congress, Kerala Socialists were not only willing to make compromises but were also at times willing to put up with ‘humiliation from the Congress High Command’.40 The radicalisation of the Congress as a whole during the upsurges and organic growth of left-wing from within the Congress in successive waves towards socialist orientation was a nation-wide phenomenon. 36

E.M.S. Namboodiripad, A Short History of the Peasant Movement in Kerala, Bombay, April 1943, p. 30. Emphasis added. 37 For details see K.N. Panikkar, ‘Agrarian Legislation and Social Classes: A Case Study of Malabar’, Economic and Political Weekly, No. 21, 27 May 1978. 38 E.M.S. Namboodiripad, A Short History of the Peasant Movement in Kerala, p. 15. Emphasis added. 39 Ibid. 40 P. Krishna Pillai’s statement in April 1938. Gopalankutty, ‘The Rise and Growth of the Communist Party in Malabar, 1934–47’, M.Phil, dissertation, JNU, New Delhi, 1978.

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A superficial look at the three national upsurges (1920–21, 1930–34 and 1942) makes this point absolutely clear. Unfortunately these ‘successive waves towards socialist orientation’ could not have their cumulative effect in the National Congress and transform it ideologically into a people’s party under left-wing hegemony. THE POLITICS OF ALTERNATIVE STRATEGY

According to a document, circulated by the Communists immediately after the War had begun, the main task was to ‘seize the initiative in making preparations for struggle through the Congress Committees’. It was only ‘through wholehearted participation in the struggle launched by the Congress’ that the Communists would be in a position to ‘swing the entire national movement to the path of a revolutionary struggle’. These tactics were designed to ‘realise the hegemony of the proletariat over the national movement’.41 Soon after the outbreak of War, the CPI demanded that the war be converted into a revolution—the essence of Leninist positions on ‘war and Revolution’. This radical line was unambiguously stated in an official resolution of the politbureau, adopted at its October 1939 meeting.42 The task of Indian people was the ‘revolutionary utilisation of the War crisis for the achievement of national freedom’. The resolution asserted that ‘capture of power is immediately realisable goal’. Communist leaders made it clear that a Congress satyagraha campaign would serve no useful purpose unless Communists not only take part in it but also guide it in such a way as would avoid procrastination and would prepare the ground for a nation-wide struggle. Instructions were issued to various units:

41 A Statement of Policy and Tasks in the Period of War. Available in Swami Sahajanand Sarswati Papers, Roll No. 5. Written after 23 October 1939. An important paragraph ran as following: ‘This is the Bolshevik path, the path of Bolshevik tactics, the path which leads to the hegemony of the proletariat and to the coordination of all partial mass struggles into a general strike and no-rent and no-tax campaign leading finally to capture of power through armed insurrection and paving the way for passing over the bourgeois democratic revolution into the proletarian revolution.’ Ibid. 42 P.C. Joshi, Communist Reply to Congress Working Committee’s Charges, Bombay, 1945, pp. 35–39.

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We must make it clear that the day Congress launches the struggle the volunteer corps organised by us will place itself at the disposal of the local war-council of the Congress. All our comrades must join the volunteer corps ... . If we win their (rank and file Congressmen) confidence today and start anti-war activities with them, we shall be able very much soon to more and more influence the movement.43

The political mobilisation of the working class on the ‘Independence Day’, i.e., 26 January 1940, was the first major action undertaken by the CPI without any help from other left groupings. Earlier also, communists in Bombay had organised a strike in the textile mills on 2 October as an anti-war protest of the workers.44 The Communists took a very active part in carrying on intensive propaganda in the mill area in connection with the observance of ‘Independence Day’. Out of 68 mills in the city 57 mills comprising 101,238 daily-shift workers, remained closed on the day, only 11 mills with a complement of 7,762 working.45 The CPI group was busy developing an alternative politics so it naturally ignored this call. On 22 January, 40 street corner meetings were held. During the next two days the GKU workers in two motor cars went round the working class areas holding meetings. Twenty thousand handbills were distributed. Special attention was given to the Muslim workers of the areas of Madanpura and Kamathipura. Throughout the day numerous workers processions, carrying the tricolour and red flag marched through the city declaring opposition to imperialist war, demanding the Congress to start the fight for freedom. Meetings were held at Azad Maidan, at the Chowpatty sands and in the north of the city in which hundreds of students participated. The meeting in the Muslim populated area was attended by 3,000 workers. In the evening over 30,000 workers met at the Kamgar Maidan. Comrade Shahid, President of GKU said: ‘They, our leaders, say we are not ready; they raise the bogey of communal riots. Let them go to Madanpura today and witness the enthusiastic participation of Muslim workers in the Independence Day. That will open their eyes.’46

43

File No. HDP 7/6/1939. The communists were able to mobilise 35 mills out of 72 while 37 continued to work. Review–84, 10 October 1939. File No. 543(13)-B(2) of 1938 (MSA). 45 Review-88, 1 February 1940. File No. 543(13)-B(3) of 1940 (MSA). 46 The Communist, Vol. 2, No. 6, February 1940. 44

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In Cawnpore 30,000 workers came on the streets. Right in the morning seven big mills out of 12 closed down. ‘It was a tremendous success—the first great political action of the Cawnpore working class.’ Communist activitists, namely, S.S. Yusuf and Arjun Arora called upon the workers to be at the forefront of the national freedom movement. 30,000 workers in Dalmia Nagar went on strike. ‘Peasants poured into the city in innumerable processions. It was an atmosphere the like of which Dalmia Nagar had never experienced.’ The strike was a complete success.47 8,000 handloom workers of Sholapur downed tools and marched in a big procession through the main streets of the city. They were shouting slogans: ‘Defend the Soviet Union’, ‘Fight for complete Independence’. Similarly, in Delhi workers of DCM, Birla Mills, Jamuna Mills and Ganesh Flour Mills marched with red and tri-colour flags. 70,000 textile workers of four mills of Serampur downed their tools. A huge rally of jute workers took place at Budge-Budge. 30,000 students held a rally in Madras. There were rallies in Guntur district (Andhra). At Trichinapoly 4,000 railway workers demonstrated led by the red volunteers and later joined the Congress meeting. Students of Trichinapoly also participated. In Bihar the Independence Day was jointly celebrated by the CSP, Kisan Sabha and Communists. At Bhita a meeting of 20,000 kisans was addressed by Swami Sahajanand. In Dinapore sub-division more than a lakh people, mainly kisans, participated. At Patna 10,000 students participated in the demonstration. The CSP made the day a great success in Jamshedpur. A meeting of 7,000 kisans displayed red and national flags. ‘It was a day of nation-wide demonstration against the policy of inaction and compromise.’48 Communists were of the view that the participation of the workers and peasants in the struggle for independence with their own weapons, their own forms of struggle would upset Gandhi’s plan for ‘honourable settlement’. The leader of the national bourgeoise that fears the masses and mass struggle more than it hates imperialism, Gandhiji wants to keep the proletariat out of political action, for he knows that the emergence of the proletariat as an independent political force, the adoption of proletarian technique of action by the peasant and student masses— strikes, no-rent, mass action—spells the death of Gandhism, of 47 48

Ibid. Ibid.

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bourgeois leadership, of the policy of compromise. Fear of masses masquerades as non-violence.49

According to the Communists, Nehru condemned the compromising policy of Gandhi only verbally and was not really interested in carrying on a struggle against it. The leaders of the CSP also renounced, in practice, the struggle against this policy—‘the central task today’. In the session of the AICC and in the open session of the Ramgarh Congress as well communist delegates voted against the main resolution when the amendments they moved were defeated. But they claimed that their stand had nothing in common with the ‘disruptive line of Bose’ or the ‘anti-struggle constitutionalist line of Roy’.50 Communists explained their strategic conception in a pamphlet, The Proletarian Path, written by G. Adhikari. India was to make revolutionary use of the war crisis to achieve her own freedom through the weapon of general strike and armed insurrection. The document was of the view that the conquest of power by the Indian people had become a practical proposition and immediate task. The strategy of the entire national movement had to be formulated with this task in view. But how to raise the national movement to that level was the immediate question. The crisis created by the war and intensified by mass action during the war period, will begin to deepen into Revolutionary Crisis. Confronting each other will stand two forces—the armed might of British imperialism and the mightier, forces of national revolution. The national movement will enter into a new and higher phase—the phase of Armed Insurrection. Storming of military and police stations by armed bands of national militia in rural as well as urban areas, destruction of government institutions, actual offensive against the armed forces of the government on the most extensive scale—these will increasingly become the chief features of the struggle … . It is with this perspective and towards this culmination that the communist party, the revolutionary party of the proletariat, shall work. It is this perspective that it shall strive to make the perspective of the entire national movement.51 Communists had already begun to deduce the logic of a ‘rising curve’ behind the working class struggles since 1937 and project it into 49

Ibid. The Communist, Vol. 2, No. 8, April 1940. File No. 543(1) of 1939–40 (MSA). 51 The Proletarian Path: Inside the National Front, published by the CC of the CPI (Section of the CI). 50

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the future. At last this bestowed a semblance of reality on their dream of placing the working class at the head of the national movement. The ‘proletarian path’ was becoming visible on the horizon. It was natural that they should have turned their hopes towards the working class in Bombay.

The mahangai (Dearness Allowance) conference was organised by the Bombay Provincial Trade Union Congress on 15 January 1940, at the Kamgar Maidan in Parel. Twenty-two trade unions were represented and about 5,000 persons participated.52 Speakers argued that the prices of various commodities had registered an increase from 25 per cent to 90 per cent. They demanded 40 per cent increase in the present wages of the workers. The resolution passed was in the nature of a notice to the mill-owners of a general strike in case the demand for 40 per cent increase was not met.53 In the negotiations with the Mill-owners Association on the question of war-allowance the workers were represented by R.S. Nimbkar and S.A. Dange. The mill-owners offered 10 per cent increase in the wages while they demanded at least 20 per cent. The government of Bombay appointed a Board of Conciliation, consisting of Sir S.S. Rangnekar (Chairman), Mr. J.C. Setalvad and Mr. A.S. Trolipp (representing employers), and Mr. S.C. Joshi and Mr. Jamnadas M. Mehta (representing workers) to promote a settlement of the dispute.54 There was a difference in the viewpoints of labour representatives and the representatives of the mill-owners. While labour circles held that a study of the present price levels of commodities showed that the rise in the cost of living of workers was 20 per cent, mill-owners’ representatives said that it was about 6 per cent.55 Questioned by the Chairman of the Board Sir S.S. Rangnekar as to what he considered to be an equitable settlement of the dispute regarding Dearness Allowance, the government labour officer suggested that a cash increase in wages by 12.5 per cent would be a fair compromise.56 Further attempts to formulate proposals acceptable to both, the representatives of labour and those of the mill-owners, were made but without any success. The representatives of 52

File No. 550(23)-C(2) of 1940 (MSA). The Times of India, 2 January 1940. 54 Ibid., 5 January 1940. 55 Bombay Chronicle, 7 February 1940; 10 February 1940; 11 February 1940. 56 Bombay Chronicle, 15 February 1940; The Times of India, 22 February 1940. 53

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the Red Flag Union were agreeable on 15 per cent but the mill-owners did not feel that anything more than 10 per cent was a reasonable demand. GKU (Red Flag) held a public meeting on 11 February which was attended by 10,000 workers.57 The President Tambitkar, R.S. Nimbkar and B.T. Ranadive made speeches. Placards bearing the following inscriptions were exhibited: (1) Immediate grant of 40 per cent mahangai allowance. (2) Great War means profits for the capitalists. (3) Enlist 40,000 members for the union. A grand rally of nearly 40,000 mill-workers was held at the Kamgar Maidan under the auspices of the GKU (Red Flag) on Sunday evening (18 February) where a resolution was passed calling upon the workers to be ready for ‘any eventuality’ as the conciliation attempt had failed. Thousands of hands were raised when R.S. Nimbkar asked them if they would be ready to respond to the call. B.T. Ranadive pointed out that workers of Ahmedabad, Sholapur, Cawnpore and Nagpur were also preparing for a general strike. In the Bombay suburbs nearly 450,000 persons were engaged in some kind of manual labour but hardly 60,000 belonged to any union, registered or unregistered. The GKU (Red Flag) which claimed the membership of largest number of textile operatives was of 38,000 members.58 The council of action called upon the BPGKU to declare a general strike on 4 March. Intensive preparations for it were launched. Everyday meetings were held and militant speeches were made. The stress in the speeches was on anti-imperialism. Instructions from Maulana Azad and Dr Ashraf to the BPCC did not prove helpful. At the beginning of the strike the attitude of the BPCC was sympathetic but later on it adopted an attitude of an unconcerned third party.59 As usual the government was carefully watching the development of the strike. ‘All the leading communists took an active part in this agitation (mahangai) 57 Weekly Report from the Police Department, 13 February 1940. File No. 550(23)-C(2) of 1940 (MSA). 58 The Times of India, 15 February 1940; 25 February 1940. 59 File No. 550(23) C-I of 1940 (MSA). Letter from the General Secretary of BPCC to the General Secretary. GKU (Red Flag), 6 April 1940. Bombay Chronicle, 24 March 1940. Press Interview of S.K. Patil.

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and their efforts were successful in bringing about the strike which is still continuing.’60 The mahangai strike of 160,000 textile workers of Bombay began on 4 March. When the strike was at its peak about 50,000 to 70,000 workers participated in the rallies. In the beginning there was a lot of enthusiasm and the leaders were hopeful that BPCC would intervene. They also hoped that Congress would donate ` 2 lakh through the corporation as they did in 1928. Hotel workers and students also went on strike in sympathy with the workers. On 11 March, mill-owners met in the annual general meeting of their association and its Chairman said that the 10 per cent Dearness-Food Allowance was the last straw and they would not be prepared to pay a pie more. Declared one of the communist participants: ‘There is no tempo, no militancy. A great unity no doubt but rather colourless. The tempo must be raised.’61 The mill-owners spurned the Congress offer for mediation. The most important feature of this strike was that women were in the lakhs were out on the streets. At 6 p.m. an assembly of 80,000 people was held at Chowpatty. There were slogans: ‘Long live the CPI’, ‘Down with Imperialism’. In the GIP Railway Workshop nearly 1,000 workers were on hartal. Sixty per cent of the workers in the loco-shed of the BB & CI Railway remained away from their work. All the silk, woollen and rice factories were closed. Fifty-eight persons were arrested during the course of the day. A meeting of 90,000 was held at the Kamgar Maidan and strong speeches were made against the police. A threat was held out that the workers’ patience was getting well-high exhausted. Workers were beaten up by the police for shouting slogan.62 The meeting on 19 March was not well-attended and there were only 50,000 on the huge Worli Maidan. Many workers had gone away to their villages in Konkan. ‘This is a ding-dong struggle, alternating between hope and despair.’63 At 10 p.m. on 20 March, police attacked Naigaum Chawls Nos. 9, 10 and 11. All were beaten up. Meetings were prohibited except at the maidans mentioned. As a protest 1,000 women went on hunger strike. ‘Day after tomorrow the trial of strength will take place.’ Attendance of the meetings started declining from 22 March onwards. ‘City seemed under martial law. Armed police, lathi police, white police, 60

Review-90,14 March 1940. File No. S43(13)-B(3) of 1940 (MSA). An Epic Struggle: A Diary of the Bombay ‘Mahangai’ Strike, 1940— Part I, by a participant, published by the CC of the CPI, June 1940. 62 Ibid. Entry for 12 March 1940. 63 Ibid. Entry for 20 March 1940. 61

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brown police.’64 Thirty workers were arrested but their morale was still high. ‘About 200 blacklegs are returning escorted by the police. Attacked by striking workers with stones. Four arrested. Huge meeting. Eighteen arrested in all.’65 Again on 29 March police lathi-charged the workers when they were returning from the meeting. On 30 March, 12 more were arrested. ‘Workers are now tending towards the offensive.’ The next day 20 more persons were arrested for breach of order. ‘There is a kind of artificial militancy. Just stray assaults. Policemen at every chawl. Six workers of the union arrested on the charge of intimidation and rioting.’ Meetings were allowed but it was ordered that they must terminate by 6.30 p.m. And now we are faced with the most interesting comment in the Diary: There has been no militancy at all in this strike and how are the workers as a whole going to, suddenly at this stage, develop mass militancy? That can come about only by mass clashes with the police. This is not done. The conscious advanced elements are of course always in readiness … . Militancy will be the very breath of its (strike) life.66

On 5 April, 25 workers were arrested on the charge of intimidation. Next day 40 more were arrested. ‘Imperialism wants to break the strike.’ It was at this point that the liberal trade unionist N.M. Joshi met the Deputy Commissioner of Police and told him that ‘workers would withdraw the strike if the allowance is above 10 per cent.’67 On 7 April 50,000 workers attended a meeting organised by the strike committee. Leaders like Nimbkar, Pendse and Bhise inspired the workers to confront the police. Twenty workers were arrested on 9 April while 30 more, including 6 women, were arrested the next day. Earlier workers had admitted in the meeting: ‘… the police repression is terrific. Normal life in chawls is impossible. There is terrorisation in every chawl. The workers somehow are not in a mood to fight back.’68 64

Ibid. Entry for 27 March 1940. Ibid. Entry for 28 March 1940. 66 Ibid. Entry for 2 April 1940. 67 A Strike Diary, Part-II, File No. 543(46) Part-III of 1940–41 (MSA). 68 Ibid. Entry for 11 March 1940. ‘Barring the single exception of the 1929 general strike, in no case has such a huge majority of workers displayed such voluntary willingness, solidarity and loyalty to their union. Once hundred per cent stoppage of work achieved.’ 65

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Communists came to the conclusion that there was no sense in losing active workers. It was better to call off before demoralisation had set in. Time had come to withdraw the strike by calling it a ‘strategic retreat’. The strike in Bombay started on 4 March 1940 and lasted for 40 days. The first attempt of the Bombay working class to place itself at the head of the national movement had failed miserably. Within a week the strike was faced with heavy repression. Two weeks later the situation was no better and the spectre of defeat began to haunt the Communist leadership. Suddenly they realised that not to talk of unleashing a revolution the party was not in a position even to lead a strike in an organised manner. In a remarkable letter to the Bombay comrades Politbureau observed: A strike could be brought about by the general influence of the Red Flag but it obviously cannot be maintained. Lack of organisation yet constitutes our most serious weakness … . But our party itself as a political organisation has never functioned in Bombay. Even before the strike, no attempts were made to function the party and prepare for the strike in an organised manner. A non-functioning party is faced with the leadership of an unorganised general strike. This is an impossible situation; instead of leading to victory, it has made us feel helpless and will lead to certain defeat if we do not immediately make real Bolshevik efforts … . The fate of the party and the strike is interlinked. If we lose the strike, we also lose the party in Bombay …. If the strike is lost and our party in Bombay gets wiped out, our party on an all India scale, during the coming national struggle stands liquidated as an organised political party. Our party is an effective political force as a proletarian party and the Bombay proletariat is the leader of the proletariat of our country. If the Bombay proletariat gets crushed, if our party in Bombay gets wiped out, our party could function only on a local scale, in a small way, through non-proletarian elements. In such a situation, could our contribution to the national movement be what we desire to take it to the revolutionary stage? In different localities and provinces, our comrades will give examples of unexampled heroism but that is all. Their sacrifices will create a tradition, produce local effects but that is all.69

The failure of the strike was categorically recognised though the direction in which the causes of failure were explored was positively wrong. 69 To all Bombay comrades. Letter of the Politbureau, C.C. 24 March, 1940. File No. 543(46) Part-II of 1936. Emphasis added.

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It was a recognition of the fact that the Bolshevik-type party which the Indian Communists were struggling to build could not be built. Though the Indian Communists always blamed themselves for their ‘inability to build a real party’. Let us examine in detail the Communists’ own analysis—self criticism—of their failure: Despite the achievements of the strike, however, they had ultimately to submit to the dictates of the employers, and the strike had to be withdrawn without even partially gaining the workers’ demand. They had continually said that they would bring the proletariat to the forefront of the national struggle as its boldest and most uncompromising element while at the same time widening its sweep and intensity. Actually confronted by a situation they had visualised so often, in deeds they limited themselves to the minimum that had to be done for keeping up the unity of the workers. They did not ask the workers to defy prohibitory orders to transgress the limits of economism, that would have invited the sympathy of the petty bourgeoisie. They did not do this because of hopes of an early settlement.70

But why could the strike not be transformed from an economic strike into a political strike—a grim battle of the working class against imperialism? In other words why could class struggle not be transformed into an anti-imperialist struggle? One answer could be the following: The strike once again threw into sharp relief the fact that we have not yet completely emerged out of the ‘trade union group’ phase. We have not yet become a political party of the working class. Organically as well as politically the party failed to function during the strike. Most of the cells hardly functioned at all.71

The Communists were hoping this struggle would be ‘the precursor of national struggle’ when the proletariat would emerge as ‘the practical leader of the people and our party as the teacher of every serious antiimperialist’ and also ‘the proletarian alternative to Gandhian settlement and Bosite disruption’. The failure of the strike conclusively proved that under the imperialist conditions in India where the state was ever vigilant, the political line of creation of an alternative mass movement and Communist Party to the Congress-led mass movement and Congress Party 70 71

A Strike Diary, Part-II. Ibid.

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was devoid of any potential. The crucial element involved was that the working class struggle against the colonial state on a nation-wide scale could not be evolved through class struggle between the internal classes in the society around day-to-day partial economic damands. As we pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, the modern semi-hegemonic colonial state had already evolved and perfected a mechanism whereby it could easily cut short the transformation of economic strikes into political strikes. On the other hand, such a transformation constituted the central core of the operative side of the communist strategy to place the working class at the head of the national movement.72 Mere repression was ruled out by the communists as a possible explanation for the failure of this strike. Seldom in the history of working class movement, it was observed, had there been such response as in this strike. The strike was almost complete from the very first day. Yet it failed. Why? Bombay had got the most advanced and class conscious proletariat in the whole country, a proletariat that had won great victories. Bombay had got the best and most developed working class cadre who formed the base of the party. The GKU commanded confidence and devotion of the entire textile proletariat, a fact eloquently demonstrated on many occasions. All these factors would ordinarily ensure victory. Yet we failed to win that victory. The reason is to be sought not in police repression … . If we give that as the root cause of our failure, then the inevitable conclusion would be that no strike can be won during the war period. That it goes without saying, would be a wrong conclusion.72a

The reason was sought primarily in, what they called, lack of organisation and party’s failure to harness the forces at its disposal and organising them for offensive against the police. All said and done, the ultimate reason, thought the communists, was their ‘inability to build a real party in Bombay’. That their very strategy could be a misplaced one remained beyond any doubt. After the stage of successful stoppage had been attained, the only alternative was between a frontal offensive against the police and the chance of success, and a gradual petering out of the strike resulting from 72

A Strike Diary; Part-II, File No. 543(46) Parl-III of 1940–1 (MSA). Ibid.

72a

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starvation and sweeping repression as happened in this strike. ‘Either the sinking of the strike struggle to the level of satyagraha, or a militant anti-police offensive, these are the only courses open in such conditions.’73 In actuality the two courses were: a militant anti-police offensive and getting crushed by the might of the state or ‘glorified satyagraha’. This was the communist experience in all the general strikes in Bombay, i.e., of 1928, 1934 and 1940. The path of economic general strike developing into insurrection of sorts was organically closed. Ironically, given the nature of the colonial state, the only path open to them was ‘satyagraha’ but this for them was not a proletarian form of struggle. This dilemma emerged because they were committed to a form of Marxism which could not give any clue, let alone guide, the Communists where they were faced with a semi-hegemonic modern bourgeois state. The Communists in China and Vietnam were placed into a comparatively simple situation which did not require drastic changes in the available Marxist theory. Unlike them the Indian Communists were called upon to make a breakthrough in Marxist theory by the very different nature of the circumstances in which they were placed. Their failure was part of the failure of all Marxist parties which were and are operating within the framework of a hegemonic state. DISORGANISATION OF THE PARTY

As we discussed earlier the bureaucracy had evolved a strategy to contain communism in India and this was successfully applied this time also. As the strike developed the working class leaders began to be arrested in batches. Dange, Ranadive and Mirajkar were arrested under DIR on 11 March. Later on S. V. Deshpande and S.V. Parulekar, a member of the council of action were arrested on 15 March, the former one under DIR. On 25 March, R.S. Nimbkar was also arrested. In July 1940, 10 prominent second line Communists were arrested. ‘It is not out of place’, noted the police, ‘to mention that this literature (anti-war) is issued in very limited quantity … and that its effect on the general public is practically nil as it is not seen by any except a handful of communists and students’.74 Again the police department reported to their seniors: 73 74

Ibid. Review-97, 1 July 1940, File No. 543(13)-B(3) of 1940 (MSA).

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However, our policy to cut off as many of their contacts as possible was successfully continued and on 30 July, the following 12 second-line Communists were arrested under DIR … . In spite of the tall talk about their being able to carry on propaganda on an extensive scale, it appears that the Communist leaders are not able to do so.75

Ajoy Ghosh was arrested at Lucknow and 16 more ‘contacts’ were also arrested. In a circular No. 18 issued by the UP Central Executive Committee (15 July 1940) under the heading ‘our present difficulty’ the CEC observed: ‘In view of the situation the very existence and continuance of the party is at stake. Either we are able to find ways of rapidly expanding the party and of making it function illegally, otherwise we are faced with complete wipe out.’76 In September the police department, Bombay reported: ‘It is, however, some satisfaction that the communist organisation in Bombay has been throughly disorganised.’77 Another circular of the Communist Party (17 November 1940) gave the information that after the great attack at Lucknow, the secret centre of the Bombay and Maharashtra party was again raided on 7 November. On account of this raid the party had suffered a great loss but ‘if we are discouraged our enemy would get the best opportunity to crush our party organisation and scatter us and there would be no end to the loss of our party’.78 Within a few months a substantial proportion of the office bearers of the GKU, the All-India Kisan Sabha and the All India Trade Union Congress, as well as other leftist leaders, were removed from the political scene. The total number of arrests by February 1941 was placed at 480 by the government. These were ‘acknowledged communists or else active supporters of the communist programme of violent mass revolution’. The minister, Sir Reginald Maxwell, stated that ‘the central directorate of the communist organisation in India’ had been imprisoned in order to ‘cripple the communist machinery’.79 On 14 April 1940, R.D. Bhardwaj met Jawaharlal Nehru. He gave the following report of his conversations to the Bombay group around 75

Review-100, 13 August 1940. Ibid. Review-101, 31 August 1940. Ibid. Emphasis added. 77 Review-102, 18 September 1940. Ibid. 78 Review-106, 12 November 1940. Ibid. Emphasis added. 79 Legislative Assembly Debates: Official Report, 1941, Vol. I, No. 2, p, 121. Quoted by Overstreet and Windmiller, Communisum in India, p. 184. 76

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19 April. The main drift of his thought here is to distinguish the logic of ‘Gandhian’ struggle from other struggles which the Communists were planning to launch. Nehru told Bhardwaj that the coming struggle could not succeed in gaining independence. Nobody expected success in the struggle. It would be suppressed ruthlessly. But the moral value of the struggle would be great and England would be embarrassed before world public opinion. Gandhi’s method, Nehru continued, had this merit that while it might never reach a very high point like making administration impossible it could last for a long time and thus add to their moral strength. As against this the method of struggle which they, communists, visualised brought the matter to a head within a few weeks or months and after that ‘we succeed or are suppressed and fail’. In the present conditions, according to Nehru, success was out of question; so that choice is ‘between failure after about a few weeks of intense struggle of our type or a prolonged struggle of Gandhi’s type’.80 It seems that in the beginning of 1940 the Central Government had ordered the arrests of the Communists and the provinces had immediately begun the campaign of arrests. All the available sources indicate that the Party was completely paralysed in 1940. In 1975, CPI published a book Immortal Heroes: Lives of Communist Leaders. Out of 26 prominent communist leaders who figure in this book more than 20 were arrested during the first few months of 1940. In many cases the comments of the authors also give additional information about the state of the Party. For example the following comments: Singaravelu Chettiar: In 1941 when practically all the leading Communists were in jail he gave advice to press workers … (p. 33). K.M. Ashraf: The Second World War found Ashraf in jail … along with thousands of other Communists, Socialists and left-wingers (p. 40). R.D. Bharadwaj: He was detained with hundreds of other Communist leaders in the Deoli Camp (p. 58). B.C. Panigrahi: … the entire top leadership was arrested in Orissa (p. 103). Sajjad Zaheer: Sajjad Zaheer was also arrested along with many others in March 1940 (p. 163).81

The Communists from Madras, Bombay, Bengal, Bihar, UP, Delhi, the Punjab and NWFP were detained in the Deoli Camp. About 100 of them were in Camp No. 1 and 93 in Camp No. 2. ‘Most of them are 80 81

File No. 543(13)-B(3) of 1940 (MSA). Immortal Heroes: Lives of Communist Leaders, CPI Publication, 1975.

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Communists, our experienced leaders … professional revolutionaries.’82 In Kerala by mid-1941 almost all the key figures except for E.M.S. Namboodiripad had been detained, including ‘a Namboodiri Communist’ on whom were found papers giving details of the Party’s underground organisation. A further blow was the arrest of sixty Kisan leaders and the prohibition of the All-Malabar Peasants’ Union in the wake of an agrarian clash at Kayyur in the far north in March 1941.83 According to the details furnished by E.M.S. Namboodripad: ‘Almost all the top and middle leaders of the Kisan movement had already been arrested before 15 September or were arrested in the first two weeks after it.’84 The release of a large number of Communist leaders and middle-level cadre during the People’s War phase is significant evidence of how systematically the Communist Party was liquidated. The Politbureau letter of 24 March 1940, which we have quoted above in full, shows clearly the changed perceptions of the leadership once the Government had decided to disorganise the CP. It speaks of a ‘nonfunctional party’ and ‘lack of organisation’. Obviously on the eve of the war this was not the assessment of the leadership otherwise it would not have undertaken the task of launching itself on to a Proletarian Path of capturing power. Suddenly it became clear to the leaders that organising a militant strike and organising a revolution are two different kinds of projects. ‘If the strike is lost and our Party in Bombay gets wiped out, our Party on an all-India scale, during the coming national struggle stands liquidated as an organised political party’, the letter had concluded. Within six months the colonial state apparatus had liquidated the Communist Party and with this their chances of playing any significant role in the coming struggle on a national scale, if any, were also lost. It seems that if they would not have come out of the jails during 1942 they would have certainly remained there till the end of the War. Within a year of the War the forces of Alternative Politics were completely disorganised and scattered. This backdrop forms an inseparable part of the problems raised by the pro-War political line practised by the Communists during the period 1942–45. Hitler’s attack on Russia was now used by the Party

82

‘In Deoli Hell’, The Communist, Vol. III, No. 4, June 1941. T.J. Nossiter, Communism in Kerala, Delhi, 1982, p. 84. 84 A Short History of the Peasant Movement in Kerala, p. 33. 83

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to formulate a programme of activity which served a double purpose: on the one hand it helped the Party to emphasise its international character while on the other it enabled it to get its cadre released from jails. The choice was between opportunism in utilising legality or acceptance of the situation which denied the Party any significant role in the immediate future. But opportunism could not have been practised without paying a price. It not only drove a permanent wedge between the INC and the Communists but also, to a considerable extent, soiled the anti-imperialist image of the Party. Till 1942, in their own eyes and in the eyes of ordinary nationalists, the Communists were the most inveterate enemy of imperialism. It was because of this, even when they were small in number, their selfless sacrifices had invoked respect from those who did not agree with or were opposed to them. Their stance in ‘1942’ robbed the Indian Communists of their credentials of being among the most ardent nationalist forces in this country.

Chapter 13 Communists since Independence

‘I am a Communist and I’m proud of it. But we have to change, we have to reform.’1

But the important question is: How much a Communist can reform himself without ceasing to be a ‘Communist’? In June 2006, The Indian Express published a long interview with Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. Fresh from the resounding victory of the left front led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M), CPM] in the Assembly elections and into his second term as chief minister, Bhattacharjee spoke on the major areas of development identified by his government. At the end of this interview the chief minister was asked the following question: Mr Bhattacharyarjee, before we conclude let me ask you, are we finally seeing an arrival of the Indian left? I see all these portraits here. I see Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin. I see Ho Chi Minh. When will we see portraits of some Indian leaders, a genuine Indian Communist Party?

1 Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee in an interview with Shekhar Gupta, The Indian Express, 7 June 2006.

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Pointing to the portraits, the chief minister remarked: ‘They were visionaries, it is very difficult to replace them. Indian Marxists like Namboodiripad, K.V. Krishna Iyer were national leaders. We are small fry.’2 In a sense the chief minister was speaking the truth. Since the formation of CPI(M), the theoreticians of the party have all come from Kerala, Andhra or Maharashtra while the party members from Bengal were mostly, what Communists in their language called ‘agitprops’, that is, those who were good at agitation and propaganda. There has rarely been an intellectual Marxist in Bengal, and Jyoti Basu certainly does not belong to that category, who ever dared to formulate new ideas for laying down the party line afresh. In fact, there is an unstated division of labour within the party, that is, between those English-speaking articulate individuals who wield the weapon of ‘theory’, a sort of abstract logic of textual Marxism and pragmatic provincial leaders well-versed with the nitty-gritty of electoral problems; those who work at the ‘centre’, run the party’s English journals and those responsible for bringing out the provincial newspapers. The experience of staying in power for thirty years by mastering the complex mechanism of winning elections within the democratic set-up has made the Bengali politicians first-rate pragmatists. Nobody could say within the party that they did not know the ground realities. If and when there is a conflict between the ‘revolutionary theory’ (and that is what permits them to call themselves as Marxists), and their settled practice, they could be trusted upon for putting up tough resistance. But could they or any one of these Bengali intellectuals, be expected to formulate the party experience, that is, ‘learn truth from facts’, and raise it to the status of an alternative political line by challenging the currently reigning dogmas? The answer is an emphatic ‘No’. The implications of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the changes within the Chinese Communist Party have made the CPM variety of Communists realise that old-fashioned Marxism was no longer relevant in the contemporary world. But the problem is that they do not have the intellectual wherewithal to overhaul it in order to convincingly address the issues posed by democracy and globalisation today. The Chinese party has, in a sense, completely rejected the Marxist texts, 2

Ibid.

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and openly embraced pragmatic politics of creating social wealth and building a strong nation state. For them the ‘colour’ of the cat does not matter so long it catches mice. The fact that there is a single-party rule in China has facilitated the flourishing of this politics of pragmatism. The competing groups can compete within the party, and they do compete, but only on pragmatically feasible different platforms, that is, in terms of evolving more and more relevant policies for tackling everyday problems. While in India, Communists are constantly busy to distinguish themselves merely ideologically from those political formations which they label as ‘bourgeois’ parties. They are not interested in demonstrating to the nation the greater validity of their pragmatic political agendas vis-à-vis the competing other agendas without labelling them as ‘bourgeois’. For them, this word ‘bourgeois’ is a word that is enshrined within the heart of Marxist political theory. For them to use this word means upholding Marxism, even if only symbolically. Moreover, the Chinese Communist Party, has already performed its historic task of making the revolution and successfully capturing the state power. But what about Revolution in India? Has the idea of revolution been abandoned by the CPM in the name of rapid industrialisation? So far the question has been kept in abeyance by the leadership as the very explosive nature of the question could completely paralyse the party. The impression that party policies were taking a sharp turn under the pressure of circumstances must be avoided for the sake of unity. This could cause confusion and disorient the cadre, reared as it is on the milk of Marxist truisms of class struggle. Thanks to the globalised media, what is happening in China and Vietnam is already acting as a source of legitimisation for the leadership’s new policy of industrialisation in the eyes of the cadre. When the left front government announced its new industrial policy in 1994, not only was there no serious opposition within the party; it was even welcomed by the rank and file. It showed that the atmosphere in the country was being infectious and people of Bengal had begun to entertain new expectations. Suddenly, it dawned upon the leadership, ‘we must go the whole hog to restore Bengal’s industrial glory’. This is how the mood in the party was summed up by none other than the chief minister himself: The idea had been haunting me since 1994. Communists across the globe, including those in China, Vietnam and some Latin American

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countries, are now open to private investments, even to FDI. The Chinese model has ensured unprecedented growth without ignoring their social commitments. I realised that industrialisation is a must for the all round development of West Bengal.3

Strangely enough, the question of ‘rapid industrialization’ was emphasised by the chief minister as a pragmatic question in the context of Bengal only as if Bengal was some separate state independent of the Indian union. It was not raised as a question of ‘rapid industrialization of India’ as a whole. Is the question of ‘industrialization’ a national question or merely a provincial question? The leadership is not interested in facing up this question squarely. When the party began its land reforms in the 1970s, it was able to satisfy genuine land hunger of the millions of marginal peasants whose families had, in the past, experienced famines, intensive feudal exploitation and oppression of permanent settlement. But once the peasants acquired land, they were faced with real problems of arranging finances to complete the cycle of production and selling the surplus. Land reforms were also accompanied by the concomitant process of fragmentation of land due to divisions in the joint families. Soon the educated members of these families were to realise that agriculture was not a remunerative activity. The young men who were brought up in these families, and are now in their twenties, had begun to feel a new sense of frustration with the party. Thanks to the party’s educational policies, they had wasted their energies in the Bengali medium schools, only to be told at the end that they were unemployable in the knowledge-based new economy. The limited nature of the party’s agrarian programme, without its links with expanding markets in the cities, was faced with a dead end. They had begun to question their parents’ faith and hope that the party would certainly one day lead them into a better future. By official estimates, about 12–13 per cent of land reforms beneficiaries sold off the land they had received as Patta or gave up the right to cultivate the land they got as barga by the beginning of the new century. ‘Indeed agriculture was rapidly becoming a hopeless unprofitable activity.’4 The vote bank of the left has remained intact though. The coexistence of economic stagnation

3 4

The Times of India, 30 September, Sunday, 2007. Abhirup Sarkar, ‘Industrious Bengal’, The Telegraph, 3 September 2007.

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and political stability was an apparent puzzle. According to economist Abhirup Sarkar: Stagnation and the ensuing poverty made a vast majority of the people helpless and crucially dependent on the small favours selectively distributed by the left to those who remained loyal. To this was added a section of the privileged who aspired to climb up the social and economic ladder by remaining close to the party. Benefits of different sorts were doled out through a strong political organisation and one knew, in no uncertain terms, that while remaining faithful to the party might give him a chance of getting a share of the pie, dissidence would without doubt get him nothing. This created a huge political society, consisting of people from the entire social spectrum, which sustained and was in turn sustained by massive economic inefficiency. The inefficiencies, however, did not tamper with the political success of the left, but actually enhanced it.5

Towards the nineties the entire party leadership had begun to sense this and were looking for a way out before this resentment further deepened and created a backlash. Moreover, the introduction of liberalisation regime by Manmohan Singh in 1992, and Chinese leadership’s rejection of ‘revolutionary Marxism’ in favour of ‘developmental Marxism’, had already unleashed new winds of change. Looked at historically, the single most important Maxist–Leninist idea, which has always remained central to the Communist practice in India since 1920, that is, the Second Congress of the Third International, is anti-Imperialism as a strategy as well as a framework of analysis for understanding political events in the world.6 In a colonial or an ex-colonial country, the Communists could abandon their opposition to ‘national capitalism’, even support it temporarily by calling it a support to the ‘national bourgeoisie’, in order to oppose the feudal relations of production. But anti-imperialism could not be abandoned without abandoning Marxism–Leninism itself and thereby ceasing to be Communists.7 It is 5

Ibid. For details of the Second Congress of the Third International, see Shashi Joshi, Struggle for Hegemony in India, 1920–47, Volume I, Delhi, 1992. 7 In a two-page message sent on 12 October to the 17th Congress of the Communist Party of China, the CPI(M) Central Committee shared its worry about a world in which ‘imperialism, led by the US’ was making a renewed efforts to ‘establish its hegemony worldwide’ (The Indian Express, 23 October 2007). 6

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a different matter, that after their support to British imperialism during the Second World War, their political opponents in India, especially the Congress, have never taken seriously this Communist commitment to anti-imperialism.8 On their part, Indian Communists have always been perceived by the liberal intelligentsia as nothing more than a bunch of blind followers of the Soviet Union or China. What happened during the recent national debate on ‘strategic partnership’ with America in the name of ‘Nuclear energy deal’ and Communists’ inflexible opposition to this illustrates this point. The months of August–September 2007, were the months when the debates in the print and electronic media on the ‘nuclear deal’ with America kept the entire nation on tenterhooks. In its 22–23 August meeting the central committee of the CPM passed a resolution asking the Manmohan Singh government not to proceed with the next step of negotiating the text of a safeguards agreement with the IAEA. This stand was reiterated in subsequent meetings of the party leadership. If the government ignored this and proceeded with its plans the party was supposed to withdraw its support to the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. Hundreds of articles and editorials sought to portray the Communists as enemies of India’s economic development whose outdated ideas were putting obstacles in the country’s fast-paced development. Some of the liberal intellectuals, especially the journalists, sought to persuade them while many others bitterly criticised them, even denounced them as anti-national. The presence of so many news channels turned the nuclear-deal issue into one of modern India’s greatest debates. One of the unintended consequences of this debate was that the little-known names and faces of the new generation Communist leaders became familiar to millions of TV viewers. Day after day, the newspapers began to flash Prakash Karat’s photograph along with the photographs of Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi. One of the TV channels, CNN–IBN, even asked its viewers to vote on the following question: Is Prakash Karat the strongest man in the country? The provocative tone of the question was actually addressed to the vacillating Congress party to get a clear answer to 8 According to Prakash Karat a strategic alliance between India and the United States was meant to ‘counter-balance’ and ‘encircle China’. Moreover, the US was trying to make India its strategic ally because China was ‘the most powerful socialist country capable of challenging the might of the USA’. The Indian government was aware of this ‘US hegemony’ but preferred to remain silent (The Indian Express, 2 November 2007).

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the question: ‘who is the leader of the UPA and the country in this hour of crisis?’ The debate provided the Communists, especially the younger leaders, Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury, a national platform for the first time in independent India. And they fully utilised it to publicise the party’s views on various issues. Last time the Indian Communists had got such an opportunity was seventy-eight years ago, when they had addressed the nation during the Meerut Conspiracy Case (1929–32).9 The great debate also helped both the leaders to emerge as the familiar face of the left in India. The comments of the following sober-minded critics give an idea of the kind of rhetoric which was employed to pressurise the Communists into agreeing to the ‘nuclear deal’: 1. ‘As the Communists conflate India’s nuclear imperatives with a moribund world view, the presence of Mohammad ElBaradei in the capital this week should help calm down the acrimonious debate. ElBaradei’s arguments on the Indo-US nuclear deal emphasize the one reality that the Communists don’t see. It is about ending India’s struggle to marry its nuclear security and energy demands with the rules of the non-proliferation regime …. With India poised to become part of the global nuclear mainstream, it is the left that stands in the way. Our Communists, either out of extraordinary ignorance or deliberate malevolence, have abandoned the Indian legacy of responsible multilateralism and mobilising science for national development and global peace.’ —C. Raja Mohan, The Indian Express, 10 October 2007 2. ‘This unspoken alliance between the so-called left and so-called right should explain the odd reactions that the Indo-US nuclear deal has aroused within India. Leftist politicians like Prakash Karat and Bardhan fiercely oppose the deal because it would draw India close to the US. Rightist politicians like Arun Shourie and Yashwant Sinha oppose it because the deal would impinge on India’s sovereignty. The New York Times is worried about nuclear proliferation and about Iran getting the bomb. The CPI(M) is worried about the deal crippling India’s foreign policy and preventing Iran getting the bomb. Pro-Muslim journalists are dead

9

See Shashi Joshi, Struggle for Hegemony in India, 1920–47, Volume I.

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set against the deal because it involves Bush who attacked Iraq. The most influential section of the US media, US big business, China, Israel, pro-Islamists, CPI(M), BJP—they are all on the same side. With one voice they chant the same refrain: ‘Kill the Indo-US nuclear deal!’ They add up to a formidable group and a powerful voice.’ —Rajinder Puri, The Statesman, 10 October 2007 3. ‘I have always been a leftie and a fellow-traveller. I was an active member of the Civil Liberties Union, a Communist front organisation and my first foray into the literary world was a small booklet in praise of Stalin. I gave shelter to Communist leaders on the run: Dange, Ajoy Ghosh, and Danial Latifi. I mention all this as credentials of my being a Communist sympathiser. I remain so to this day .... But I no longer subscribe to the politics pursued by Indian Communists and am particularly dismayed by the line chalked out by the general secretary of the CPI(M), Prakash Karat, on the proposed Indo-US nuclear deal and the joint naval exercises with other nations, including the United States of America. The Indian Communists’ allergy towards everything American is juvenile; their enthusiasm for everything Chinese because China is ruled by Communists, is pathetic. It will boost reactionary elements in our country and Prakash Karat who has become the one man think-tank of the party, will have much to answer for … . The deal in no way compromises our rights as a sovereign, independent state. On the other hand, the Chinese betrayed our trust, we fought a war against them, which we lost, and they still lay claims to our border territories. Is it not in our interest to have the world’s most powerful nation and democracy as our ally?’ —Khushwant Singh, The Telegraph, 6 October 2007 Here in this context, two pertinent questions must be raised. Why did a situation/crisis like the ‘nuclear deal’ emerge at all? Could it have been stalled at its very birth? The CPM was born with an anti-Congress agenda in 1964 and has built its mass base in Bengal and Kerala in political opposition to that party. But the rise of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) complicated the national level politics for the Communists. Keeping in view the forces of Sangh Parivar and its governments in many states, the CPM should

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have invited the Congress to enter into a strategic alliance and not merely an opportunistic promise of external support. The Communists were aware that BJP would leave no stone unturned to come back to power once again. After the defeat of BJP in 2004 elections, the emergent crisis of governance at the centre was not analysed and identified by the Communists as a serious political crisis created by people’s reaction to the processes of globalisation in this country. Probably, their opposition was not so much to policies inspired by globalisation as it was to the political dispensation or the government at the centre responsible for the implementation of these policies. Communists had fought against the ‘Shining India campaign’ with a hope-giving message but after the electoral victory they did not take their political struggle to a logical conclusion, that is, ‘capturing as much power as possible at the Centre’. Nobody would have expected that with this much share in the power Communists would have completely changed the developmental direction of the country. But certainly this power clout would have been adequate enough to stop the re-emergence of a programme/agenda similar to the one embodied in the slogan of ‘India Shining’. It was a failure of imagination on the part of the younger generation of Communists who were expected to lead by making a historic breakthrough. Without even entering into a contest for power at the centre they had surrendered their share of political power to the Congress, and that too for the sake of crumbs! Communists’ support to the Congress ‘from outside’ to form a coalition government at the centre was born of their desire to keep the BJP out of power. The failure of imagination did not allow them to convert this negative approach into a positive one through participation in the government. Actually, they had never imagined the kind of situation which emerged with the Congress failure to form the government of their own. Instead of working out a new governmental strategy to bring to book those who had committed massacres, it was considered enough to bar them from capturing power once again. The real task of confronting communalism was left to the Congress. The Congress, emboldened by Communist blunder of not asking a share in the political power, did not take much time to form the UPA. Given the fact that the government could not have been formed without the support of the Communists, they could have asked for a share in the ministries. This would have enabled them to participate in the working

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out of government policies, including the foreign policy, at the various stages of their formulation. How would have the Congress reacted to this Communist demand of sharing power at the centre? Would it have agreed to go along with the Communists, an extremely tough task or accepted outside help from the BJP just to keep the Communists out of the sacred citadel of power called the Centre. How the ministries would have been divided between the two sides? Who would have got what? For the first time in India’s modern history, both the parties would have been compelled to debate and evolve ‘a genuinely minimum national programme’, including the agenda of implementing the ‘Shri Krishna Report’. Such a concrete programme, even if implemented partially, would have shifted the centre of gravity of India’s polity. This was truly a historic blunder which even Jyoti Basu failed to recognise. The Indian people’s struggles as well as a lucky combination of circumstances had created a situation where the government could not be formed without the support of the Communist Members of Parliament (MPs). This was indeed a unique situation in the history of independent India. For the first time in India’s history the central government had become hostage to the Communists giving them a golden opportunity to correct their earlier ‘historic blunder’ of not letting Jyoti Basu become the Prime Minister of the country in 1996. One wonders what fears stopped the Communists to ask for their legitimate share of power at the Centre? What stopped them to carry forward the logic of their own pragmatic approach to translate votes into constitutional power? Do they genuinely believe, that one day in the foreseeable future, they would be able to capture power at the centre by leading a third-front formation? If Samuel Beckett is to be believed, not only individuals, even the political parties, can continue to wait for Godot. Needless to say, sharing power at the Centre would have been a great symbolic victory for the Communists. But to the good luck of the Congress, they surrendered this power to it willingly. There is no example in the history of world Communist movement when Communists would have voluntarily handed over power to others. Had the Communists entered the portals of power, this would have been a turning point in not only in the nation’s history but also an event of first-rate importance in international affairs. Indirectly, it would have catapulted the Indian Communists to a position where they could have been perceived as a ruling party of the largest democracy of the world.

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Happy to receive the gift of power, the Congress very quickly agreed to a so-called ‘common minimum programme’, consisting of a bunch of mutually acceptable vague promises and ambiguous programmatic generalisations. This fig leaf was considered good enough of an argument to rationalise the Communist support to the Congress in the eyes of the party cadre. The objective of keeping the BJP out of power was the only glue between the two parties, but not a very spidey one, as was to be seen during the nuclear-deal debate. Following the logic of our argument, it must be concluded that the crisis of governance on the ‘nuclear deal’ was in way of Communists’ own making. Under particular circumstances they had acted in one way which ultimately, stage by stage, led the entire government to this crisis. Under the same circumstances, they could have made a different choice, acting in a different way as has been suggested in the above discussion. The Congress leadership was lucky that the Communists had virtually given it a free hand. Therefore, it was logical for this leadership to conclude that when it came to the crunch the Communists would think 10 times before dislodging the government because of their fear of being stigmatised as the tacit allies of the BJP. They were expected to be upset and resentful on every issue not to their liking. They could grumble, fret and frown, but finally coming round once taken into confidence by Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi. After all, both the parties were equally convinced of the historic need of uniting all the secular forces. Without this assumption the Congress would not have treaded the path it did. After all, had not the Communists already relinquished power and trusted the Congress to govern the country. On the part of the Congress, given its electoral vulnerability, it was fully conscious of the fact that in this era of coalition politics, it would never be able to get such an opportunity in the future. Fate might force them to deal with such power-conscious politicians as Mayawati or Jayalalitha in the future. They could not but have seized the moment to do what they did. If one looks at the chronology, it is clear that the joint statement was signed by India and America on 18 July 2005; immediately after that there was a discussion in the Parliament. In March 2006, the government placed the separation plan on the floor of the house, in which it was stated that fourteen rectors would be placed within the safeguards and eight outside safeguards. In his speech in the Rajya Sabha, Sitaram Yechury observed that we must see to it that the assurances given by the

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Prime Minister are met in actuality. Immediately, the assurances were put forth by the Prime Minister. There was no opposition to the deal at this stage. Then came the Hyde Act in December 2006. The government went ahead with the deal and placed it on the floor of the house for debate. At this stage the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) came out with the slogan ‘Nuclear deal wapas lo!’ The anti-deal stand of a political party, considered as pro-imperialist by the Communists, suddenly awakened them to the fact that their platform of nationalism/anti-imperialism had already been stolen by their enemy. It was at this stage that the Communists began to argue that the Hyde Act, an India specific legislation, overrides the 123 agreement. The Communists have now claimed the Hyde Act ‘is completely inbuilt into the 123 agreement and the question of which gets precedence is irrelevant’.10 All along it was clear to the knowledgeable that ‘though energy is at the heart of the deal, it’s not just about energy’.11 Meanwhile, the Communists have now begun to read ‘deeper meanings’ of an evolving trend in the ‘happenings of the past’ through a sort of Whig construction of the past: ‘Left is not making the nuclear deal alone the issue. We consider this nuclear deal is the culmination of the drift of the UPA government from the stated positions of the common minimum programme ... especially from the position of our foreign policy.’12 When Buddhadeb took charge as Chief Minister for the second time, he was lionised by many in the Indian media as the poster boy of reform and the Indian left. His practical agenda of industrialisation of Bengal in terms of inviting FDI, creating special economic zones (SEZs), private 10

The Telegraph, 14 October 2007. Ibid., Kapil Sibal, Minister in the Central Government. 12 This is how D. Raja, an ideologue of the CPI, looks retrospectively at the chain of events: ‘Before the 18 July statement, the Government of India entered into another treaty. That is the new framework for Indo-US defence relations. Mr Pranab Mukerjee was a signatory to that. And it was questioned by the left. We disapproved, criticised, questioned. We were told it is not a treaty, it is not a pact, it is just a framework. We didn’t buy that argument even at that point of time. We said ‘No’ because it is going to pave the way for many more things. They have also agreed to a democracy initiative fund set by George W. Bush and our government has contributed some million dollars. What is the democracy initiative? Waging war in Iraq? Or waging war in Afghanistan? The deal is leading to India becoming a military ally of the US. As somebody said, it is a move to build up India as an Israel in South Asia. India can be part of Asian NATO. Otherwise, why should India agree to this giant naval exercise with Japan, Australia, America and Singapore?’ (The Telegraph, 14 October 2007). 11

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investment for modernisation of Kolkata airport, feasibility of deep-sea port in South Paragana district, banking reforms, plans for transforming Kolkata by renovating business districts, creating underground car parkings and elevated transport system, and the public–private partnership (PPP) gave the impression to some that an Indian Deng has already arrived on the scene. The chief minister seemed to be certain that ‘investment will be coming from East and Southeast Asia’ and his party itself was struggling to ‘find the middle path’. In response to a question which sought to convey to him that ‘real life governance’ was ‘different from theory’, the chief minister was quick to respond: ‘I shall give you an example. In my first term I was faced with the problem of what to do with loss-making undertakings. Fifty-six undertakings were making losses. The government was not able to pay the salaries. This could not continue. So we decided to go in for restructuring. We have done that with fifty six manufacturing units. Now we are restructuring SEBs and transport.’13 It seemed as if Buddhadeb was setting out to do in Bengal what Manmohan Singh was attempting on the national scene. In fact this was very much in line with the leftist vision of deliberately projecting Buddhadeb as the left icon ‘who advanced new concepts in economic development without succumbing to the diktats of the pundits of liberalisation’.14 Left’s ability to score both in opposition and as a ruling party has emboldened it to highlight its various developmental initiatives in Bengal as an alternative framework for industrialisation in India. They were now convinced that Chinese model of pro-people industrialisation can only be implemented by the Communists. India’s ‘bourgeois landlord parties’ can only appropriate it to justify their ‘anti-people’ policies. Therefore, Bhattacharjee was to be consciously projected as a new type of Communist, as an iconic politician with a new vision. According to a CPM document prepared in 1996, the basic difference the left had made on West Bengal’s developmental scene is the creation of awareness of development among the common people. The document underlines that West Bengal used bodies of local self-governance such as the network of Panchayati 13 The Indian Express, 7 June 2007. In another interview the chief minister spoke at length about the interests of the farmers: ‘ We will protect the interests of farmers, and at the same time, in a balanced way go forward with industrialisation. You see, the general trend of economic development and human civilisation has always been from agriculture to industry, from the village to the city’ (Frontline, No. 129, 16 June 2006, pp.129–131). 14 Atul Kumar Anjan’s comment quoted in Frontline, 2 June 2006.

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Raj institutions for this purpose. The party termed its governments as people’s democratic governments and claimed that such governments can allow foreign direct investments (FDI) in selected sectors to acquire advanced technology and upgrade productive capacities. Many in the media sought to create the impression that the policies followed by the Communists were no different from the policies being followed by the Manmohan Singh government at the Centre. While for the Communists the difference in the policies should be not merely in economic terms. For the difference lies in the politics which commands those policies and gives their implementation a specific pro-poor twist. To the over-enthusiastic journalist (who had conducted the above stated interview: Shekhar Gupta, Indian Express, 7 June 2006) Buddhadeb gave the impression as being someone who no longer carried the burden of Marxist theory, someone who looked forward to an industrial resurgence. The conclusion seemed to be inescapable: ‘From sort of pure theoretical Marxism to a practical, fact-oriented, truth-dominated theory of governance, that is great progress.’15 By the evening of 11 May 2006, it became clear that the CPI(M)-led left alliances were marching towards massive victories in the Assembly Elections in West Bengal and Kerala. Inside A.K. Gopalan Bhavan the leadership was carrying out ‘a precise and objective analysis of the verdict’s various dimensions’. Addressing a press conference, the general secretary Prakash Karat said that the ‘election verdict would pave the way for increased intervention of the Left parties in national politics … to advance people oriented policies’.16 The results marked a historical high point for the Indian left in terms of its strength in the legislatures and Parliament. Their presence in the Parliament was at an all-time high of 60 Lok Sabha members. The CPM alone accounted for 44 of them. More important, to the good luck of the left, the results of the 2004 Parliamentary Elections had created a unique situation where the very survival of the Congress-led UPA government at the Centre became dependent on the support of these 60 left members. This placed the power to veto any policy which was not to the liking of the left. It was up to them to draw the ‘lakshman rekha’ and the Congress could go beyond it only at the cost of losing power. Therefore, it were not the question of numbers of left MPs but the existence of a unique set of circumstances which created a situation 15 16

Ibid. Frontline, No. 5, 2 June 2006, p. 4.

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which tilted the balance of power in their favour. The Congress leaders as well the rank and file could not but be on the beck and call of the left leaders. It took them little time to realise that they had come to acquire a stature which they had always aspired for but could never achieve. Partly, it was the BJP’S irreconcilable attitude towards the Congress government which had made the Congress utterly dependent on the left. The defeat of the INC in these two states at the hand of the leftists also demoralised the Congress to some extent. Yet the Congress leadership’s faith in the Communist support at the Centre remained unshaken because of Communists’ antipathy towards, what they called BJP’s communalism. Throughout the campaign, the left had vociferously attacked Congress policies, particularly its pro-liberalisation economic policy and its proUnited States policy initiatives.17 However, the most striking verdict was the left front’s seventh consecutive victory in the assembly polls in West Bengal—an unmatched record in the parliamentary history of the country, and in all probability, the world. The left front had come to power 29 years earlier, in 1977. In West Bengal the left front was able to win 235 seats and 50.23 of the votes polled. In Kerala, the Left Democratic Front (LDF) won 98 seats as against 42 won by the United Democratic Front (UDF).18 Observers of the Kerala politics were more or less unanimous in agreeing that the vigorous campaign against the pro-US tilt, particularly the vote against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), significantly shifted Muslim votes from the Indian Union Muslim League, a UDF constituent, to the LDF.19 The Kerala experience showed very clearly that in the changed situation created by American occupation of Iran, the left’s traditional anti-Imperialist propaganda can successfully be married to the pan-Islamist sympathies among the Indian Muslims.20 Given left’s strident anti-imperialism and substantial Muslim presence in 17

Ibid., p. 5. ‘Observers of Kerala politics are more or less unanimous in agreeing that the vigorous campaign against the pro-U.S. tilt, particularly the vote against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), significantly shifted Muslim votes from the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), a United Democratic Front constituent, to LDF.’ 18 For other electoral details see ‘Ascendent Left’, Frontline, 2 June 2006. 19 Frontline, 2 June 2006. 20 Though never stated openly except once when A.B. Bardhan, the CPI general secretary, alleged that the PM had not visited a major Muslim country, the Muslim angle to the deal was always present. The following simple facts are known to every intelligent citizen: ‘(1). Muslims are about 14 percent of the national population (2). There are

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Bengal and Kerala, it would be extremely difficult to dislodge the CPM from power.21 To the extent that left will be able to paint the Congress’s national security vision centring on strategic partnership with America as betrayal of national sovereignty, to that extent the Congress would stand to loose Muslim sympathies. Already, the Congress is no longer above suspicion in the eyes of the large sections of the Muslim masses. The foreign policy dilemmas in which the Manmohan Singh government is caught up encourages the Communists to contend for Muslim affinities. Looked from another angle, the Congress may be able to make up for this loss by winning our those sections of the Indian middle class which traditionally vacillate between the BJP and the Congress from election to election. By 1970s, the CPM, its mass fronts called mass organisations such as Kisan Sabha and youth organisations had penetrated into the majority of states’ villages and settlements and succeeded in building a network of cells/branches/committees. The party leadership and its cadre had to work hard for decades to accomplish this task. In the process, many a time armed clashes were fought with workers or supporters of other parties. Over the years, many members or sympathisers were either imprisoned or killed. But how does one explain the CPM’s continuously coming to power in Bengal election after election?

69 Muslim concentrated districts, according to one estimate. (3). There are 11 Muslim majority seats in the Lok Sabha. (4). Muslims are said to be a factor in around 100 parliamentary seats. (5). The number of Muslims in the Lok Sabha has been between 21 and 49. (6). There have been about a dozen Muslim women MPs since 1952.’ The Hindustan Times, 29 October 2007. 21 Karat Prakash’s comments and statements were re-edited in the form of a booklet: ‘Subordinate Ally, the Nuclear Deal and Indo-US Strategic Relations’, Left Word Press, 2007. On 5 September, pledging to fight US Imperialism, CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat and CPI secretary D. Raja hit the roads leading a ‘jatha’ from Chennai to Vishakhapatnam against the five-nation naval exercise, involving the USA, in the Bay of Bengal (The Stateman, 6 September 2007). Also see, The Telegraph, 4 September 2007. The booklet reiterated the view that, ‘pushing through the US agenda in all fields of concern to our people, whether it is sovereignty of India, the interests of common people, farmers, of workers and employees … . The majority of Indian parliament is against the deal. By refusing to accept the majority view, government sends a message which is harmful for Indian democracy …. Don’t proceed with the Nuclear Deal. It is … . part of a wider strategic alliance to make India the outpost of American interests in Asia’ (The Stateman, 4 September 2007).

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Every Indian village is like a small ‘republic’, linked to the outside world through the network of markets, communication channels, ideologies, parties and administrative institutions. There could be three types of villages: (a) In which one particular big landowner or a rich peasant family exercised a weak or strong hegemony over the entire village. Nothing could happen in the village without the direct or tacit consent of the family’s members. (b) Where a considerable number of landowning families contested for influence over the entire village, of sharecroppers, small peasants, daily wagers, and small traders. In such villages if one faction of the population supported a particular party, the other faction lent it allegiance to its opponent. (c) In which the residents were mostly poor tenant families, sharecroppers and daily-wage workers. In such villages, apart from individuals who did odd jobs, there could also be households which could be described as not so poor. All these ‘republics’ reproduced their daily activities within the web of multilayered power relations exercised along the lines of class, caste, lineage, gender, religion and kinship. Experience of building Communist cells in the villages shows that it is always difficult for Communists to enter into the villages of the first two types. There the entire village could be easily united to deny them entry. Most of the well-off, and sometimes even not so well-off citizens of these ‘republics’ are always well acquainted with the functioning of national and provincial level parties, as well as their ability to influence individuals in the police, revenue and scores of other local institutions of governance. It will not be incorrect to say that the daily life of these villagers is always enmeshed with the webs woven by the various institutions in these domains. The Panchayat elections, over the years, have politicised these villagers along party and ideological lines. By and large, over the years, every village has come to be associated with the dominant influence of one or the other political party. There would be ‘Communist or red villages’ and villages of the Congress, Trinamool, etc. As it was always difficult for Communists to enter into the villages of the first two types, to begin with, the Communist workers in such villages could enter only when invited by a left-leaning member of some well-to-do family of that village. By 1930s, such individuals interested in socialist ideas came to exist in many Indian villages of those provinces where the Communists were actively involved in the Kisan movements. Some of them had come under Communist influence during their school

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or college days. Such a person would become the channel as well as centre of Communist organisation in the village. He and his friends would, over time, prepare the ground for Communists to hold small meetings or a conference. Thus the space is created in the village for the subaltern groups to speak and express their grievances. If the local contacts, many of them might turn out to be potential grassroots leaders, are able to withstand the pressure from the vested interests in the village, the Communist activists’ visits would become more frequent, ultimately leading to the creation of a core group and their supporters. Many a times, the way to the formation of such a core group is paved by local bloody clashes. All this always happens under the watchful eyes of the local police responsible for law and order. The intervention of local administration, especially the police, is always of crucial importance in the emergence of the Communist core groups. Only an ideologically motivated cadre imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice is able to cross these hurdles successfully. Given the police repression and assaults from the opponents, it requires tremendous courage for the poor to assert their democratic rights in the Indian village. Finally, this core group or grassroots leadership is brought into the network of party organisations which extend from bloc upward to the provincial level. The ideological awareness of what is called ‘fundamentals of Marxism’ is imparted to this leadership in variety of ways, especially through party schooling, pamphlets, journals and discussion meetings. The first attempt of the local vested interests (big landowners, jotedars) is always to oppose the very beginning of organisation of the sharecroppers and other rural poor through variety of ways. But once such organisational activities take root in the teeth of local opposition, these vested interests are forced to retreat and come to terms with it. A very serious crisis is now precipitated in the agrarian relations. The jotedars or the rural rich are no longer in a position to easily enhance rent, decide its mode of payment or forcibly evict the sharecroppers. Attempts to do so are always preceded by tough resistance, at each stage involving the local administration, especially the police. The police can no longer enforce the court orders of evictions by permanently staying in the village. Even when they are able to do so, it leaves a bitter after-taste. The powerful are no longer in a position to arbitrarily fix the daily wages for those who work in their fields. A watershed is reached in the deepening class struggle in the village, thereby polarising the villagers into conflicting camps.

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What direction these unsettled conditions in the countryside would now take? This would depend upon the ‘agrarian programme’ and the political strategy of the Communist Party whose cadre is involved in organizing the rural poor. As is well known, the Indian Communists who formed the CPI(M) in 1964–65, were committed to the idea of armed revolution. Partly, it was this idea of armed revolution which had led to a split within the Communist movement. ‘We did not agree with the Soviet strategy of peaceful competition, peaceful co-existence and peaceful transition adopted in their 20th party Congress’ (Interview with Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, The Indian Express, 7 June 2006. There were many within the new organisation who had seriously believed that the party really meant what it had declared in its theoretical documents. In the above context, the local party leaders, with the intentions of further sharpening the class struggle, could incite the sharecroppers/tenants to forcibly occupy the lands of big landowners and establish the ‘liberated zone’. Once this is done, the theoretically abstract vision of armed revolution, now acquires the form of an immediate concrete agenda. Those who had been advocating armed revolution are now required to confront the might of the state. Given this immediacy of the armed revolution, the party is faced with two real alternatives: it could take the ‘leap of faith’ and enter into a do-or-die situation or it begins to dither in the face of danger and declare that ‘the situation is not yet ripe for the revolution’. The revolution is postponed to some other day in the future. This is what happened in 1967 in Bengal when the CPM went through a split giving birth to what came to be called as the ‘Naxalite Movement’. Those who called themselves Naxalites or Maoists felt that the Revolution had been betrayed by the dominant leadership of the CPM. Consequently, the CPM was thrown into an ideological, political and organisational turmoil. Interestingly, the dominant leadership of the CPM, even after ‘Naxalbari’, continued to declare its commitment to an armed revolution. ‘We are only waiting for the conditions of revolution to ripen’, it said. Even today, the existence of the letter ‘M’ in the name of the party continues to announce its commitment to the armed revolution. The beauty of this argument is that it could remain eternally valid. Meanwhile, for decades, the party could continue to participate in parliamentary elections, repeatedly form provincial governments and support the in coalitions at the Centre. This is how Buddhadeb describes that moment of crisis in the party:

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We held that socialism could not co-exist with capitalism and neither could the transition from capitalism to socialism be peaceful. So when the party split, I chose to join the newly formed CPI(M). I faced my second major dilemma in 1967, over the Naxalbari uprising. Radio Beijing called it India’s liberation struggle and there was Mao-Zedong’s magnetic appeal. It had a major impact among some Bengal youth. My close friends and party colleagues, like Saibal Mitra, Asim Chatterjee and Azizual Haq, left CPI(M) to join the Naxalbari Movement under the banner of CPI(M–L). I was also in a fix, but later realised that the time was not ripe for an armed struggle and chose to stay away from the movement.22

Just like Beckett’s Godot, for decades the Communists in India have been waiting for Revolution. But ‘that morning was sure to come’ (wo subbha jaroor aayegi, subbha ka intjar kar), the popular song has continued to emotionally reassure the rank and file. But the real question was posed, though metaphorically, by a Punjabi writer in a story titled: ‘Rat kaise kate?’ (But how to live through the night?) What was to be done during the interregnum? The answer to this important question was provided by the democratic system itself: meanwhile let us continue to participate in the parliamentary elections as a ‘holding on operation’. Let us go back to our story of breakdown of agrarian relations in the village as the sharecroppers and the rural poor begin to organise themselves with the help of Communist cadre. Once the organised movement of peasantry begins to assert its might, a new and unstable equilibrium of power relations emerges in the village. From now onwards the landowners/jotedars are on the defensive and look for opportunities to enter into a compromise with the local leadership of the sharecroppers. Many among these jotedars become reconciled to the inevitable. Some of them, in their self interest, may even crossover to the Communist side, first as sympathisers and then as members by paying levies to the party fund. While the majority of them might continue to live with suppressed anger and resentment hoping to undo the ‘mischief’ of the Communists at some future date. The above state of affairs could take a very different turn if the ‘agrarian programme’ is understood and implemented by the Communist cadre 22

The Times of India, 30 September, Sunday, 2007.

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in a different way; not through the strategy of armed revolution but through the strategy of ‘adjustment of class relations’ in a peaceful manner by carrying on mediation between the conflicting classes to secure the consent of the landowners/jotedars for a compromise settlement with sharecroppers. Both sides try to avoid violence as they have to continue to live in the same village. Common sense dictates: ‘In situations when the adversary is weak but your side is unable to deliver a decisive blow either, the best strategy is to negotiate.’ This was the Congress approach to the agrarian question during the struggle for independence, especially during the period of formation of ministries (1937–39). This method ensured the support of both the sides to the Indian National Congress.23 The congress was of the view that the existence of class struggle cannot be denied but it was up to the leadership to either sharpen it or moderate it, and manage it while favouring the tenants through the strategy of mediation to create multiclass support base. In the process the balance of power relations begins to shift towards the tenants as a group/class. One approach led to a violent agrarian upsurge while other led to the establishment of ideological hegemony of the party which helped the conflicting classes to reach settlement through negotiation and compromise. This was the method of reconciling class interests by ‘adjusting class struggle’. In this strategy the Congress represented the peasantry as well as mediated on behalf of them to seek concessions for them. The feudal relations are not abolished at one stroke but the process of their erosion in the long run is firmly put in place, finally transforming them through state legislation and compensation.24 This Congress approach to handle agrarian relations was in conformity with its overall strategy of building counter-hegemony through non-violent struggles against the colonial government.25 Also, this was an alternative to the Communist approach of sharpening the class struggle to create conditions for ‘Agrarian Revolution’ and seizure of state power. After Naxalbari, once the idea of armed revolution was indefinitely postponed by the CPM, it quietly shifted to the above-mentioned strategy as a pragmatic solution to 23

See Bhagwan Josh, Struggle for Hegemony in India, 1920–47, 1994, Vol.2, chapters on ministries. 24 For details see the chapters on Congress Ministries in Bhagwan Josh, Struggle for Hegemony in India, 1920–47, Vol.2, New Delhi, 1994. 25 For the details of the Congress strategy of building counter-hegemony see Struggle for Hegemony in India, 1920–47 ’, Vols 1 and 2.

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extend its influence or build hegemony in the countryside of Bengal. The Operation Barga legislation brought in by the CPM to reconcile class relations between the conflicting groups created a sort of arrested equilibrium of class struggle in the countryside. Both the groups have benefited from this legislation and both look upon CPM with a sense of gratitude. After coming to power, Operation Barga was the most significant intervention of the left-front government in Bengal. In just over three years (1978–81), 1.2 million sharecroppers who were de facto tenants-atwill were registered in the record of rights through Operation Barga.26 The recording of their names ensured security of tenure, fair division of produce rent and heritable right of cultivation. Currently, there are 1.6 million recorded sharecroppers in West Bengal. Nearly one million acres of good agricultural land vested to the state was distributed to the rural poor. Half a million homeless families were given free housing sites. A general definition of a bargadar would be any person who cultivates on the condition of delivering a share of the produce to the landowner. According to Section 15A (amendment of 1972), the produce will be divided between the bargadar and the landowner in the following proportions: (a) 50:50, in the case where the plough, cattle, manure and seeds are supplied by the landowner, and (b) 75:25 in all other cases. The landowner will be entitled to terminate cultivation by a bargadar only in the following four cases: (a) when the bargadar fails to cultivate the land or uses it for non-agricultural purposes; (b) when the land is not cultivated by the bargadar personally; (c) where the bargadar fails to tender the share of the produce to the landowner; (d) where the landowner requires the land for bringing it under personal cultivation. It is clear from the above four clauses that Bargadari Act also equally ensures the interests of the landowner. His rent is legally secure and cannot be withheld arbitrarily by the sharecropper. On the other hand, bargadar now has the security of the right of cultivation and a certificate of his recorded name. He cannot be evicted arbitrarily. Thus both the parties, in their own self-interest, have come to be dependent on the mediating party, that is, CPM to run the agriculture cycle smoothly. This method 26 According to an estimate, the total number of bargadars in West Bengal will be around 20 lakh. See Tushar Kanti Ghosh, Operation Barga and Land Reforms, Delhi, 1986, p. 99.

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of management of agrarian contradictions by adjusting class struggle does not end feudalism at one stroke but paves the way for the abolition of feudal relations of productions in the long run. Therefore, it falls short of left’s declared programme of ‘land to the tiller’. This approach to the agrarian question was invented by the INC in 1920s to build a mass base among the conflicting classes in the countryside according to its schema of non-violent strategy of capturing state power as well as giving substantial economic relief to the tenants. One reason why operation barga has not succeeded to the extent desired is the fact that in the villages, the process of decision making still lies with the village rich and with the land-owners. It is apprehended that when leftist power will vane from the country, there will be large scale “Istafanama” (withdrawl) by the bargadars and there will be a large scale eviction of bargadars.27

This method of bringing the social classes with conflicting economic interests under the influence of the party implied that the discontent of the tenancy was to be recognised and understood but was not to be worked up to arouse the feelings of intense anger and hostility.28 But the landowners must also be feeling a debt of gratitude to CPM, that unlike the Naxalites in 1967, it has not taken the path of ‘violent structural change’.29 This method of managing the agrarian tension has ensured an atmosphere of tranquillity in rural areas as it consciously avoids fomenting civil war. Operation Barga did have a beneficial impact on production and productivity of land. One study has suggested an increase of 17–18 per cent in productivity and a reduction in the headcount poverty ratio in Bengal.30 The landowner is happy that his rent could not be withheld by the sharecroppers while the sharecroppers are happy that given the presence of the CPM they could not be evicted from their plots of land. Both the sides are interested in avoiding bloodshed as both were destined to live in the same village. The landowner’s mind is without fear while the sharecropper can also afford to hold his head high so long 27

Ibid., p. 145. Bhagwan Josh, Struggle for Hegemony in India, Vol. 2. p. 188. 29 Ibid., 145. 30 D. Bandyopadhyay, ‘Tebhaga Movement in Bengal: A Retrospect’, Economic and Political Weekly, 13 October 2001, p. 3901. 28

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both parties are willing to accept the terms of the ‘historic compromise’ as mediated by the CPM cadre in the villages. So long both the groups continue to trust the ‘impartiality’ of the CPM cadre and it continues to play its mediatory role successfully, it will remain entrenched in rural Bengal. The sharecroppers feel that given the existence of ‘their’ party’s influence in the villages, nobody could evict them from their plots of land. Neither the rent could be enhanced arbitrarily. For the landlord the rent realisation has now become a certainty. But this method of settling the agrarian conflict only moderates and regulates the class struggle. From now onwards the class struggle begins to seek subterranean ways to express itself. This requires that CPM must not only continue to be vigilant but also continue to rejuvenate its network of organisations. The vigilance committees and vigilante groups must not slacken their ideological watchfulness. But organising one half of a society into an electoral mass base could never be an easy task even when an array of skilful devices is available, not all of them ideological-organisational. The local level leaders must be given a free hand to decide who were to be included/excluded in the distribution network of benefits. Not only that, the party must defend this level of leadership whenever required. Clearly, such a system would end up generating its own variety of grievances and resentments. Those who felt excluded within as well as outside this support base would always be on the look out to subvert party influence, secretly or openly, sometimes even violently. The muffled-up anger and resentment of the excluded would continue to burst forth occasionally, even when they sensed that they are up against a wall. The problem with this way of maintaining the electoral mass base is that it cannot be kept intact without the entwined efforts of the government and the party. These methods of governance and carrying on development generate processes which are bound to polarise the society— at one end emerge sections of the population, largely disorganised and feel excluded from the benefits of the developmental schemes while at the other polar end stands a consolidated bloc of population who live with the hope to receive some of these benefits on the basis of their organised strength. Hardly, any benefits are available to those who remain outside the network of party’s front organisations. This micropolitics systematically implemented by the local-level cadre ensures that the party continues to garner between 45 and 50 per cent of the votes polled in

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every election. In the absence of a united opposition, CPM’s hegemony in rural Bengal could not be challenged let alone be dismantled. Yet the excluded families/groups would continue to resort to peaceful as well as violent methods to express their anger and resentment against the CPM government. Obviously, this elaborate and gigantic social engineering would be virtually impossible to be put into place without the active complicity of the forces of law and order. In the absence of the active support provided by the police, this vast system created solely to garner electoral victories runs the risk of falling apart. Therefore, the left-front government could never afford to alienate the state’s police by acting against their bosses unless it was subjected to tremendous pressure of mobilised citizens. This is the reason why Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was not willing to act against police officers accused of pressuring Rizwanur Rahman to end his marriage with Priyanka Todi.31 And this is despite the fact that many leaders within the party were demanding the transfer of police officers to ensure impartial enquiry.32 What is happening in Bengal today ought be understood in this context. One of the consequences of this method of maintaining and reproducing a sizeable and durable electoral base is that it gives birth to ‘an atom like structure’ where everybody located in the concentric circles of the electoral base around the ‘thick party nucleus’ must draw some material benefits from the developmental projects. This gives ample opportunities to unscrupulous individuals in positions of power at the local levels to indulge in corrupt practices. In October 2007, the ‘ration rage’ swept South Bengal.33 Armed looters burnt down at least half a dozen ration shops and dealers’ homes 31 Rizwanur Rahman was found dead near railway tracks at Dum Dum on 21 September following his marriage to Priyanka, daughter of city businessman Ashok Todi on 18 August. The officers of Kolkata Police, including the DCP (detective department) had summoned Rizwanur to the police headquarters and pressurised him to send his wife back to her parents despite their having married legally. For details of the case see The Statesman and The Telegraph between 22 September and 25 October 25, 2007. 32 Referring to the public demand against the police officers, Hashim Abdul Halim, speaker of the Bengal Legislative Assembly, observed: ‘Those police officers against whom charges have been brought should be transferred for the sake of impartial inquiry.’ CPM minister Anisur Rahaman and CPI minister Nandagopal Bhattacharya also came out strongly against the police (‘Left clamour rises for action against cops’, The Telegraph, 5 October 2007). 33 ‘The current violence over food is the worst that Bengal has witnessed since 1966’, observed a leading newspaper editorially (The Statesman, 25 October 2007).

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in Burdwan and Murshidabad. In an apparent outpouring of pent-up anger, the mobs shouted slogans against the ‘nexus’ between the CPM and the ‘corrupt’ ration dealers. In Nababhat, a CPM party stronghold, MLA Pradip Tah, zonal committee secretary Kamal Gayen and a few others were dragged from a meeting and were thrashed. Earlier, on 16 September, villagers had attacked CPM leaders in Bankura’s Radhamohanpur, another party bastion.34 The mob in Nababhat was made up of nearly 2,000 people who marched to Sheikh Fakir Mohammad’s shop-cum-home around 9.30 am. A kangaroo court ordered him to pay ` 5 lakh fine and promise to supply free ration for six months. Around the same time in Sherpur, villagers were coercing dealer Nazir Khan to shell out ` 1,000 per ration card. The mob looted Nazir’s entire stock and torched his two houses and three godowns. In Balipara in Murshidabad’s Nabagram a ration dealer was kidnapped by the villagers. ‘While we are controlling one place, incidents are being reported from other areas.’35 But police was not the only force to stop these acts of vandalism and lawlessness. On 7 October, in Nababhat, a CPM stronghold, … thousands of CPI(M) cadres armed with sticks and sharp weapons brought out a procession in that area to establish the rule of law! The police officers present at the spot remained mute spectators as the vice-chairman of Burdwan municipality, Mr. Inul Haque and the secretary of the CPM’S zonal committee, Mr. Shym Bose, were in the vanguard of the rally.36

Similarly, on 17 October, hundreds of CPM supporters armed with scythes, daggers, axes and rods prevented a mob from looting a ration shop at Bohar village in Burdwan’s Memari. The mob, which demanded ` 2,000 per card from Abdul Rafiq, was chased out of the village.37 Shops and dealers’ houses were also looted at Sarkarpara and Mahisha in Nabagram. In Burdwan’s Musuti, CPM supporters attacked the mob that had ‘gheraoed’ a dealer. The coercive method of semi-violent protest called ‘gherao’ was invented by the CPM to begin with. Now it 34

The Telegraph, 8 October 2007. Ibid. 36 The Statesman, 18 October 2007. According to another report more than 5,000 CPM supporters carrying swords, sticks, spears and red flags, held protest march through the village (The Telegraph, 8 October 2007). 37 The Telegraph, 18 October 2007. 35

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is being used by every political party to shut down the city. Till 7 October, two persons had been killed and hundreds of ration dealers in the state had gone into hiding. On 27 September, Nirmal Pal, a ration dealer in Matgoda village in Bankura district, committed suicide. On 6 October, another dealer in Bankura, Biman Kundu, committed suicide. On 8 October, Utpal Narasundar, the 27-year old son of a Birbhum dealer hanged himself after villagers ransacked his home and demanded ` 27 lakh from his father. Villagers angry at not getting ration supplies from the PDS outlet his family owned slapped a fine of ` 27 lakh on his father Chandra Kishore. Of the 8.3 crore ration cardholders in the state, almost 60 per cent are above the poverty line (APL). Many of them had routinely depended on the open market rather than the public distribution system (PDS) shops for supplies. But there had been rise in food prices. In Birbhum, for example, APL wheat was sold for ` 6.75 a kg while the open market rate was ` 13 per kg. But the unique feature of these riots was that the cardholders were not interested in lifting food grain but, instead, wanted money as compensation for the months they had not got their supplies. In the kangaroo courts dealers were forced to give in writing that they would compensate in cash.38 ‘The disturbances are based on a rumour that the Centre has increased the money to be given to cardholders above the poverty line who have not received wheat’, said Birbhum district magistrate Tapan Kumar Shome.39 The crisis created by food riots have been attributed by Bhattacharjee to Centre’s quota slash of food grains, compelling the government to scale down distribution of wheat to 250 grams per head per week. However, it is clear from the rioters’ demand for cash that the Centre’s decision alone could not have triggered the crisis across South Bengal (rice allocated to the state for people above the poverty line was reduced to 7,700 tonnes a month from around 2.3 lakh tonnes. The allocation of wheat was cut to half from around 1 lakh tonne a month). The interesting thing was that the villagers were willing to believe in a rumour instead of the party apparatus and the administration. This reflects villagers’ deep-seated suspicion of CPM and its government. According to the newspapers, the rioters were mobilised

38 39

The Indian Express, 10 October 2007. The Hindustan Times, 8 October 2007.

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by the same political groups, that is, Naxalites and Jamiat-e-Ulema Hind, that had led the villagers against CPM in Nandigram.40 The assertions on the part of mobs followed a pattern—dragging dealers to kangaroo court, demanding lakhs as punishment for holding back food supplies, ransacking their shops and homes. At many places the dealers were beaten up and the mobs also fought pitched battles with the police. For example, the Panchgram residents fought police and locked up six personnel inside ration dealer Moinuddin Mondal’s house before setting it on fire. The policemen fired to disperse the mob, broke open a door and fled.41 There are about 20,000 ration dealers across the state. Many of them are either members of the CPM or its supporters. According to Amiya Patra, Bankura CPM secretary, 24 of the 1,245 dealers in the district, are party members. In Birbhum, 10–12 dealers out of 976 are CPM members.42 The country spends over ` 10,000 crore for public distribution. A panel set up by the food ministry has found that around 36 per cent of the wheat meant for the poor is diverted to the open market. In the case of rice and sugar the diversion rate are 31 and 26 per cent, respectively. Wheat diversion in Punjab and Haryana is around 53 per cent, 46 per cent in Uttar Pradesh and 47 per cent in Himachal Pradesh. The eastern states do not fare better. The diversion rate of wheat in Bihar is 44 per cent, 39 per cent in Orissa and 40 per cent in West Bengal. Moreover, in this region, higher percentages of rice are siphoned off—64 per cent in Bihar, 54 per cent in Orissa and 34 in Bengal. Diversion is comparatively low in southern India. The percentage of wheat and rice diverted in Andhra Pradesh is 19 per cent.43 Obviously, like many other states, there is a nexus between the local party leaders of the CPM and the ration dealers who divert the food grains to the open market. According to a party source most of the local leaders were aware of what the ration dealers had been doing. Ours is the ruling party with a strong organisation down to the grassroots level. So, the leadership was very much aware that ration dealers 40

The Indian Express, 10 October 2007; The Hindustan Times, 10 October 2007. The Telegraph, 9 October 2007. 42 The Telegraph, 8 October 2007. 43 The Hindustan Times, 8 October 2007. 41

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sell foodgrains meant for public distribution in the black market. It is not possible for ration dealers to carry on the illegal business without backing from sections of the party.44

The conclusion is inescapable. Despite the fact that the CPM government claims itself to be a people’s government, it has not made any difference to the daily lives of the people. The government party nexus in Bengal is as corrupt as in other states where, according to CPM, ‘feudalbourgeois parties’ are in power. In these riots, the spontaneous protests of the angry villagers were pitted against the organised strength of a party in government. This meant that local level party leaders could easily mobilise thousands of their sympathisers at a very short notice to neutralise the impression made by the assertion of their opponents. To what extent had the aggressive spirit of Nandigram influenced these protests is difficult to say. This brings us to the most significant event in the history of the left-front government in Bengal. If and whenever the CPM government’s hegemony in Bengal villages is sought to be challenged, it would be through the occurrence of a series of Nandigram-type village wars. The fact that the left-front government was unwilling to retreat in the face of this event had sent a very positive message to those interested in investing in Bengal. The opposition and resistance put up by the population of Nandigram to the methods of industrialisation of the left front in Bengal had transformed this village’s name into a symbol with multiple meanings. Throughout the world all those who were opposed to the policies of economic liberalisation and globalisation applauded the heroic struggle of the poor of Nandigram against the creation of SEZs.45 The people of Nandigram are an economically backward community. In the last three decades they have lived on small produce from agricultural land. Many of them were supporters of the CPM. An area covering of number of villages was the target for land acquisition for the purpose of setting up of a chemical hub by an international capitalist group known 44

The Telegraph, 8 October 2007. Mainstream 23 June 2007. ‘Resolution of All India Citizens’ Convention Against Atrocities in Nandigram and Special Economic zones’ and ‘Ramsey Clark’s Statement to the Convention’. ‘It is important’, said Clark, ‘for all people who stand for justice to stand on the side of the poor people of Nandigram in their heroic struggle against the special economic zones.’ 45

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as Anthony Salim of Indonesia. An extraordinary procedure had been adopted by the government for the implementation of this development project. No physical survey involving the people was made. None from the administration had told the people anything about the project. The chairman of Haldia Development Authority Mr Lakhman Seth had issued a notification on 28 September 2006, proposing to acquire more than 38,000 acres of land. This created suspicion in the minds of the people regarding the intentions of the government. Neither the constituents of the left front nor the local elected bodies were aware of such a project. The apprehension of losing land drove the people to put up organised resistance. The reworked package which the finance minister Nirupam Sen had offered to the Singur farmers on behalf of Tata Motors did not include jobs, equity shares and higher compensation. When it was pointed out to him that for the Salboni steel plant, the Jindals were offering jobs and shares, he replied: ‘We can’t dictate to investors. We can only lend a helping hand to the affected.’46A day after the sudden violence in Burnpur (19 June) over an 18-year-old land acquisition plan for IISCO’s modernisation project, a majority of CPM state committee members told the government to deal firmly with the opposition, else the industrialisation drive would be jeopardised.47 Non-bailable sections of law were slapped against 130 villagers arrested for protesting against the land acquisition at Burnpur and they were all sent to jail. Villagers raised slogans in the court: ‘jami nao chakri dao, chakri chhara jami jibon thakte debo na’ (Take land, give job. No land will be given without jobs as long we are alive).48 46 The Times of India, 20 June 2007. In a letter to Mamata Banerjee Buddhadeb had said that consent had been obtained for as much as 954 acres out of the 997 to be acquired for Tata Motors. But Abdur Rezzak Mollah, one of the ministers, told the house on 6 July that the government had not got owners’ consent for the acquisition of 326 acres (The Times of India, 7 July 2007). To a suggestion that lands of those who had not accepted the compensation cheques be returned, the financed minister replied:

You know it’s impossible to return the land, legally or otherwise. In any case, we’re not making any distinction between willing and unwilling farmers. There could be several reasons for a land-owner refusing land. By acknowledging unwilling farmers we don’t want to undermine those who’ve willingly given land’ (The Times of India, 20 June 2007). 47 48

The Times of India, 19 June 2007. Ibid.

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Much before the incident of 14 March 2007, in which 14 villagers were killed and 162 injured in police firing.49 Nandigram had become a battlefield between the CPM supporters and the locals led by Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool, Naxalites and many other human rights organisations.50 Immediately after the tragedy, the supporters of the CPM were forced by their opponents among the local peasantry, that is, the followers of Bhoomi Uchchhed Pratirodh Committee, to leave their homes and stay in camps outside the ‘liberated zone’. Both sides were fully armed and CPM cadre backed by the party had been trying very hard, first to seek re-entry in the villages and then subdue their opponents. During this period, hardly a day had passed when the occurrence of ‘fresh violence’ was not reported.51 Nandigram is no longer a local issue, it has come to symbolise something more than merely a contest for power in the state between CPM and their opponents, especially the Trinamool leader Mamta Banerjee52 ‘Nandigram’ has become a metaphor for the kind of development which would be resisted by the peasantry violently. The memory of this ‘carnage’53 would be kept alive and politically used to ridicule the high moral ground which the CPM had always claimed to establish its revolutionary credentials. 49 On 16 November 2007, Calcutta High Court observed in a judgement that the situation in Nandigram was not provocative enough to warrant police firing and therefore the firing was ‘wholly unconstitutional’ (The Telegraph, 17 November 2007). 50 ‘We have reports that both groups are carrying arms’, observed chief secretary Amit Kiran Deb. 51 For example the following headline: ‘Bullets fly, Nandigram still on the Boil’, The Times of India, 17 June 2007; ‘Fresh Violence in Nandigram’, The Statesmen, 16 June 2007; ‘Back to battle with CPM revenge strike’, The Telegraph, 17 June 2007; ‘Tough Time for reined-in cops’, The Times of India, 19 June 2007; ‘A Power Struggle in Battlefield Nandigram’, The Indian Express, 24 June 2007. 52 The propaganda war over Nandigram is being fought through the medium of films. The events in Singur and Nandigram were covered extensively not only by news media but also amateur and professional film-makers. There is plenty of footage available on the YouTube site. At least two documentaries, ‘This Land is Mine’ and ‘Unnayaner Name’ (In the Name of Development) are attempts to tell the Nandigram story. ‘Nandigram: Asman ki Talash Mein’ in Bengali and broken Hindi is a collection of interviews of those who had fled Nandigram and taken refuge in Khejuri. 53 The Indian Express, 16 June 2007. The Statesman, 19 June 2007. ‘Nandigram: Memories alive and festering’. Meanwhile, the government had decided Nayachar as the new alternative site to Nandigram for setting up the chemical hub. Nayachar is an island 2.5 km from Haldia in the Hoogly. It will attract an investment of ` 12,000 crore from

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The bloody event of Nandigram could not but have split the villagers into two warring camps.54 Meanwhile, the 2,000-odd CPM supporters, driven out of home in January, were desperate to return. Equally desperate were the Bhumi Uchched Pratirodh Committee supporters to stop the CPM men in their tracks. The police were under strict orders—a fallout of the March 14 firing that left 14 dead-to be restrained.55 On 29 October, four CPM activists were killed and four injured in a bomb blast at Nandigram where a protest Bandh for an activist’s killing was being observed by Trinamool backed Bhumi Uchched Pratirodh Committee.56 Immediately after the event, the CPM local as well as provincial leaders and the Bengal government were faced with a serious dilemma: How long could it allow the existence of a ‘liberated zone’ where the government writ did not run? How long could it wait for the rehabilitation of its evicted supporters in the villages around Nandigram before they felt completely demoralised? How long could it wait before its support base in other districts declared its government impotent not worthy of their commitment? Clearly, there was too much at stake for the Bengal government. the central government. ‘We appreciate the chief minister’s change in attitude in inviting all political parties before finally deciding on the new site’, observed a Bengal Congress leader (The Indian Express, 4 September 2007). Immediately after this decision, the Centre virtually shot down the choice as the ministry of environment and forests was of the view that industrialisation was prohibited in an area that came within the Coastal Regulation Zone (‘Editorial’, The Statesman, 31 October 2007). 54 The report of the people’s tribunal headed by Justice S.N. Bhargava, a former chief justice of the Sikkim High Court, however, concluded: ‘There was unprovoked, indiscriminate firing without sufficient warning and without following the established procedure in accordance with law against a peaceful, religious and lawful gathering of mostly women and children from Nandigram.’ The report names 14 people, including two women, who were killed by the police, and one person who is missing. Further it describes the unsavoury collusion between the government agencies and the ruling CPI(M) party, thus: ‘The motive behind this massacre seems to be the ruling party’s wish to “teach a lesson” to poor villagers in Nandigram by terrorising them for opposing the proposed Special Economic Zone (SEZ) project. No charges have been filed against policemen implicated in the killing’ (‘Nandigram: Six Months Later’, Economic and Political Weekly, 13 October 2007). 55 The Times of India, 20 June 2007. 56 The Indian Express, 29 October 2007. On 6 July Jyoti Basu observed: ‘It’s a matter of shame that our supporters are still homeless when we are running the government here’ (The Telegraph, 7 July 2007).

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Most importantly, the Nandigram tragedy has added a new sense of urgency to the process of rethinking and evolving new modes of industrialisation in India.57 It is well known that unlike the western countries where the development of capitalism had preceded the introduction of democratic institutions, in India the introduction of democracy has preceded the full-fledged fast-pace development of capitalism. The industrial revolution, despite the diversity of trajectories of capitalist development in each country, had been carried through by harsh authoritarian methods. In a country where the poor villagers and mass of the peasantry had voting rights, the ‘Stalinist methods’ of handling the countryside could no longer succeed. Clearly, if the process of industrialisation is to be sustained in the long run, it must include the poor peasants and underprivileged, especially the unemployed youth. Farmers cannot be forcibly dispossessed and displaced without resistance and bloodshed, causing massive social dislocation. It is in this context that the marginalised ‘Naxalite movement’ has acquired a new lease of life. In fact, this new turn of industrialisation has helped this extremist political current to rethink its strategies of mobilising people and tribal groups against SEZs and industrial projects. The 9th Congress of the CPI(Maoist), at the beginning of 2007, had decided that mega-projects, including steel and bauxite projects in Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh and SEZs had to be resisted. According to one estimate their number is roughly 14,000 and they are active in 185 districts across 16 states.58 This is the one lesson of Nandigram which the state governments would be forced to come to terms with. Poor people would not allow themselves to be dispossessed without putting up tremendous resistance to safeguard their livelihoods. Also no democratic government could afford to snatch away poor farmers’ lands by killing them in hundreds. This realisation has begun to dawn upon the CPM leadership. Nandigram has become an albatross around its neck. The Chief Minister admitted that ‘Nandigram has become a liberated zone. Police cannot move there. No development work is taking place…. Naxalites are roaming there freely. I have definite 57

The recently declared National Policy on Rehabilitation provides for the following: consultation with village councils mandatory; land for land for farmers; money for sheds for artisans; homes for outees; displacement and transit allowances; tribal groups to be resettled in one place; others as near their villages as possible (The Telegraph, 13 October 2007); The Statesman, 12 October 2007. 58 The Sunday Express, 22 July 2007.

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information that a group of about 100 Naxalites were moving around Nandigram.’ Moreover, a number of other groups, apart from Naxalites and criminals, were inciting violence in Nandigram. What he has said showed the dilemma his government was faced with. ‘I have not yet thought of calling the Army though I have asked for CRPF personnel.’ In the next breath he contradicted himself: ‘However, I want to say that police or Army action will not be able to solve the problem. There has to be a political solution.’59 Chief Minister had been urging all opposition parties to unite for the sake of industrialisation in Bengal. Answering the question regarding what he thought about Nandigram, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen made a wishy-washy comment: ‘Nandigram is a much more complex issue. There is a question whether that kind of operation was needed, whether it was the right place. But I have not studied it in the way I have studied Singur. So I won’t comment.’60 59

The Indian Express, 30 October 2007. In Jharkhand, CPI(Maoist) cadre set afire nine trucks carrying bauxite from the Hindustan Aluminium Corporation Ltd’s mines in Gumla on 29 October 2007. Meanwhile, five policemen were killed and three seriously injured after about 200 Naxalites surrounded a police party in Bijapur district of Chhattisgarh (The Times of India, 30 October 2007). 60 The Telegraph, 23 July 2007. Interview with Sambit Saha of The Telegraph. Leaders of Trinamool felt that though the Nobel laureate had said that there was no harm if farm land is taken for industry. But he had avoided answering the real question: ‘whether fertile land can be taken by force.’ The economist felt that the government had committed a tactical mistake by not exploring the possibility of maximising the land price in Singur. The government rate was less than what the value would have had the land been free for competition among industries. But the finance minister was not convinced. ‘We stand for government intervention in land acquisition for industry and infrastructure to protect the interests of the farmers. Given the nature of land-holding in Bengal, thousands of small plot-owners would not be able to negotiate and extract the best price from big companies and their agents’ (The Telegraph, 24 July 2007). On the question of Nandigram killings Prabhat Patnaik takes a very different position. Unlike many others, ‘Nandigram’ for him is not the result of authoritarian methods and attitude of the CPM, i.e., ‘bad governance’. ‘… tragedies like Nandigram are inherent in the operation of a neo-liberal policy regime. It is to camouflage this that that the proponents of neoliberalism are attributing the Nandigram tragedy to the so-called “Stalinist” methods of the CPI(M)’ (‘In the Aftermath of Nandigram’, Economic and Political Weekly, 26 May 2007).This mode of argument is nothing but pure economic determinism, an unfolding of the inexorable logic of a systemic regime. Policy-makers could draw a very different conclusion from his argument and use it as an input in policy making. Given the corporate nature of India’s ‘industrialisation’, the poor people’s consent for government policies is an absolute must if the tragedies of the ‘Nandigram’ sort are to be avoided in the future. For Malini Bhattacharya, ‘Nandigram’ occurred because the party had failed to allay the rural people’s genuine fears of what industrialisation and the associated displacement held out for them if a special economic

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On 11 November, in a final lightning offensive the ‘Red Army’ of the CPM armed cadre recaptured all the Nandigram villages while the state government pitched in by holding the just-arrived CRPF back at Tamluk. The local police had already been instructed to stay inside the barracks. The victory was celebrated by exploding crude bombs and by planting red flags in all those villages which were under the influence of Bhumi Uchched Pratirodh Committee.61 All the houses of the protest leaders were burnt down in order to strike fear in the hearts of local peasantry. Next day the Chief Minister Bhattacharjee said that armed CPM cadre were ‘morally and legally justified’ entering Nandigram. ‘Our people retaliated in desperation. The opposition has been paid back in the same coin.’62 This tone of defiant arrogance provoked many sections of the left intelligentsia in Calcutta and on 14 November a rally, in which 60,000 participated, was organised by them to protest against atrocities in Nandigram.63 In a damning indictment of the CPI(M) led left-front government to prevent the Nandigram outrage, the country’s premier human rights body, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC),came to the conclusion that the state government should bear the responsibility for the loss of life and property following the attack there by the CPM cadre. ‘The state police and administration rather than preventing the CPI(M) cadres from indulging in violence, played a partisan role and helped them throughout the period from early January to November.’64 The left-front government had come to power in West Bengal on 21 June 1977. Speaking on the occasion of completing 30 years of left-front rule, Buddhadeb reiterated the party’s new vision: ‘Only new industries, small scale and big ones, knowledge based and engineering, can provide jobs to the young generation. We are answerable to them and the opposition needs to understand that. This government is for the proletariat. With their support we will go ahead.’65 But the way ahead is zone was established in the area (‘Nandigram and the question of Development’, Economic and Political Weekly, 26 May 2007). 61 The Indian Express, 13 November 2007 ; The Telegraph, 12 November 2007. 62 The Indian Express, 14 November 2007. 63 The Telegraph, 15 November 2007. 64 ‘Nandigram Violence: NHRC Indicts Bengal Govt.’, The Indian Express, 10 February 2008. 65 The Statesman, 22 June 2007. In Asansol, Bhattacharjee had laid the foundation of the ` 2,200 crore Mejia B expansion project of DVC.

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not very clear and not without serious hurdles. Communists would have to persuade the unwilling farmers to sell their lands to various corporate houses. ‘The appalling tragedy of Nandigram will haunt the left for a long time to come.’66 Can the long history of the Communist movement in India (1920– 2007) tell us anything about the contemporary politics today? In theory, the Communists can always claim to be anti-communalism and antiimperialism simultaneously. The upholding of this ‘theoretical politics’ is the thread which runs through the entire history since 1920. But in practice, as choices have to be made from issue to issue, this theory has always taken the form of an unresolvable dilemma: Should they be more anti-communalism or more anti-imperialist on a particular issue at a particular moment in time? At the beginning of the formation of this government in 2004 they were more anti-communalism. Towards the end of its tenure they have turned out to be more anti-imperialism, and tacitly, even if at an ideological distance, placed themselves on the same side as the BJP. This had happened even during the formation of the Janata Dal government, when the circumstances had forced them to support a government in which ‘Sangh’ was a partner. Before independence, it was the sharpening of this dilemma, embodied in their desire to create an alternative to the Congress-led movement, that had taken them to a point where the undivided CP, later on much to its regret, found itself supporting the Muslim League and its movement for Pakistan. Now BJP has come to replace Muslim league in independent India. Given the fact that the two big nationalist formations are currently contesting for power at the Centre, the Communists would always be forced to side with one of them, either openly or tacitly, not withstanding their claim of standing at an ‘ideological distance’ vis-à-vis both of them. Even the so-called third front would require the open or tacit support of one or the other formation for it to form a government at the Centre. Can the Indian Communists ever create an opposition movement to the Indian National Congress without opening up the political space for the BJP or any other right-wing formation to rush in and utilise it for replacing the Congress? If our reading of Communist history provides us with any guidelines, the answer is clear ‘no’. 66 Prabhat Patnaik, ‘In the Aftermath of Nandigram’, Economic and Political Weekly, 26 May 2007.

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The process of negotiations resulting in the Independence of India was something very confusing to the Communists for the simple reason as this Independence was not won under their leadership. As has been demonstrated in these volumes, the series of mass movements led by Gandhi within the framework of non-constitutional and noninsurrectionary strategy did not fit into their received Marxist theory. What had happened in ‘1947’? Even today, among the Communists, there is no unanimity on the answer to this question. For the Communists, with only few exceptions, ‘either 15 August 1947, was a downright betrayal of the revolution or it was a compromise for sharing of power between the colonialists and the Indian capitalist-landlord bloc’.67 Such is the blinding power of their outdated Marxist theory that it could stop individuals from seeing even the obvious. Their brand of Marxism has told them that it was only the proletariat led by the Communist Party that could win independence by overthrowing the colonial state through an armed revolution. Either the freedom won by the Congress was false or their Marxism theory was false! To them the answer was obvious: India’s freedom was false. (Hence the slogan: yeh aazadi juthi hai!) Genuine freedom could not have been won because the struggle was not led by the working class through the Communist Party. Since its very birth the Communist movement has continued to be confronted with the singular question: What should be its attitude towards the Indian National Congress? To this question it could give three possible answers in theory but only two answers in practice: 1. It should support the Congress Party and its leadership, that is, Jawaharlal Nehru (later on Indira Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi). 2. It should not support but oppose the Congress Party or its leadership. 3. It should support as well as oppose the Congress Party and its leadership (the so-called formula of ‘unity as well as struggle’. This cleaver formula was worked out in fifties by those ‘centrists’ who did not want to join either of the above two factions and also wanted to stop them from immediately splitting the party).

67 Mohit Sen, ‘A Traveller and the Road: The Journey of an Indian Communist’, New Delhi, 2003, p. 292.

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In actuality, they as well as everybody else knew that the party could not but end up either supporting or opposing the Congress Party. These pragmatic approaches were then clothed in the Marxist clichés acceptable to all, including the rank and file, to give a particular ‘political line’ the semblance of ‘Marxist theory’. After all, had not Lenin already worked out the theory about the ‘duel role of the bourgeoisie’ in the colonial countries! The starting point of both the factions was that the Congress was a party of the ‘bourgeoisie’—an ambiguous Marxist category understood differently by various factions of the Indian Communists. Some ‘more theoretical minded’ Indian Communists could even further chop it up into three pieces: big, middle and small, depending upon the need to justify a political attitude. Obviously, those who were interested in supporting the Congress and Nehru (later on Indira Gandhi or Sonia Gandhi) characterised this bourgeoisie as progressive and anti-imperialist while those who wanted to oppose it characterised it as anti-people and always on the look out to surrender to the imperialist forces. In June 1947, the Central Committee of the Communist Party gathered in Bombay to make sense of the Congress acceptance of the Mountbatten Plan and to work out a policy towards the Nehru government. P.C. Joshi was still in command of the party. Unlike the Russians who had denounced the Mountbatten Plan as a betrayal of the nationalist cause and attacked Nehru government for accepting it, the CPI in effect declared the ‘settlement’ to be a step ahead and pledged the party to support the Nehru government. ‘The Communist Party will fully cooperate with the national leadership in the proud task of building the Indian republic on democratic foundations, thus paving the way to Indian unity.’68 Moreover, the ‘concessions’ had been ‘extracted’ through the continuous pressure of the Congress. Even R.P. Dutt had analysed it as an ‘enforced retreat of imperialism’. For Joshi, even when clothed in convoluted Communist jargon, the transfer of power had taken place in India and the freedom had been won by the Congress party and its leadership. It was for this confession that P.C. Joshi was not only humiliated and denounced in 1948 but was to be damned for a life time. In plain terms, 68

Statement of Policy, People’s Age, 29 June 1947.

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Joshi was asking the CPI to rally behind Nehru and support his policies. Joshi’s willingness to extend support to the Congress government was strongly influenced by the outbreak of communal war between Hindus and Muslims and the newly emerged anti-Congress mood among the Hindus. For Joshi, the threat of communalism, he called it a threat of ‘rightwing reaction’ to India’s democracy, was to remain as the primary faultline of modern India’s politics. The Indian revolution of the kind envisaged by the Communists was no longer on the horizon. Joshi had forgotten that his young comrades, many of whom came from upper castes and classes, had joined the party precisely because it had successfully sold them the idea of revolution, that is, ‘turning the world upside down’. Why join a CP which was doing everything else except claiming to make a revolution in the near future? Perhaps it would not be incorrect to say that Indian Communists have always lived in their imagination the life of ‘professional revolutionaries’ even when they were actively engaged in electoral campaigns.69 Later on, in 1948, this political line—‘Joshi line’—was branded as ‘reformist deviation’ by the dominant leadership led by B.T. Ranadhive. ‘Joshi line’ was projected as specifically Indian version of ‘revisionism’, a dangerous pitfall which the party was supposed to avoid in the future. After this, Joshi and his supporters had been practically silenced for the ‘crime’ of taking the party away from the path of revolution. Under the leadership of B.T. Ranadive the pendulum of Communist policy had swung to the opposite extreme. Since 1928, drunk on the heady cocktail of what M.N. Roy had called ‘Reason, Revolution and Romanticism’ the Indian Communists had lived in a sort of ‘dream’ of an imagined revolution. Soon Joshi line was forgotten, and Ranadive’s new political line transported them to that familiar ‘dream world’ of revolution once again. He was known among the ranks as a tough-minded Communist of true Stalinist mould who would not hesitate to ruthlessly wield the ‘weapon’ of Marxist theory against his supposedly revisionist opponents. Nobody could match his skills for quoting relevant Marxist texts in the innerparty struggles for power and supremacy. Unlike Joshi, who had devoted 69

After the Party had surrendered weapons in Telangana, P. Sundarayya had ‘some arms hidden in some dumps in the Telangana area for future use since he was convinced that at some time the armed people’s democratic revolution would break out and the long march to Delhi would begin. He stuck to this belief till the day he died’ (Mohit Sen, op. cit., p. 126).

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all his energies to build the party by winning friends and influencing people through his pragmatic methods, Ranadive had mastered the texts of Guru Marxists. This ‘show of strength’ easily disarmed those who dared to confront him on the basis of pragmatic arguments. He was the general secretary of the party during the critical period of 1948–49 when the Communists were following the militant line of armed struggle in Telangana. Soon they began to imagine that the same type of revolutionary situation was building up in the rest of India as well as Pakistan. At the CPI’s second party Congress convened on 28 February 1948, pointing to the agrarian insurrection in Telangana, Ranadive had asserted that the party was entering the new stage of class struggle. ‘Telangana today means communists and communist means Telangana’, he declared. The ‘Political Thesis’ prepared by the Ranadive leadership had concluded that the final phase of the revolution, the phase of ‘armed clashes’ had already arrived in India. As discussed earlier in the book, in an attempt to make revolution on the eve of the Second World War, the large number of leaders and middle-level cadre were all arrested by the colonial state in one coordinated sweep and the party was completely paralysed. The official newspapers of the West Bengal, Kerala and Andhra party committees were suppressed. Even this time the experience of the party was no different. Now, in 1948, the Indian revolution, according to the text-book Marxism, was supposed to begin with a general strike. Ranadive had hoped that the Communist trade unionists in the All India Railway Federation (AIRF) would be able to organise a nation-wide railway strike. Unfortunately for them, the president of the AIRF, Jayaprakash Narayan, settled with the government and the impending strike was called off. But the Communists went ahead according to their plans. Mindlessly prolonging the struggle brought in train massive repression and many Communists were killed during this period. Soon the party leadership realised that let alone making revolution the party did not possess even the resources to lead a successful strike of railway workers. The attempt at making the imaginary ‘Russian Revolution in India’ had failed miserably. But unlike the rest of India, the peasant agrarian uprising was in full swing in Nizam’s Hyderabad, more precisely the Telangana area. This created the illusion for some dreamers within the Andhra section of the party that a Chinese type revolution was maturing in the Indian countryside. Now it was the turn of Andhra peasant leaders to apply Mao Tse-tung’s ideas to give an organized leadership to this agrarian revolution. ‘Our revolution in

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many respects differs from the classical Russian Revolution; and is to a great extent similar to that of the Chinese Revolution.’70 In September 1948, the Indian army marched into Hyderabad and quelled all opposition to the state, including the Communist. The party in Talengana was split and numerous Communists were killed. Thanks to the democratic nature of the Indian State, the Indian Communists survived the failed revolution. Not only that, they were also able to participate in the first general elections thanks to the intervention of Nehru.71 Later on, during the intense inner-party debate,72 the party declared these interventions to stage revolutions as nothing but adventurism that is premature attempts at revolution. Earlier, when Joshi line was implemented, the party had learnt the lesson that the pitfalls of rightwing ‘revisionism’, that is the folly of mindlessly supporting every move of the Congress, must be avoided. Now it learnt its second lesson, the serious danger of following the ‘adventurist line’, that is, the assumption that in India situation was ripe for an armed revolution. But, in theory, the party had not abandoned the idea of revolution altogether. The revolutionary intervention was postponed to some other day in the future. One of the arguments of this three-volume series has been that these ‘mistakes’ were not actually mistakes as misunderstood by the Communists, but were/are the organic result of applying Lenin’s ideas to the Indian situation. The irrelevance of Leninism73 in context of the nature of Indian state has not been admitted openly. Though the idea of revolution was to be postponed permanently by the CPI(M), but even today, the CPI(M) leadership has not yet openly admitted the view, as argued in these volumes, that the violent armed revolution against the contemporary Indian state, a legacy of the colonial state, is an impossibility. And this continues to have its dangerous consequences. For more than 60 years the Indian Communists had dogmatically followed the examples of revolutions in other countries, that is, Russia and China. In 1948–50, the adventurism of Ranadive’s line led Joshi to reassert that his was the correct political line. This trend of political thinking continued and resulted in the CPI’s support to Emergency. 70

Communist, June–July, 1949. Mohit Sen, op.cit., p. 126. 72 For details of the debate see Bipan Chandra (ed.), The Indian Left: Critical Appraisals, New Delhi, 1983, pp. 259–400. 73 See the chapter ‘Irrelevance of Leninism’ in volume 1 of this series. 71

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The majority of the CPI leaders in Telangana had wanted the armed struggle to continue even after the entry of Indian army in 1948. As far as they were concerned, the revolution was proceeding apace but was prematurely withdrawn by the central leadership; and hence had been betrayed. This trend of thinking too continued, and continues even today in the form of various groups of Naxalites. Thus faced with the might of the modern Indian state, the Communist mainstream had split itself into three rivulets each convinced of the correctness of its own political line. Let us place this three-way split in the historical perspective as outlined in these volumes. We have argued in these volumes that after the suppression of the armed revolt of 1857, the British had begun to create a new type of modern state which resembled no one in history.74 The state was supposed to survive and defend itself through an in-built strategy. On the one hand it tried to manipulate and convert all forms of opposition into constitutional forms in order to absorb them by giving small concessions while on the other hand it drove underground all those who frontally attacked this state with the aim of evolving an insurrectionary perspective in the long run. It then took steps to destroy, disorganise and scatter them. In other words it was not difficult for this state to neutralise and contain those forces which either followed the strategy of constitutional opposition (pre-Gandhian phase of the Congress) or attempted to stage armed revolution to overthrow the British rule (the Bengal revolutionaries, Ghadar Party and Bhagat Singh). Gandhi and many in the Congress had come to the conclusion, and that too fairly early, that the modern state rooted in a constitutional framework, however rickety it might be, can never be overthrown through an armed revolt. To attempt an armed violent opposition to this state was to fall in its trap as it was already designed to effectively deal with it. Gandhi succeeded in avoiding these two pitfalls, of constitutionalist politics and insurrectionary politics, and evolved a new paradigm to confront the colonial state—the paradigm of peaceful mass movements. In the language of international communism, here was a strategy which was neither ‘revolutionary’ (in the sense of armed revolution) nor ‘reformist’ (in sense of mere constitutionalism or parliamentarianism) but a strategy of ‘revolutionary reformism’, that is, of transformation of the state by shifting the balance 74

For details see the respective first two chapters of Volumes 1 and 2.

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of power. This was Gandhi’s enduring legacy, even Gramsci took note of it, for all those who were interested in transforming the modern state in the pro-poor direction. Like, Lenin and Mao, who had evolved their respective strategies against the feudal states, Gandhi had evolved his strategy to confront the modern state, especially the one rooted in some sort of constitutionalism in order to secure the consent of sections of the population. The focus of all these three strategies was ‘state power’ and the complex mechanisms through which this power was reproduced and exercised. Given India’s parliamentary system and the constitutional framework of the modern Indian state, the only strategy relevant for the Indian Communists is the Gandhian one, that is, the strategy of ‘revolutionary reformism’. But the Communists’ deep Marxist conviction that ‘revolution’ actually meant ‘violent revolution’ does not permit them to accept this fact. How could someone other than a Marxist thinker evolve such a comprehensive strategy? How could they embrace someone’s ideas whom they had consistently denounced? But as we shall demonstrate below, they have been driven by circumstances to occupy the ‘political space’ of this strategy, even if due to purely pragmatic considerations. This is one of the ironies of Indian history. One of the lessons of the evolution of Gandhian strategy was that people with diversity of views could be united only around a shared strategy and not a shared ideology. Political leaders and workers can never unite on the basis of a singularity of ideology (nationalism or Marxism– Leninism). There would always be multiple interpretations of such an ideology (contending discourses) and they would invariably contest with each other, sometimes even violently. Therefore, leftists cannot unite into one big left-wing movement just because they call themselves Marxists/ Leninists or Maoists. In the absence of a shared strategy for the attainment of power the existence of factions would become inevitable. More often than not, over a period, such factions would tend to consolidate and become permanent splits.75 The great debate that the party organised during 1955–56, instead of promoting internal unity further accentuated the ideological fault lines, ultimately leading to the creations of three distinct factions within the party. The factional locations of individual actors were determined not 75 See the chapter ‘The Divided Left: Notes on Pemanent Disunity’, Volume 2 of this series, pp. 254–81.

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only through the articulation of their strategic visions but also by personal equations between the individual leaders. The two political–strategic visions, that is, ‘Joshi line’ vs ‘Ranadive line’, constituted the two polarities within which the spectrum of opinions sought its articulation. Those occupying these polarities described each other with denunciatory labels such as ‘right-wing revisionists’ and ‘left-wing adventurists’(sometime described as ‘radical’ or ‘left’) in order to gain majority, and hence controlling power, within the party. Those who were unwilling to join their ranks were dubbed as ‘centrists’.76 In fact, it was this loosely structured group which continued to maintain the illusion of hope that through discussion and debate the party leaders can evolve a shared political strategy. The changing political situation in India along with three other very important ‘developments’ further deepened the ideological differences within the leadership. These ‘developments’ were the 20th Party Congress of the C.P.S.U.77, formation and dismissal of the first Kerala government (1957–59)78 and the Chinese attack on India in 1962. The arrested section of the Communist leadership sympathetic to the Chinese views by the Indian government precipitated the split, leading to the formation of CPI(M) by this faction in 1964.79 The ‘neither this nor that’ or the ‘middle-road strategy’ of the new party, that is, CPI(M) emerged through a pragmatic, protracted process of ideological distancing from the extremes. The so-called ‘centrists’ did not agree with the extreme ‘left’ but they also did not want the taking over of the party by those whom they called Rightists.80 This is because 76 Ajoy Ghosh, E.M.S. Namboodiripad and Jyoti Basu were considered as the leaders of the ‘centrists’ by their opponents. Pro-congress ‘constitutionalist trend’ was led by P.C. Joshi, Ravi Narayan Reddy, Bhowani Sen and Somnath Lahiri. The leaders of the ‘insurrectionist trend’ were P. Sundaraya, M. Basavapunniah, H.S. Surjeet, N. Prasad Rao and Hanumantha Rao. 77 For an excellent and insightful discussion of the crisis in the international Communist movement and its impact on Indian Communism see Bhupinder Brar, Explaining Communist Crises, Delhi, 1994. 78 T.J. Nossiter, Marxist State Governments in India, London, 1988. 79 Ross Mallick, Indian Communism: Opposition, Collaboration, Institutionalisation, Oxford, Delhi, 1994. 80 In the context of Communist movement the words ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ figure only as relative terms describing political trends unpalatable to a particular communist speaker or the author. For example, Dipankar Bhattacharya who stands left of CPM in ideological leanings, sees a ‘Right-wing shift’ in CPM politics. While for those who stand left of him, i.e., the Communist Party (Maoist) he uses the category ‘anarchist’. Dipankar Bhattacharya

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they did not want the CPI to become an appendage of the Nehru-led Congress. This was also the mental make-up of a large number of provincial leaders. E.M.S. Namboodiripad and Jyoti Basu were the two important champions of this ‘middle-road strategy’.81 A party document declared in 1964: ‘At present we shall have to utilise the parliamentary forum as much as possible but instead of bestowing all attention on this we shall have to take steps which are complementary to the work there-we shall have to lay stress mainly on mass movements.’82 The first split (1964) was supposed to have purged the ‘Revisionists’, that is, ‘Dange group’ while the second split (1967–68) sought to get rid of the ‘dogmatists’, that is, those who had wanted the party to actively work for creating a revolutionary situation and were responsible for ‘Naxalbari’ upsurge of the poor peasantry. Both the splits were endorsed by the Communist Party of China for holding high the banner of Marxism–Leninism! Superficially, the strategy of the CPM—a strategy of avoiding ‘politics of constitutionalism’ (CPI) on the one hand and ‘insurrectionary politics’ (Naxalism) on the other—resembles the Gandhian strategy as elaborated in these volumes. But two very important elements of Gandhian strategy are missing here—an honest conviction in non-violent mass movement and a genuine belief in the ‘democratic’ part of the organisational principle of ‘democratic centralism’. A party could be called a ‘democratic’ in which various views and opinions could publicly contend with each other, dissenting ideas are not only tolerated but even allowed to be expressed openly before the policy/or ‘the political line’ is taken as finally settled. In a way working out a non-violent strategy for social change and democratic functioning are the two sides of the same

succeeded Vinod Mishra as the general secretary of the CPI (M-L). The two extreme left groups—the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) and the CPI(M-L) People’s War have merged to form the Communist Party (Maoist) (The Statesman, Kolkata 17 November 2007). Interview with Dipankar Bhattacharya: ‘No Left Content left in CPI(M)’. 81 E.M.S. pointed towards this direction in his pamphlet ‘Revisionism and dogmatism in the CPI’, New Delhi, 1963. According to him the new party line, whatever that might be, must be worked out by avoiding ‘Joshi Line’ as well as ‘Ranadhive Line’. In 1963, Basu and 20 other party leaders dissociated themselves from the leftists, whom they denounced as ‘diehard dogmatists to be fought as ruthlessly as revosionists’ (Ross Mallick, Indian Communism, Oxford University Press, Delhi 1994, pp. 44–45. 82 ‘Bartoman Paristhiti Communist Party Karmonniti’ quoted in Ross Mallick, p. 78.

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political process. In such a party there is no place for ‘vigilante cadre’ always waiting in the wings to be mobilised for rallies and ‘street fighting’ to subdue the opponents. Given his belief in the violent seizure of state power, Lenin’s conception of the ‘underground party’ was of a party of ‘professional revolutionaries’ and not of a party that depended upon ‘vigilante cadre’. In this sense, the Communist Parties of India are not ‘Leninist Parties’. Given the democratic polity of India that allows the Indian Communists full freedom to peacefully organise and mobilise the poor, they have rightly dispensed with the Leninist notion of the party. But their rejection of ‘Leninism’ as such is only half-hearted. They are ‘mass parties’ with huge mansions as offices and are designed to fight elections in a democratic polity. They are, in fact, middle-class parties with their membership running into lakhs. The CPM’s utter paralysis during the Emergency (1975–77) proves the point that such parties become dysfunctional as soon as the democratic polity disappears.83 Interestingly, it was the spontaneous mass electoral support in the wake of the Emergency that gave a landslide victory to the left front in Bengal in 1977. But the Communists do not fully trust the democratic system. That is why they continue to call themselves ‘Communist parties’ and are reluctant to become genuine social democratic parties. In actuality, their historical evolution under conditions of democracy has led them to become hybrid parties. Their leaders have artificially grafted ‘social democratic’ variety of party organisation upon another, that is, the Leninist one. No wonder, the CPM continues to talk of revolution while in practice it largely behaves like a social democratic party except on few occasions when it summons its armed cadre into bloody action. For them democracy continues to be an intrinsically bourgeois system, à la Lenin. It is because of this reason that their attitude towards violence continues to be a ‘tactical one’. In Bengal, these ‘Vigilante Cadre’ were first recruited to eliminate the Naxalites. Very soon the CPM was forced to adopt it for sheer survival against Naxalite attacks. Today, irrespective of ideology, this ‘form’ of grassroots organisation has become a normal part of the political culture in Bengal. Both, Trinamool and CPM, had experimented with this form 83 The review report of the CPM’s Jullunder Congress in 1978 admitted its failure to organise a democrat movement against the Emergency. For details see ibid., pp. 162–64.

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of mobilisation in Nandigram. Caught between the crossfire, the Bengali intelligentsia, for the first time, is slowly awakening to the threat posed by this anti-democratic culture of the mainstream political parties. The rally on 14 November was the first of its kind that was not organised by a political party and yet had a turnout of 60,000. It was a protest not only against the brutal acts of state repression that was carried on in Nandigram by the Buddhadeb government but also against the political culture of violence.84 In West Bengal, thanks to 30 years of left rule, the relationship between the intelligentsia and the CPI(M) and its government has been particularly cosy. It was the first ‘rally against the established left. People of the left were expressing their utter disapproval of and disenchantment with the CPI(M), the way it functions, its arrogance, its authoritarianism and complete lack of any sense of responsibility’.85 At the surface the sequence of events seem to be a series of acts of mere retaliation. In Nandigram, 11 months earlier some people had forced local supporters of the CPI(M) to leave their homes, destroyed bridges, dug up roads and isolated Nandigram from the rest of Bengal. They did not allow the supporters of CPM to return to their homes and had begun to treat a group of villages as a sort of ‘liberated zone’ beyond the reach of law and order. Then a sort of armed contest began between the two groups to expand the area under their respective control and the police was asked to stay away from these violent assertions. Daily armed skirmishes took place between the two groups of villagers and police simply looked on for months. All along, the CPM continued to maintain 84 After Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s comment of ‘paying back in the same coin’ in the context of ‘recapture of Nandigram’ the Bengal intelligentsia came out on the streets.

There was Aparana Sen on day one walking down the potholed streets. There was Soumitra Chatterjee on day two joining forces with the “alternative” dissenters. There was Mrinal Sen walking in both rallies and Sunil Ganguly in neither. One cause sharply split into two like never before. (The Sunday Statesman Magazine, 8th Day, p. 19. ‘What a Full and Fragmented Week’) 85

In the rally walked people who would all broadly identify themselves as belonging to the left. There were quite a few who had invested a lifetime in the Communist movement as workers in the cultural front, as writers and intellectuals who, without actually being members of a Communist Party had worked in various ways to help the CPI and the CPM. There was a huge and amorphous mass of people who, in elections, had voted for left candidates (The Telegraph, 25 November 2007).

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that the villagers on the other side were led by the Trinamool–Naxalite armed cadre. After waiting for eleven months, the vigilante groups or armed cadre of the CPM, with the tacit support of the state bureaucracy and police ‘recaptured’ the villages in which their domination had been challenged. Time had come to re-establish the domination of CPM in these villages, through not the police, that is, the force of law and order, but through the violent assertion of their armed cadres. The logic of domination demanded that excessive force must be used to teach a lesson to one’s enemy before your hegemony begins to be questioned if not challenged, at other places. What had actually happened in Nandigram? In the words of someone who knows the CPM inside out: If the government had learnt a little from the protests, clashes and the blood-letting in Singur, the government would have been more careful in Nandigram. But that was not to be, it remained as arrogant as ever …. The loyal followers of the ruling party declared revolt and those who were not with them were driven out. The onus of this rests on the government as well. For 11 months, complete silence and inactivity were carefully maintained. No political or administrative alternative was explored. Suddenly, a new plot was hatched. As has been repeatedly admitted by Bengal Home Secretary, the police was instructed to remain inactive. Mercenaries were collected from across the state. Workers of the ruling party encircled Nandigram from all directions. Birds, bees, flies, journalists—no one was given the permission to penetrate the blockade. And the light brigade of the ruling party charged in, beat the wayward militants of Nandigram to a pulp and into submission. Those who had fled returned. However, the moment of their return saw a parallel and opposite incident. Houses were torched anew; those who were inside Nandigram were butchered in a massive celebration of revenge … Ninety percent of the party members have joined after 1977, 70 percent after 1991 … there has been a rising dominance of ‘anti-socials’. For different reasons, every political party has to lend patronage to ‘anti-socials’; they remain in the background and are called into duty at urgent times. In the 1970s, these anti-socials had reached the top rung of the state Congress. I fear the same fate is awaiting the communist party.86 86

‘The Party’s Over’, The Hindustan Times, 19 November 2007. Ashok Mitra, an old Communist, is one of the four ministerial colleagues who took the oath as members of the first Left Front led by Jyoti Basu on 21 June 1977. He is a former finance minister of West Bengal and a former Rajya Sabha member.

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On 25 November 2007, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee admitted that a ‘mistake’ was committed in the way the government went about the proposal to set up a chemical hub in Nandigram.87 ‘Nandigram-bhool hoy-echhey, aamra shorey eshech-hi’ (We committed mistakes in Nandigram and we have withdrawn). CPM is a huge mass party with extensive organisational network in rural areas of Bengal. But according to Ashok Mitra 70 per cent of the members have joined the party after 1991. Who are these people who come to constitute the backbone of the party in rural Bengal? The available data suggests that the well-off peasants, if not the rich, have joined the party in big numbers and are using it to serve their own class interests. In rural Bengal CPM is no longer the party of rural poor even when it continues to provide some sort of protection to them against violent oppression and highhandedness. The Motorbike-borne CPM cadre that swept into Nandigram on 12 November to recapture the villages for the Party were the progeny of this rural red-peasantry. According to the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGA) 100 days per year of guaranteed wage employment must be provided to every poor household. Interestingly, only 14 person days of employment were registered in West Bengal in 2006–07. While in Rajasthan the average was 85 days followed by Madhya Pradesh with the average of 68 person days of employment. These figures must be correlated to the figures of poverty ratio and food inadequacy. In the case of Rajasthan, the poverty ratio is 10 per cent points less than that of West Bengal. While West Bengal had highest percentage of rural household (11.9 per cent) suffering from various degrees of food inadequacy. The figures for perceived food inadequacy per rural household in percentage of total rural households for other states are as follows: Bihar (2.8), Madhya Pradesh (2.0), Orissa (6.1), and Uttar Pradesh (1.7). Given these conditions one would have expected a higher performance of creation of person days of employment in rural Bengal. The report of the National Commission for Enterprises in unorganised sector (August 2007) shows

87

This is the first time the chief minister has spoken on Nandigram at length since 13 November when he tried to justify the violence unleashed by CPM cadre in Nandigram saying the Bhoomi Uchched Pratirodh Committee supporters ‘were paid back in their own coin’ (The Telegraph, 26 November 2007).

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that 95.4 per cent of agricultural workers in West Bengal get wages much below the national minimum wage of ` 66 per day. Their daily earnings hovered around ` 45–46 for males and ` 30–32 for females. Therefore the dismal performance in the creation of person days of employment cannot be attributed to the attraction of higher wages in the market. The Planning Commission’s study on the implementation of NREGA has come up with some startling figures. In West Bengal, as on March 2007, only 40.2 per cent of households were registered under this scheme as against 94.9 per cent in Rajasthan. Why is the percentage of registration low in Bengal when compared to many other backward states? It is only in Bengal that the implementation of the NREGA was carried on by the panchayats. And who were predominant elements in these rural panchayats? After the first panchayat elections in Bengal in 1979 a survey was conducted by Satyabrata Sen, the then advisor to the government. Only 7 per cent of the elected gram panchayat members were landless agricultural workers and bargadars. The other 93 per cent had landed interests. The survey was repeated after the second panchayat elections in 1983. Results of the second survey confirmed the findings of the first one. In the last 30 years the landed interests have consolidated their control and influence over the weaker sections in the Bengal countryside.88 On 5 February, police fired on a group of Forward Bloc demonstrators at Dinhata in Cooch Behar district of West Bengal. These demonstrators were demanding proper implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 for ‘enhancement of livelihood security of the poor and destitute households’.89 One of the reasons for the poor political commitment on the part of the states, including West Bengal, is that, if successful, the Act is likely to disturb the political equilibrium and affect the vested interests of the power elite adversely, particularly at the micro level. The NREGA is not merely an economic act, it is also a 88 This discussion about the condition of agricultural workers is based on the article by D. Bandyopadhyay in ‘A Betrayal of Workers’ Cause’, The Sunday Statesman, 7 October 2007, p. 9. 89 The Statesman, 14 February 2008. In an interesting article written in defence of this scheme Jayati Ghosh observes: ‘… the way the NREGA has been framed and the desired mode of its implementation amount to no less than a social and political revolution.’ But she does not explain why its implementation remains lackadaisical in Bengal countryside. Jayati Ghosh, ‘National Rural Employment Guarantee Act’ Frontline, 15 February 2009, pp. 88–89.

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political act, which has the potential of changing the power structure in India’s rural society.90 STRATEGY FOR DEMOCRATIC TRANSFORMATION

One of the central themes of these volumes have been that the Communist Party which was founded in the 1920s and was affiliated to the Third International was designed to organise armed revolutions and forcible seizure of state power. It was not designed to participate in the elections to be held periodically, win majorities, form governments and design and implement policies within the framework of a democratic state structure presiding over the development of a capitalist economy. Since the formation of the first Communist government in Kerala, the Undivided Communist Party had struggled to transform itself into a later type of party and in the process got split twice. We have argued in these volumes how the Indian state, even the colonial state, defied the logic of Communist theory and strategy from the very beginning. We have also demonstrated that the colonial as well as the democratic state in India generated four major forms of politics irrespective of ideological trends; two of them mainstream while the other two for ever doomed to remain on the margin. These four forms of politics were: extreme right, centre right, centre left and extreme left. It is very clear from this structure of democratic politics that the only two viable forms of national politics, viable in the sense that only they stand the chance of winning majorities and forming governments at the commanding Centre are ‘centre right’ and ‘centre left’. In other words, the ‘extreme right’ (the RSS brand) and ‘extreme left’ (the Communist Party brand) forms of politics will never be in a position by themselves to constitute the power at the commanding Centre as singular political formations. These two extreme forms of politics might continue to repeatedly come to power at the provincial level by inventing a mobilising ideology, the core of which would always be the strong appeal of caste, class or regional culture. But this very success could easily become a hurdle in their path of seeking to constitute themselves as the broader form of national politics required to capture power at the Centre, that is, of becoming a 90 For details of the argument see Indira Hirway, ‘Plan for Long Term’, The Indian Express, 2 February 2008.

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‘centre right’ or a ‘centre left’ formation. The history of BJP seeking power at the Centre under the leadership of Vajpayee is the history of striving to solve this riddle of Indian politics: how to work out a system of alliances so as to constitute a political formation which somewhat resembles to the ideological complexion of being a ‘centre right’ formation. Now the Indian Communists under the leadership of CPI(M) have declared to work out a somewhat similar strategy with the mistaken assumption that ultimately the Indian National Congress would be forced to support a multi-party alliance under their leadership, and like the BJP they will be able to constitute a political formation which will resemble with the complexion of a ‘centre-left’ formation. By the end of 2007, the CPI(M) leadership had realised that they have got themselves into a permanent trap after their decision to extend support to the Congress-led government from the outside. If Communist aim was that the ‘rightwing communal fascist’ BJP must be kept out of power then they must continue to support or the Congress till the time the BJP threat continues to loom large. In other words, they must follow Joshism, that is, they must commit to this political line not as a short-term tactic but as a strategy. Such a strategy was suggested by Joshi vis-à-vis Nehru’s government immediately after independence. Let it be stated here that the CPI(M) was created as a separate party in 1964 precisely on the rejection of this Joshi line. The CPI(M) was faced with the question: how to get out of this politics of support/alliance with the Congress precisely at a time when a right-wing party’s take-over threat is not merely a supposition but an actuality? This could be done only by following the well-trodden path before independence, that is, by going back to the false assumption on the basis of which the Communist movement itself was founded in 1928, that is that the Indian National Congress was a proimperialist party, by implication also suggesting that Congress’s proimperialism if not more, at least, was equally dangerous. Today, there is no other way in which CPI(M) could reject the Joshi line and once again return to its foundational assumption of antiCongressism. But that way lies an other trap: logically step by step, it will be compelled to practice the ‘politics of convergence’ with the BJP. Even when at an ideological distance, it would be working for the shared project: how to dislodge the Congress from its position of power at the Centre by mobilising all anti-Congress forces? But the objective result of such a politics would only be to clear the path for the advance of the BJP-type formation. Historically speaking, the Communists are trapped

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in this politics because of their inability to reconstitute themselves as a centre-left movement. They are attempting to solve this real problem of becoming a broad ‘centre-left movement’ by cobbling all kinds of coalitions. This two-fold trap for Indian Communists emerges from their basic misunderstanding that politics of a democratic state could be conducted by artificially modifying the Communist Party ‘structure’, originally invented as a party of professional revolutionaries à la Lenin, designed to violently seize power by organising and staging an armed revolt of the masses. Since India’s Independence and birth of democratic polity, the two very important historical results which could not be anticipated by the Communists, have been pragmatically trying to transform themselves into mass Communist parties geared to win majorities in parliamentary elections. The promised debate regarding the unbridgeable chasm between the pragmatic politics and revolutionary theory has continued to be postponed over the years. It seems that the Communists have selfconsciously maintained ‘pragmatic politics’ and ‘revolutionary theory’ as two separate registers. Somewhere the Communist leadership knows in its heart of hearts that their theory of Marxism–Leninism does not cohere well with their democratic practice of empowering the poor and oppressed through the path of ‘constitutional communism’. But opening debate on this critical question would be nothing short of opening a Pandora’s box. Such a debate could finally force many of them to the conclusion that Marxism–Leninism was in fact irrelevant to their current politics of participating in elections, forming governments and evolving pro-poor policies even while seeking to build capitalist economy in the states under their control. Their actual policies were somewhat similar to the policies of the labour government in England. Morally speaking, that would be an honest political position. But by following this kind of honest approach, the Communists run the risk of a very dangerous consequence, that is, this might lead to the disintegration of the party as it stands today. This real fear has created the conviction that commitment to Marxism–Leninism might not serve as a ‘revolutionary guide’ to their pragmatic politics of building capitalist economy in Bengal but at least it continues to keep the party ranks united. Moreover, the revolutionary prestige of Marxism–Leninism continues to sustain the belief of the cadre in the inevitability of revolution. Thus even a redundant theory of Marxism–Leninism, does serve more than one purpose. Even while the

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Communists have been trying their best to build ‘mass parties’, a uniquely novel form invented by Indian Communists to suit the actuality of democratic politics in this country, they have consistently refused to interrogate their theoretical beliefs. Hoping to steer clear of the above mentioned two traps, since January 2008, the Communists have begun to put forward the idea of a ‘third front’. The left parties have asked the United National Progressive Alliance (UNPA) to work with them on a ‘third alternative’ and launch a ‘joint struggle’ against the Congress-led UPA government.91 But this time there will be no Jyoti Basu around to lead them into the government, even if they are lucky enough to be successful in the numbers game. The strategy of ‘third alternative’ or ‘third front’ advocated by the Communists is a strategy to somehow come to power by replacing the Congress. This is not a strategy for building a new type of capitalism and pro-poor society. It is an acute symptom of the failure of the Communists to reconstitute themselves as ‘centre-left’ movement. By pursuing the politics of ‘third alternative’, the Communists are, once again, trying to create a political situation where the Congress not only fails to win a big majority but also rendered incapacitated as far as formation of the government at the centre is concerned. The fact that the younger leadership has come back to this political line once again is an explicit admission that in 1996 the CPI(M) committed ‘a historic blunder’ when it did not allow Jyoti Basu to become the Prime Minister. Now they are hoping for the history to repeat itself. ‘1996’ was indeed a very dramatic moment in the history of Indian politics. All non-BJP political formations were not only looking up to the Communists but begging to lead them. In this context, it is important to know what precisely had happened when Jyoti Basu was offered the chance to become Prime Minister of India. … in India we have reached a situation where, knowing fully well who I am, what my philosophy is, what my beliefs are, they invited me, all

91 The Indian Express, 27 February 2008. ‘It is my appeal to the UNPA leaders that the time has come for us to work towards the formation of a Third Alternative’, said CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat, addressing a farmers rally organised by the UNPA. While the CPI general secretary A.B. Bardhan reminded the UNPA leaders that Left parties found no ‘difference’ over the issues raised by UNPA.

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of them together, unanimously, to sit on the Prime Minister’s chair. Because there was nobody else, they said, to stop the BJP…92

Explaining the logic of his allies, Basu observed: They said, ‘you have been talking of a Third Alternative, Your party has been the main architect of this concept, and now you are saying that you will not take this responsibility’. In fact in the midst of election campaign, at the later stage, they sent us a message that we should not go on saying at every meeting that we will not join the government, that people are talking about a third alternative and we will think about it when the time comes. Then we said we cannot do it because our central committee resolution (preventing us from joining a government in Delhi) stands. So we called an emergency meeting of the central committee and there, by a majority, I don’t know how many votes, 35 to 20 or something like that—the decision was made to (keep out). I was in the minority. Surjeet was also in the minority.

Sitaram Yechury and Prakash Karat were among the Central Committee members opposed to Basu becoming Prime Minister of India. Interestingly, this is how Basu narrates the arguments used by those opposed to his being Prime Minister: The usual things (short laugh) like these are bourgeois parties .... But we are with them …. When V.P. Singh was there it was the same thing: BJP was there, and we told him we cannot share a platform with you, but we will support you from outside. This time the argument was that we have disparate elements, from various regions they have come, good thing 13 parties have got together. They have fought the BJP and Congress. We thought: do they have any differences? We say at the moment they do not have any differences, but at some point they will have to have differences. See that they have common programme. That was our argument. That was the argument of the majority of the central committee.93 The minority thinking was: since we have the experience, we know these people, we can keep them together for as long as possible. If we were there we would see that the programmes would be somewhat carried

92 93

Interview with Jyoti Basu, The Asian Age, 1 January 1997. Ibid.

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out, much better than what they would do if we were not there in the government. This was the main argument: that they would not be able to carry out the programme, because their thinking is different. Our argument was: this cannot last five years. If we are there, much more than the others we can make them accept some policies, put them before the country, whatever the limits are. You can’t remove every obstacle, that is not possible; but we could do something for self-reliance, for the countryside, for panchayats, all that we can push through. Anti-poverty programmes: it is there but it does not reach the people. So we can do that much better … But the minimum programme was there, and we could have implemented it much better than others. Because we have the experience, nothing more; we have been running a government with so many parties for the last twenty years. Earlier also we worked with Ajoy Mukherjee who came out of the Congress.94

It is rationally difficult to grasp why was the majority opposed to Jyoti Basu becoming Prime Minister when the inherent logic of their practice of ‘constitutional communism’ was pushing them in the direction of formation of coalition governments of the third alternative. It was a failure of imagination; and such an imagination is ultimately rooted in a theoretical conviction. The path of ‘constitutional communism’ followed by the CPI(M) continues to be a pragmatic practice without its logical future being anticipated and illuminated by an adequate theory of democratic transformation of existing power relations in society. Earlier we thought they would never allow us to function even in the states, but things changed. But we never discussed about the Centre, we thought it was absolutely a dream now, it would come later. But things have happened since then: in the Centre also we have to play a part. That is not in our party document, so we said we have to update that programme. Then the argument came: how do we support a central government that is not in our programme.95

Interestingly, though Jyoti Basu was clearly in favour of leading the government of the third alternative at the Centre, but even he has not reflected very clearly about an other scenario, an equally possible scenario,

94 95

Ibid. Ibid.

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as framed in the following question by M.J. Akbar, the editor of Asian Age in this interview: Q. You have a problem with the Congress, but not with those who left it, and in fact they are beginning to rejoin it. If today the Congress accepts the Common minimum programme of the United Front, will the CPM support a Congress government. A. It is a big ‘if ’. Q. The Congress will do anything to come to power. Their MPs have not come to Delhi to drink coffee. A. I cannot discuss that because, as I have been telling you, why don’t they spell out what their policy is?

No wonder the Communists did not seek their share in the government at the Centre even when the government could not survive one day without their support. Once again, it was failure of imagination: they had never imagined that a situation like that could ever emerge at the Centre when they will be called upon to respond to the scenario as sketched above. Now let us return to the question we had asked at the beginning: How much can a Communist change without ceasing to be a ‘Communist’? One thing is certain that the Communist leadership of both the Communist parties does strongly feel the need to change. But do they have the necessary intellectual wherewithal and courage to not only make a clear break with old Marxism and the deep-seated Leninist distrust of democracy? The unambiguous answer to this question must be postponed for some time. Consider this news. Tibetians have protested against the Chinese regime and all over the world. But they have been banned from the streets of Kolkata, the city where the protest rallies are a way of life. The Indian Communists seem to have forgotten that unlike Indonesia and many other countries of Asia, the CPs owe their continued existence to democratic polity in India. ‘So the CPM banning the Tibetian rally in Kolkata is not just democratically abhorrent, not just an embarrassment for India, but chillingly hypocritical.’96 96

The Indian Express, 12 April 2008. ‘There will be no ban on protest rallies by Tibetians in India, the government clarified to China on Friday after Chinese officials asked if the central government would take a cue from the Communist leaders ruling West Bengal.’ (‘No Ban on Anti-China Protests’, The Times of India, 12 April 2008.

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Today, internationally, the leftists are trying their best to re-invent all over the world, especially those who are working in Latin America. The victory of Daniel Ortega in the 5 November presidential elections in Nicaragua signals the dramatic comeback of the Sandinistas after more than 16 years in the political wilderness. But this Ortega is a very different individual than the one who had captured power in 1979. Ortega, on the campaign trail, turned out to be a consummate politician. Though he still professes left-wing views, he has also embraced religion and the market. He has dropped his objections to the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The Cuban and Venezuelan governments vehemently oppose this grouping. He promised to respect the deals the previous right-wing governments had negotiated. Ortega offered an olive branch to the Bush administration by expressing his willingness to do business with Washington and let bygones be bygones.97 Clearly, in their desire for change, the Indian Communists have already begun to make moves, even if slow and half-hearted, in two significant ways: one, realizing the ‘irrelevance of Leninism’; and secondly, appropriating some aspects of the Gandhian strategy. Occasionally, observing Gandhi Jayanti is not enough. Till the time they are not able to embrace Gandhi fully and whole heartedly in the same manner as they have embraced Marx and Lenin, they would not be able to make a paradigmatic break in their ways of thinking and acting.98

97

Frontline, 1 December 2006, p. 52. In October 2002, given the context of Gujarat riots, Indian Communists (including the Revolutionary Socialist Party and the Forward Bloc) celebrated Gandhi’s birth anni-versary, even allowing the distinctly unathiest ‘Sarswati Vandana’ to be sung at the function. Prakash Karat acknowledged that the party is undertaking an ongoing ‘appreciation’ of the Mahatama ‘The Communists have their own critical assessment of Gandhiji in the context of Indian National movement. But at the same time we value Gandhiji’s con-tribution in fighting communal forces’ (The Statesman, 3 October 2002). 98

Epilogue From Naxalbari to Lalgarh: The Continuity of Insurrectionary Politics

We have tried to demonstrate that the history of ideological differences, debates and splits within the Communist movement is inseparably linked to the unresolved dilemma between the idea of ‘armed revolution’ and the logic of the path of ‘constitutional communism’ necessitated by India’s parliamentary system. The idea of the need for an armed revolution in India has continued to persist in the Communist imagination because even those who are steeped in parliamentary politics dare not reject it. This is, because in the heart of their hearts, they know, this would imply, directly or indirectly, the rejection of what is called Marxism–Leninism. Moreover, it was the ideology of ‘reason, revolution and romanticism’ which had brought them into the party, in the first place. It is understandable why they continue to dread the label of traitor to the cause of revolution being hurled at them by the younger generation. Moreover, there was a time in the history of the party, i.e., 1948–51, when the present-day senior leaders of the CPM had used this method of labeling to denounce and denigrate the then General Secretary of the undivided Party, P.C. Joshi. He was a popular leader who was responsible for winning over in large numbers the members of intelligentsia, individuals involved in cultural movements and films to the party. It was because of his organisational ability and popular political vision that

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Communist Party came to resemble a sort of mass party of the poor and middle-class Indians by 1946. Joshi never recovered from that organised campaign of denunciation and died as a broken man. Today’s young leaders know very little about that painful chapter in the history of the party. Therefore, it is understandable why these leaders, even when they do not have any deep-seated conviction in the idea of armed revolution, continue to pay lip service to it. The excuse they use to disagree with the Naxalites is clothed in a cautionary, pragmatic vocabulary: ‘The time for revolution has not yet arrived. The conditions are not yet ripe for an armed revolution in India.’ It is another matter that this refrain has been heard since the Telangana upsurge of 1948 and will continue to be used through the 2020s. Even though the Telangana armed insurrection was suppressed the idea of the armed revolution continued to be cherished by some leaders within the United Party. When the first split took place in 1964, most of these leaders quit the party and formed a new party calling itself CPI (‘Marxist’). The epithet ‘Marxist’ in bracket implied that the other faction of the party, whom they now began calling as ‘right-wing CPI’, was no longer a party that followed the pristine ideology of Marxism–Leninism. When the CPM and its allies formed a ‘Kerala type Government’ in Bengal in 1967, a section of the party in the Naxalbari region now wanted the party leadership to return to the unfinished agenda of Telangana and start arming the poor peasants for an armed revolution. This raised the question of ‘armed revolution’ vs. ‘constitutional communism’ once again and prepared the ground for the second split in the party in 1969. There was an ideological current within the CPM that had continued to harbour the idea of ‘armed revolution’. In many of India’s poorest areas beyond the reach of political parties and administration people have learnt from their experience that it is only the presence of Naxalite armed guards which evokes fear and results in a less oppressive response from local exploiters and the police atrocities. No other political formation has been able to perform this valuable service to the poor to live with dignity and without fear. No wonder, the Naxalites/Maoists have successfully carved out pockets of influence, called the liberated zones by them, in various districts of India. Here, we will be presenting a very condensed version of the ‘Naxalbari’ story, just sufficient to underline the acuteness of the dilemma (armed revolution or constitutional path) that has continued to dog the Indian Communists in the last 60 years since the formation of the Kerala government.

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Naxalbari, half an hour drive from Siliguri in West Bengal is the place that has lent more than just its name to a farmers’ uprising. It had a powerful impact on some sections of the population of contemporary India. Yet, the place itself is like any other in rural Bengal. Currently, the Naxalbari gram panchayat, with its 21 villages, has a population close to 25,000.1 The coming to power of the left-wing government in Bengal was interpreted by the local leadership of the CPM, especially by Charu Mazumdar, who later on became a legendary leader of the movement, as a signal for organising and starting armed activities against the local exploiters. Mazumdar found staunch allies in Kanu Sanyal, Jangal Santhal, Kesab Sarkar, Babulal Biswakarma, Kadam Malik and others who were active members of the CPM. ‘In 1964, when the CPI split and the CPM was formed, Baba showed his undisguised inclination to the Maoist line’, says Abhijit Mazumdar. In May 1967, the first police bullet was fired, triggering a violent phase in the movement. Sabitri Rao, wife of Punjab Rao, yet another name associated with the Naxalite movement, is an eyewitness to the incident. One morning, a few of the men went to till the fields and didn’t return. We suspected that they have disappeared for a drink. But we got worried and scared when they did not return even the next day. A few others went missing the day after too. The next morning some of us hid behind the bushes and watched. As soon as the men would begin tilling, the police would appear and take them away. In the confrontation that followed, inspector Sonam Wangdi was killed by arrows. No one still knows who shot that arrow.

On 25 May, a bigger police contingent arrived in Naxalbari. The police fired at the demonstrators, killing nine women and two children. ‘It was after this incident that the movement lost its agrarian character and became a militant movement.’ In a big rally of peasants and tea garden workers, it was resolved to fight the battle to the finish. Mujibur Rehman said: It is ironical that it was communist party members like Hare Krishna Konar who initially inspired us to grab land from the tyrannical 1 This narrative is largely based on an article ‘It happened in Naxalbari’ by Mouparna Bandyopadhyay in The Sunday Express, 28 June 2009. This article was also published in The Financial Express, 23 June 2011.

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landlords so that it could be distributed to sharecroppers. Yet, they themselves backed out when the time came for action. There is no peaceful way to establishing rights for the poor. The gun is where the answer lies.

A team of ministers from the United Front government visited the area and suggested certain land reform measures. Finally, a plan was approved on 5 July 1967, and the warring leaders were asked to surrender. Two years later, at a huge May Day rally, in 1969 in Calcutta, Kanu Sanyal announced the formation of a third party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist). The flames of the uprising eventually died down sometime in 1970s, after it was suppressed by the Siddhartha Shankar Ray headed Congress government. Many of the Naxals were released when the left front assumed power in 1977. However, as Kanu Sanyal insists, ‘contrary to popular perception, the Left Front did not pardon us. We had been detained illegally in jails in Andhra Pradesh all those years. We moved the Andhra High Court and eventually won our freedom through a legal battle.’ Today, Naxalbari and its people barely evoke memories of an uprising. Kanu Sanyal still lives in his small mud hut. (Few months after this interview, he committed suicide.) He has his own breakaway faction from the CPI(M-L). Jangal Santhal passed away in1987. Mujibur Rehman’s family today runs a momo shop. The old man still loves recounting tales from his flaming past. Khokon Mazumdar, yet another firebrand leader of the movement, today lives in penury, rendered speechless by a cerebral attack. After the death of Charu Mazumdar in police custody in July 1972, the party got split into many groups. A considerable section of the activists continued different sociopolitical activities in towns and villages of West Bengal. A good number of them continued their critical revolutionary past approach towards CPM politics. The backwardness of Bengal’s villages is shocking. When compared with Kerala’s villages, they are extremely backward—economically, socially and politically. During the last 33 years of left rule in West Bengal, most of the local cadres of CPM did succeed in transforming their social conditions but the vast masses continue to live in very poor conditions. As we have discussed in these volumes, the Indian state, powerful as it is, can easily crush such insurrectionary movements when they are perceived to be crossing a certain limit. At the same time the security agencies of the state know fully well that given the backwardness and

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poverty of certain regions the Naxalites cannot be completely wiped out. Their movement also serves an essential purpose of keeping the oppressors in their place and helping the poor economically and socially. Naxalbari also showed that as long as the mystique of armed revolution existed, younger generations would continue to return to insurrectionary politics. The romantic appeal of revolution is always greater than the appeal of reforms, however consistent and path breaking they might be. Framing and implementing such reforms is always a slow and long-term process. Many of these young people who go over to Naxalism seriously believe that where there is poverty, there will be a revolution. In their revolutionary imagination the poor are always waiting to embrace the revolutionaries. These extremist views continue to persist because nobody among the ranks of the Communists has ever convincingly argued of the impossibility of armed revolution in India. Even the CPM’s modified programme upholds the goal of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat—the same goal as that of the Maoists. Theoretically convinced of the need for revolution, the idealist young people would continue to go back to the poor and the oppressed for the purpose of organising them for an armed revolution. While the poor, especially the tribals, would willingly follow them with the hope that they would defend their legitimate basic rights. This is because there is nobody else to protect their rights. Here is an interesting phenomenon which has already been discussed in the context of working class strikes in Bombay. In their imagination, Maoists assume that they are fighting for armed revolution when they are actually and objectively fighting for the legitimate democratic rights of the tribals. Even when their long-term goal is revolution, their immediate practice is a constitutional and democratic one, i.e., defending the legal rights of the tribals. In actuality there is no logical relationship between the two, i.e., the real movement of the tribals for rights and the imagined armed revolution in the heads of the Naxalites. It is their practice of violence which forms a bridge between the two. Unless some other democratic force is willing to step in and defend the rights of the tribals, no amount of state repression can eliminate Naxal presence from these areas. This inseparably links up Naxalism with the idea of development. It is clear even to the ordinary citizens that it is the absence of an effective and inclusive developmental approach in the past that has resulted in the alienation of vast sections of the population, which in turn became an ideal breeding ground for the extremist ideas.

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In 2009, UPA government appointed a committee under the chairmanship of Debu Bandopadhyay, a former rural development secretary to understand the causes of discontent, unrest and extremism. According to the report of this committee after the insurgency in Naxalbari was crushed by force, it has spread from one police station, one district and one state to five hundred and sixty police stations, one hundred and sixty districts and fourteen states. This is because the basic craving for justice and equity, which spawned far-left extremism in the first place, was never addressed.2 The Maoist influence is limited to some areas in the forests. Since their survival depends on guerrilla warfare, it is unlikely that Maoist influence will ever grow beyond the jungles of West Bengal, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Orissa. In states such as Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand, Bihar and now West Bengal, where they are able to exhibit their military presence through armed actions, they are unable to expand their influence among the people except in pockets of tribals or the most backward areas of these states.3 The activities of such groups might cause serious concern from time to time, especially when such groups seek wider publicity through well-organised and successful military actions. But these groups will never be able to pose any serious threat to the stability of the state. The Naxalbari struggle was based on the interests of the landless. The Maoists in Lalgarh, in West Bengal’s West Midnapore district, in June 2009, were fighting on the premise that only they can protect tribal rights. In fact, much before Lalgarh was declared a so-called liberated zone by the Maoists and the attack on the CPM local leaders, the mobilisation of locals was being carried on by the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCPA). Lalgarh was a major entry point in Bengal for the Maoists as the CPM government did not implement any central government projects in this area. Partly, the Maoist insurgency in Lalgarh was the result of a gradual and systematic administrative collapse in the state. In Lalgarh the complete alienation of the poor due to police repression

2

Quoted in Neelabh Mishra, ‘Waging Peace in Redland’, Outlook, 31 August 2009,

p. 8. 3 K. Venu, ‘Shades of Red in Lalgarh’, The Indian Express, 2 July 2009. The writer of this piece was a CPI(M-L) leader and a Marxist ideologue.

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created the opportune moment for the Maoists to take over, driving out the representatives of the administration, including the police. The CPI (Maoist) was formed in 2004 by merging together two Naxalite factions, Maoist Communist Centre and the People’s War Group. On 21 July 2009, the Central Government declared the Communist Party of India (Maoists) responsible for the death of 180 people and banned the party.

Conclusion

I

Given the nature of the colonial state in India the project of creating a national movement led by a party of the working class was misconceived and doomed to be a failure. Here was an ever-vigilant modern state armed to the teeth and capable of immense destruction. It perpetuated itself, as Gandhi seems to imply, on the following in-built strategy: On the one hand, it tried to manipulate and convert all forms of opposition into constitutional forms of opposition in order to absorb them within its framework while on the other it drove underground all those who frontally attacked this state with the aim of evolving an insurrectionary perspective in the long run. It then took measures to destroy and disorganise them systematically. In other words it was not difficult for this state to neutralise and contain those forces which either followed the strategy of constitutional opposition (pre-Gandhian phase of the Congress) or attempted to evolve an insurrectionary strategy (the so-called revolutionary terrorists and later on the Communists). Gandhi was convinced that the modern state could never be smashed. The uniqueness of the task before the Indian nationalists whatever their ideology was embodied in the fact that they were called upon to evolve a strategy to successfully confront a semi-hegemonic state at a time when nobody had fought or was fighting such struggles either in Europe

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or in Asia. The existing form of Leninist–Marxism with its underlying strategy of insurrection and forcible seizure of state power had already failed to guide all those struggles in Western Europe where the communist parties, unlike the Bolsheviks in Russia, were confronted with the might of hegemonic states. The recognition of this failure formed the point of departure for Gramsci’s Marxism. This led him to put forward an alternative conception of strategy—‘the war of position’. Naturally, it was a kind of ‘algebraic formula’, highly abstract and its various aspects and presuppositions not fully worked out. Fascism had thrown Gramsci into jail and the communist parties were suppressed. It is clear from his comments on Gandhi and India in the Prison Notebooks that Gramsci did not have any direct access to the information regarding the anti-imperialist struggle in India but even then he was able to see that Gandhi was the only politician in the contemporary world who was mobilising the Indian people within the framework of a new type of complex strategy—which he had characterised as ‘war of position’. The Indian National Movement led by the Congress is the only movement in world history which wrested state power from a semi-hegemonic state and therein lies its uniqueness. As pointed out above, anti-imperialist Indians of various ideological persuasions were called upon by the uniqueness of the circumstances (i.e., the specific nature of the colonial state) to evolve a new strategy. The failure of the so-called moderates (constitutionalist strategy) had led to a split in the Congress and the rise of the revolutionary terrorist movement embodying within itself the promise of an alternative strategy. The colonial state took tough measures, drove it underground and ruthlessly suppressed and scattered it. The experience of suppressing revolutionary terrorism was later on effectively used to evolve a comprehensive strategy to tackle all those movements which might be peaceful in the short run but whose aim was to evolve insurrectionary politics in the long run. It was in opposition and competition to this strategy of revolutionary terrorism that Gandhi evolved a new strategy and a new paradigm of nonviolent peaceful mass movements not only to undermine the hegemony of the colonial state but also to build an alternative hegemony and its political organisation in the form of a state within a state. Non-violence was underlined as an inseparable part of a mass movement striving to build an alternative hegemony in the face of a modern state form. Gandhi emphasised that it was nothing but foolishness to indulge in violence

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in the face of such an organised violent machine. To indulge in violent outbursts or acts of terrorism was precisely to provide a much needed provocation and opportunity to this state for which it was always on the lookout. Given this state of affairs he could not but make non-violence his most cherished creed. Gandhi evolved a strategy which was neither constitutionalist nor insurrectionary and thereby could avoid the pitfalls of the other two strategies already available to the Indians. He consistently and cogently argued that to indulge in violence was to fall into the trap of the state. The British were ruling India as much by arms as consent through the legislatures, distribution of titles, the law-courts, the educational institutions and the financial policies. They were holding India not merely by force but also by their ideological influence over the heads and hearts of Indians of all classes and communities. Without challenging this hegemony, which had created fear and inferiority among the Indians, India could not be freed. Gandhi came to the conclusion that this hegemony (influence, authority) could not be eroded without building powerful but peaceful mass movements on a vast scale and combining these with continuous and consistent work among those whose sympathies and active support would be earnestly required. Thus was evolved the two-pronged strategy—as opposed to the colonial state’s dual policy of reform and repression—of launching mass upsurges and constructive programmes. The activities in the legislative chambers were integrated within this basic framework. The theory of a new mode of struggle—‘satyagraha’ and a new type of cadre—‘satyagrahi’-—was elaborated by Gandhi. Building counter-hegemony was a complicated and difficult task and not many understood its presuppositions and inherent logic. Not to speak of the rank and file, many of the leaders continued to practise it for pragmatic reasons. Inspired by the Russian Revolution and the Marxism of the Third International the various left groups (the Communists, Socialists, Royists and Bose) except Nehru completely misunderstood Gandhi’s perspectives, and instead of evolving a positive relationship with Gandhi pitted themselves against him. Situated as they were in a borrowed paradigm, they could not but perceive Gandhi as the most powerful stumbling bloc in their path of making revolution and forcibly overthrowing British rule. However, the modern colonial state in India had evolved a mechanism whereby it could easily cut short the transformation of economic strikes into political strikes. On the other hand, such a transformation constituted

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the central core of the operative side of the Communist strategy to place the working class at the head of the national movement. When combined with systematic repression this strategy of the Government, concluded the bureaucracy in 1932, would not allow the Communist movement to expand to such an extent where it could constitute a serious threat. The success of the Government strategy presupposed the separate and independent existence of the Communist Party. Therefore the political line of creating an alternative mass movement and a strong Communist Party to the Congress-led mass movement and the Congress Party was devoid of any potential. II

The task before the Indian National Congress was to wage a long and protracted counter-hegemonic struggle against the colonial government and the colonial state. With deep and firm faith in its reasonableness such a movement would begin with an open and declared stand that its leadership was willing to negotiate and compromise; it would always strive to cover half the ground provided the colonial Government agreed to cover the other half in search of a peaceful and honourable settlement. This declaration in no way stopped the leaders of the movement from emphasising that law and order and peace could not be fully established unless the legitimate and justified demand of swaraj was fully met. This kind of approach is based on another hegemonic principle: always give your enemy the space to retreat and to rationalise that retreat. The immense and complicated task of eroding the hegemony of the colonial stale required a series of mass movements. The idea of the ‘hegemonic principle’ behind the anti-imperialist struggle was to create a dilemma, rather a series of dilemmas, for the colonial Government by confronting it with popular demands backed by the sanction of a genuine and powerful mass movement. Either the Government would be forced to recognise the strength of the movement and agree to give concessions or it would ruthlessly crush it in order to suppress it. Either attitude would lead to the loss of its legitimacy and prestige, i.e., its hegemony. If it adopted the first stance it would not only begin to take steps towards its abdication but would also enhance the prestige, power and legitimacy of the movement and its leadership. For example, this happened when Irwin agreed to negotiate and compromise with Gandhi during the first phase of the

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Civil Disobedience Movement. If the colonial Government refused negotiations and compromise and indulged in violent suppression of the peaceful mass movement, as was done during the phase of second Civil Disobedience Movement, it would not only lead to the erosion of Government’s hegemony on a large scale but would also create conditions for the emergence of a more powerful and widespread mass movement in the future. The rickety constitutional framework, an important characteristic of the semi-hegemonic nature of the colonial state, acted as a double-edged weapon. The colonial Government wanted to use this ‘periphery of the state’ to elicit consent and legitimise its rule while the nationalists wanted to use this arena to blunt the edge of British hegemony and advance the cause of their own project. This was the only space of political power open to them within the portals of the colonial state and they were obliged not only to use it but also to seek its expansion in order to move towards the ‘core’ of state power. The logic of this type of struggle dictated that the ‘periphery of the state’ be fully occupied by winning constitutional majorities and forming ministries before the long term task of ideologically and institutionally dismantling the state was undertaken seriously and systematically. The accumulated sanction of the first two mass movements helped the Congress to emerge as an alternative ‘political force’. The logic of the ‘hegemonic principle’ dictated that the ‘political force’ be translated into ‘political power’. Step by step the Congress was led to the capture of legislatures and to forming ministries in order to find a firm foothold within the parameters of the state. The Congress was in the Government in the provinces as well as in opposition vis-à-vis imperialist control at the centre. This was a unique situation. But this was a situation of ‘dual Government’ and not the revolutionary situation à la Russian Revolution described by Marxists as ‘dual power’. As the future history of the national struggle was to show, the further march towards the ‘core of the state’ was zigzag and complicated. Our critique of the Communists thus is not that they did not understand their task as one of building hegemony over the national movement through their participation in the Indian National Congress. As a matter of fact, towards the end of the United Front phase, in 1939–40, the Indian Communists did formulate their task exactly in these terms. Though not clearly articulated this understanding was also implied in the practice

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of the United National Front. Our criticism is entirely at a different level: that they wrongly understood this task of building hegemony as analogous to the Bolsheviks’ task in the Russian Revolution. We have tried to show that neither was India like Russia nor the Indian National Congress an organisation of the Indian bourgeoisie. Organisationally, the Indian National Congress was open to the entry of all patriots including the Communists. Therefore, the Congress did not enter and could not have entered into a United Front with the communists à la the KMT model though the Communists continued to speak the language of the United Front. They were free to join the Congress or leave it so long as they did not practically oppose its anti-imperialist activities during phases of mass upsurge. In practice the United Front for the CPI meant an equal emphasis on anti-imperialism and class struggle in an insurrectionary perspective. The desire to unite with the Congress born of anti-imperialism ran parallel to the desire to keep the Communist Party and the mass organisations under its influence separate and independent of the Congress. These contradictory pulls led to a trajectory in which the Communists came to politically oppose, though being tenuously allied with, the Congress. The Communists firmly believed that each class had its own specific methods of struggle and that a particular strategy, in fact, corresponded to a particular class ideology. This automatically implied that the strategy which was being followed by them was a proletarian strategy while the strategy followed by the dominant Congress leadership, especially Gandhi, was a bourgeois strategy. In their conceptions ideology and strategy were organically linked to each other. Therefore, struggle against Gandhian ideology also simultaneously became a struggle against Gandhian strategy. The political–strategic issues appeared to the communists as ideological issues, and as such defined class positions of various groups and individuals. The political moves could not be judged on the basis of merit by calculating the pros and cons because there did not exist any nonideological criteria to do so. So issues such as council entry, office acceptance, etc., became ideological issues and respective positions on those issues expressed the bias of a particular class. As long as strategy and ideology were synonymous in the minds of the Communists they could not have upheld the one while simultaneously struggling against the other. Only the separation between strategy and ideology could have allowed them to forge a relationship of unity and struggle with Gandhi. On the other

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hand, in Gandhi’s understanding, with which the dominant leadership of the Congress also agreed, strategy corresponded to the specific nature of the state and not to the specific nature of ideology. Given this conception of strategy different ideologies could contend for hegemony within the broadly conceived Congress organisational structure while simultaneously maintaining their commitment to a single strategy. The idea of building an illegal underground Communist Party functioning according to a strategy of armed overthrow of the colonial regime was an open secret. As a response to this declared Communist strategy the colonial apparatus evolved its own strategy of containing the growth of Communist-led forces. This strategy involved a very careful surveillance and control of underground communist activities. In this regard the state’s earlier experience of handling the revolutionary terrorists provided useful clues. Within the framework of this anti-communist strategy the communists were assigned a limited space. Within this space and under the watchful eyes of the police agents they were allowed to carry on their multiple activities. The Communists’ dedication, initiative and tremendous energy in building trade unions, students and youth organisations, peasant movements, cultural squads, literary unions, reading rooms was phenomenal. But their growth was constantly observed and monitored by the Intelligence Bureau and the Home Department. This information was discussed and plans to cut the Communists to size were evolved at the highest levels. Whenever the Communists tried to transcend the limits of the ‘space’ allowed to them the policy was to initiate action against them through conspiracy cases, and ‘timely’, selective arrests. These repressive measures, each time, threw back their rising ascendancy like a broken wave. But why did the repressive measures succeed in doing what they were expected to do? All revolutionary movements have to face repression and in the face of this repression assert their strength and ascendancy. State repression is a double-edged weapon. If it could repress a revolutionary movement it could also fuel it and drive it deep in the minds of the people. Nobody knew this fact better than the British administration. Therefore, the stunted growth of the CP, we suggest, cannot be explained in terms of severe state repression. Our enquiry has led us to the conclusion that it was the Communist Party’s own strategy which was responsible for the success of the state’s counter-strategy. It was because of this strategy that the

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Communist Party was driven underground, separated from the openlyfunctioning national movement and contained through repressive measures. Within the confines of their strategy, various tactical experiments and innovations could result in limited success in numerical growth, however, without making a qualitative difference in their fortunes. The success of the anti-Communist strategy led the DIB Williamson to declare in 1932 that the Communist Party had no future in this country. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Communists began to make efforts to correct their isolationalist tactics from 1933–34 onwards. In retrospect, many individual Communists as well as scholars have argued that the marginalisation of the Communists was the result of certain ‘sectarian mistakes’. One way of looking at these ‘sectarian mistakes’ would be that given their strategic assumptions these ‘mistakes’ were perhaps logical and inevitable occurrences and it would be wrong to characterise them as ‘mistakes’. However, assuming that there is no logical or inevitable link between the overall Communist strategy and the political stances taken at times, the explanation based on ‘sectarian mistakes’ seems to imply that if the Communist Party had consistently upheld that Indian National Congress was a party of the anti-imperialist bourgeoisie and if the Party, along with the Congress, had actively participated in all the anti-imperialist upsurges, it would have succeeded in doing what it set out to do, i.e., lead an armed revolution of the Indian people. We would like to suggest that falling short of a revolution and creation of an alternative mass movement to the Gandhi-led mass movement, the Communist Party, following the above framework, could have made relatively speaking, substantial gains in terms of influence and numerical strength. Nonetheless, it would have remained a small and growing force. Thus, in the ultimate analysis, given the nature of the colonial state. the only viable strategy was the one elaborated by Gandhi—the nonconstitutionalist, non-insurrectionary strategy of building vast peaceful mass movements. The two paths open to the Indian Communists, and later on the Socialists, were, like Nehru, either to accept Gandhian strategy while critically relating to his ideological system or to reject both—his strategy and ideological system—and confront him with an unviable modified form of an insurrectionary strategy. In order to make the first choice they were called upon to make a theoretical breakthrough by rejecting the dominant Marxist–Leninist theory and independently

390 A History of the Indian Communists

moving in a direction in which Gandhi was already moving in India and thereby evolving a new Marxist discourse. They failed to make this breakthrough and as a result the unified socialist movement could not forge ahead and become a considerable force. Jawaharlal Nehru, partly intuitively and partly because of his study of Marxism and the Russian Revolution, was able to grasp the fact that only Gandhi could lead the nationalist forces and no alternative was possible to his leadership till independence was achieved. This understanding became a personal conviction with him but he could not translate this conviction into a new theoretical discourse intelligible to the left but critical of their dogmatic Marxism. As his later day practice showed though he possessed a sense of revolutionary social transformation he failed to articulate it systematically. Largely because of this the ranks of his socialist supporters continued to dwindle as he moved from one phase to another. Because of this failure, the failure to separate Marxism from the uniqueness of Russian Revolution and to explain the internal coherence and validity of the Gandhi-led mass movement in rational categories, he could neither fully explain his own political positions to the left nor challenge the theoretical roots of their convictions. This led him to avoid controversies with the left and seek aloofness. Over time he became a lonely individualist Marxist socialist, who could be admired for his convictions and passion but could not be followed as a leader, especially by those who thought themselves to be Marxists. M.N. Roy, with his dogmatic clarity, always derisively referred to him as a confused person. The large body of Congress socialists was also caught in a terrible dilemma. Remarkable for their pragmatic understanding, they were like a band of dedicated soldiers, not knowing clearly which general to follow. They were inspired by Nehru but he was not willing to take the responsibility of leading them. Many of them who were seeking a theoretical coherence and a system of clearly articulated thought moved on to join the Communists. While those who could live with doubts and dilemmas continued to follow Gandhi’s leadership pragmatically. When considered in a broader perspective the failure of Indian Communists was in actuality the failure of the Marxism of the Third International. Also their failure was a part of the failure of all working class Marxist parties in Europe which were operating within the framework of a hegemonic state. The failure to evolve a common strategy split the Indian left into many currents each following its own strategy eager to

Conclusion 391

prove it as the only correct political line. What could unite the left was not the ideology of socialism but a shared strategy to fight for the independence of India. It is true that without a theory there can be no social transformation in the desired direction. But it is equally true that a wrong theory necessarily involves a setback, spelling misery and ruin to thousands. It may not jeopardise the ultimate achievement of the goal, but it may dangerously retard progress towards it. The only way in which all the left-wing groups could unite and the only path open to the expansion of this united left was the path of ideological transformation of the Indian National Congress into a people’s party (or historic bloc) under left-wing hegemony. But this strategy required the dissolution of all the separate and independent groups and parties inside as well as outside the Congress. The left groups, especially the Communist Party group, based as they were on untenable political assumptions were not willing to do this. Eventually, despite their mutual conflicts, they were all forced to accept the idea of transformation of the Congress. In their own ways, they all attempted to transform the Congress as well as simultaneously build their own respective parties independent of the Congress. They all failed on both fronts: neither could the Indian National Congress be transformed nor could they succeed in building effective alternative organisations or politics to the Congress despite their dedication and sacrifices. The untransformed Indian National Congress resulted in establishing a hegemonic state with an ideology which is ‘more bourgeois and less socialistic’. This is how a socialist like Nehru presided over the forces of developing capitalism in India. The transformation of the Indian democratic state into one which is ‘more socialistic and less bourgeois’ still remains a task for the future.

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402 A History of the Indian Communists Karat, Prakash, ‘Organised Struggles of Malabar Peasantry, 1939–40’, Social Scientist, October 1973. Ranadive, B.T., ‘The Role of the Communists in the Freedom Struggle in India’, Social Scientist, No. 136, September 1984. Sarkar, Abhirup, ‘Industrial Bengal’, The Telegraph, 3 September 2007. Sarkar, Sumit, ‘The Logic of Gandhian Nationalism’, Indian Historical Review, Vol. 3, No. 1, July 1976. ———, ‘Popular Movements and National Leadership, 1935–47’, Economic and Political Weekly, Annual Number, 1982. Sinha, B.P. ‘Socialist Strategy’, Congress Socialist, Vol. I, No. 44, 14 October 1936. Sinha, Sachidanand, ‘Fifty Years of the Socialist Movement: An Overview’, in Fifty Years of Socialist Movement in India, Santa Era Publication, 1984. Singh, Awadeshwara P., ‘The Peasant Movement in Bihar’, Congress Socialist, Vol. 1, No. 12, February 1935. Ulyanovsky, R., ‘Marxist Critics of Mahatma Gandhi’, Indian Left Review, Vol. I, No. 5, New Delhi, August 1971. White, Christine, ‘Peasant Mobilization and Anti-Colonial Struggle in Vietnam: The Rent Reduction Campaigns of 1953’, Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 10, No. 14, July 1983.

Index

Acharya Narendra Dev, 59, 83, 125, 129, 130, 169, 185, 239, 244, 276, 285 Adhikari, G., 90, 91, 98, 104, 132, 136, 229, 304 adjusting economic relation, 185 adjustments, 109, 185, 273 agrarian, legislation, 12 Agricultural Laborers Union, 97 Ajoy Ghosh, 43, 44, 93, 187, 313, 324, 360 alliance(s), xv, xxi, 212, 330, 368 All-India Anti-Ministry Day, 174 All India Congress Committee, 129, 179, 217, 221; Kisan Committee, 215, 220, 234; Kisan Sabha, 230, 252; Railwaymen’s Federation, 94; Red-TUC, 81, 87; Textile Workers’ Conference, 90, 107; Trade Union Congress, 67, 109, 128, 305, 313 All India Congress Socialist Party (AICSP), 85, 86, 109; agrarian programme of, 183 All India Detenus Day, 81 All-India Railwaymen’s Federation (AIRF), 94

All India Trade Union Congress, 67 All India Village Industries Association, 58 Ambedkar, G., 247, 251 Amilcar Cabral, 182 Anderson, Perry, xxii, 2 Andhra: grassroots activities in, 79, 80 Andhra Congress Socialist Party, 79 Andhra, xxiii, 79, 80, 138, 210 anti-communist, strategy, 388, 389; feudal, 183; imperialist, 105, 106, 112, 175, 176, 261; imperialist front, 44, 113, 114, 126, 258; Imperialist League, 105, 106; imperialist movement, xxv; imperialist struggle, xix, xxi, xxx, 61, 65, 95, 111, 112, 115, 116, 275, 310, 383 anti-Congress, 26 anti-imperialist nationalism, 41, 42 anti-imperialist united front, 105 armed, overthrow of the state, xxiv Bakasht, struggles, 225, 226; land bill, 205 ban on CPI, 127

404 A History of the Indian Communists Barahiya Tal, 226 Bengal: grassroots activities in, 82 Bengal, 28, 68, 82, 245, 314, 318 Berar: grassroots activities in, 83 Bhagat Singh, 28, 32, 146, 273, 358 Bhardwaj, R. D., 94, 239, 313, 314 Bihar, 52, 72–76, 194, 195; grassroots activities in, 72–76; Kisan Sabha, 76, 212, 214, 216, 217, 225, 226, 228; Tenancy Amendment Bill, 205 Bihar Socialist Party, 73 Bihar Tenancy (Amendment) Act, 74 Bolsheviks, 32, 132, 383, 387 Bombay, 52, 80, 81, 86, 92; government, 14, 16–19, 80, 98, 101, 232, 233, 240; millowners, 247; Provincial Congress Committee, 128, 250; Provincial Trade Union Congress, 128, 305; Textile Enquiry Committee, 240 Bombay: grassroots activities in, 80, 81 Bombay Special (Emergency) Act, 90 Bose, Subhas, 31, 219, 271–81, 294 bourgeois, 10, 42, 44, 105, 108; leadership of INC, 258; party, 46, 119, 120, 319, 345, 371; revolution, 44 bourgeois, xxxi; national movement by, 43–46 bourgeoisie, 42–46 bourgeois romanticism, 149 British Government, 5, 25, 29, 179; parliament, 4, 8, 9, 23; rule, 6, 14, 25–27, 148, 358; society, 8 British policy-makers, 55 British rule, in India: consent of, population, 26 bureaucracy, 37, 38, 50, 59, 67, 68, 88, 99, 100, 156, 189, 244, 312, 364 Calcutta, 93 Calcutta Congress Socialist Conference, 82 capital, 11, 108, 192, 236, 246, 323, xxxi capitalism, 18, 64, 84, 110, 144, 167, 251, 349, 370

capitalist class, 45, 245; society(ies), xxi, xxiv castes, 297, 355 Central Committee of CPI, 96, 354 Central Legislative Assembly Elections, 211 Champaran, 73, 137, 188, 192, 212, 213, 215 change of heart, 142, 143, 159 change of heart method, 142 China, 22, 34, 47, 183, 312, 322 Chinese Communist Party, 181, 206, 318, 319; land policy of, 181 Civil Disobedience movement: fortnightly reports on, 49; Gandhi recommendation, to suspend, 50, 51, 63, 72; moment of supreme crisis, 157; second phase of, 155; suspension of, 159 civil liberties, 15, 144, 157–59, 231–33, 235, 242, 246, 254 class(es), 26, 27, 33, 36, 41–43, 46, 139; adjustment, 181, 186, 225, 251, 271, 272; collaboration, 115; contradictions, 36, 138, 184, 187, 236, 252; and leadership, 47; organizations, 125, 128, 129, 216, 220, 259, 263, 269; party and, 46, 47; struggle(s), 13, 45, 127, 133, 136 colonial constitution, 152; countries, 110, 181, 252, 354; India, xxiii, xxvii, 22, 62; ideology, 5; policy, 5, 6, 99; state, xxii, xxiii, xxvii, 1; revolution, 106, 110, 132 colonial constitutionalism, 25 colonial state: nature of: engine of modernisation, of Indian society, 2; exploitation of India, 4; legislative council, creation of, 9; perceptions of, 15–18; reforms by British parliament, 23; Trevelyan views, 7; political process, development of, 56 Comintern/Comintern policy, 103, 105, 110, 112, 116, xxxii communalism, 33, 42, 325, 331, 352, 355 communism, 64

communist, xii, xiii, 12, 14, 15, 17; International, 81, 98, 124; League, 298; movement, xiii, 98–100, 102, 105, 242; organizations, 14, 91, 95, 98, 313, 334; parties, xi, xiv, 105, 362, 369, 373, 383; propaganda, 96, 247 Communist Party: Russia, in, xii; since independence, 317 Communist Party of India (CPI): creation of confusion, in National Congress, 120; Government notification on, 108; hindrance, in growth of, 111; legal function, from trade, 127; National Executive, decision on communist tactics, 129, 130; secret circular of, 129 communists: and ministries: Bombay, 245–55; UP, 236–44; self-criticism by, 108 compromise(s), 9, 12, 17, 36, 47, 52, 159, 172, 188, 202, 208, 210, 220, 238, 239, 290, 303, 336, 337, 385 conflicting strategies, 30 Congress, xiv, xxix, 23, 30, 34, 35: agrarian programme, 184–86, 284; -cum-Kisan Sabha Movement, 300; Kisan Enquiry Com-mittee, 195, 196, 205; Leaders, 10, 23, 51, 76, 123, 172, 225, 253, 331; movement, xix, xxxii, 39, 46, 50, 99, 102; Socialist leadership, 234, 283; Socialist party (see Congress Socialist Party) Congress Socialist Party, 59; first preliminary conference, 85; leaders failure, to understand own experience, 89; radical tendency, within Congress, 111; socialist fascists, 86; task of workers, 87 consciousness, 12, 41, 42, 47, 62, 66, 104, 134–36, 138, 139, 150, 299 consent, 11, 19, 23, 25, 26, 29, 144, 146, 147, 179, 225, 253, 333, 346, 359 conservative, 26 Constituent Assembly, 11, 59, 80, 116, 172, 175

Index 405 constitutional communism, xiii constitutionalism, 71, 154 constitutionalism versus nonconstitutionalism, 34, 53, 68, 263 constitutionalist opposition, 7 constitution(al) reforms, 7, 22, 23, 152 constructive programme, 30, 52, 59–61, 115, 120, 173, 235, 236, 384 contending, hegemonies, xxi, xxvviii– xxxiii; strategies, 36, 215, 271, 272 conversion method, 142 Council entry, 36, 52, 53, 60, 68, 77, 152, 163, 165, 168, 173, 177, 387 Councils Act of 1892, 10 Criminal Law Amendment Bill (1938), 25 Cuba, xx Czarist autocracy, 105 Damodaran, K., 292, 299 Dange, S. A., 98, 247, 305, 312, 324 Darbhanga Raj, 227 democracy, 20, 22, 49, 170, 201, 236, 268, 277, 318, 324, 326, 349, 373 Democratic, discourse, xxvii, xxx, 12; India, xxx; Movement, 11; Revolution, 134, 182, 193, 204, 355; Republic of Workers and Peasants, 111, 113; Socialism, 88, 89; Swaraj Party, 107 democratic socialism, 89 Democratic Swaraj Party, 107 democratic transformation: strategy of, 367–74 Deoli camp, 314 Desai, Morarji, 233, 245 destruction process, xxviii Deutscher, Isac, 44 development, 29 dogmatism, 104, 163, 361 dual power, xxi, 70, 386 Dutt-Bradley thesis, 106, 112, 113, 123, 124, 252, 258, 264 Dutt, R.P., xiv, xvi, xvii, 28, 112, 354 Economic concessions, xxix, 200, 223, 224, 243, 290

406 A History of the Indian Communists educational policy, 5 elective system, 9 Eleven Point Demands: Gandhi’s proposal of, 103 elite, 366, xxx England, 248 English, education, 5; language, 4, 5 Europe, 22, 31, 105, 106, 116, 140, 382, 390 European socialist thought, 89 exposure theory, 107, 109–12 extremists, xxv factions, 180, 219, 353, 354, 359 fair rent: demand in UP peasantry, 11 Faizpur, 127, 175, 185, 212, 260, 264, xxix fascism, 47, 64, 110, 115, 116, 383, xxi feudalism, 182, 188, 193, 204, 339; abolition of, 12 Feudal state, 2, 148, 359, xxiii First World War, 134 Forward Bloc, 163, 281, 366, 374 France, 47, 248 Franchise Committee (1919), xxiii French revolution, 134 Fundamental rights, 76, 205, 215, 295, xxix Gandhi: Bose confrontation, 124, 177; and national movement, 44, 66, 106 Gandhian, ideology, 44, 387; strategic perspective, xxiv Gandhi–Irwin Pact, 153 Gandhism, 48, 93, 113–15, 117, 135–37, 143, 162, 220, 250, 279, 303, xxvi General strike, 21, 67, 90, 95, 107, 108, 241, 291, 304–6, 312, 356 Ghadar Party, 28, 32, 358 Girni Kamgar Union, 90, 95, 232, 247, 249 Gladstonian liberalism, 8 Gopalan, A. K., 293, 295–97, 299, 300, 330 Gorky, Maxim, 79 Government of India Act of 1935, 179

Govindan Nair, M. N., 296 Gramscian, xx, xxi, xxiv Gramsci, Antonio, 359, 383, xxi, xxii, xxiv, xxv Grey theory, 138 Gujarat, 81, 83, 130; grassroots activities in, 83 Harijan campaign: Gandhi, by, 57 Haripura congress, 218, 277 hegemonic, 6, 12, 15, 20, 24, 188, 193, 200, 224, 252, 270, 297, 383, 385, 390 hegemonic politics, 6 hegemony: mediation and, 188–94; struggle for, xxii hegemony theory: Gramsci, of, xxii Historic bloc, 46, 118, 123, 391, xx Historiography, 7, 44, xv, xvi, xxx, xxxiii Hitler attack: USSR, on, xxxii Hitler’s attack, 315, xxxii Ho chi Minh, 182, 317, xxvi identities, 41, 42, 139, 262 ideological, 7, 33, 34, 38, 42, 152, 160, 180, 203 ideologico-political, 225, xxi ideology, 12, 33, 34, 42, 49, 64, 65, 78, 134, 165, 170, 180, 256, 289 Ilbert Bill controversy, 9 imperialism, 13, 18, 30, 34, 41, 45, 70, 106, 110, 122, 132, 163, 181, 184, 193, 216, 219, 246, 308 imperialist absolutism, 29 imperialist ideology, 7: strategy, 37 Independent Marxist party, 126, 262 Indian bourgeoisie, 106: Intelligentsia, 5, 28; Labour Party, 93; National Congress (see Indian National Congress); Nationalism, xxxii, 23, 133; States, xxiii, 357–59, 367, 378 Indian communists: history of, 103; Leninist guidelines, 104 Indian National Congress: class movement organisation, xxviii; new

characteristics of, 122, 123; new programmes, in 1934, 58, 60; origin of, 2; as party, 46, 47 Indian National movement: bourgeois movement, 133, 134 Indian public law, 3 Indian Trade Union Act of 1926, xxiii Industrial Disputes Bill, 247 ‘inner voice,’ 159 insurgency: paradigm of, 27 insurrection(ary), 7, 27, 31, 36, 40, 61, 145, 149, 167, 193, 235, 246, 286, 312, 358, 361, xii, xiii, xiv insurrectionary politics, 375 Intelligentsia, 5, 28, 45, 89, 322, 351, 363, 375 Italian history, xx Jinnah, 259 Joint Strike Committee, 90–92 Joshi, N. M., 90, 290, 308 Joshi, P. C., 93, 132, 260, 280, 286, 301, 354, 360, 375 Joshism, 121, 368 Kanpur: Congress Committee, 241, 243; Enquiry Committee, 240; millowners, 240, 242, 245, 247 Karnataka, 186 Kayyur, 315 Kerala: Congress, 299; Congress Socialist Party, 291; grassroots activities in, 82, 83; Provincial Congress Committee, 210; youth, 293, 294 Kisan Bulletin, 233 Kisan conference(s), 186, 196, 234: Leader(s), 125, 208, 215, 217, 220, 224, 225, 228, 315; Sabha, 73–76, 78, 196, 198, 206, 207, 218 Kripalani, Acharya, 24, 166, xxvi labour, xxxi, 11, 83: laws, xxiii; movement, 15, 87, 109 Laclau, Ernesto, 42, xxiv Lahore session, 35, 103 Lal Bavta, 95

Index 407 Lal Bavta’ Sholapur Girni Kamgar Union. See Sholapur Red Flag Union Lalgarh, 375 landlord(ism), 12, 34, 106, 144, 183–85, 191, 195; and ministries: Andhra Desa, 210; Bihar, 205–8; Orissa, 208–10; United Provinces, 197–205 Language of socialism, 150 land, reforms, 183, 320, 338, 378: to the tiller, 12, 13, 184, 339 law and order, 16, 17, 26, 98, 171, 241, 246, 334, 341, 363, 364, 385 lawless laws, 11 League against Gandhism, 93 left, 257; Gandhi on alternative strategy of, 270–72; and ministries: experiments with class confrontation, 211, 231 Left, ‘bloc’, xxx, 64, 299: groupings, 126, 230, 247, 264, 269, 272, 281–83, 286, 287; nationalism, 148; unity, 177, 286, 287 Left-wing movements, in India, 359: historical perspective of, xix; sectarianism, 121 Left-wing sectarianism, 121 legality, 12, 13, 17, 59, 289, 316 legality notion, 12 legal rights, 11, 379, xxiii, xxvii legislation, 14, 16, 76, 196, 208, 209, 216, 328 Legislative Assembly, 25: Councils, xxiii, 9, 19, 20, 169, 203 legitimacy, 12, 18, 23, 144, 147, 159, 191, 193, 385, xxii, xxvii legitimate/illegitimate, 11, 17, 19, 68, 129, 191, 192, 222, 224, 252, 259, 271, 290 legitimation, 10, 31 Lenin(ist), 104, 132, 301, 321, 359, 362, 373 liberal ideology, 34, 37–39 liberals living ideology, 143 local self-government, 9 Madras: Congress Ministry, 231; government, 52, 96, 102; grassroots activities in, 83

408 A History of the Indian Communists Maharashtra: grassroots activities in, 83, 84 Malabar, 83, 293, 300 Mao, 133, xxvi Marxism, 32, 45, 88, 126, 132, 133, 181, 261, 312, 318, 321, 334, 353, 356, 373 Marxism practice(s), 133 Marxist:-Leninist, 378, 389; Socialist Party, 260, 264; theory(ies), 144, 258, 312, 330, 353–55; party, 125, 126, 131, 262, 264, 269; strategy, xxiv Masani, M. R., 81, 129, 173, 256, 265 Mass, movement, 11, 13, 15, 35, 39, 68: involvement of militant attitudes, 27; paradigm of, 27; organizations, xxvii May Day, 128 Mazdoor Sabha, 237–39, 241, 243 mediation: and hegemony (see Hegemony and mediation) Meerut Conspiracy case, 97, 294, 323 Mehta, Dinkar, 130, 212 Menon, Achutha, 296 messianic moment: Gandhi, of, 137 militancy, 50, 61, 63, 92, 102, 164, 241, 243, 244, 290, 307, 308 Ministers’ conference, 233 Ministries, 36, 181, 211, 231 moderates, xxv modernisation, 2, 4, 329, 346 modern state, 22, 25, 28, 145, 193, 358, 359, 382, 383, xxiv Moscow, 87, 107 Munshi, K. M., 161, 165, 232, 233, 245, 248 Muslims workers, 302 mutiny, 32, xxiii Namboodiripad, E.M.S., 44, 82, 89, 232, 291–97, 299, 300, 315, 318, 361 Narayan, Jayaprakash, 29, 66, 79, 84, 117, 126, 130, 150, 172, 227, 234, 239, 257, 262, 263, 269, 280, 285, 356 Narodnism ideology, 137 nation, 139: class, xxxi, xxxii, 139, 182 National bourgeoisie, 44–46, 106,

124, 259, 321; interest, 10, 43, 45; liberation struggle(s), 183; movement, xxii, 38, 43–46; programme, xxviii– xxxiii; representative assembly, 6; self-government, 9, 10; reformist union(s), 108; revolution, 139, 304; Trade Union Federation, 81, 109 nationalism, 13, 27, 33, 41 Nationalist, counter-hegemony, xxiv; intelligentsia, 45; political discourse, xxx nationalist forces, 27 National United Front: political line of, 177 nation-class, 139, 140 Naxalbari, 375 negotiations, 12, 41, 50–52, 152, 153, 196, 206, 224, 225, 237, 276, 305, 353, 386 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 29, 39, 40, 49, 50, 52–54, 63, 66 new, ideology, 49, 65, 72; Marxist principle, 181, 281 new strategy: Gandhi, of, 30 non-constitutional non-insurrectionary, 35, 145 Non-Cooperation movement, 12, 28, 155, 157, 166, 167, 282, xxviii non-hegemonic state, xxi non-violence, 162 NREGA, 366 office acceptance, 152 opportunism, 120, 121, 284, 316 Orissa: grassroots activities in, 81 Orrisa, 81, 208–10 orthodox Congressman, 219 overthrow of the state, xxiv Pant, G. B., 199, 237, 238, 242 paradigm, of insurgency, 27, 28; of mass movements, 27 parliamentary, xii, xx, 58, 85; democracy, xx, 20, 22; party, 161, 165, 168, 196 parliamentary mentality, 158

Patel, Sardar, 61, 77, 167, 172, 186, 209, 213, 236, 285 Pattabhi Sitarammayya, 275, 278 peaceful force, 148 Peasant Jathas, 296; movement, 296; revolution, 296 peasant movements: Bihar, in, 12; Kerala, in, 12 peasantry, 12, 13, 69, 71, 76, 137, 188, 191 People’s Front, 47, 110, 112, 113, 264; war, 315 permanent mass movement, 70 platform of action, 105, 113, 116 Politbureau, 123, 124, 301, 309, 315 political, consciousness, xxvii; general strike, 107; power, xxi, 2, 196, 254, 255, 325, 386 politics of, alternative, 246, 288, 301; transformation, 288 Poona Conference, 49, 52 Poulantzas, Nicos, xxi power relations, 11, 12, 56, 138, 146, 183, 333, 336, 337, 372 Prasad, Rajendra, 59, 165, 168, 177, 185, 187, 195, 200, 202, 205, 206 Prison Notebooks, xxii, xxv, 383 proletariat/proletarian, xxxi; hegemony, 44; path, 289, 304, 305, 315 psychological transformation, 62 public opinion, 9, 14, 17, 18, 20, 22, 25, 56, 153, 154, 314 Punjab, 12, 98, 234, 314, 344, 377 Purna swaraj, xxix Rajagopalacharya, 231, 232 Ramgarh Session of the Congress, 304 Ranadive, B. T., 90, 91, 94, 95, 107, 116, 132, 183, 290, 306, 312, 355–57, 360 Ranadivism, 121 Ranga, N. G., 79, 220, 229 Red Flag Union, 95, 306 reformism, 32, 117, 176, 220, 290, 358, 359 reformist(s), 32, 91, 92, 94, 108, 110, 159, 171, 211, 250, 290, 355, 358

Index 409 reform(s), xxviii, 6, 23, 53, 152, 169 representative institutions, 9, 23 repression, 9, 21, 22, 39, 56, 89–97 revisionism, xiii, 104, 355, 357, 361 revolution, 31, 44, 68, 100, 106 revolutionary, xiv, 32, 54, 67, 70, 91; insurrectionists (‘terrorists’), xxv, 28, 32, 93, 100; Marxist, 149, 321; socialism, 261 rights, 12, 29, 33, 87, 186, 187, 191, 194 right-wing, 36–41, 54, 68; opportunism, 121 Round Table Conference, 153 Royal Titles Bill (1876), 8 Royists, xii Roy, M. N., xii, xx, xxi, xxiii, 18, 21, 22, 29, 32, 96, 97, 100, 134, 148, 164, 315, 357, 383 rule of law, xx, xxii, xxiii, xxvii, 3, 10, 26, 342 Russia, xii, xxiii, 21, 22, 32, 96 Russian, experience, 164; revolution, xii, 22, 28, 73, 86, 88, 107, 249, 257, 356 Sardesai, S. G., 91, 132, 229 satyagraha, 11, 24, 30, 31, 63, 69, 70, 146, 147, 167, 228, 293, 301, 312, 384 scientific knowledge, 5, 132; socialism, 258 scientific socialism: Nehru views on, 132, 133 Second International, 88, 89 Second World War, xxxii, 94, 101, 286, 289, 314, 322, 356 Secretary of State, 14, 17, 19, 52, 201 sectarian(ism), xiv, 104, 108, 109, 113–15, 120, 121, 124, 175, 269, 282, 283, 389: impact of politics of, 116 sectarian united front: policy of, 114 self-criticism, 108, 310 self-government, 7; on European model, 7 Seventh Congress, xxxii, 105, 110, 111, 114–16, 124, 258, 291 Sholapur, 16, 80, 94, 95, 107, 128, 232, 242, 247, 251, 303, 306, 350 Sholapur Red Flag Union, 95

410 A History of the Indian Communists Sixth Congress, 86, 111, 113, 115, 116, 122, 124 social change, 12, 67, 133, 143, 361; reform movement, 297 social consciousness process, 66 socialism, 38, 40, 46, 64–67, 72, 79, 83, 84, 87–89, 138, 140, 149, 176, 195, 298, 336 socialistic, xxxii, 46, 65, 82, 88, 135, 209, 391 socialist(s), xxxi, 38, 42, 43, 61; faith, 176; groups, 77, 161, 261; ideology, 42, 295; India, xxx; party, 74, 257, 258, 260, 263; program, 79, 87, 261; revolution, 110, 134; society, 86, 87, 261; strategy, xxiv; transformation, xxiv; unity, 126, 256 social transformation process, 62 Stalin, 93, 113, 133, 164, 317, 324, 349 state: and strategy, xx–xxviii state/state apparatus, xxi, xxxvi, 2, 3, 11, 13–15; power, xii, xv, xxiv, 22, 70, 158, 167; and revolution; people’s organization, xxiii; a state, xv, 14, 89 strategy(ies), xxv, 24, 30–41, 72 student unions, 298 subaltern, xvi, xxx, 334 Sundarayya, P., 80, 96, 129, 355 Sun-Yat-Senism ideology, 137 Sutlej, 3 Swami Sahajanand, 12, 73, 74, 76, 196, 198, 208, 212–15, 217, 221, 223, 226, 229, 253, 297, 301, 303 Swarajists, 52 Swaraj, xxix, 19, 28, 35, 60, 61, 84, 138, 139, 174, 177, 262, 385 teachers’ unions, 298 Tebhaga Peasant movement, 12 technique of revolution, 261 Telangana, 355, 356, 358, 376 Tenancy legislation, 76, 198 tenants, 12, 13, 74, 78, 184, 186, 192, 194–99, 203, 205–9, 221, 224, 226, 227

terrorist movement, 100, 383 Textile General Strike, 16, 17, 291 textile strike (1934): and repression by workers, 89–97 theoretical, 3, 103, 104, 106, 110, 112, 113, 117–20, 138, 181, 182, xxxi theory, xxxii, 18, 88, 106, 109 Third International, xi xxi, 21, 28, 86, 88, 89, 101, 103, 148, 181, 258, 266, 291, 321, 367; Seventh Congress of, xxxii Thompson, E. P., xx Toilers’ Front, 124 Tolystoyism ideology, 137 tories, 4 Trades Disputes Act, 16, 90 trade unions, 16, 17, 93, 111, 125, 128, 248, 251, 298, 305, 388 transfer of power, xv, 142, 146, 172, 354 transformation, 269, 270; politics of: vs. politics of alternative, 288 Tripuri, xxxiii, 36, 124, 177, 219, 252, 279, 280, 283, 284 Tsarist state, xx, xxi, xxiii United Front, 127 United National Front, xxxii, 47, 103, 111, 123–25, 244, 260, 387 United party, 261, 376 United Provinces Congress Committee, 241 U.P., 121, 194, 229 U.S.S.R, xxxii Uttar Pradesh: grassroots activities in, 77, 78 Vietnamese liberation struggle, 182 Vietnam, xx, 182, 183, 312, 319 villages, 11, 29, 73, 74, 77, 78, 83, 137, 195, 198, 227, 234, 295, 332, 333, 339, 340, 345, 347–49, 351 violence, xxiv, 15, 16, 27, 28, 30, 91, 110; versus non-violence, xxiv, 36, 110, 142, 219 violence, armed revolt, xxiv, 170, 369; revolution, 28; seizure of state power, 27

violence: vs. non-violence, xxiv voluntarism, 163 Wang Ming, 105, 110, 111 War of, manoeuvre, xxi, xxiv, 56, 149 war of position, 56, xxv White Paper, 51 Whither Congress, 49 workers, 87, 90–95, 107, 115, 127, 128, 172, 177, 216, 239–47; and peasants’ parties, xxx Workers and Peasants party: formation of, xi working class, 15, 21, 42, 71, 94, 95, 105, 116, 127, 128, 184, 241–48, 250; party, 92, 258; unity, 127

Index 411 working class: Russia, of, xxiii Working committee, 49, 169, 175, 186, 199, 214, 218, 232–34, 271, 274, 275 Youth league, 232; movement, 16 Zamindari-Congress agreement, 206 zamindari system, 74, 78, 186, 187, 194, 210, 224 zamindars, 194–97, 199–200, 204–9, 221–24, 226, 228

About the Author

Bhagwan Josh is Professor of Contemporary History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Besides writing for scholarly journals, he has contributed essays to many edited books. He is one of the project committee members of ‘Europe–South Asia Maritime Heritage Project’. He has also been co-director of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) project on the ‘History of the Indian National Congress, 1885–1947’.

Praise for the Previous Edition

[Joshi and Josh] on their part go deep into the ‘medieval’ past of Indian history to try and find answers to the fundamental question of what hinders the creation of a ‘composite nation’. Sudarshan Sathianathan in Asian Affairs: Journal of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, Vol. XXVI (Part 1), February 1995 Bhagwan Josh and Shashi Joshi’s three volumes are a reconstruction and reinterpretation of the Indian independence struggle that is largely refracted through the central concept of ‘hegemony’… The structure of the narrative offered is distinct and takes it in a very different direction. Theirs is, above all, a detailed and insistent critique of the communist left in the National Movement period and, as a counterpoint to it, a defence of Gandhi and the ‘Gandhian strategy’ for securing independence via the Congress… What is distinct in the treatment here is the diagnosis and description given for this communist failure. Achin Vanaik in Economic and Political Weekly, 23 December 1995 Joshi and Josh made in my judgment an extremely useful contribution to our understanding of the Indian colonial state. This necessarily reopened several issues which historians have the need to grapple with afresh. Bhupinder Brar in New Quest, November–December 1995

Joshi and Josh provide good reason to suppose that there was a greater identity of interest between the Congress leadership and their mass following than Marxist-inspired histories generally allow. This, of course, is deeply committed history-writing. Joshi and Josh have few qualms about writing the history not merely of ‘what was’, but also of ‘what ought to have been’. Nicholas Owen in South Asia, Vol. XVII, June 1994 [As] a sociological analysis of various hegemonic struggles that have taken place in India this century, and their historical foundations, this is an excellent work, which displays possibly the most important criteria for such an undertaking: a clear and thorough understanding of the topic. Stuart Tilley in Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 25, No. 2, 1995 The study is a pioneering attempt to understand why the Communist Party in India, comprised of brave and sacrificing cadres and sympathizers and having conducted many heroic struggles could not provide an alternative to the National Congress, in leading the people to achieve freedom… [This work] is the first systematic endeavour during [the] post-independent period to examine the role of the Communist Party during the national movement since it became a mass movement under the unique strategy and tactic evolved by Mahatma Gandhi… The volumes should be studied because it has relevance in understanding the policies and practices followed by the Communist parties in the postIndependence era. A.R. Desai in The Book Review, Vol. XVIII, Nos 2–3 (February–March), 1994 [Joshi and Josh] look far more critically at the history of the formative period of the CPI in the wider context of the national movement for independence and study the process by which the communists cut themselves off from the national mainstream. Sham Lal in The Times of India, 7 November 1992. Joshi and Josh show that the communists were mistaken, too, about the sentiments of the Indian people… [They] explain communist blindness in terms of an unthinking adoption of Russian images as Indian facts,

and of a failure to grasp the truth that Gramsci had understood about how hegemonist or semi-hegemonist states can be fought. Rajmohan Gandhi in Indian Express Sunday Magazine, 20 December 1992 This is a significant contribution towards understanding of strategies and methods advocated by the rival ideological groups within India’s national movement… This is a mature analysis within a neat conceptual framework. Amal Ray in Deccan Herald, 12 September 1993 Undoubtedly, a great deal of effort has gone into the making of this book. The readings are impressive and extremely informative for anyone wishing to undertake research on communalism. There are several highly perceptive observations, especially in the postscript which deals with the present day scenario. Visalakshi Menon in The Economic Times, New Delhi, 24 April 1994 The book provides an excellent overview of a turbulent period in Indian history which continues to fascinate both laymen and experts. Amulya Ganguli in The Times of India, 12 April 1992 It is an extremely interesting book, worth reading for all social scientists, academicians and activists. Aditya Nigam in The Sunday Observer, 12–18 April 1992 [The] use of hegemony as a central category in politics when applied to an anti-colonial movement does provide a new frame for the discussion of our past. More significantly, it re-centres the role of ideas and culture as material forces influencing history. One wishes that these formulations generate serious debate, such that historical narratives return once again to the fold of history rather than remain mere pawns in sterile ideological polemic. Harsh Sethi in The Express, 2 August 1992 The most remarkable quality of Josh’s book is that it has been able to tell a controversial story with great plausibility. However unusual for a

Marxist to articulate such a view of Indian nationalist politics, he makes it a highly persuasive account, and it is underpinned by a theory which is certainly impeccably Marxist in its origins, if not in the conclusions it is made to support. He also achieves a commendable balance between the detailed empirical accounts of Congress policies, debates among the radicals, the politics of the ministerial government in the provinces after 1935, and his theoretical commentary on what is going on, within one single narrative frame. His work, which is the second in the series, is an interesting, if controversial, contribution to the history of Indian nationalism. Sudipta Kaviraj in Asian Affairs: Journal of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, Vol. XXVI (Part II), June 1995 Shashi Joshi has placed all who will—and may their number be legion— read her book deeply in debt to her. Those who want India and communism to grow will learn much from what she has written. Mohit Sen in Mainstream, 19 December 1992 Shashi Joshi’s work is an important contribution to the historiography of our freedom struggle. It helps us understand and critically appraise the Indian Left in a much better way. Ganesh Mantri in The Times of India, 29 July 1992. Shashi Joshi displays considerable grasp of detail without losing sight of the broad contours of her story which is related with fluent authority. Premen Addy in Asian Affairs, February 1993

Culture, Community and Power A Critique of the Discourses of Communalism and Secularism

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Other Volumes in the Series Volume 1 A History of the Indian Communists: The Irrelevance of Leninism by Shashi Joshi Volume 2 A History of the Indian Communists: From United Front to Left Front by Bhagwan Josh

Struggle for Hegemony in India Volume 3

Culture, Community and Power A Critique of the Discourses of Communalism and Secularism

Shashi Joshi Bhagwan Josh

Copyright © Shashi Joshi and Bhagwan Josh, 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. First published in 1992 This second edition published in 2011 by Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd B1/I-1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110044, India www.sagepub.in Sage Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320, USA Sage Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP, United Kingdom Sage Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 Published by Vivek Mehra for Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd, typeset in 10.5/12pt Adobe Garamond by Star Compugraphics Private Limited, Delhi and printed at Chaman Enterprises, New Delhi. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Joshi, Shashi, 1949–   Struggle for hegemony in India/Shashi Joshi, Bhagwan Josh.     p. cm.      Includes bibliographical references and index.   1. India—Politics and government—1919–1947.  2. Nationalism—India— History. 3. Communism—India—History. I. Josh, Bhagwan, 1949– II. Title. DS480.45.J665324.254'07509041—dc23

2011

ISBN:  978-81-321-0654-8 (HB) The Sage Team: Gayeti Singh, Sushmita Banerjee, Rajib Chatterjee and Deepti Saxena

2011034896

In memory of P.C. Joshi and K. Damodaran

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Contents



List of Abbreviations,  ix Preface to the Revised Edition,  xi Preface,  xv Acknowledgements,  xxiii Introduction  xxv

  1. Culture, Community and Power,  1   2. Outline of a Theory of Cultural Power,  57   3. The Power of the Past: Two Paradigms of Cultural Hegemony,  72   4. Power and Hegemony: The Site of Cultural Struggle,  86   5. The Cultural Faultline and Its Mirrors,  100   6. The State in Medieval North India and the Cultural Faultline,  130   7. Women and Sexuality in the Discourse of Communalism and Communal Violence,  177   8. Narratives of Cultural Contest,  239

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  9. The Cultural Complexion of the Nation: Indian National Congress versus Hindu Mahasabha,  271 10. Cultural Limits to Secular Politics: Sermons on National Unity,  303 11. Three Songs,  324

Conclusion,  347 Postscript: Dilemmas of Indian Secularism,  361 Bibliography,  382 Index,  397 About the Authors,  405

List of Abbreviations

CP CPI DIB IB MLA RSS UP

Communist Party Communist Party of India Director Intelligence Bureau Intelligence Bureau Member of Legislative Assembly Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Uttar Pradesh

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Preface to the Revised Edition

Is reconciliation achieved through historical amnesia? Or, is remembrance, the acknowledgement of past error, and forgiveness the answer to conflict? If reconciliation is the object, is ‘the truth’ at all germane to the goal?1 Nazrul Islam, invariably quoted as the emblem of syncretic Bengali poetry regardless of religious affiliation, having written innumerable Hindu and Muslim songs, is celebrated in the tradition of the Bhakti Sants, Kabir or a Dadu. Despite being a devout Muslim, he was a trenchant critic of Islamic dogmatism, and Hindu superstitions and caste-based untouchability. He was of course an admirer of the Russian revolution and a friend of the communists, such as Muzaffar Ahmed. However, he was fiercely attacked by orthodox Muslims in journals such as Muslim Jagat, Mohammedi and Islam Darshan. Extreme elements labelled him as an apostate deserving death while moderate Muslims sought to win him to the right religious path and offered him the throne of Bengali Muslim literature. Likewise, the extreme Hindu journal Shaniarer Chithi attacked Nazrul virulently while the more sober Prabashi closed its doors to him. While Muslims were angered at his bringing in Hindu icons into his poetry, 1

See S. Muralidharan in EPW, Vol. XLIII, No. 4, 26 January–1 February, 2008, p. 31.

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the Hindus disliked his use of Arabic and Persian vocabulary. Nazrul gave an ironical picture of this double hostility in his famous poem Amar Kaifiyat (My Explanation)2 My friends the poets are unhappy with my verse They sigh: from effective you are now worthless And leaning towards politics. They say: he doesn’t read now, is hopeless His wife has swallowed his creativity. In jail he whiled away time playing cards. Some say: better that he should go back to jail. The Guru says I try to shave with a sword In the Shanibarer Chithi3 I get love letters abusing me as ‘Harichacha’4 But when I threaten to spill the beans they fall quiet. I left everything and married a Hindu Now I am an outcaste for the Hindus. Yavana to Hindus and kafir to Muslims, I look for my tikki, kaccha, darhi and narhi.5 The ‘mou’ loving moulvi 6 says, let’s defile his caste, he who recites the names of the gods. He then releases the fatwa that the qazi 7 is a kafir. All together have made me untouchable. Maulvis say I have merely read Aampara8 yet boast of expertise I am willing to be a Shaheed. While the Hindu calls me Muslim for I use Farsi in my poems.9 2

This poem in original Bengali was provided by Saumya Dey, a doctoral student in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The translation was made by Nilanjana Mukherji, Assistant Professor, Bhagat Singh College (M), University of Delhi. 3 The Bengali Shonibarer Chithi. 4 ‘Harichacha’ is a hoarse, shrill bird juxtaposed to poetry’s mellifluous sweetness. 5 These are the stereotyped symbols of Hindus and Muslims, i.e., the Hindu queue and dhoti, and the Muslim beard and pyjama. 6 The pun is on the word mou which means honey in Bangla. 7 Qazi Nazrul Islam refers to himself. 8 Aampara refers to the very first stanzas of the 30th section (‘para’) of the Koran. Usually it is considered the starting point for beginners and children, with brief, simple stanzas easily accessible for daily prayers. (I owe this explanation to C.M. Naim, former Professor of Urdu at the University of Chicago.) 9 From the Collection ‘Shorbohara’; see Nazrul Rachnabali (Abdul Qadir, Ed.), Bangla Academy, Dhaka, 1986, Vol. II, pp. 41–44.



Preface to the Revised Edition

Nazrul’s marriage to a Hindu without any conversion and naming his first child Krishna were anathema to both, Hindu and Muslim fanatics. The point that is being made is, there is a vast reservoir of combustible material that feeds into the building of sectarian strife and fuels communal discourses; economic deprivation, social dislocation, political militancy in the form of insurgency, cultural and linguistic insecurities, and so on. This inflammable material is utilised by venal and violent groups to channelise the people’s prejudices and anger. All these issues have been addressed by several scholars. This book (when it was first published as part of a trilogy in 1992–94), sought to go beyond these themes; it examined the causes of communalism in shifting power-relations in culture. The work focused upon the discourses of communities and on the way these were deployed and mobilised by the protagonists of communal struggles. In a rather naïve expectation that such a study would help many to understand the power and force of these discourses, we were sadly disappointed as the proponents of the discourse of ‘scientific secularism’ retained a complacency of thought and attitude. The price that was paid in anguished community relationships and frequent bloodshed in the intervening years till now is a grim reminder that all must delve deeper into the issues discussed here. Contemporary Hindutva is still shackled in the discourses of the hoary ‘past’ while the historical conjuncture was rapidly transformed since 1992. That was why its subscribers in politics peaked in popularity during the 1990s with a handicap—they could not stand alone and had to seek the support of other discourses still embedded in past historical conjunctures, i.e., casteist and peasantist discourses. Since then ‘modern’ Hindutva is a ridiculous, though sporadically dangerous phenomena (vide Gujarat). Shashi Joshi Bhagwan Josh

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Preface

General Preface

In this project an attempt has been made to combine organically the perspectives of ‘a history from below’ with ‘a history from above’ to emphasise that their mutually exclusive deployment tends to blur rather than sharpen our understanding of historical events and processes. The macro-structures such as the colonial state/institutions/political parties/ kisan sabhas/trade unions/workers–peasants mobilisations have been placed in a context of interaction and interdependence, and their relationships focused upon. Theories in themselves do not confront history. They serve to provide meaningful questions and a language to explore historical problems. By discussing Gramsci’s theories in the context of mass movements, political representations, group alliances, ideological struggles, domination– subordination, conflict of interests between social groups and his insights into the specificity of the state structure and strategies, we evolve a new framework for the study of this theme. This has enabled the construction of a new paradigm: revealing the specific form and uniqueness of British rule in India, the rise of a mass movement, i.e., a protracted struggle to build ‘national hegemony’/‘state within a state’ and baring the logic of a ‘transfer of power’ rather than of a violent seizure of state power.

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In traditional historiography, what have been generally considered as three separate histories (history of state policies, history of the National Movement and the history of the left) are here treated as three strands of a single history. Also, we do not approach the reconstruction of this triangular relationship in the traditional way, i.e., dividing the project into three parts narrating the individual characteristics of each one of them separately. Rather, we chose the left, specifically the Communists, as the protagonists of this story and then constructed the experience of their interaction with the others as well as with social and political reality. The reason for this is the fact that for a long time the already existing historiography has revolved around the ‘Raj’ and ‘nationalism’/‘the Indian National Congress’. By conceptualising the period not in terms of a ‘dual contest’—the Congress and the Raj—but in terms of a ‘triangular contest’ we introduce a fundamental change in the reconstruction of the ‘national experience’. With the entry of the third contestant, the other parts of the picture also change. It becomes a different scenario—a very, very different history. In the historiography of the subaltern studies, which sought to write history of the third type, the heroes, despite appearing in brilliant but brief flashes on the political scene, do not constitute the ‘national experience’. They remain combatants but not contestants in the struggle for hegemony. The subaltern studies series reflected largely the traditional left’s historiographical premises exemplified in R.P. Dutt’s India Today. Logically, therefore, it focused upon the concept of subaltern insurgents rather than on hegemonic politics in the study of Indian history. We, on the contrary, begin with the rejection of R.P. Dutt’s methodology and analytical categories. A point in clarification of the focus in the three volumes: the first two volumes addressed, mainly, the political project of establishing hegemony of all the three contenders, i.e., the Colonial State, the National Movement, and the Left. However, the social–cultural project of integrating a hegemonic view of Indian society, as a basis for Indian nationhood is also taken into account. The third volume addresses the problems and perspectives involved in the contention over a social–cultural hegemony.



Preface xvii

Preface to Volume Three

Thus far, the historiographical treatment of the subject taken up in this volume has been labelled by scholars as the theme of ‘communalism’. Two parallel methods of study have emerged from the work done so far. The first began with the initial simplified evaluation of British role in creating the communal divide: the introduction of colonial political institutions, administrative structures and new economic modes were held responsible, apart from directly malicious encouragement of communal rivalry. The same method, in a refined form, has now begun to be employed by looking at the ideological dimension of colonial intervention—its cultural assumptions and the kind of discourse it introduced into colonial consciousness. This kind of analysis has been labelled as the ‘construction of communalism’ by the colonial discourse and those Indians who succumbed to it. The second historiographical method has been to trace the two nations of India and Pakistan to two civilisational and cultural pasts and to view the British as sometimes helping, at other times thwarting, the natural logic of this past. The first—largely nationalist and self-consciously secularist—body of work found enough evidence to demonstrate the coexistence of communities since the medieval cultural encounter, and to reveal the baselessness of the two cultures, thus two-nations, argument. The second, found equally strong evidence to show that long-term tensions and incompatibility existed between the two communities. The former refused to consider any of the evidence of the latter as it would lead them, they felt, into accepting the two-nation theory or separatism. The latter could not acknowledge the elements of adjustment and accommodation of the communities and cultures—variously called coexistence, syncretism and synthesis—for this would undermine any hard division of communities and nations. Both, thus, denied the evidence of the other. The struggle between the two historiographies became a struggle to assert their evidence as the only ‘true’ representations of the past. The task, as we see it, is not ‘simply telling the truth of this world, as can be uncovered by objective methods of observation, but also showing that this world is the site of ongoing struggle to tell the truth of this world’.1 Social scientists are constantly engaged in struggles for and 1 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Towards a Reflexive Sociology: A Workshop with Pierre Bourdieu’, in Sociological Theory, 1989, p. 21.

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contests over what may count as rational knowledge. The historian who makes a special claim to discover the truth about the past is inevitably implicated in such contests. We confronted the question: Is there a theory or concept which could help us to gain an insight into the problematic of community relations without ignoring the evidence of either side? In the course of seeking an answer to this, we found it desirable to get rid of ‘communalism’ as a category or label and take the self-perceptions and projections of communities and cultures into serious consideration. Thus, we felt, the thematic of Culture, Community and Power was the most helpful way of approaching our subject. Economic and social interests fuel all movements that provide a channel for individual desires and discontents. But why do these interests propel people towards certain ideologies and not others, and why do some people for some time plunge into certain movements and not all the people for all the time? Ideological resonance in any movement must be sought in the cultural realm. At least three alternative ideas about what culture is, have emerged in recent anthropological writings. The first, conceives of culture as a multiplicity of groups and voices without establishing any relationships of significance, of dominance or subordination, of hegemony or marginalisation between them. The second views culture as a battlefield on which competing groups struggle to define symbols and meanings. The third approaches culture as a process inevitably involving contradictions, conflict and accommodation, and emphasising the actors’ agency. In our view, the first has absolutely no concept of power and no grasp of the central fact of the history of human experience, of the world of process and change: the fact that power constitutes the dominant moment of all relations in society and culture. Consequently, it does not grasp the concept of hegemony either. If we understand that the struggle for power is about social conditions and cultural forms as sites of political tension, then we would also understand that hegemony aspires to establish not coercive but legitimate, enduring power relations. The second and third approaches to culture should not be seen as alternatives: we believe that culture is both, an arena for contestation between competing groups and a process involving conflict and accommodation. Our conceptual framework characterised as ‘the struggle for cultural hegemony’ between contending groups in society precisely recognises the actors’ agency through the examination of cultural discourses.



Preface

The discourse of domination versus that of hegemony is abundantly available in the cultural lives of all people in space and time. When this conceptual framework is brought to bear on understanding Indian history, and the relations of cultures, communities and power in the past and today, what results is a deconstruction of the phenomenon known as ‘communalism’. The struggle for cultural hegemony, thus, emerges as a struggle between, professedly, ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ groups to assert a position of cultural power so as to define the cultural complexion of the nation-state. Confrontations between symbolic cultural systems can be observed only at the level of totalising theory. The tradition of totalising social theory tries to conceptualise the principles behind cultural interaction and symbolisation, and presupposes that such principles exist, even if they are invisible to the empiricist observer, as the necessary triggers for agency or social–cultural interaction. Conceptualisations of such underlying principles range from Dumont’s concept of ideologie and valeur to Bourdieu’s doxa and habitus.2 This does not mean that totalising philosophies must lead to reification of society and culture, unable to account for the role of individual agency and internal variation. However, the individual person cannot act or speak in a non-cultural manner. For this reason the totalising theory’s irreplaceable value lies in enabling us to recognise aspects and patterns of cultural and social structures and their interaction, specially in societies marked by a diversity of symbolic universes and systems of practices. Cultural syncretism is surely a matter of degree and scale. For instance, the similarity of concepts and language in Indian Bhakti–Sufi compositions had a structure of relevance in common enabling them to make their plea for transcendence of differences and a negotiation of coexistence, although the social field activated by them was probably both narrow and shallow. As the Bhakti poet Dadu, a contemporary of Emperor Akbar, put it: ‘Dadu parva parvi sansar sab, nirpakh virla koi’ (all the world is partisan, the non-sectarian are few and far between).3 In this context, Barth’s dynamic conception of the observable behaviour

2 Louis Dumont, Essais sur I’individualisme, Paris, 1983; Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge, 1977. 3 Savitri Chandra, ‘Akbar’s Concept of Sulh-kul, Tulsi’s Concept of Maryada and Dadu’s Concept of Nipakh: A Comparative Study’, Social Scientist, Vol. 20, Nos 9–10, September–October 1992, p. 35.

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of cultural groups as acts of ‘boundary maintenance’ is relevant.4 It is the ‘psychic economy’ of people, shaped by the relationships of power in society, which reveals the linkage between representations, that is, the construction of meaning, and those whom they represent—the represented. Thus, apropos the use of terms such as ‘Hinduness’ or ‘Muslimness’, the point is not to deny that there exist, within different cultures, different intellectual motifs or cultural forms and practices which people share with each other within their cultural enclosure. The crucial question is to examine the different ways in which groups and individuals make use of, interpret and appropriate these motifs and practices; in short, to discover their ‘psychic economies’. The ‘Quit India’ movement in 1942 was one of the high water marks of the freedom struggle. Though the nature and pattern of this movement was different from the earlier movements, it acted as a final blow to the fast eroding hegemony of the colonial State. This further underlined the point that after the war the question of independence could no longer be evaded by British politicians. But what would be the shape of independent India? Would it be a united India? This question from now onwards emerged as the most important question and began to dominate the political agenda. This third volume is an attempt to understand the nature of social forces which contributed to the emergence of a segment of militant Hindu nationalism and an alternative mass-movement of the Muslims demanding Pakistan. This is also the period when Indian Communists adopted the policy of support to the war efforts of the colonial government. A one-sided reading of the exaggerated claims of their achievements made by the communists could easily give the impression that communists had struck a secret deal with the colonial officials in 1942 and their support for the suppression of the Congress movement was of crucial importance. The communists were living in a world of fantasy and knew very little about the minor role the colonial authorities had set aside for them in their strategic script. Moreover, the communist leaders made their cadre look ridiculous when they made them carry three flags simultaneously. Publicly ridiculing the communists, Jinnah, in his presidential address to the Muslim League session in Karachi in December 1943, observed: 4 Fredrik Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organisation of Culture Difference, Introduction, Oslo.



Preface

I find that the cleverest party that is carrying on propaganda are the Communists. They have got so many flags, and I think they consider that there is safety in numbers. They have got the Red flag; they have got the Russian flag; they have got the Congress flag. And now they have been good enough to introduce our flag also (“laughter”, says the official record). Well, when a man has got too many flags, I get suspicious ….5

After 1940, unlike many other nationalists, the communists were willing to recognise the fact that Muslim League had succeeded in creating a mass upsurge of the Muslim people. Theoretically speaking, this had raised the following fundamental questions: Is it correct to say that ideas of ‘nation’ and ‘class’ were operative only within the cultural internality? Was the project to build a non-cultural or culture-neutral national movement itself misplaced or misconceived?

5 Presidential Speech delivered extempore at the Karachi Session of the All-India Muslim League, 24 December 1943. Available in Jamit-ud-Din Ahamad, Speeches and Writings of Jinnah, Vol. I, Lahore, 1960, 6th edition, p. 569.

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Acknowledgements

For stimulating discussions we are grateful to R.K. Mishra, Renuka Mishra and Primila Lewis. We thank Professor Harbhajan Singh and Purshottam Aggarwal for their assistance in locating relevant materials. Some of this work was presented at the Nehru Memorial Museum and monthly seminars at the invitation of Professor Ravinder Kumar and at a conference organised by Professor G.S. Grewal at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. We are grateful to Professors Ravinder Kumar and Grewal for giving us the opportunity to discuss some of our ideas with them and other participants. Swati Mitra was a very enthusiastic participant in discussions and debates. We thank her for her keen interest in the completion of this work. Finally, our gratitude to the British Council for financial support which enabled us to visit the British Museum, London, to consult the R.P. Dutt Collection. Shashi Joshi Bhagwan Josh

xxiv Culture, Community and Power

Introduction

In the context of historical encounters between peoples, cultures and religions, the dynamics of cross-cultural contact need examination. Critical to our purpose is the question: Are the protagonists of the encounters open to cross-cultural dialogue and multiple ways of seeing the past? It is historically significant and contemporaneously crucial that we study the ways in which they are represented today, drawing upon often contradictory and contentious ‘memories’. Memory appears to range freely over unrestrained time—from centuries ago to just some years past. The role of memory in the life of people and societies can at times be cohesive and at other times disruptive. In the latter case, the past (often imagined and constructed) is dredged up for the production of memory that challenges social cohesion and secular institutional norms. If social cohesion is challenged, boundaries of the Other become demarcated and norms of mutual respect and tolerance get challenged. Objects, events and histories get represented to rationalise suspicion and distrust. The troubling vista that the spectre of memory opens up undercuts the vocabulary of a secular, critical discourse. Thus, we cannot appropriate words such as trauma, healing, catharsis, testimony, and so on, without careful discussion. Shashi Joshi

xxvi Culture, Community and Power

Chapter 1

Culture, Community and Power

The examination of relations between cultures and communities and the story of ‘separatism’ and representational politics has inhabited different, almost parallel worlds. The world of representational, political power sharing, constitutional politics based on perceptions of the community and claims to communal leadership has produced the histories of ‘communal politics’. The other world, peopled by embattled, violently rioting masses has produced histories of ‘religious conflict’ and ‘communal riots’. Where and how do these histories intersect and coincide to produce the phenomenon we have learnt to call ‘communalism’? This question is rarely explored. Community mass violence—‘communal killings’—has thus far been grounded onto a materialist explanation of deprivation, class competition, economic rivalry and hostility. Some studies which relate communal politics to local interests and local conflicts also trace their source to economic and system imperatives.1 When a non-economic force is recognised it is termed ‘religion’ or ‘religiosity’ which, via the route of 1 C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in ihe Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870, Cambridge, 1983; and ‘Indian Merchants in a “Traditional” Setting: Banaras, 1780–1830’, in C. Dewey and A.G. Hopkins (eds), Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India, London, 1978; Partha Chatterjee, ‘Agrarian

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ideologisation and manipulation by motivated leadership, erupts into sudden, spasmodic violence. This violence is a moment of ‘madness’ which spends itself in directionless fury against scapegoats and surrogates for their real enemies who oppress them. And then they return to ‘sanity’ and carry on their routine life. In brief, communal violence is an aspect of ‘social pathology’.2 Thus the basic scenario is one of dislocation—social and economic— and mobility—upwards or downwards—in the context of the colonial situation. In this framework the manipulations and constructions of communal ideologues or the colonial state, or both, get fuelled by the changing political economy. This kind of historiography can be summed up as a presentation of ‘communalism without cultural contest’. It describes the evolution of a structural condition and the construction of an ideology that has no ‘rationally’ comprehensible links with the people who fight and kill each other with ‘insensate’ violence.3 A recent study of communalism expresses ‘fundamental disagreement’ with those historians who artificially separate politics and ideology from violent crowd behaviour.4 It views collective violence as amenable to ‘rational scrutiny’ and not as insensate actions. Nevertheless, to discover the ‘rational values’ and ‘motives’ of violent crowds it is imperative to fall back upon deterministic caste and class competition in ‘the larger economic and political forces’.5 The methodological assumptions of such an approach are obvious. The search for coherence in a problematic historical topic such as crowd Relations and Communalism in Bengal, 1926–1935’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies, Vol. 3, New Delhi, 1984; Mushirul Hasan, Nationalism and Communal Politics in India, Delhi, 1979; Mushirul Hasan (ed.). Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India, Delhi, 1986; F.C.R. Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims, Cambridge, 1974; Suranjan Das, Communal Riots in Bengal 1905–1947, New Delhi, 1991. 2 Bipan Chandra, Communalism in Modern India, New Delhi, 1984, contains all the arguments on class oppression being distorted into communal oppression (p. 55), the manipulation of cultural and psychological anxieties by communal propaganda (pp. 123–33), and religion and religiosity as ‘emotionalising and inflammable factors’ (pp. 163–73). Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, New Delhi, 1990, for community riots as ‘religious’ and ‘moments of madness’, pp. 124, 126. 3 Ibid., pp. 93–243. 4 Sandria B. Freitag, Collective Action and Community; Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India, New Delhi, 1990, p. 36. 5 Ibid., p. 14.

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behaviour is undertaken by looking for a ‘material’ rationality and motivation that can be rooted in economic and political institutions and structures. Consequently, it ends up merely describing ‘collective activities in public spaces’ in interesting detail but offers little by way of decoding their cultural meanings. While rejecting the subaltern approach6 which views symbolic action as expressing class antagonisms the study is unable to offer an insight into why and how a collectively shared symbolism is to be analysed. The reason for this appears to be an inversion of appropriate methodology; instead of reading the meanings that a collective’s symbolic language and discourse infuses into their activities it seeks to ‘analyse primarily the crowds’ actions’.7 Naturally, therefore, it devalues the polemical vernacular sources which alone can tell us why and how certain cultural symbolism is projected and effectively grips the imagination of collectives. This approach can be summed up as ‘contest without cultural power and struggle for hegemony’. In this framework people are implicated in violent contestation but their violence is fuelled by economic and status deprivation, rivalries and competition. The relationships of power in culture and society became a veneer for real, hard conflicts following system imperatives. Moreover, they are local and specific—‘contextualised’— without any broad, encompassing cultural symbolism being evident. We prefer to characterise the so-called ‘religious conflict’ as civil strife and to interpret it as a process of cultural contestation. This characterisation is applicable to struggles between castes—in contests of elite and popular cultures—as much as to struggles between self-defining communities. They can be seen as attempts to structure or restructure power relations in culture and society and are manifest in contests of symbolic power. The ideologues of cultural contests can be seen as reflecting a cultural faultline in the first place and then acquiring leadership by deliberately activating and deepening the flaw through cultural symbolism. Looking at evidence very similar to that cited by C.A. Bayly, Warren Fusfield8 and Sandria Freitag, our conceptual differences with them produce very different analyses and interpretations. They tend to draw a line of continuity between ‘religious conflicts’ of pre-colonial India to the 6

Ibid., p. 17, fn. 32. Ibid., pp. 16–17. Original emphasis. 8 Warren Fusfield, ‘Communal Conflict in Delhi: 1803–1930’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. XIX, No. 2, 1982. 7

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‘communalism’ of the colonial situation. In our view, there is a continuity, not of religious oppositions but of the cultural faultline which produced long-term tensions and resistance despite accommodations. There is a substantial body of work on the Sufis, the Vaishnava and Vithoba cults of eastern and western India, the Nanak and Kabir panths of the north and identifiable Hindu cults such as the Ramanandis, etc., which provide clear evidence of the faultline. They reveal cognate perceptions of ‘us’ and ‘them’, of the ‘self ’ and the ‘other’—their goal clearly being to obliterate the conflict and strife between cultures while incorporating ‘religious’ motifs across the cultural faultline, not to deny or ignore these perceptions through ersatz syncretisms.9 Clearly, these perceptions were not a colonial ‘construction’; the ideologues of community and culture and the colonialists simply activated them by deliberate selections and arrangements of history and memory. If we do not accept this we cannot explain how mass cultural contests called ‘riots’ intersect with representational politics without taking recourse to manipulative theories of mobilisation or materialist explanations of motivation. Studies of medieval social and cultural movements reveal cultural conceptions of the community as early as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Cultural, because a wide spectrum of religious beliefs agglomerate within the Muslim and non-Muslim enclosures, respectively. The tendency of historians of communalism is to collapse ‘religious beliefs’ into 9

G.A. Deleury, The Cult of Vithoba, Poona, 1960; J.S. Grewal, From Guru Nanak to Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Amritsar, 1982; David N. Lorenzen (ed.), Religious Change and Cultural Domination, Mexico, 1981; Kenneth E. Bryant, ‘Sant and Vaisnava Poetry’, in Mark Juergensmeyer and Gerald Barrier (eds), Sikh Studies: Comparative Perspectives on a Changing Tradition, Berkeley, 1979; Jayant Lele (ed,), Tradition and Modernity in Bhakti Movements, Leiden, 1981; Linda Hess and Sukhdev Singh (translators), The Bijak of Kabir, San Francisco, 1983; Charlotte Vandeville (translator), Kabir Granthavati, Oxford, 1974; Nelson Fraser and K.B. Marathe (translators), The Poems of Tukaram, Delhi, 1981; Karine Schomer and W.H. McLeod (eds), The Sants: Studies in a Devotional Tradition of India, Delhi, 1987; N.K. Wagle, ‘Hindu–Muslim Interactions in Medieval Maharashtra’, in G.D. Sontheimer and Herman Kulke (eds), Hinduism Reconsidered, Delhi, 1989; Fred W. Clothey (ed.), Images of Man: Religion and Historical Process in South Asia, Madras, 1982; A.R. Kulkarni, ‘Social Relations in the Maratha Country in the Medieval Period’, in Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 32nd Session, 1970; Richard Maxwell Eaton, The Sufis of Bijapur 1300–1700, Princeton, 1978; S. Wilson (ed.), Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History, Cambridge, 1983; George Michell (ed.). The Islamic Heritage of Bengal, Paris, 1984; S.A.A. Rizvi, A History of Sufism in India, 2 vols., New Delhi, 1983; Annemarie Schimmel, Islam in the Indian Subcontinent, Leiden, 1980.

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the cultural signifiers which demarcated these enclosures. Consequently, they see the continuity of communalism as ‘religious conflict’ and fail to observe that the negotiations of power relations were basically those of cultural power in society. The colonial intrusion broke the continuity with changing perceptions of societal status in relation to the state and the balance of power in cultural relationships. The Muslim qasbas (‘never was there such a Ram Nowmi’10) and the Hindu ganjs (never did we have a cow sacrifice) showed the same tension-ridden relations. This rupture of ‘old usage’ and ‘past practices’ can only be located at the broader plane of cultural contests and struggle for hegemony. The state could only encourage and not manufacture the process which pushed and transformed cultural enclosures into movements of social closure. While rivalry and competition existed, the disharmony produced by a sense of cultural dominance and cultural subordination constituted the discourse of contestation. When ‘instigators’, ‘manipulators’, ‘propagandists’—the ideologues of contest—roused people to ‘disgraceful excesses’ on a ‘purely religious principle’ they appealed to this disharmony in the cultural sphere. There are no constructions with fresh material in cultural history, only a reconstruction within a changing world view. Materials inherited from the past—from some ‘tradition’ (the greater the plurality of tradition the greater the choice)—modified, elaborated, negotiated or reified, are ingredient to the strategies for confronting and explaining current phenomena and experience. It is in this sense that Bayly’s observation of continuity is valid and not as a simple re-duplication of the earlier phenomena on a larger, expanded scale. It was not ‘communalism’ that developed in a linear direction but the transformation of cultural awareness into a ‘contestatory ideology’ in a process of reification of one tradition. It was this process which turned the cultural enclosure into social closure. To the extent that the discourse appears novel, whether created in certain circumstances or adapted from the discourse of others (with their different premises), the materials of past experiences and moods are selectively arranged and built upon. This constitutes the process of recasting a culture into an ideology—into ‘communalism’—which is facilitated by stereotyping it into a new discourse. ‘Construction’—as part of an imaginative act—is ‘something made’, ‘something fashioned’ 10

See Freitag. Collective Action and Community, p. 64.

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in the original meaning of fictio. It is not something ‘false’ or ‘unfactual’. Fictio is a ‘making’ not an ‘invention’.11 Most of the work referred to approaches symbolism, above all, as an instrument of social communication. It utilises the concept of religious symbols—‘sacred symbols’—in a functionalist manner, that is, in providing an ‘identity’ for competitive groups under colonialism. On the contrary, we view these symbols as cultural in Habermas’s sense of the term. Culture and the symbolism and discourse of culture cannot be located in colonial politics. The concept of culture in Habermas denotes the ‘symbolic structures of the lifeworld’.12 And symbolism is a cognitive mechanism that participates in the construction of knowledge and in the functioning of memory. In other words, we must accept the existence of unequivocally cultural normative structures that do not follow system imperatives or economic imperatives. They evolve according to their own logic. To discover that logic is a prerequisite to discovering what makes people do what they do. Fusfield and Freitag emphasise the active role of the ‘intrusive’ colonial state in imparting significance to the formation of ‘community identity’ by playing the balancer of community power.13 They miss, however, the crucial characteristic of the colonial state as alien to the pre-existing balance of cultural power between Muslims and non-Muslims in Indian society. The parameters of culturally hegemonic rule by the Mughals had established certain well-defined limits to community behaviour. Power relations between Muslim rulers and non-Muslim subjects were acknowledged and played by the rules of what was mutually recognised as possible or futile. This state of affairs had evolved through a long-drawn process of conflict and complicity. The ground rules could not be violated by community aggressions and transgressions on either side without upsetting the equilibrium of hegemonic rule in Mughal India. This concept of hegemony helps to analyse the lived dominance and subordination of particular cultures as a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living, shaping perceptions of the self and the world. With the entry of the British on to the scene this hegemony 11

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York, 1973, pp. 15–16. Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, London, 1984, Ch. 2. 13 Unlike G. Pandey who gives the colonial state an ideologically creative role as the constructor of the communal discourse. 12

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was broken, transforming practices and expectations, and perceptions of the self and the world. Now, the parameters of possible, acceptable community behaviour appeared blurred and uncertain and the potential for a restructuration and renegotiation of cultural relations seemed available. To renegotiate relations means to try and change, modify or expand a situation or a context that one is obliged to inhabit—that which can never be made over afresh. Contest and a continuous reinterpretation of ‘rights’ and ‘custom’ were a natural corollary to this strategy. Freitag argues that the ‘ascendancy’ of ‘upwardly mobile new leaders’ and ‘new and rising socio-economic groups’14 led to their pressurising and influencing the colonial state into recognising their community power and their cultural assertions. However, there were as many rising socio-economic groups under the Mughal dispensation as well, as the study of regional economies in pre-colonial India shows. Why should the cultural contestation of communities acquire the scale and proportions that it did only in the colonial period? The answer, we would argue, lay not in the ascendancy of new economic groups but in the establishment of a new state. The structurally intrusive character of the colonial state or its ideologically divisive role, in its obviously disruptive and manipulative tendencies, could not provide the motivations and symbolism of cultural assertions. Its role was to fertilise the existing perceptions of ‘otherness’ and contestation by creating new rules and space for such assertions. The state’s proclaimed cultural neutrality was, in the eyes of the contestants, the ‘public arena’ which was opened up for asserting new relations of power. However, while the nationalists in the Congress sought to contain this contest within a discourse of democracy and mass representation, sections of Hindus found in this new state an opportunity to argue for an aggressive strategy, of a reversal of cultural hegemony. As M.S. Golwalkar defined the ‘we’ of the future Indian nation: In Hindusthan exists and must needs exist the ancient Hindu nation and nought else but the Hindu nation .... So long, as they (Muslims and other non-Hindus) maintain their racial, religious and cultural differences, they cannot but be only foreigners …. There are only two courses open to the foreign elements, either to merge themselves in 14

Freitag, Collective Action and Community, pp. 64, 96–97, 107, 113–14, 126.

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the national race and adopt its culture, or to live at the sweet will of the national race … they must cease to be foreigners, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation ….15

Freitag asks an important question: if the identities of Hindus and Muslims were not immutable why was a religious idiom used in their interrelationship? Her answer is tautological: the religious idiom was rooted in the ‘nature of public ceremonials and public arenas’; these public ceremonials were ‘religious’ and, therefore, their religious symbolism was the raw material for communal riots. One can question: why should public ceremonials using religious symbolism be the site of community hostility? Is there an inevitable strife built into different religions? The only answer we could find in Freitag’s book is that hostility is born of competition in the changing social and economic positions. In our view, public ceremonials lie in the wider domain of culture and are never narrowly ‘religious’: ‘Sacred symbols function to synthesize a people’s ethos and their world view … their most comprehensive ideas of order’. A set of ‘religious’ beliefs, like all belief systems, denote ‘a specific disposition’, a preferred mode of experiencing the world, the self and the relations between them. This disposition ‘casts a derivative, lunar light over the solid features of people’s secular life’.16 It is this disposition and orientation that constitutes the cultural limits of all politics. Therefore, all so-called religious rituals are cultural when they go public. ‘Cultural acts, the construction, apprehension, and utilisation of symbolic forms, are social events like any other’ and are unquestionably a publicly acted document because above all, they are a symbol of some thing—a meaning—which to qualify as collectively deciphered meaning must be public. It is in terms of these meanings that ‘people signal conspiracies and join them or perceive insults and answer them …’ and are 15 M.S. Golwalkar, We: Or Our Nationhood Defined, Nagpur, 1939, 1947 edition, pp. 19, 52–56, 62. 16 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973, pp. 89, 123–24. The attack on Geertzian culture concepts, such as ‘ethos’, for being ‘essentialist’ comes from those who reject the anthropological idea of culture as such. Arjun Appadorai, for instance, characterises Indian society as ‘a multiplicity of voices and perspectives’ and instead of identifying a dominant cultural pattern that tends to override the multiplicity, he is for describing a multi-vocal equality in culture. As a result he has no concept of power relations in society and culture, and no concept of hegemony either. See John Leavitt, ‘Is Homo Hierarchicus?’ American Ethno logist, No. 13; and ‘Cultural Holism in the Anthropology of South Asia’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol. 26, No. 1. January–June 1992.

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an inalienable part of the ‘imaginative universe within which their acts are signs’.17 Public ceremonials, therefore, are not ‘religious’, they are what Milton Singer calls ‘cultural performances’ in which dispositional and conceptual aspects of religious life converge for the believer.18 Thus, ‘public ceremonials’ with all their symbolism are not the reasons for communal riots, they are the theatre for negotiating power relationships in culture and society. The cultural contests they embody need not be, and are not most of the time, violent and life destroying. They are, largely, channels for asserting the ‘felt sense of the quality of life at a particular time and place’, a way of living and thinking.19 At what point in time and place they turn to bloodletting, is an area for exploration, perhaps, with the help of psychohistorical methodologies. However, the view that the ‘sentiments’ and ‘prejudices’ do not express ‘real’ interests and are elements of ‘false consciousness’ has already been demolished by the psychological exploration of cultures and civilisations.20 Assuming the abandonment of this conveniently evasive answer of ‘false consciousness’ offered by theorists of mass manipulation, more important questions emerge; why should the psychic order or disorder of people en masse express itself through a particular selection and arrangement of historical memory? The ‘cathartic explanation’21 for the emergence and construction of an ideology, for example, Ranajit Guha’s reading of Bankimchandra,22 sees emotional tension as being ‘displaced’ on to symbolic enemies. While, in other contexts it could be the ‘Jews’, ‘Big Business’ or the ‘Reds’, in Bankim’s case it is the ‘Muslims’. The historically significant question, 17

Ibid., pp. 11–13 and 91. Milton Singer, ‘The Cultural Pattern of Indian Civilisation’, Far Eastern Quarterly, No. 15, 1955, pp. 23–26. 19 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, Harmondsworth, 1971, pp. 63–64. 20 For a re-examination of Freudian psychological insights in the context of culture and civilisation, see Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation, London, 1969. 21 Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 204–5. 22 Ranajit Guha, An Indian Historiography of India: A Nineteenth Century Agenda and Its Implications, Calcutta, 1988, pp. 64–67. Bankim’s obsessive concentration on kalamka (kalank or blot on reputation) and bahubal (physical prowess) according to Guha was put ‘in the wrong place in Indian history … the force of ideology had brought about a series of displacements to make the Musalman rather than the recent, colonial past its temporal site’. This arbitrary proclamation of the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ place in history and arrogating himself power of deciding the ‘true historical vocation’ of concepts, compels Guha to resort to the ‘displacement theory’, p. 67. 18

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however, is: why should these ‘enemies’ and not some ‘other’ symbolise the target for displacement of emotion? If, as Guha argues in Bankim’s case, the expression of hostility against the British is displaced on to Muslims, what makes the latter appear as ‘legitimate’ objects of hostility? What in society enables the ideologues to so displace their hostility? When emotions, for whatever reasons, seek symbolic outlets it must be asked why one particular symbolism is invoked and how it resonates with the people whom the ideologues address? The world view of dominant groups in society becomes ingredient to cultural memory. It is impossible to separate this worldview from geography and territory. Cultural memory is evoked as an essential part of the cultural Self and Being and is projected in the ideology of cultural tradition, prestige, inheritance. This is true of both Hindu and Muslim dominant groups. The discourse ranges widely on the political spectrum while the cultural inspiration is shared: from Vivekanand and Bankimchandra, Bipin Chandra Pal, Aurobindo and Tilak to Gandhi, Nehru and Subhas Bose; from Shaukat and Mohammad Ali and Hakim Ajmal Khan to Mohammad Iqbal and Maulana Azad. The Muslim elite celebrated Muslim culture as a focus of selfesteem. Like the poet Hali and later Iqbal, Hakim Ajmal Khan was also deeply concerned with the greatness of the Muslim cultural past, of the vicissitudes in the fortunes of all cultures, and of the possibility of the restoration of Muslim greatness in the present. The Muslim elite’s relations with the British and the Hindus was predicated on a quest for respect, for quami izzat and wiqar.23 This concern for Muslim culture had nothing to do with ‘religion’ as such. The symbols of Muslim culture were ‘worldly symbols in that they are linked to historical romanticism and look to the restoration of worldly glory’.24 It was the quest for cultural self-esteem that led Iqbal to the view that ‘modern Western thought is a direct descendant of the glorious medieval intellectual culture of Islam, disseminated through Spain and Sicily’.25 Just as Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s writings in the mid-nineteenth century ‘breathe of pride in bygone eras’ while seeking an explanation 23 Barbara D. Metcalf, ‘Nationalist Muslims in British India: The Case of Hakim Ajmal Khan’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 19. Part I, February 1985, pp. 1–28, see p. 10. Also see, Rajmohan Gandhi, Understanding the Muslim Mind, New Delhi, 1987. 24 Ibid., p. 3. 25 Quoted in Fazlur Rahman, Islam, Chicago, 1979, p. 220.

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for ‘Muslim decline’, Zakir Hussain was greatly moved by the concept of ‘Islam’s honour’.26 Abul Kalam Azad sought inspiration for nationalism and Indian independence in the ‘pure Islam’ of the Quran which commanded a fight against slavery and oppression; ‘There will be nothing left with us if we separate politics from religion .... For the Hindus patriotism might be a secular obligation, but for the Muslims it was a religious duty.’27 Nationalists who were Hindus likewise sought inspiration in the greatness of their past. Aurobindo Ghose asserted: ‘I say that it is the Sanatan Dharma which for us is nationalism. This Hindu nation was born with the Sanatan Dharma; with it it moves and with it it grows.’28 Bipin Chandra Pal observed: ‘Behind the new nationalism in India stands the old Vedantism.’29 ‘India,’ Gandhi said, ‘has a soul’ discovered long ago by its ancient rishis: ‘I believe that the civilisation India has evolved is not to be beaten in the world. It is my firm opinion that no culture has treasures so rich as ours. Nothing can equal the seeds sown by our ancestors.’ Again: ‘Hinduism has made marvellous discoveries in things of religion, of the spirit, of the soul .... After all there is something in Hinduism that has kept it alive up till now.’30 Jawaharlal Nehru observed that there was a philosophical continuity in India and saw this as a precondition for Indian society’s continued existence over so many centuries: ‘She (India) was like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer has completely hidden or erased what had been written previously.’31 Subhas Bose was eloquent: The Indian nation died more than once, but every time it had its resurrection .... There is something in India’s culture which mankind 26 See Muhammad Mujeeb, The Indian Muslims, London, 1967, pp. 446–47 and his biography of Dr. Zakir Hussain, New Delhi, 1972, p. 11. 27 Mushir Ul Haq, Muslim Politics in Modern India: 1857–1947, Meerut, 1971, pp. 72, 88, 101. 28 Sri Aurobindo, Collected Works, Vol. 2, Pondicherry, 1972, p. 10. 29 Quoted in K.P. Karunakaran, Continuity and Change in Indian Politics, New Delhi, 1964, pp. 97–98. 30 M.K. Gandhi, India of My Dreams, Ahmedabad, 1947, p. 183 and My Picture of Free India, Gandhi Series No. 8, Bombay, 1965, pp. 3–10. 31 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, London, 1956, p. 46.

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cannot do without, a culture which is essential for the fullest development of human civilisation. That is why the sages of India kept the lights of learning burning through ages and ages of darkness.

Inspired by the spirit of ‘Nilakantha, or the God Shiva, one must say, there’s a fountain of joy within me ….’32 It is important to observe here that the philosophy, the Vedantism, the Sanatan Dharma, Hinduism and the learning bequeathed by the sages that these nationalist Hindus spoke of was not religion as a coherent ideological system but the sum of cultural practices, a world view, a habitus. The celebration of their cultural pasts as a focus for self-esteem, thus, characterised all self-consciously nationalist Hindus and Muslims. Clearly, therefore, nationalism and communalism are political categories seeking to conceptually separate different political positions on a cultural spectrum. This leads to the unending debate on whether culturally selfconscious Hindu and Muslim leaders of society were nationalists or communalists. Equally, the discourse of cultural anxiety and psychological imagery was also shared by many whom scholars have separated under the categories of nationalists or communalists. In 1925, Lajpat Rai declared that Hindus were organising themselves because there was the danger of ‘subordination to the other community’ which would ‘humiliate and destroy us’.33 Zakir Hussain, on the other hand, referred in 1935 to the ‘deep suspicion’ among Muslims, … that under a national government the existence of the Muslim culture will be imperilled. Muslims are not willing to pay this price for unity under any circumstances. I, not only as a Muslim, but as a true Indian, am glad that Muslims are not ready to pay this price.34

While, ideologues of the Hindu Mahasabha feared ‘a perpetual state of inferiority and impotence’ and asserted that they were ‘in no way inferior in prowess’,35 Shaukat Ali and Hafiz Hidayat Hosain articulated 32

Subhas Bose, The Mission of Life, Calcutta, 1953, pp. 9–10, 13. V.C. Joshi (ed), Lajpat Rai: Writings and Speeches, Vol. II, Delhi, 1966, pp. 246, 253. 34 A.G. Noorani, President Zakir Hussain, Delhi, 1974, p. 61. 35 Manifesto issued by Calcutta Hindu Mahasabha, quoted in P. Dixit, Communalism: A Struggle for Power, New Delhi, 1974, pp. 140–63. 33

Culture, Community and Power

the Muslims’ contempt for Congressmen such as Ansari, Abul Kalam Azad and Syed Mahmud who were, they said, ‘weak men and renegades’ who ‘have chosen to live at their (Hindus’) mercy’ and had become ‘impotent to devise effective means of cure’.36 The historiographical approach that argues of a split between ‘elite’ and ‘popular culture’ and the manipulation of the mass by the elite produces no insight into the internal relationships within a cultural enclosure. It sees the elite as independent of their own and their community’s normative context and its symbols and ignoring the constraining influence of culture. One must reject the notion that ‘ashraf’discourse was not shared by non-ashraf Muslims37 or that the discourse of ‘Hindu’ cultural greatness was irrelevant to caste-divided non-Muslim masses. Mushirul Hasan38 has clearly shown how the ulama seeking theoretical justification and legitimation in the same sources of the Sharia, the Koran and Hadith, split in two—the Jamiyat Ulema-e-Hind which supported the National Congress and the Jamiyat Ulema-i-Islam which supported the Muslim League’s political position. He overlooks, however, that the shared inspiration generates a cultural spectrum with observably different, even contrary, political positions located within it. This phenomenon can be seen as the continuity of what we have termed as ‘revisionism’ and ‘dogmatism’ in all cultural–ideological systems which always offer alternative ways of interpreting master-texts, the common sources of inspiration. In our view, ‘religion’ and ‘religiosity’, which are emphasised by Hasan, are poor explanations for ‘communal’ relationships. In the case of the ulama, ‘religion’ unites them for both the Jamiyats expounded on the best way to serve Islam. On the other hand, the struggle for cultural hegemony, the assertion of cultural power, divided them. The same religion could authorise equally valid ways of serving it, one by being faithful to one’s religion even in a predominantly alien cultural environment, the other 36

Moin Shakir, ‘The Muslims and the Freedom Struggle in India 1919–1935’, in Ravinder Kumar (ed.), A Centenary History of the Indian National Congress, Vol. II, New Delhi, 1985, pp. 327–28. 37 For the common discourse of ashraf and non-ashraf Muslims see Farzana Shaikh, Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in Colonial India, 1860–1947, Cambridge, 1989. 38 Mushirul Hasan, ‘The Authority of Religion’, in Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India, Delhi, 1986, p. 414.

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by striving for cultural hegemony in fresh territory and abandoning the site where alien hegemony appeared to threaten. This fresh territory was the concept of Pakistan, fulfilling the desire for a ‘cognisable centre’ for Islam in the subcontinent. The term is Iqbal’s, for whom the symbolic ‘cognisable centre’ of Muslims the world over was the Kaaba while the regional centre could be the Muslim majority areas.39 Despite Iqbal’s political position of opposition to any physical division of territory the cultural concept of a symbolic cognisable centre could naturally evolve in favour of Pakistan. The conclusions of Hasan’s work point towards problems which he does not address. He makes two parallel sets of observations: in the first instance, Indian Muslims are not a monolithic community. Political divisions reflected socio-economic positions which varied from province to province and city to city and, we might add, village to village. Thus, Muslim reactions to the Congress-led national movement varied likewise and became regional, local responses and relationships.40 In the second instance parallel conclusions are drawn: As a religious group Muslims are viewed by and large as a homogeneous community. Common allegiance, Hasan holds, to Islam and its symbols—mosques, Sufi shrines and the Hajj—created a sense of cohesion and unity. Thus, despite coexistence and cooperation in everyday life between Muslims and non-Muslims, there were moments ‘when their religious feelings became inflamed’ and they treated each other ‘as enemies’ and clashes occurred. ‘Old and cherished traditions’ of ‘good feelings’ suddenly disappeared at such moments.41 The context of socio-economic positions is adequate for a discussion of representational politics, competition and patronage. However, it completely neglects the cultural enclosure which encompasses the various communities and groups of Muslims. Hasan, by accepting the materialist explanation of socio-economic interests in one instance, even while employing the idealist notion of a religion-based community on the other, fails to establish any conceptual linkage between them. Between the ‘rationality’ of everyday coexistence and what appears as the

39 Mohammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Delhi, 1974, p. 80. Also see, Gandhi, Understanding the Muslim Mind, pp. 47–80. 40 Hasan, Nationalism and Communal Politics in India, 1979, pp. 306–13. 41 Ibid. Governor of Bengal quoted on p. 308.

Culture, Community and Power

‘irrationality’ of cataclysmic moments of religious fervour appears the void of unintelligibility, an absence of analytical discourse. The failure to see the significance of cultural contests and the urge towards cultural assertion often leads to erroneous generalisations. For instance, the reason for bitter competition in representational institutions is ascribed by Hasan to the existence of uneven economic and social development of Muslims.42 The implied theory of ‘deprivation caused communalism’ cannot explain why the competition was most acute in areas where development was equal or in fact, where Muslims were more advanced in terms of existing power and influence. Punjab politics offers an excellent example of an area where Muslims had established themselves in positions of power, patronage and cultural hegemony through the inter-communal Unionist Party. The challenge to this hegemony by Sikhs and Hindus led to a clash of communities in the political arena.43 Thus Fazl-i-Hussain, the architect of the Unionist Party was not, as Hasan maintains, ‘ironically’, the champion of ‘Muslim interests’. The challenge to Muslim hegemony established through the Unionist Party made him the natural spokesman of Punjab’s Muslims. When Hasan writes that all-India leaders ‘employed communal slogans to advance vested interests’, he fails to ask the question: why should such a ploy succeed in mobilising people? The implicit answer in his work is ‘religion’ and the religious susceptibilities of the people. Naturally, the solution to this problem could only be the Gandhian prescription of ‘equality of all religions’ and their unity. This discourse of unity of all religions and ‘brotherhood’ of communities, however, did not really help in averting or decreasing contestation. As pointed out earlier, religion per se could inspire diametrically opposed politics and political alliances. For religion was only the ideology around which contestation was organised not the motive force for contest and conflict. After all, Gandhi’s religiosity or the Jamiyat-i-Hind’s religious ideology and persona did not generate political opposition; rather, it fostered cooperation and alliance. The emphasis on religion and religiosity has led to the kind of study made by Farzana Shaikh. To be fair, Shaikh perceives ‘Muslim vision’ and ‘their culture’s religious base’ as an ‘active tradition’, characterising 42

Ibid., pp. 312–13. David Gilmartin, Empire and Islam, Punjab and the Making of Pakistan, New Delhi, 1989, especially Chs 4 and 5. Also see, David Page, Prelude to Partition: The Indian Muslims and the Imperial System of Control, 1920–1932, New Delhi, 1982. 43

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it as ‘the ideological contextual dimension’ of Muslim politics.44 From this we would conclude that the cultural spectrum of a shared vision which was the source of legitimation for Muslim leaders and politics was its limitation as well. In other words, they could not break out of the cultural limits of all politics. Equally, one can observe the cultural limits of the Congress’ political leaders who excited the imagination of people in the ‘Hindu’ cultural enclosure. Shaikh reduces this relationship of culture to politics, of the moral discourse to political discourse, into the ‘constraining influence of Muslim religious ideology’.45 Religious ideology could produce contest as well as incorporation and accommodation. The substantive evidence of religious and cultural accommodation variously termed ‘syncretism’ or ‘overlapping religious identities’ shows, basically, that religion is not the site of conflict. This phenomenon is discussed elsewhere. Our basic proposition is that contestation is the characteristic of a struggle for cultural hegemony. Religious ideology is only the hub around which this contest is arranged. Mushirul Hasan is rightly critical of Aziz Ahmed’s stark portrayal of continuous unrelieved Hindu–Muslim tension.46 However, the relief of accommodation or ‘syncretism’ in everyday life cannot square up with the continuity of cultural conflict unless one understands them together as two parts of one whole—the ‘struggle for cultural hegemony’. The contestation must cohere with the cooperation—the strategies of inclusion and exclusion are twin phenomena of the same reality. To go back to our original question: what in mass, popular culture and elite culture resonates and wins the allegiance of both to a common ideology? And further: why is this ideological interest stronger and more able to mobilise rather than social and economic interests? For mass mobilisation on any ideology, two methods of analysis are possible. First, to see the masses as not naturally generating this ideology but getting manipulated by the elite. They have no common social and economic interests. Neither are they beneficiaries of power as the ideologues of all classes tend to become. Consequently, the masses are victims of ‘false consciousness’. If however, this theory of manipulation is rejected then a second analytical method is available. This would see the masses as sharing 44

Shaikh, Community and Consensus in Islam, p. 5. Ibid., p. 7. 46 Hasan, Nationalism and Communal Politics, Conclusion. 45

Culture, Community and Power

precisely the same ideological frame of reference with the elite. As a result, though the mass of people are keen to carry on day-to-day life without conflict yet, they are susceptible to the ‘promise’ of the ideology to collectively empower them. This empowerment is not ‘material’ in the sense of wealth or position but in the sense of ‘self’ that is elevated to a sense of history and heritage, past glory and future greatness. In other words, it activates the urge to cultural assertion. This urge to cultural assertion is fuelled by the desire to be recognised as someone who is visible and who matters. Collectively, this cultural assertion builds up towards a struggle for cultural hegemony. Cultural hegemony implies that the overarching societal order is permeated by a particular cultural system or the shared symbols of a cultural enclosure. The religious, racial, linguistic or ethnic features are only parts or aspects of this cultural system—which imbues the societal order with the temper of its own personality. Ideology, in the cultural context, is an ordered system of cultural symbols which express power and hegemony. These symbols are strategies for encompassing situations.47 Invariably, cultural assertion is built on the basis of exclusion of ‘others’. An exclusivist cultural identity is easier to grasp and build upon than an inclusivist, ‘self’ defining identity. For a majority of people it was easier to grasp how they were non-Muslim but not how they were ‘Hindu’; it was easier to grasp how they were not Englishmen (‘non-whites’ or ‘blacks’ in America) but not how they were ‘Indian’. The ‘Indian Nation’ was to begin with a hope and a promise, not a description. Popular alienation of cultural sentiment from ‘Islamic’ or ‘colonial’ rule can be stimulated more easily by the ideologues than they can define a collective subject or create an experiential ‘we’. The same would apply to the construction of a collective ‘Muslimness’—a cultural category vis-à-vis ‘Hindus’. In the colonial situation Hindu–Muslim (and in the Punjab Sikh– Muslim) cultural contests were against each other as well as against the English, against western cultural hegemony. The political nationalist, carefully excluding cultural questions from ‘secular, nationalist ideology’, sought to confine the struggle for hegemony to politics and to exclude culture from its field of power. The basic assumption of ‘epochal’ thinking, such as Nehru’s for example, was that social change unleashed after

47 Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 141. The following discussion of culture and ideology draws upon the work of Geertz.

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political hegemony of nationalism was successfully established would neutralise, dilute and remove the teeth of narrow and parochial definitions of culture. However, the role of ideology in culture is not amenable to simplistic analysis. It is only when ideology is seen as a cultural system48 that one can examine how the phenomenon of ‘cultural awareness’ develops into a contestatory ideology and its political articulation. Studies on ‘communal ideology’ by historians or sociologists reveal a concept of ‘latent function’, that is, the function an ideology is motivated to play.49 Their analysis of an ideology’s goal (of manipulation, for example) ‘names’ the phenomenon rather than explains it. Thus, functional analyses remain hopelessly equivocal. They either describe the presumed effect of ideologies or analyse the social reality which the ideologues presumably distort. The problem of how, after all, ideologies transform sentiment into significance and so make it socially available is bypassed. A ‘flattened view’ of people’s mentalities interprets symbols as either deceiving the uninformed or exciting the unreflective. An ideology might in fact draw its power from its capacity to grasp, formulate and communicate cultural perceptions of social realities and ‘that it may mediate more complex meanings than its literal reading suggests, is not even considered’.50 It may be, after all, not a label but a trope or a metaphor. The power of a metaphor is successfully established not only by coercing discordant meanings into a unitary conceptual framework as is generally believed. Such an attempt could easily misfire. Its power is established through a social process which occurs not in the head of an ideologue but in that public world where people talk together, name things, make assertions, and understand each other to a certain degree. To be effective an ideology formulates the mood of its constituency accurately and thus mobilises it by making it not a private mood but a public possession—a social fact. It ‘transforms a prevalent, personal neurosis into a powerful social force’.51 It is not so much a distortion as an objectification of peoples’ consciousness. 48

The term is Clifford Geerlz’s. See his The Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 206–19. Chandra, Communalism in Modern India. Also see, Veena Das (ed.), Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, New Delhi, 1990. 50 Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, p. 210. 51 Ibid., p. 232. 49

Culture, Community and Power

The focus on theatricality which symbols, metaphors, metonyms lead us to can easily be an escape into an elusive world of symbols and semantic process with no compulsion to relate it to the concrete world of sentiments and social–cultural institutions. For example, Veena Das points out how the ‘events’ in India in 1984 showed that the conflict was ‘seen as simultaneously involving two communities as well as the community versus the state’.52 While observing how metaphor and metonymy linked ‘events’ such as the prime minister’s assassination and the violence against Sikhs, she neglects exploration of the world of sentiments which provided metaphoric linkage to a ‘Hindu State’ and its ‘Hindu leader’ with the majority ‘Hindu community’ in the perceptions of both communities. ‘Our’ state and ‘our’ nation was as dominant a perception among Hindus as was the Sikhs’perception of ‘their’ attack on ‘our’ Gurudwara at the level of the prevailing collective consciousness. Here, the sense of cultural ‘self’ and ‘otherness’ needs examination, but is not addressed by Das. Sandria Freitag, in an otherwise important study rich with evidence on societal relations and cultural contests, provides no theorisation that can unravel the significance of this material in its totality.53 Unable to see the power relationships in a metahistorical perspective she confuses her categories of analysis, for example, the categories of ‘public’ (variously employed such as public arenas and public space, public ceremonials and public activities) and the category of ‘symbols’ or ‘symbolism’. Describing at length the collective activities and symbols she is at a loss to explain the significance of the ‘public’ activity and the ‘symbols’ deployed by it in the context of cultural power relations in society. They become, instead, merely expressions of beliefs and religion or localised competition and rivalry. Her conclusion is thus naturally replete with tautology and circularity: ‘collective action … served to define community symbolically’. The ‘community’ employed certain ‘symbols’ collectively. The ‘symbols’ were expressive of ‘collective rites’ and ‘collective actions’.54 Thus, if collective action defined the community, the community and its symbols defined the collective actions. Public actions expressed symbols while symbolic language was expressed through public actions.55 52

Das (ed.), Mirrors of Violence, pp. 19–20. Freitag, Collective Action and Community, especially Part I, Ch.1, Part II, Ch. 4. 54 Ibid., p. 280. 55 Ibid., p. 16. 53

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What is this realm ‘we have designated “public arenas”?’ Freitag asks and goes on to define ‘public arenas’ as ‘a world of ritual, theatre and symbol’.56 Quoting Victor Turner on how symbolic actions express ‘social and cultural dynamic systems’,57 she nowhere analyses the cultural dynamic involved in ‘Hindu’–‘Muslim’ power relationships and changing cultural experiences. How do cultural experiences change over historical time and how do they effect change in power relationships? Freitag introduces Turner’s term ‘structure-in-process’ but does not reveal either the structure of cultural relationships nor the changing meaning of their symbolism in the context of Islamic and non-Islamic cultural practices. Because collective activities, ‘ceremonies, popular entertainment and performances, even violent protests—all took place in shared, therefore, public places’, Freitag’s key category becomes ‘public arenas’.58 However, a public space is a public space—the question is: who uses it, and how, and to achieve what? Only in answering this question do relationships of cultural contest and power reveal themselves. Freitag’s ‘public arenas’ and ‘ceremonials’ merely become an example of theatre and symbols without relationship to the politics of meaning and ritual as a cultural system. Her focus, acknowledgedly, is ‘the world of collective activities in public spaces, involving crowds and rites, music and swordplay, sacred place and sacred time’.59 To make the leap from this elusive world of symbols and semantic process to the politics of meaning requires cultural analysis with different premises and procedures which foster multiple orders of significance, implication and suggestion. This is the reason why Freitag cannot answer the ‘larger question’, as she puts it, of ‘why Indians attacked other Indians (and) in what circumstances might they, instead, have attacked the British directly?’60 Freitag, though assigning importance to religious and cultural practices, turns out to be a crypto-materialist in the final analysis. Not desiring to be guilty of ignoring the economic, social and political ‘causes’ of ‘communalism’ she manages to get grounded in them eventually. The concept of symbolism employed by Freitag is also functionalist and empirically defined in terms of ‘religious’ symbols of ‘sacred space’ and ‘pollution and 56

Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 17. cf. Victor Turner, Process, Performance and Pilgrimage: A Study in Comparative Symbology, New Delhi, 1979, p. 12. 58 Ibid., p. 18. 59 Ibid., p. xii. 60 Ibid., p. xiii. 57

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purity’.61 The symbols she discusses are, we would hold, not ‘religious’ at all but actually symbolise what we characterise as cultural assertion and cultural violation. To view the sphere she designates ‘sacred space’ as a narrowly ‘religious’ concept instead of seeing it as an issue of what we term symbolic cultural power, is to reduce the cultural contest to a conflict of religions. Freitag’s own work provides evidence to the contrary, for example, when she discusses the ‘cow protection riots’ of 1893: when assertions of symbolic cultural power were accepted by the targeted community the so-called ‘sacred’ object or symbol—the cow—receded into the background. Moreover, attacks on persons and property proved unnecessary when symbolic power was demonstrated by assembling in large numbers near a mosque or a cow or a shivalaya.62 When it was acknowledged that ‘there is not much of real religious animosity among the people’ in a particular area, but that ‘mutual rivalry and jealousy’ marked their cultural practices in Muharram and Dasehra celebrations, in Shudhi and Sangathan and Tabligh and Tanzim processions, then it is obvious that the contest was not ‘religious’ but one of cultural influence and prestige and symbolic power.63 Freitag constantly uses the phrase ‘the state and its constituent communities’ as if the state, regardless of time and space, was some independent entity dealing separately with each community. We, on the other hand, see the Mughal state as mediating relationships of cultural power between communities. It was the social equilibrium established by Mughal cultural hegemony which was eroded with the entry of the colonial state with its professed policy of ‘even handedness’ between communities. This erosion of the pre-colonial equilibrium provided both the inspiration and the space for renegotiation of power relationships through escalating cultural contests. Freitag and Gyanendra Pandey have quoted extensively from the documents reporting the Banaras riots of 1809 and 1810, in support of the ‘colonial construction of communalism’.64 Neither sees the qualitative

61

Ibid., p. 39. Ibid. See Ch. 5, especially pp. 172–74. 63 Ibid. Freitag gives us a detailed description of the contests but reduces them to ‘religious’ symbols and overlapping ‘sacred space’, pp. 232, 238. 64 For Freitag. see ibid., pp. 19–53. Also see, Pandey, The Construction of Communalism, pp. 27–57. 62

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difference between the two types of mobilisation that were observed and reported despite the administrative assumptions of colonial officials. What these authors see as the ‘religious riot’ of 1809 between ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’ and the ‘civic protest’ of both, Muslims and Hindus, together against the House Tax in 1810 are not, in fact, contradictory because they do not inhabit the same universe of ‘collective action’. While, the contestation between Hindus and Muslims65 in 1809 was part of the ongoing struggle for cultural hegemony, the House Tax Protest of 1810 was against the colonial state’s political domination. The two sets of collective action were located in separate paradigms of self-assertion and self-defence; the first was imbricated in contests of cultural empowerment while the second was vis-à-vis state authority and political control, that is, against the project of colonial hegemony. Their simultaneity reveals complexity not contradiction. It is only in stray footnotes that Freitag comes close to sensing the problems of cultural hegemony and its relations to power when she writes of the ‘pragmatic’ recognition by Mughal officials of power relationships in different places. For instance, she describes the ascendancy of Hindu rituals in Banaras and Muslim ones in Bareilly.66 She does not, however, have any notion of cultural power separate from the socio-economic local power structures. The chapters on Banaras and Awadh, in fact, are excellent examples of culturally hegemonic states—the former integrating its Muslim population into a ‘Hindu’ cultural ambience while the latter integrating its Hindu subjects into a ‘Muslim’ cultural ambience (in this case Shia cultural practices). The Shia–Sunni cultural contests and struggle for cultural hegemony are insights fully explored, without, however, drawing any conclusions from this for the general theme of Hindu–Muslim relations of culture and power. The category of ‘construction’ of an ideology and a political praxis, is intelligible and coherent only within the conceptual framework of ‘hegemony’. Hegemony pertains to relations—relations of power as a whole, subsuming relations between ideas and values, perceptions and interpretations, and normative structures and institutions. The full range of these relationships go into the ‘construction’ of ‘reality’. 65 Hindus and Muslims as categories of mobilisation used by both the self-styled leaders who mobilised and the crowds which got mobilised. 66 Freitag, Collective Action and Community, pp. 54–55, fn. 2.

Culture, Community and Power

To the extent that the participation and complicity of society or its segments is available to the state in promoting, strengthening and recognising—all crucial indices in relations of power—certain ideologies and politics, to that extent alone can we speak of their ‘construction’ by the colonialists. In the absence of this dynamic relation between societal groups and state intervention, we can only observe the generation of particular stereotypes by the state. The power relations in society and their thrust towards representation in the power structure of the state (and in its ideological orientation), their drive towards becoming a hegemonic force, are crucial determinants in the construction of a discourse and its political praxis. Gyanendra Pandey’s account of the construction of ‘communal’ categories such as the ‘bigoted julaha’ by the colonial administrators67 often appears at the same level of colonial construction of categories such as ‘criminal tribes’, ‘sly Bania’ or ‘cunning Maratha’, the ‘cowardly Bengali babu’ or ‘warlike Sikh’ and ‘martial Pathan’. This ‘naming game’ does not help very much in understanding the construction of ‘communal’ consciousness and riots. Pandey’s ‘colonial text’ or ‘master narrative’ is what nationalists and leftists called, in simpler language, the introduction of false categories or stereotypes by colonial officials. The question that needs to be asked is: is this ‘text’ a creative effort at construction which historians can deconstruct? Or, is it a text conditioned by the cultural relationships of Indian society itself ? Is it the colonial selection from the available range of self-projections by Indians or is it a colonial invention? As Bernard Cohn puts it, the peoples who were the objects and subjects of colonial construction ‘were caught up in a complex dialectic; they participated in the definition and compilation of the colonial sociology, not merely as informants, but frequently as the shapers and interpreters of the indigenous cultures’.68 Therefore, the construction of ‘communalism’, based on colonial documents cannot but mislead a researcher if ‘read’ within the cultural codes of secularism versus communalism as employed by the officials. Putting the word communalism in inverted commas is no substitute for a radically different kind of reading of these official memos. We are of the view that these documents should be read 67

Pandey, The Construction of Communalism, Ch. 3. Bernard Cohn, ‘Anthropology and History’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 12, No. 2, Autumn 1981, p. 241. 68

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not as documents detailing communalism of the non-secular natives but as documents of cultural clash. A recently completed dissertation explores the various aspects of this cultural confrontation in terms of definitions of boundaries and purposes of conservation of old ruins, historic and sacred buildings.69 Caste, class, economic dislocation and societal mobility—upwards or downwards—fuel distress, jealousy, elation and triumph or despair at good or bad fortunes. In our view, Pandey’s description of violent conflicts reveal that the sum total of all emotions and beliefs finds expression in an affirmation of the self which leads to the violation of the other. However, Pandey does not ask why and how? Is the Hindu cussedness over the cow and the Muslim cussedness over music and shivalayas constructed at random? If the acts and words of affirmation and violation by groups in society add up to a pattern, a tendency, a manifest form, then this must reveal an ideological–cultural construct shared by persons belonging to these groups. It cannot be a colonial construct appropriated by ideologues which we can discover in the Archives but a societal orientation which community ideologues utilise to establish their political representation—and which colonial officials utilise to offer or deny this same representation. Any construction of ‘communalism’, one expects, would examine this. A major thrust of Pandey’s argument on the nationalists’ contribution to the construction of communalism is the dual or Janus-faced discourse of nationalism. Taking his cue from Ranajit Guha, who writes of the coalescence of the ‘modernist’ and ‘dharmic’ idioms in the nationalist discourse, Pandey generalises on ‘the internal contradictions’ of nationalist thought: On the one hand, nationalism must speak in the language of rationality, of the equality of individuals, and of ‘construction’, the possibility of making the world as we want it; on the other, it needs the language of blood and sacrifice, of historical necessity of ancient (God-given) status and attributes—which is part of the discourse of community, as it were, and not of individual rationality.70

69 Priti Anand, ‘Monuments and Sacred Structures in Imperial Delhi: 1900–1925’, M.Phil, dissertation, New Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, 1992. 70 Pandey, The Construction of Communalism, p. 209.

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This is a remarkable counterposing of desirable attributes such as progress and human capability viewed as inherent in ‘the post-Enlightenment discourse of modernity’ to implicitly primordial and reactionary attributes which are pejoratively forced into ‘the discourse of community’. Strangely, Pandey fails to observe that the latter three elements of blood and sacrifice, historical necessity (teleology) and inherent status and attributes (such as class character, in this case historically given instead of God-given) have been a part of the discourse of socialism—a modernist discourse.71 On the other hand, the elements of the so-called discourse of modernity, that is, rationality, equality of all individuals and the possibility of making the world as we want it, are strikingly present in the Bhakti and Sufi traditions of pre-modem India. Even in modern India, Gandhi’s discourse on ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’ community was cast in the language of rationality, equality and construction, while V.D. Savarkar’s discourse demanded blood and sacrifice while relying on the ancient attributes of ‘Hindu civilisation’. Both Gandhi and Savarkar sought to speak of the community and for the community. Apparently, there is no one, singular discourse of the community. Pandey appears to think that there was, broadly speaking, one vision of nationalism, till the twenties and thirties, of India as a collection of communities, and that this vision changed and altered its course to a concept of individual citizenship.72 In our view, on the contrary, there were two parallel discourses of nation and Indianness that were generated with the first articulation of nationalist thought and have persisted over time to the present day. In the context of Hindu–Muslim strife in the Bhojpuri-speaking areas—which provide Pandey’s evidence—a Muslim qasba or a Hindu ganj had traditions of the ‘community’ and a corporate existence.73 But did their ‘communities’ have a shared world view, an ideological frame in which they ordered their existence and relationship to the world and, 71 The inherent status and attributes of ‘class character’ are formulated as the essentially revolutionary character of the proletariat which is historically given. 72 Ibid., p. 210. 73 Ibid., see pp. 28–29. For a sharply critical and insightful review of Gyanendra Pandey see Nita Kumar’s review in The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 29, No. 2, 1992, p. 227; also see, Dipankar Gupta, ‘Communalism and Nationalism in Colonial India’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXVIII, Nos 8–9, 20–27 February 1993, p. 339.

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even, the cosmological universe? It is in this domain, after all, that the symbols of ‘Islam’ and ‘Hinduism’ lay. While the solidarity of the ‘qasba community’ leads to a corporate existence, the lower class Muslims of Mubarakpur shared many of their privileged neighbours’ concern for Muslim cultural hegemony in the qasba—which Pandey ambiguously refers to as ‘the faith and traditions of the qasba’. What Pandey does not point out is that Mubarakpur was an area of ‘Muslim’ hegemony just as Banaras was an area of ‘Hindu’ hegemony; that ‘insults to Islam’ or ‘challenges to the traditions of Mubarakpur’ were one and the same thing, identified inextricably with each other.74 Moreover, what ‘community’ is one speaking of? The notion of community is randomly employed in the work as the corporate existence of the people of a qasba, as the aggregation of an occupational group such as the community of weavers, and as religious communities. While Pandey’s evidence provides numerous examples of contestation of social–cultural hegemony, our conclusions are the exact opposite of his. Unlike him, we do not believe that a contrary reading of ‘rights’ by Hindus and Muslims led to confrontation but that their cultural contests and challenges generated contrary readings of rights. In the ultimate analysis, Pandey outlines more the colonial sociology which created specific forms of representation and less the construction of community discourses which sought to claim representation. Interestingly, he shares with nationalist leaders and historians the notion of ‘religion’ as the mobiliser of Hindu–Muslim conflict and violent confrontations around specific symbols. ‘Communalism’, for Pandey, is the ‘politics of religious communities’, the ‘religious logic that dominated the thinking of the people’, the appearance of politics in the form of religion, when ‘religion is at the same time polities’, and ‘quarrels over religious questions’.75 There is no awareness of religion and religious practices being only the symbols of cultural empowerment and hegemony which is established by ideology. In our view, religion is a part of this ideology—as a means of maintaining, preserving, asserting or defending cultural influence and power in society. Consequently, Pandey resorts to the characterisation of violent

74 Ibid., pp. 145–48. The Hindu, ‘Chauhan Rajput Village’ (see p. 155) was the exact counterpart of the Muslim qasba of Mubarakpur. 75 Ibid., pp. 81, 92, 134, 243.

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conflict and riots as ‘moments of madness’ awaiting the restoration of ‘sanity’.76 How are the terms ‘madness’ and ‘sanity’ any different from the colonialists’ use of the binary categories of the intelligent and rational versus the volatile and irrational? In fact, constituting riot as an explosion of madness is no different from the colonial orientalist’s generalisation on the ‘primeaval’ and ‘primitive’ character of Indian society. ‘Madness’ can have no rational comprehensible linkage to ideology and discourse and therefore no explanation in Pandey’s version of the construction of communalism. The central rituals of religion are symbolic models of a certain sort of devotional mood, which their continual re-enactment tends to produce in their participants. These ‘moods’, ‘attitudes’, ‘sentiments’ have little to do with the metaphysics of religion. They have more, rather, mainly to do with the cultural life of the people. They are ways in which people conduct parts of their predominantly public behaviour. The distinction between the ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ is a dualism that can be very misleading. Veena Das, for example, identifies ‘sacred spaces’ with the ‘self-definition of a religious community’.77 The so-called sacred spaces are very much a part of the cultural system with less significance for metaphysical tenets than for everyday life’s social and cultural practices. Ritual is a matter of ortho-praxis and is concerned neither with interpretations nor with latent or hidden meanings.78 Therefore, ritual prayers, public ceremonies, processions, idol immersions, etc., should not be studied as a religious system. Rituals are not religious symbols as much as they are symbols of ways of life—cultural practices and artifacts. In cultural contests they become symbols not of opposed religions but of power assertions and violations respectively, of one’s own and other’s practices. Ritual has little to do with religion and instead of focusing on ‘religious beliefs’ one ought to take into account the domain of unreflective praxis. It must, however, be emphasised that ritual has a lot to do with power. And to understand the question of power, we must ask: what about the time and place of practices, their teleology? And what about the arena of practices, private or public, their sociology? 76

Ibid., pp. 124, 126. Das (ed.), Mirrors of Violence, p. 10. 78 This is the basic thesis on ritual in Frits Staal, Rules without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras and the Human Sciences, Toronto Studies in Religion, Vol. 4, New York, 1989. 77

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The social teleology or social meaning of certain rituals may be obscure to those involved in them. But the persistence over many generations of such rituals only makes sense in terms of the social and cultural solidarity achieved in the course of the historical process. This is a level of obscure social operation—something like la longue durée of Braudelian analysis—at which a certain meaning or significance of entire cultural processes can be grasped. For these rituals, once they become a collectively and historically worked out rite, with definite meaning attached, sketch a domain of ritual praxis and provide good reason to privilege this process as one of social significance. ‘SYNCRETISM’ AND THE THEORY OF CULTURAL POWER AND CONTEST

Over the years, a theory of cultural symbiosis or the syncretism of culture, between Hindus and Muslims on the Indian subcontinent, has become the lingua franca of the secular, nationalist understanding of relations between the communities. Louis Dumont had struck a note of warning, precisely, on this theoretical trend when he maintained that this kind of a ‘sociology of interaction’ would be likely to miss the problem and find sudden bursts of hostility and riots between communities hard to explain.79 Dumont, of course, has been largely ignored by most of the writing which claims to explain ‘communalism’. To an extent, Dumont’s own use of a category such as ‘synthesis’, for different levels of adjustment and resistance between cultures, proved unhelpful. ‘Co-existence’, he wrote, ‘had produced no general ideological synthesis’. On the other hand, he added that ‘Kabir and the Sikhs’ were an example of ‘only a partial synthesis’.80 The confusion of splitting ‘synthesis’ into partial and general can be avoided only by not using terms such as synthesis, symbiosis or syncretism. To assert the separate ideological spheres of the Muslim and Hindu cultural enclosures while not ignoring the transcendent concepts of coexistence put forward by Kabir or Nanak require new categories of thought and comprehension. (See Chapters 2, 5 and 6 for our attempt to provide new categories of analysis.)

79 Louis Dumont, Religion, Politics and History in India, Paris/The Hague, 1970, pp. 95–96. 80 Ibid.

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The perceptiveness and insights of Dumont, however, are extremely useful. As he puts it, ‘the two communities attained a modus vivendi … a kind of compromise which depended for its maintenance on the continuance of Muslim power’. The situation of social–cultural peace under the Mughals was ‘due to an equilibrium between religion and power’. Even the lowest segments of Muslims appeared as if they ‘had been lifted above their expected position by a kind of thread which was tied ultimately to the wrists of the Muslim rulers’.81 This is a valuable approximation of the process we have termed the establishment of cultural hegemony and its consequent maintenance of social and cultural equilibrium. The modus vivendi or compromise, that is cultural hegemony (for which Dumont retains the old category of cultural symbiosis) receded by a slow process which may be traced, ultimately, to the change of power with the British conquest. Because the social equilibrium established by cultural hegemony does not amount to cultural symbiosis or syncretism we can say with Dumont that ‘the co-existence was empirically accepted without being legitimised, and was therefore at the mercy of a change of power’.82 The concept of ‘syncretism’ is born of the apparent cultural ambiguities of everyday life that produce a blurring of boundaries between communities.83 The ambiguity can be seen as not merely tolerated but ‘valued’ and even ‘exploited’ for greater personal ‘choice’ by members of one or another community. However, during moments of ‘crisis’ which can be brought about by perceptions of external challenge or inner dissent and dilution, there occurs a general loss of cultural orientation. At such moments consistency in a society’s or community’s organising principles becomes very important—and contradictions between these principles and the practices of everyday life are carefully examined and terms and symbols are zealously defined. Demarcating the boundaries of the community, setting the limits of acceptable behaviour, and scrutinising the lives of ordinary people to erase the spaces for ambiguity, become crucial to the very concept of ‘community’ in its organised form. This sets limits to the discourse available for interpreting the organising principles of a society or a community, and its culture. 81

Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 98. 83 For a discussion of ‘ambiguity’ in cultural practices, see Katherine P. Ewing (ed.), Shariat and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam, New Delhi, 1988, Introduction. 82

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A substantive body of work describing the ambiguity or overlap of cultural practices in everyday life in regions such as Bengal, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Tamil Nadu now exists under the general category of syncretism. Most scholars, however, find it difficult to relate their evidence on syncretic practices to moments of sharp, bloody confrontations and hostile separation of communities.84 ‘Syncretism’ and the Cultural Enclosures

Religious ideology could produce both, cultural contest as well as accommodation. The substantive evidence of religious and cultural accommodation variously called ‘syncretism’ or ‘overlapping identities’ shows, basically, that religion is not the site of conflict. Contest is the characteristic of a struggle for cultural hegemony. N.K. Wagle’s analysis of late medieval Marathi historical writings demonstrates the enormous flexibility of Hindus under Muslim rule in Maharashtra without losing a strong awareness of ‘Hinduness’, though, any term such as Hinduism may have been non-existent. While exclusive tendencies in the culture formed cultural enclosures vis-à-vis the ‘other’, daily life fostered inclusive strategies of incorporation. The inclusive strategies of Hindus are evident in texts such as the Parasarama Caritra, showing that Hindu writers of the eighteenth century sought to accommodate the nearly 400 years of Muslim rule in Maharashtra to the traditional system of Hindu yugas.85 And yet, contraposed to and distinguished from Islam, the term ‘Maharashtra dharma’ which does not distinguish between different, non-Islamic religious sects can only be denoted as Hindu dharma.86 References to Maharashtra dharma by the Sufi saints, Shah Muni and Sheikh Muhammad, are 84 Rafiuddin Ahmed, The Bengal Muslims 1871–1906: A Quest for Identity, New Delhi, 1981. Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700–1900, Cambridge, 1989, Indian edition, 1992. Milton Israel and N.K. Wagle (eds), Islamic Society and Culture, Delhi, 1983. Asim Roy, The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal, Princeton, 1984. 85 N.K. Wagle, ‘Hindu–Muslim Interactions in Medieval Maharashtra’, in Gunther D. Sontheimer and Herman Kulke (eds), Hinduism Reconsidered, Delhi, 1989, p. 53. 86 Of course, it goes without saying that attempts to derive a reductionist monolithic ‘Hinduism’ from such a Hindu dharma is historically constructed in being deliberately selective and motivated.

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employed as a comprehensive term of reference for Brahmanical and folk practices, theology from the Vedas, Puranas, Mahabharata and Ramayana, the dharmashastras and dvaita and advaita philosophical tenets. In the juxtaposition of traditions of the Muslims with those of the Hindus in the sixteenth century Marathi Bhakti poet Eknath’s Hindu–Muslim Samvad, the features singled out as specifically Hindu are belief in the Vedas and Purana, image worship and jati rules.87 These are thus the overlapping and crisscrossing similarities in the network of ‘Hinduness’ or the Hindu cultural enclosure. The syncretism of everyday life has been largely observed in the popularity of pir worship by non-Muslims. However, pir worship was not a mixture of Islamic and Hindu practices. In the main, it was characterised by Muslim pirs joining the pantheon of deities that the Hindus worshipped. This appropriation of Muslim pirs and fakirs by the non-Islamic people was naturally seen as closer to Hindu beliefs than Islamic ones by the Muslim theologians. The Hindu followers of the Chishti Pir Davalmalak (Abu-Masud), without giving up their own local practices, temporarily assumed the identity of a Muslim fakir and went on pilgrimage to a Davalmalak shrine. This practice, incidentally, was followed by Brahmans, Kunbis, Telis, Bhui and Mahars among others from the spectrum of Hindu castes, and provides a good example of Hindu inclusive strategies.88 To the extent that Sufis such as Shaikh Mohammad and Shah Muni accommodated Hindu gods like Rama, Krishna, Shiva and Vishnu, within a framework of indefinable supreme entity, nirguna and nirakar, accepted Hindu chelas and gurus without formal change of religions, or, when Shah Muni used a puranic device to explain the origin of Islam through Mahavishnu, they made the Muslims acceptable members of society rooted in local tradition.89 ‘Tradition’, in the sense that widely divergent Hindu communities or even sub-sects, for example, the Ramnandis, do not leave the Hindu cultural enclosure vis-à-vis the ‘other’. This concept of cultural enclosure—of Hinduness—is a ‘polythetic concept’ without well-defined common attributes and clear-cut boundaries, its members 87 Wagle, ‘Hindu–Muslim Interactions’, p. 62. Also see, Eleanor Zelliot, ‘Eknath’s Bharuds: The Sant as a Link between Cultures’, in Karine Schomer and W.H. McLeod (eds), The Sants: Studies in a Devotional Tradition of India, Delhi, 1987. 88 Wagle, in Sontheimer and Kulke (eds), Hinduism Reconsidered, p. 63. 89 Ibid.

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being held together only by ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing’, what Wittgenstein implies by holding that a ‘family resemblance’ exists between the members.90 The Sufi current embodied in Maharashtra by Shaikh Muhammad and Shah Muni thus, effectively eliminated cultural antagonism and entered the arena of difference and competition between various sectarian religious ideologies and belief systems on the subcontinent. In such cases their ‘Islamic’ beliefs were nothing more than monotheism which segments of the Hindu enclosure shared. But if their adoption of images and concepts familiar to the non-Muslim population is located in their professed object of re-explaining the hidden meaning and actual purport of images and concepts within the Islamic doctrine then it becomes an inclusive strategy in the struggle for cultural hegemony. The Ismaili sect of Muslims’ manuscripts of the ginan (gyan) in Gujarati, said to have been composed from the thirteenth century onwards, reveals remarkable identity between the compositions of Pir Shams, a founder of the Ismaili community and those of Bhakti poets such as Kabir, Nanak and Narsi Mehta, the first poet of Vaishnava bhakts in Gujarat. Equally, the ginan are permeated with concepts and symbols of Islamic thought. Said Pir Shams: … who in this world is a Hindu and who is a Musalman? The Hindu goes to the sixty-eight places of pilgrimage, while the Muslim goes to the Mosque. Yet neither the Hindu nor the Muslim knows my Lord, who sits—Pure.91

The demarcation of the cultural faultline between the Hindu and the Muslim is clear from Pir Shams’s sentiment, as is his effort at transcending the conflict. It, moreover, fully supports the conclusion that religion, that is, the metaphysical concept of God as a formless, invisible power called by different names, was not the locus of conflict in society. This is revealed by the mystical trends of thought embodied in the Sufis 90 G.E. Ferro-Luzzi, ‘A Polythetic Concept’, in Sontheimer and Kulke (eds), Hinduism Reconsidered, p. 187. 91 Francoise Mallison, ‘Hinduism as Seen by the Nizari Ismaili Missionaries of Western India’, in Sontheimer and Kulke (eds), Hinduism Reconsidered, p. 93.

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and sants of the Bhakti tradition. Important, in the struggle for cultural hegemony, was the question of which side of the cultural faultline the mystical trends fell and the success of one or the other cultural enclosure in appropriating the thought, life and even the dead body of a religious preceptor. It is only by examining their cultural contests that the inclusive and exclusive strategies of both Muslim and non-Muslim enclosures can be observed. Though the sant or pir could sometimes stand as a channel of grace independent of what was contemporaneously perceived as ‘Hindu’ or ‘Islamic’ heritage—after his death both heritages or cultures would try to claim him as their own, in order to ‘rehabilitate’ and ‘absorb’ him within either dominant stream.92 This was equally true for the struggle over the appropriation of Kabir as of Lal Ded (as the Muslims call her) or Lalleshwari (as known to the Hindus) of Kashmir. Comparative statistics on the occurrence of key words in different collections of Kabir’s sayings, interestingly, show that though Muslim (i.e., Turk) figures in them numerous times, the word ‘Hindu’, as a key word, does not.93 This suggests an insider/outsider separation of the two enclosures—Muslim and non-Muslim. Within the non-Muslim–Hindu enclosure, the trenchant critique of Brahmanical dominance follows the principle of cultural internality, that is, the critique appears to seek to rectify the strife and separations within this fold. Despite the fact that the Brahman and Shudra are used as binary oppositions just as the Veda and Koran or Hindu and Turk in Kabir or Nanak,94 it is the principle of cultural internality which led internal dissent in the form of Bhakti actually helping to culturally integrate caste society to some extent, albeit with some rearrangement of power relations. To cite an example of how cultural internality works, Jotirao Phule in nineteenth century Maharashtra, challenged given caste relations by drawing upon symbols, loyalties and conflicts within traditional popular culture, that is, the Bhakti tradition, to construct a new identity. Phule’s work, however, did not lead to splitting the society as much as

92

Daniel Gold, The Lord as Guru: Hindi Sants in the North Indian Tradition, New York, 1987, Introduction. 93 Linda Hess, ‘Three Kabir Collections: A Comparative Study’, in Karine Schomer and W.H. McLeod (eds). The Sants: Studies in a Devotional Tradition of India, Delhi, 1987. 94 Ibid., p. 158.

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it led to the creation of a broad and distinctive ‘Maratha’ identity. His reinterpretations of the past forged a rearrangement of older and very powerful symbols which gave the Maratha identity its potential for changing the relations of caste power within western Indian society.95 Within the Hindu enclosure, the sectarian rivalries between Shaivism and Vaishnavism, for example, may be described as contending ideologico-cultural hegemonies. On the other hand, the contention and rivalry between the Hindu and Islamic enclosures, including the hegemonic paradigm of the latter’s Sufi intervention, was, in the ultimate analysis, aligned to the overarching hegemony of state power. (A comparative insight could be that of Brahmanical hegemony aligned to state power in pre-Sultanate dynasties in India.) This alignment of Islamic communities and Sufi orders with state power was often not organisational, institutional or structural, though, in most cases ties of patronage and fealty were well-established.96 Nevertheless, it was an ideologico-cultural alignment. The Sufis, howsoever independent, were protected in the overall cultural–social climate, by a shared cultural symbolism and ideology with the state. Susan Bayly’s description of the political and economic geography of south India makes apparent that the Sufi scholar and literati had a long-term spiritual presence in the peninsula.97 That Sufis in many cases were later endowed with martial character, specially, when the ghazi pir tradition emerged, only shows how cultural traditions tend to coalesce with political and military narratives when the power symbolism of both—in this case Islam—is shared. (Within the Muslim enclosure or internality, of course, ‘Islam’ can be endlessly debated over as either purist or folk, high or low.) For non-Muslims, the shared symbolism of the Sufi and the ruler is part of the ‘single continuum’ between the divine and political power of Islam. Bayly’s examples of ‘purist Islam’ supporting the Sufi pirs shows at once the unity of a religious tradition as well as its hegemonisation by non-purist practices.98 All Sufis belonged to the larger moral order of Islam and claimed their origin to ‘Islamic lands’. The exploits of Pir 95 See, Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology, Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in 19th Century Western India, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 303–08. 96 The Chishtis, for example, were among those Sufi orders which emphasised their separation from state power self-consciously. 97 Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings. 98 Ibid., p. 91.

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Fakiruddin which are interwoven with the chronicle of Hindu lineages do not signify a religious–cultural meshing but isolate the history of power and hegemony as a continued narrative of struggle, victory or defeat, and the final establishment of overweaning authority by one contender, in this case, the Pir. Cultural overlaps and equilibrium are produced as a consequence of this victory. Fakiruddin’s ‘great confrontation’ with the Rajas and their final ‘submission’ led to the cultural mingling in which the Rajas ‘indigenous’ cultural–religious practices were combined with paying homage to the Pir’s followers. Sufi literature shows the pir as the great protector, in a position of dominance over the Hindu pantheon of deities.99 Richard Eaton shows how the Sufi saint, Baba Farid, was a link between his rural following and the broader Islamic community in India. Farid was recognised officially, within the Sunni tradition, by the Delhi court. In Eaton’s words, the shrines of Sufis and pirs in India ‘displayed, theatre style and in microcosm, the moral order of the Islamic macrocosm’. In addition, Baba Farid’s shrine provided the tribes/clans of the region with a tiny ‘theatre state’ of their own. Participation in this, what we would call symbolic cultural power, was afforded by the shrine to its followers, giving them ‘not only access to Islam, but the honour of participating in the reflected splendour of the Sultanate or Mughal courts …’. It was the shrine’s historical function to incorporate local systems of culture into a larger cultural system, ‘to connect rustic clans politically with Delhi and religiously with Islam’.100 Gilmartin also emphasises the role of the Sufi shrine, ‘as an intermediary religious focus within Islam inextricably tied to its place within a larger political system …’. It linked ‘the local political systems of the tribes and the larger Muslim Empire’. 101 It is in this context that we employ the terms ‘revisionism’ and ‘dogmatism’ in Islam: both were strategies attempting to provide a model for exercising authority in the social and cultural world in India while maintaining commitment to a larger Islamic moral order. While ‘revisionism’—mainly Sufi intervention—sought to bind together diverse 99

Ibid., pp. 117, 124, 184–85. Richard M. Eaton, ‘The Political and Religious Authority of the Shrine of Baba Farid’, in Barbara D. Metcalf (ed.), Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam. Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1984, Ch. 4, pp. 334, 347, 354. 101 David Gilmartin. ‘Shrines. Succession and Sources of Moral Authority’, in Metcalf (ed.), Moral Conduct and Authority, Ch. 9, p. 222. 100

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cultural systems in symbolic terms through the agency of the ruler (the benevolent Muslim monarch) in a political framework committed to an Islamic moral order, ‘dogmatism’ sought to cleanse the cultural world of its diversity and multi-vocal interpretations of the mastertext—the Book. The shared attempt to reach a culturally diverse society and establish moral authority in it often brought the Sufis closer to the monarch (the benign gaze) who was striving to establish hegemony. As a result official recognition and honour was bestowed on the Sufis. The ‘dogmatist’ tendency which reached its apogee in the movement led by Maulana Thanawi in the nineteenth century, offered hard opposition to the entire culture of saints and shrines, condemned it as unlslamic and sought to replace the shrine as the source of Islamic moral authority with a reassertion of the Book as the only legitimate source. 102 In this context, the important point is not whether there ever existed a monolithic ‘Hindu’ community. The set of contrasting images projected by the dogmatist current—of a pure, rigorously monotheistic Islam and an amorphously polytheistic Hindu way of life—is conducive to the ideological construction of ‘Hinduism’ as the ‘antithetical other’. It is not the internal coherence of a cultural enclosure but the construction of a boundary between enclosures that is significant in societal relationships and their power play. The problem with Susan Bayly’s account of Hindu–Muslim cultural relations in south India arises because she sees the complex nature of union plus separation, between the exercise of Muslim power and the practice of hegemonic strategies by Muslim rulers, in either/or terms, that is, as ‘communal’ or its implied opposite ‘secular’. She does not see the cultural accommodation and resistance simultaneously present in intercultural relations of power. She fails to see the feature of Sufis getting absorbed into the pantheon of south Indian martial pattavans and power divinities as strategies of incorporation in cultural encounters, such as are abundantly available in Sufi literature in Maharashtra, Bengal or 102 Other terms have been used to characterise these tendencies in Islamic thought: Eaton speaks of ‘theatre’ and ‘scripturalism’, Judy Pugh in ‘Divination and Ideology in the Banaras Muslim Community’ calls them ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’. For Eaton, see Metcalf (ed.), Moral Conduct and Authority, p. 334; for Pugh, see Katharine P. Ewing (ed.), Shariat and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam, New Delhi, 1988, pp. 290, 304. Rafiuddin Ahmed, calls them ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’.

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Andhra Pradesh.103 The theme of incorporation appears, at one level, as the story of transcendence of barriers between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ cultures and between Hindus and Muslims. However, Bayly fails to notice that, at another level, it is the form in which resistance to power accommodates its reality without succumbing or surrendering to it unequivocally. This point could be well illustrated by Bayly’s own discussion of ‘abortive Islamisation’ and the ‘domestication of Pirs’.104 Bayly writes: ‘An awareness of distinctions and conflicts between aliens and indigenes, or between groups defined explicitly as Hindus and Muslims, clearly did appear in the texts and cult traditions.’ However, it is difficult to slot this ‘awareness’ into ‘communal themes’, as she recognises.105 In our view, it is only when the concepts of cultural enclosures (which generate ‘awareness’) and cultural power relations are employed that it is possible to see the awareness of separation and practice of cooperation as two related moments. The dynamic relationship of both moments in cultural struggles must reach some sort of equilibrium before the business of daily life can be resumed and carried forward, often, with new overlapping cultural practices which scholars have labelled as ‘syncretic’. Bayly is able to achieve some insight into these cultural processes when she looks at a different context, what she calls the ‘integration’ of the Syrians within the wider Hindu society of the region under Malayali rulers. The term ‘integration’, she clarifies, is used to convey ‘a position of high status and acceptance within the region’s most prestigious social and religious institutions’.106 This ‘integration’, in our view, is nothing but the hegemonic cultural incorporation practised by the Hindu rulers whose symbolic cultural power was recognised and acquiesced to by the Syrian Christians.107 This achieved, the Hindu rulers endowed and protected Syrian churches in the same way as they patronised Hindu temples. As Bayly herself remarks, these Hindu rulers’ ‘acts of benefaction served 103 See Roy, Islamic Syncretistic Tradition; Eaton, ‘The Political and Religious Authority’; and Wagle, ‘Hindu–Muslim Interactions’. 104 Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, pp. 203–06. Apropos the people in the South placing the Islamic cult heroes ‘alongside or even subordinate to the amman goddesses and male power divinities of the pre-existing Tamil pantheon’. See pp. 236–37. 105 Ibid., p. 190. 106 Ibid., p. 251. 107 For, the Malabar Hindu kings exhibited ‘close attachment to traditional roles: keepers of the laws and social order, protectors of Brahmans and cows’. The attempt, by Mappilla leaders of the sixteenth century, to overthrow this cultural hegemony was symbolically expressed when Pate Kunjali Marakkar assumed the title ‘King of the Malabar

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to incorporate the Syrians’ holy places into the networks of shrines and temples which comprised the Hindu king’s domain.’108 What we have termed the ‘Akbar paradigm’, of establishing the symbolic cultural hegemony of the Islamic state which made benefactions to the Hindu temples and shrines, also served to accommodate and incorporate the Hindus’ holy places into the ranks of the mosques and dargahs which comprised the Mughal domain in the north. This paradigm includes the cultural praxis of the Kashmiri King Zain al-Abidin a century earlier, and that of the Adilshahi dynasty in the Deccan contemporaneously, with Emperor Akbar. Non-Muslim religio-cultural life—of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, etc.—thus functioned within the setting of north Indian Islamic culture just as the Syrians’ religio-cultural life which, Bayly observes, ‘developed within the setting of Malayali Hindu culture’.109 Equally comparable is the example of eighteenth century Banaras where Islamic culture thrived within the setting of the Banarasi Hindu king’s domain.110 Even earlier examples are provided by the incorporationist cultural hegemony established by the Sikh kingdom under Ranjit Singh and by the Peshwa raj of Maharashtra. The critical moment—moment of ‘crisis’—however, revealed the structure of relationships, the relations of power that were embedded in the ‘syncretic’ or ‘integrated’ lifestyles in various regions. As Bayly notes, in the Malabar context, … when Nayars and other high-ranking Malayalis began to challenge the place of the Syrians in this Hindu culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the group soon ceased to be a part of a shared social and ritual system … the longstanding pattern of ‘integration’ gave way to rapid and irreversible disintegration.111

Because Bayly’s framework does not conceptualise the unity between cultural hegemony and benefaction, between resistance or conflict and Muslims’. See, Genevieve Bouchon. Sixteenth Century Malabar and the Indian Ocean’, in Ashin Das Gupta and M.N. Pearson (eds), India and the Indian Ocean 1500–1800, Calcutta, 1987, p. 180. 108 Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, p. 251. 109 Ibid. 110 Sandria B. Freitag (ed.), Culture and Power in Banaras: Community, Performance and Environment, 1800–1980, Delhi, 1989; Sandria Freitag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India, California, 1989; New Delhi, 1990; Nita Kumar, Artisans of Banaras: Popular Culture and Identity, 1980–1986, Princeton, 1988. 111 Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, p. 276.

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incorporation within a field of power relations, she is thus forced into speaking of ‘integration’ giving way to ‘disintegration’. Bayly’s search for and failure to find, ‘communal’ distinction between Hindu and Muslim in pre-colonial India, frustrating her attempt to link cultural continuity with discontinuity, only shows that the term, ‘communal’, itself is a misnomer. Invariably, it has been imprecisely used to identify the process by which cultural enclosures existing in a dynamic of power relations earlier, moved towards social closure and exclusiveness. From a scenario of cultural equilibrium developing within a setting of either Muslim or Hindu cultural hegemony, the term ‘communalisation’ seeks to simplistically describe the movement towards cultural contention on the basis of a discourse of cultural exclusiveness under colonial hegemony. The struggle for cultural hegemony intensifies whenever a settled hegemonic culture is disturbed and challenged (as in the eighteenth century, when almost all of the Tamil country’s ‘little kings’ were reaching out to embrace and incorporate forms of ‘high’ Hindu worship in the south, and the Marathas were projecting ‘Hindu padpadshahi’ and the Sikhs the ‘Khalsa panth’ in the north), or when it is replaced (as it was with the British conquest), and enters into the moment of ‘crisis’. This crisis tends to push the overlapping, fluid and ‘syncretic’ practices towards absorption and more defined identification with the broader cultural enclosures. This process is what can be observed as the thrust towards fuller, more complete ‘Hinduisation’ or ‘Islamisation’ which Bayly notices with the colonial entry into south India. It is a process which gets hastened and strengthened with the colonial intervention. The fuzzy character of Islamic and Hindu groups at the frontier of the enclosures that separated the Muslims and Hindus are listed in the religious practices of the Bohras and Khojas, the Ismailis and the Pirai, and provide endless examples of ‘syncretism’. These range from cremating their dead, customs in marriage, laws of inheritance, possessing no mosques and beginning their calendrical year from Divali. One of the Khojas’ religious texts describing the incarnations of God, is called the Das Avatar and holds that the incarnations of Vishnu and Ali are the most important. The corpus of the religious books of the Shamsis, a sub-sect of the Khojas, is called the Atharv Vedh. And so on.112 112

Aziz Ahmed, Studies in Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment, Oxford, 1964; and An Intellectual History of Islam in India, Edinburgh, 1969.

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These are the ‘overlapping identities’ that produce the picture of syncretic, symbiotic cultures. However, this ‘religious syncretism’ has little to do with the politics of cultural contest. The contestatory ideologies appealing to the broad social aggregations ranged on the two sides of the cultural faultline, which separates the Hindu and Muslim enclosures, are invariably collapsed into religious differences. When, however, examples of religious overlap are found this misreading of the linkages between religion and cultural contest generates bewilderment. Aziz Ahmed, for example, comments on the ‘remarkable’ and ‘paradoxical’ fact that the two most religiously syncretic groups produced the most vigorous exponents of cultural contest. The Ismaili leader, ‘Agha Khan III, from 1908, was the leading advocate of Muslim separatism’ and Jinnah, was a Khoja by birth.113 Much more than any accounts of religious syncretism, oral histories of daily life reveal complex overlaps of cultural practices and modes of life and are hopeful, optimistic stories of human cooperation and coexistence. However, faced by the question of how and why conflict and confrontation erupt and destroy all this cooperation, one has to delineate a wider, encompassing pattern of relations of power in a society so as to locate the varying social groups’ assertions and subversions vis-à-vis each other. In other words, we are interested in asking the question (no longer a mere academic interest but pushed to the forefront by the climate and problems around us): Why, despite the story of compromise and complicity in daily life does there occur a crisis of such magnitude that society is ripped apart by contention, acrimony and violence? Our effort is to discover whether we can observe any pattern of recurrence in the points of rupture and explosion in social and cultural life which almost blot out the flow of day-to-day life. By looking at the ‘cataclysmic moment’ the faultlines under the apparently continuous crust and surface of daily life can be observed. Put another way, we ask: In the lush, tropical forest of the cultural practices of varying overlapping segments, does there exist 113 Ibid. A recent study of ‘overlapping identities’ of Hindus and Muslims in south India provides rich evidence for our view that it was not religious disputes but cultural struggle that produced contest and conflict in society. In addition, the work shows continuity in relationships of cultural power and contest from the earliest caste, tribe and region formations which came into being through the ‘ancient’ and ‘medieval’ cultural-social formations. See, Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings.

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any continuous pattern of order or disorder, any broad, overarching praxis of power and hegemony in society and culture? In this context, the concept of cataclysmic moment, that is, the crisis that reveals the hegemonic moment of power, propels disparate, contending, fragmented groups into broader unities. Varying groups tend to fall, or feel pushed into falling in line, on one side or another in cultural contests. This plays a determining role in how the question of power is settled, despite individual and group cooperation even in times of bloodshed and division, helping each other to cross over to their respective enclosures and extricating themselves from the webs of daily coexistence. The endless stories of mutual help and protection during the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent are witness to this phenomenon. It is the cataclysmic moment that reveals the extent of crisis of a polity, a society and a culture and whether a formerly unchallenged hegemony is firm and secure or shaken and undermined. Muslim unity is an abstract unity of theological principle, that is, of the Ummah and Koran and Hajj. At moments of crisis this abstract unifying principle is invoked. Hindutva’s or Hindu nationalism’s main problem and obsession was, precisely, with the absence of an abstract, unifying principle within the Hindu enclosure, which could be successfully invoked as ‘Hinduism’ against the ‘other’ and Islam. The absence of such a unifying theology bred impotence and frustration in the minds of ideologues and vigilantes. In consequence, the discourse of Hindu impotence has been a constant feature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thus, the history of crisis and struggle for cultural power and hegemony cannot be discussed and analysed on the basis of daily life—its manifold accommodations and compromises—but only on the basis of how relations of power are projected and perceived in society, the discourses that arise around them, and the way struggles are undertaken to settle or unsettle these power relations. Is it relevant to retain the notion of the ‘past’ which bears a complex relationship with the ‘present’? Is ‘continuity’ merely a rhetorical claim asserted by individuals and groups? Is ‘past’ merely a disguise or a subterfuge? ‘… the past does not live in the present’, says Gramsci. It is not an essential part of the present, in the history of our national culture there is no continuity or unity. The affirmation of continuity

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or unity is only rhetorical or amounts to mere evocative propaganda. It is a practical act which aims to create artificially that which does not exist.114

Here, we discern in Gramsci a sort of voluntaristic approach to the idea of constructedness which assumes ‘past’ without any power of claim thereby allotting privileged status to the ‘present’. Here, the idea of ‘making history’ has been completely torn out of the other idea of ‘in the given circumstances’ which embody in themselves limiting devices not always fully understood or realised by the actor(s) themselves. In other words, such an approach tantamounts, to use the language of Umberto Eco, to understanding/interpreting the text without the empirical author and his/her creative process which brings the pretext ‘world’ into the language-trap: ‘To understand the creative process,’ writes Umberto Eco, ‘is also to understand how certain textual solutions come into being by serendipity, or as the result of unconscious mechanisms.’115 The bringing in of these ‘unconscious mechanisms’ within the purview of analysis ‘can only tell how a text, which is a machine conceived in order to elicit interpretations, sometimes grows out of a magnetic territory which has nothing or not yet-to do with literature’.116 If ‘unconscious’—‘magnetic territory’—comes before the ‘conscious’, then it cannot but limit the preferences and choices of the available axes which provide ‘fantasy maps’ for the future constructions. While explaining the creative process of the Name of the Rose, Eco further underlines this spontaneity of the unconscious when he writes: ‘… for decades the image of those poisonous leaves lay in the most remote part of my soul, as in a grave, until the moment it emerged again (I do not know for what reason) and I believed I had invented it.’117 It is this sense of continuity in terms of the thrust of the unconscious, which is always very difficult to separate from the memories, especially the memories of experienced power relations, that we have emphasised implicitly in our chapters on pre-colonial India and explicitly in the 114 Antonio Gramsci, Selections front Cultural Writings, p. 253. Also sec pp. 256–57. For Sudipta Kaviraj’s appropriation of this misleading statement of Gramsci see Partha Chatterjce and Gyanendra Pandey (eds), Subaltern Studies, Vol. VII, New Delhi, 1993. Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’. 115 Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Over Interpretation, Cambridge, 1992, p. 85. 116 Ibid. p. 85, emphasis added. 117 Ibid., p. 88, emphasis added.

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chapter ‘Women and Sexuality’, by exploring the historical field of a specific cultural stereotype of the Muslims. Without this, it would be virtually impossible to understand the question: Why were the conceptions of ‘Hindu nation’ and ‘Muslim nation’ at all born and continue to contest fiercely even today? The chapters ‘The Power of the Past’ and ‘Cultural Limits to Secular Politics’ also underscore the point that it is only the force of the ‘magnetic territory’ of cultural unconscious which stops reason and rationality from being functional in the direction of creating a ‘composite nation’ as posited and promised by the Indian National Congress. Let it be stated that an exhaustive survey of the history of India in the ‘medieval period’ is not intended in the chapters in this book which deal with the ‘past’. It would be more appropriate to look upon this discussion as an attempt at problematisation rather than a detailed narrative based on ‘original sources’. SIGNIFIERS OF CULTURAL CONTEST: THE LANGUAGE OF CULTURAL POLITICS

Cultural symbols evoked in contests with the other, were not the causes of contestation but the sites of cultural struggle. They ranged over language, script and diction, cows and qurbani, names and styles of dress, music before mosques, pathways and graveyards, and routes for processions, the height and area of a temple or a mosque, a minaret or a shivalaya. The struggle for cultural assertion was fought almost inch by inch, as maps and drawings were produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to argue the case of ‘custom’, ‘tradition’ and ‘practices’, from ‘time immemorial’. The fact that language was a symbol of cultural contest in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was repeatedly revealed in the temper and tone of the Bengali press which took up cudgels in favour of Sadhu Bangla (‘pure Bengali’) or Musalmani Bengali. While Hindus accused Muslims of deliberately introducing non-current Perso-Arabic words and diction into Bengali, the Muslims charged them in return with ‘making Bengali the daughter of Sanskrit’.118

118 Mustafa Nurul Islam, Bengali Muslim Public Opinion: As Reflected in the Bengali Press, 1901–1930, Dacca, 1973, pp. 236–47.

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The cultural significance and contestatory symbolism was revealed by the consistent use of psychological images: we will be ‘humiliated’, we are not ‘afraid’ of Hindus and will not ‘placate’ them. Arabic was a ‘heroic’ language but the Muslim imitators of Tagore were rendering Bengali ‘sickly and enfeebled …. To make Bengali strong, firm and heroic we must teach it to parade and manoeuvre on the field of battle astride a spirited Arabian stallion, bearing an unsheathed scimitar’.119 While an aggressive cultural assertion by Hindus was enmeshed with growing political organisation and power, the sense of cultural loss was inextricably tied by Muslims to a sense of powerlessness: ‘Persian has lost royal power, and so Hindi babus are now eager to rid the Bengali language of Persian words.’ However, the Bengali Muslims had as much claim to the Bengali language if not more than the Hindus, for hundreds of Perso-Arabic words had been assimilated in Bengali Muslim speech ‘as a result of seven hundred years of Muslim rule’.120 A sense of ‘cultural isolation’ assailed many Muslims and the only way ‘to save Muslim Bengal’ they felt was ‘via a revival of the Arabic script and Islamic culture’. By accepting the Devanagri script, Muslims had ‘become separated from Muslim culture throughout the world’.121 This sense of cultural alienation was not mitigated but rather heightened with Muslim participation in the Congress-led national movement beginning with the Khilafat. The meetings and conferences of the Congress were flooded by non-Islamic, ‘idolatorous’ practices: ‘[W]orship of Mother Cow, the statue of Tilak, the image of Mother India and of the goddess mounted on the lion.’ A famous picture of Mother India showed her … being humiliated at court in the form of the superbly beautiful Draupadi. Duhsasan in the form of the British Government was re-enacting her disrobing by pulling her beautiful green sari. Meanwhile, in the guise of the five Pandavas, Maolana Mohammad Ali, Shaukat Ali, Mr. C.R. Das. Lala Lajpat Rai and Pandit Motilal Nehru were poised in readiness to punish Duhsasan with clubs, swords and bows and arrows. But Gandhi in the form of Sri Krishna told them, to desist and was himself engaged in supplying clothing for the beautiful woman

119

Ibid., pp. 241–42. Ibid., p. 239. 121 Ibid., pp. 245–46. 120

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in the form of Draupadi from his Charkha in the form of the Sudarshan Chakra. The picture was entitled Swadeshi bastraharan.122

Another picture found in the bazars showed: Mr. Gandhi in Brindaban standing in Krishna’s famous tribhanga pose piping the flute of non-cooperation. Mohammad Ali, Shaokat Ali, Das, Rai and Nehru etc. as young lads of Braja (Braj-balakas) or cowherd boys were engaged in a wild Charkha-dance with such cowherd maidens (Braja-balikas) as Banga Laksmi and Bharat Laksmi. This one is probably called the Swadeshi dalliance in Brindaban or some such thing.

The editor of Islam-darsan who described these pictures was ‘mortified to see representations in these pictures’ of men who bore ‘the title of Maolana …’.123 The cultural atmosphere appeared to be rent by conflict and mutual distaste. That Arabic, Persian, and lately Urdu, were proper Islamic languages was a view shared by the Ulama and the village mulla in Bengal even though the latter had little knowledge of these languages. The Ulama was openly hostile to any local languages being used for religious purposes. Local village mullas who spoke local languages identified, in principle, with the Ulama’s position and supported it. Even rural Muslims of some status were opposed to Bengali, viewing it as the language of the poor, uncultured and brutish masses. The pro-Urdu cultural movement was so identified with Islam that Urdu was vigorously pushed in Bengal where it was far removed from the local bhasha. Urdu medium was seen as essential for ‘Muslim culture’.124 Though a strong movement demanding total replacement of Bengali by Urdu was launched from 1882, the conflict over the status of Bengali among Muslims dates back to the cultural faultline of pre-colonial India. This conflict was evidenced in the works of the puthi writer and poet Abd al-Hakim and the poet Abd al-Nabi, writing in the sixteenth century. While the former was angry at those who treated Bengali as un-Islamic,

122

Ibid., pp. 79–80. Ibid. 124 Rafiuddin Ahmed, ‘Conflict and Contradictions in Bengali Islam’, in Katherine P. Ewing (ed.), Shariat and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam, New Delhi, 1988. pp. 121–22. 123

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the latter apologised to God for using Bengali in the interest of communicating with the common people. The tension over the issue of language in the sixteenth century was also manifest in the fact that Sayyid Sultan (1550–1648), Nasr-Allah Khondkar (1560–1620) and Shaikh Muttalib (1595–1660) were branded heretics and attacked by the mullas for rendering Islamic scriptures into Bengali, ‘a Hindu language’. The use of Bengali in their work was, according to their own defence, inspired by the desire to rectify the unIslamic practices of Muslim converts who still read the Mahabharat, prayed to local deities, honoured Brahman priests and observed caste rules.125 Thus, volumes of puthis in Bengali for educating the masses in Islam were produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Revisionist Islam met the challenge of teaching Islam and making Islamic symbols and ideals acceptable through existing local concepts and beliefs; the prophets were likened to Hindu deities and avatars; the advent of the Prophet was found in the four Vedas, which were called the ‘revealed books’ of the Hindus; Mohammad appeared with Brahma, Vishnu, Maheshwar, Rama and Krishna in the same pantheon. These efforts of the revisionists—Sufis—were seen as concessions and compromises with mass consciousness, which they were. And the bitter attack launched against them by the Ulama is evident from the constant defence they had to make of their efforts. Great tension and intense struggle in society was also vouchsafed by Hindu puthi writers of this period, such as Mukunda-ram, Vipra-das, and Vrindaban-das. The ideological struggle between the revisionists and dogmatists, who, ‘each in their own way, did try to spread the message of the Shariat’ was focalised on the question of language—Urdu versus Bengali. A concerted drive to end this schism was launched by the nineteenth century ‘reform’ movements in Bengali Islam which were a major attack on local traditions and culture.126 The new ‘Musalmani Puthis’, aimed at cleansing the state of Islam and retrieving its ‘purity’, were manuals of religious instruction written I25

Ibid. Rafiuddin Ahmed characterises these Muslim Sufi writers as ‘liberal Ulama’ as opposed to ‘dogmatic Ulama’. We prefer to separate the Sufis from the Ulama under the categories of ‘revisionists’ and ‘dogmatists’. Of course, a further distinction can be made between soft and hard Sufis: Waliullah and Sirhindi being examples of hard Sufis. 126 Ibid., pp. 124–26. Its exact counterpart is described in accounts of the Hindu ‘reform’ movements and the Hindu–Urdu language contests in Uttar Pradesh and other parts of northern India. Sec Sudhir Chandra, ‘Communal Consciousness in Late 19th Century Hindi Literature’, in Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India, Delhi, 1986. ‘Some of the epithets used for Urdu were demon, witch,

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in a Bengali in which wholesale incorporation of Arabic and Persian terms was effected. The Arabic and Persian terms were valourised as ‘Islamic’ by the authors of the puthis thus giving their language the label of ‘Musalmani Bangla’.127 These nineteenth century ‘reformers’ were the ideologues of the ‘Islamic community’ who articulated and activated the cultural faultline in their new language. They combined their contestatory ideology with their access to methods of modern organisation—public debates, door-to-door subscriptions and meetings. In this manner the struggle between the revisionists and dogmatists was carried to the public and entered its mass phase. It effectively consolidated an ‘alignment of mass and elite concerns …’.128 Community and Cultural Power

Even when rivalry between various maulvis or between ‘reformists’ qua ‘purifiers’ versus local pirs and Ulama existed it actually helped to activise Bengal’s Muslim society as a whole. The social significance of the rural debates or bahas between them, can be grasped better when seen as a cultural development—an institution for debating the best means of acquiring cultural significance and power. Reducing the bahas to a ‘religious’ phenomenon, as Ahmed does, is unhelpful.129 It must be appreciated that internal debate and differentiation was part and parcel of learning to be a community which had to cope culturally with the ‘other’ on its own strength without political power. The fact that the bahas were attended by people in thousands from all walks of life militates against characterising the event as a theological debate which it ostensibly was. Although juristic arguments in internal debates of Islam may have been lost on the audience, ‘[t]hey began to take a new pride in their “Muslimness” … and, eventually, the primary concern common to all contenders was to counter what they considered misrepresentations of the tenets of Islam’.130 The point, however, was not only to purify religion prostitute, and scum of other languages’. Also see, Paul R. Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India, New Delhi, 1975; Francis Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims, Cambridge, 1974. 127 Ibid., pp. 128–31. I28 Ibid., pp. 132–34. 129 Rafiuddin Ahmed, The Bengal Muslims 1871–1906: A Quest for Identity, New Delhi, 1981. See his discussion of bahas on pp. 74–80. 130 Ibid., p. 82.

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as a metaphysic but as a ritual and a way of life, that is, its cultural practices. The object, said Munshi Samiruddin, was to preserve distinctive faith, social manners and customs which were fundamentally different from those of the Hindu.131 The ‘reform’ movements in Islam were neither agencies for purely religious reform nor, merely, the concern of elites: they were ‘instrumental in widening the social and cultural gap between the Hindu and Muslim poorer classes’. Poorer Muslims ‘found their voice in politics through them … and helped to transform a people into a community’.132 This process and its cultural consequences were equally true of the Hindu ‘reform’ movement of the nineteenth century. The cultural politics of community is meaningless if understood in narrow terms such as political power or religious authority not only at the level of the collective mass but even for its ideologues and leaders. A community is not a religious entity or institution—it acquires significance as a channel, a social organisation for cultural self-empowerment vis-à-vis ‘others’. This channel for acquiring symbolic power is, in its appeal, available in common to all members who begin to cohere into a community and is, in fact, the inspiration for them to so cohere. The community as a cultural artifact evolves as a means for empowerment of the ‘self ’ in relation to the ‘other’. The strategies adopted by ideologues of religious reform in the bid for cultural empowerment could be very different from that of the masses. The best example in the Muslim case, is that of Deoband which opposed the Muslim League and ‘supported the National Congress provided it did not lead to any infringement of the Sharia or to the humiliation of the Muslim community’. On the other hand, the Muslim League led by a westernised elite won the masses over to its side and the pro-League party of the Jamaat-e-Islami despite its poor following among the Ulama ‘was held in veneration by the vast majority of Muslims ….’133 Similarly, the mass of non-Muslims in society combined their cultural assertions 131

Ibid., p. 90. Ibid., pp. 46, 71. 133 Aziz Ahmed, ‘Activism of the Ulama in Pakistan’, in Nikki R. Keddie (ed.), Scholars, Saints, and Sufis, Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1972, pp. 258–59. For Deoband’s efforts to effect an ‘Islamic renewal’ as professed by them and their endeavour to establish ‘Urdu as a language of communication among the Muslims of India’, see Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900, Princeton/New Jersey/New Delhi, 1982, p. 102. 132

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with active support for the National Congress and eschewed the politics of ‘reform’ movements such as that of the Hindu Mahasabha. The Cow as a Cultural Symbol

Cow slaughter was prohibited by Emperor Akbar, at least in the Punjab, and this prohibition was continued by Jahangir. According to Athar Ali, this did not amount to suppression of any Islamic ritual.134 Clearly, the assumption behind Athar Ali’s view is that rituals are ‘religious’ and therefore the prohibition of cow slaughter, not being a religious injunction, was not important for Muslims or ought not to be considered significant. However, as we have pointed out earlier, ritual is a matter of orthopraxis and should not be viewed as a religious symbol. Rituals are symbols of cultural practices and are concentrated forms of asserting cultural power in contesting with the ‘other’. It appears that even Babar appreciated the fact that the cow was a symbol of cultural resistance and he is supposed to have issued a farman forbidding cow slaughter.135 Babar is said to have instructed his son Humayun: ‘Avoid especially the sacrifice of the cow by which thou canst capture the hearts of the peoples of India, and subjects of this country may be bound up with royal obligations.’136 Akbar’s decision, therefore, to curtail the aggressive cultural symbolism of cow slaughter was certainly intended to create a basis for hegemonic, as opposed to dominant, cultural power. One must view the evolution of cultural symbols and their significance in cultural contests as a process that results from cultural encounters and conflicts. Though, Brahmanical literature knew the concept of Ahimsa and the related concept of sanctity of the cow from the fifth century BC it was not a widespread, prevalent feature of ‘Hinduism’. The concepts

134

M. Athar Ali, ‘Akbar and Islam (1581–1605)’, in Milton Israel and N.K. Wagle (eds), Islamic Society and Culture: Essays in Honour of Professor Aziz Ahmed, Delhi, 1983, Ch. 9, p. 132. 135 Norman W. Brown, ‘The Sanctity of the Cow in Hinduism’, The Madras University Journal, Vol. 28, 1957, p. 29. For the complete document, said to be Babar’s advice to Humayun, see Rajendra Prasad, India Divided, Bombay, 1946, p. 37. 136 Sunanda Rao, Cow Protection in India, Madras, 1927, p. 181.

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spread as strong societal influences mainly under the impact of Buddhism and Jainism and, especially, the latter, as a process of cultural competition with and incorporation of Buddhist and Jain concepts by Brahmanism.137 The earliest evidence of pinjrapoles (animal hospitals) is from the reign of Emperor Ashoka. All foreign travellers observed them in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, certainly. Goshalas (cow shelters) appeared well before the twelfth century. Doctrinally, cow sanctity entrenched itself in Brahmanical literature from the fourth to the sixth centuries.138 Though earlier contacts between Muslims and Hindus were limited in extent and peaceful in nature, military conquests commencing with Mahmud of Ghazni and the establishment of Muslim political control, projected as the victory of Islam, introduced an element of conflict and contest into the cultural scene. The sanctity of the cow came to be reified into a symbol of pre-existing non-Muslim culture—at least of the upper and middle castes whose influence over the rest of society was by no means insignificant. Moreover, the reification of the cow as a cultural symbol easily translated into a cultural overlap between the Brahmanical, Buddhist and Jain segments of society. Consequently, the cow easily lent itself into becoming a rallying point for resistance against the spread of Islam. As the sanctity of the cow came to be strengthened by identification with non-Muslim culture, violations of this sanctity came to be seen as a means of encouraging the dominance of Islam. The use of the cow as a cultural and political symbol of resistance to Muslim power reached its apex of organisational expression during the Maratha struggle against Mughal rule during the seventeenth century. Shivaji upheld the ‘sacred’ duty of the ruler ‘the rightful lords of the realm’ to protect the cow and the Brahman.139 The Khalsa rule of Ranjit Singh in the Punjab, also prohibited cow slaughter and the azan.140 The anti-cow-killing agitation in the 1880s and 1890s affected the lower classes of Muslims and Hindus even in the remote countryside of Bengal. As Hindu ‘communal’ leaders organised opposition to cow-killing as a point of prestige and symbolic power, ‘the matter became a point of honour with the Muslims …. Kurbani came to be celebrated with public eclat as an ostentatious response to the Hindu challenge’.141 137

Deryck O. Lodrick, Sacred Cows, Sacred Places, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, 1981. Brown, ‘The Sanctity of the Cow’. 139 Rao, Cow Protection in India, pp. 191–92. 140 Christopher A. Bayly, ‘The Pre-history of “Communalism”: Religious Conflict in India, 1700–1860’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 177–204. 141 Ahmed, The Bengal Muslims, p. 170. 138

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Though government and police sources cited Brahmans, Hindu officials, school teachers and pleaders, supported by Marwari businessmen as the leaders of the cow protection movement, the active rural mass participation occurred because of their perception of an opportunity to assert their cultural practices. Hindu zamindars protected the rural Hindu populace and many made it a condition in their patta that Muslim tenants would not slaughter cows in their estates.142 When the colonial government sought to lay down rules for cow slaughter, making it private and licensed, The Mahomedan Observer wrote: ‘The Bengalis have at least succeeded in extorting a firman against the cow-killing from the ruler of Bengal.’143 The cow and attitudes towards the cow became so inextricably associated with conflicting cultures that respect for the cow became a cause celèbre for large numbers of Hindus in the nationalist movement. The Name as a Cultural Symbol

Richard Kurin, writing on the culture of ethnicity in Pakistan, cites the popularity of names that indicate supposed foreign Islamic ancestry or origin. The significance of this is in its culturally loaded form of symbolism: descent from an ashraf group is not only an identification with the past grandeur of Islam, but ... equates such people with the conquest of and rule over South Asia and its native-born locals. To be desi is to be counted among the conquered and the ruled. To be ashraf is to be dominantand controlling; to be desi is to be subordinate and controlled.144

The urge towards cultural assertion and empowerment also led large numbers of Muslims in Bengal in the colonial period into adopting ashraf names.145 Cultural value was intrinsic to being either a descendent of a superior, conquering cultural force or of an inferior, subordinated culture. Most scholars of Islam emphasise the theory of aql and nafs as an important element of cultural pride in being Muslim—aql, the faculty

142

Ibid., p. 172. Ibid., p. 173. The Mahomedan Observer, 18 January 1894. 144 Richard Kurin, ‘The Culture of Ethnicity in Pakistan’, in Katherine P. Ewing (ed.), Shariat and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam, New Delhi, 1988, p. 220. 145 Ahmed, The Bengal Muslims, p. 40. 143

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of moral discrimination shared with the angels and nafs, the principle of wilfulness.146 Kurin points out that the contrast between aql and nafs is at times compared to that between the super-regional culture of Islamic teaching and the regional culture of South Asia—the regional culture is impulsive and wilful, more in possession of nafs than of aql.147 Shah Waliullah, the famous intellectual and religious reformist of eighteenth century India, spoke of the two opposing faculties as angelic and bestial.148 Schimmel, in her study of the poet Jalaloddin Rumi, shows that for the thirteenth century mystic, one symbol of the nafs is Hindu.149 While, William Roff, studying Islam in Indonesia, points out that there nafs is identified with women, as it is in the poetry of Rumi.150 Thus, widely differing individuals, such as Waliullah and Rumi, inherited a broadly Islamic, masculine norm of looking at the inferior Other—be it cultural, that is, Hindu, or gender, that is, women. Claiming inheritance, thus, not from local, regional sources but from the original homelands of Islam through the adoption of appropriate names, was an act of cultural empowerment of the self. An analogous account of how names signify cultural power in the regional specificity of the Hindu enclosure, is provided by the cultural power relations established between the conquering and dynasty in Kumaon and the indigenous people of the UP hills. A central distinction involved the separation of invaders and autochthones that cut across caste categories in this case. Though the royal family and nobility and its Brahman priests were divided according to the varna divisions of Sanskritic Hinduism, an indigenous Brahman was inferior to an immigrant Brahman and Kshatriya, the latter having descended from the conquering culture which had hegemonised the local people. The result was the adoption of immigrant names, not common to the indigenous culture, as an act of cultural empowerment, by claiming identity with the immigrant Brahman elite.151 146 Barbara Daly Metcalf (ed.), Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, Berkeley/Los Angeles, 1984, p. 10. 147 Ibid., Introduction, p. 15. 148 Ibid., p. 10. 149 Annemarie Schimmel, The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi, London, 1978, pp. 193–95. 150 Metcalf (ed.), Moral Conduct and Authority, p. 19. 151 John Leavitt, ‘Cultural Holism in the Anthropology of South Asia: The Challenge of Regional Traditions’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol. 26, No. 1, January–June 1992, pp. 3–44; see also p. 32.

Culture, Community and Power Caste as a Symbol of Power

The cultural hierarchy of superior/inferior, conquered and conquering, needs to be examined in caste Hindu society to extend our argument on struggles for cultural assertion and violation and cultural hegemony, into the pre-Sultanate period. Cultural history can, perhaps, be summed up as ‘the story of who rides whom and how’,152 retaining the notion of power as central to all relationships. The debate on post-structuralist versus materialist formulation in the theory of cultural history is an unnecessary and unhelpful dualism. Deconstruction of cultural texts must study language, text, symbols and metaphors in the context of the actual conditions of power relationships in society. In other words, cultural sociology must be deconstructed empirically—in terms of the cultural and social relations of power and the experiential relations of various groups in society, whether castes, classes or communities. On the other hand, the debate among social anthropologists between cultural holism and regional specificity or cultural autonomy is, as a rule, ahistorical.153 When processual or historically changing over time concepts such as Sanskritisation are examined they too do not consider power relations as the overwhelming force in the spread of a relatively unified culture across a field of varied cultures that are region or caste specific. The struggle for cultural hegemony can be traced historically backwards into time, into the formation of caste society. The heretical members of the culture system whose diverse practices coexist with homage to so-called ‘great tradition’ and the observance of its injunctions, could then be seen not as remnants of ‘little traditions’ but as modes of resistance to and acceptance of the hegemonic Brahmanical caste culture. This analytical mode would also get rid of static, immutable models and concepts, because, power relations in society are neither fixed nor permanent. Times of disturbed equilibrium can upset existing equations of power, with cultures becoming more or less assertive or submissive, as the case may be, changing the enthnographic reality accordingly.

152 Fox-Genovese and Genovese, quoted in J. Morgan Kousser, ‘Restoring Politics to Political History’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 12, No. 4, Spring 1982, pp. 569–95. 153 For a general survey of the debate, see Leavitt, ‘Cultural Holism’.

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The ‘low’ castes and ‘untouchables’, with their abjectly low status in relation to the caste Hindu, obviously appears to challenge the concept of a Hindu enclosure. The dichotomy recedes, however, if one separates caste relations with their two levels: one, of a shared Indic lexis and praxis that is holistic and cosmological, civilisational categories or a configuration of critical Indic notions (that is, dharma, karma, maya and samasara) that are shared by those who were damned as untouchables and the caste Hindus. This level, is often termed, the ‘civilisational framework’.154 The second level is that of conflict and estrangement between the castes and outcastes and a long-term struggle to reverse the cultural hegemony of caste Hinduism. This cultural struggle, with its strategies and symbols of protest, needs to be historically explored and analysed. Nevertheless, this is a process of cultural contestation within a shared cultural enclosure. Studies on the process of Brahmanical incorporation and cultural neutralisation of the Bhakti tradition suggest the evolution of strategies aimed at containing, deflecting and dispersing opposition to the established priority of Brahmanical Hindu deities and values. The reverse process of lower caste strategies to contest hegemonic Brahmanism by rearranging and sifting elements of popular culture to renegotiate power relations forms a fascinating source for the study of cultural contests.155 Recently, a cultural history of the ‘Untouchable’ has tried to solve the problem of the two levels of caste relations by distinguishing between the Indic and Hindu, and speaking of the Indic civilisational configurations of which the Hindu is a part. However, a recent strategy of cultural assertion adopted by ideologues of the ‘Untouchables’ is to call themselves the ‘adi-Hindus’, that is, the ‘original Hindus’, the autochthones of the subcontinent.156 Both, the articulation of a non-Hindu or anti-Hindu discourse and of the ‘real, original Hindu’ cultural ideology, are conceptual strategies for encompassing the situation of cultural contest. 154

R.S. Khare, The Untouchable as Himself: Ideology, Identity, and Pragmatism among the Lucknow Chamars, Cambridge, 1984. 155 Ibid. Also see, O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology; and ‘Cultures of Rule, Communities of Resistance’, in Identity, Consciousness and the Past: The South Asian Scene, Social Analysis, Journal of Cultural and Social Practice, Special Issue, No. 25, September 1989, for how ‘Maratha pride and status independent of Brahmanic hierarchy’ was sought to be established, not by anathematising the symbols of Brahmanical power but by universalising what had previously been the signs of elite caste status. p. 103. 156 Khare, The Untouchable as Himself, pp. 6–8.

Culture, Community and Power

As the study by Khare has found, the ‘Chamar ascetic’ has functioned ‘to redo popularly shared Hindu cultural ideas and perspectives to make them work for the Untouchable’s new aspirations’. Perhaps, it is this strategy that results in what Khare calls the ‘controlled cultural antagonism and social dependence’ that characterises the relations between Brahmans and Untouchables and other low castes.157 A vivid illustration of the cultural contest and efforts at reversal of hegemony between Brahmans and low castes/Untouchables is provided in the words of a chamar mechanic employed by the State Bus Transport of Uttar Pradesh: ‘The cause of increasing discord (phut ka karan),’ he said, was … our deepening mutual suspicion and distrust (shak aur shubah). It is an ailment of mind and heart, not merely of better jobs, more land, and more money. We both know inside that we are not any more what we used to be—the Untouchable, a virtual slave (gulam), and the caste Hindu, a God-fearing, charitable and compassionate master (dayavan, parmatma se darne wala, malik).158

Whether this cultural struggle is different from the one that has existed between the Hindu and Muslim enclosures in substance or degree, can only be generalised on the basis of historical and sociological research. Especially, examination of the motif of cultural transcendence characteristic of the devotional Bhakti currents, would prove most fruitful. To what extent the following generalisation is correct needs to be tested with cultural analysis of power relations between castes: ‘A rich value economy that is civilisational in character guides them (Untouchables and caste Hindu). This economy allows differentiation, disparateness, controlled contrast, and refutation between the caste Hindu and the Untouchable, but neither total opposition nor annihilation of one by the other.’159

157

Ibid., p. 78. For a study of ‘the modern Untouchable’s struggle to reformulate old notions of self, society and cosmos, and to articulate a positive cultural ideology while remaining within the framework of Indic civilisation’, see Michael B. Schwartz, ‘Indian Untouchable Texts of Resistance: Symbolic Domination and Historical Knowledge’, Social Analysis, No. 25, September 1989, p. 131. 158 Ibid., p. 109. 159 Ibid., p. 170

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B.R. Ambedkar led the Untouchables through the process of constructing a countercaste cultural assertion that had been initiated by Jotiba Phule, striving towards the reversal of Brahmanic cultural hegemony, towards contest and confrontation by ideologising their cultural awareness and assertion. In effect, he generated the slogan: the cultural is political. In the case of caste as a symbol of power, so much of the future depends on the paradigm—of hegemony or dominance—within which upper caste society allows for a strategy of negotiation of cultural power relationships.160

160

For a seminal, insightful article on caste, see Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘The Invention of Caste: Civil Society in Colonial India’, Social Analysis, No. 25, September 1989. As Dirks put it: Indian society, indeed caste itself, was shaped by political struggles and processes …. I stress the political both to redress the previous emphasis on ‘religion’ and to underscore the social fact that caste structure, ritual form, and political process were all dependent on relations of power. These relations were constituted in and through history; and these relations were culturally constructed. (p. 45, emphasis added) Also see, Nicholas B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown, Cambridge, 1987.

Chapter 2

Outline of a Theory of Cultural Power

Politico-military accommodations and adjustments are the sites neither of cultural amity nor of strife. Without locating the self-affirmation of cultures as the seat of hegemony and the negation of cultural power as a symbol of subordination in society, one cannot hope to discover the subterranean struggle of cultures. In each case, the cultural hegemony is expressed by a dominant discourse legitimising the rulers’ political-economic position. For example, the discourse of Islam for the Mughal state and of science–progress–industrial development—i.e., ‘modernisation’—for the colonial and post-colonial state. The Rajput kings and the Hindu high officials, honoured with ceremonial robes, granted land and status and tolerated with ‘tilaks’ on their foreheads could neither display nor celebrate the ‘infidel’ character of their religions, the triumphal processions of their idols and the expansive symbolism of their non-Islamic cultural precepts and practices at the Mughal court. Abul Fazl, the author of the Akbar-Nama, styles Todar Mal, the celebrated minister of Akbar, a ‘simple one’ because ‘he mourned the loss of the idols he used to worship’, and goes on to call him ‘a blind follower of custom and narrow mindedness’.1 The cultural ambience of power in the reign of the ‘Perfect Padshah’ was as Islamic as the cultural ambience of knowledge (as power) was 1 M. Athar Ali, ‘Akbar and Islam’, in Milton Israel and N.K. Wagle (eds), Islamic Society and Culture, Delhi, 1983.

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in the Sufi silsilahs. As Peter Hardy puts it, the language used by Abul Fazl is of Islamic tradition. The style and vocabulary with all its Islamic resonances could not but indicate to non-Muslims (even those in the service of the Mughals and part of the state apparatus) that they could not make Abul Fazl’s world their own. Its appeal for them was bound to be limited because they might understand something of it, hope to participate in it, but could not identify with it culturally.2 It is this ambience of political power that defines the cultural limits of politics, and reflects the cultural faultline. However, neither the existence of the faultline nor the cultural limits it imposes on politics and the state, necessarily generate cultural strife or confrontation, as we discuss elsewhere. Hardy’s conclusion that Akbar’s paradigm of a good ruler was not a good basis for Mughal rule in India implicitly assumes that cultural limits to politics are inherently divisive. For the colonial period’s history the deprecation of the ‘Hindu tinge’ in Congress nationalist politics betrays a similar assumption. The privileged groups and ideologues of caste society could not culturally resonate with Mughal rule because its ‘Muslimness’ was in a position of hegemony over them. The Islamic discourse was culturally dominant in their political and social existence producing a gap between their position in the administrative apparatus of state power and the courtly or ceremonial symbolism of cultural power. The subordination of their public or ‘outer-culture’ the sense of loss of cultural self and power coexisted with their adjustments in the political system’s hierarchy. This drove the elements of a shared, collective cultural power into the recesses of an inarticulated social psychology. There they lay dormant, to be invoked at points of political crises as memories of subordination. Meanwhile, the kings and the officials poured their wealth earned at the Mughal court in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into Krishna’s land of Braj and the Mathura region seeking cultural expression and prestige in oases of Hindu ambience. In the following century the Jat chieftans aspiring for cultural legitimacy took over the patronage and repair of many local temples.3 2 Peter Hardy, ‘Abul Fazl’s Portrait of the Perfect Padshah’, in Christian W. Troll (ed.), Islam in India, Vol. 2, New Delhi, 1985, pp. 114–37. 3 C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, Cambridge, 1983, p. 130. The mercantile castes’ survival ‘meant above all the continuity of family credit (sakh) within the wider community’ and in its dealings with other castes and people in general. This ‘sakh’ or credit

Outline of a Theory of Cultural Power

The translation of material power into cultural assertion and the conversion of cultural capital into economic–political capital and vice-versa was an integral strategy in the case of the Marathas. In the post-Mughal era, the three important actors in the power play in Banaras were the Rajas of Banaras, the Nawab of Awadh with their capital at the Islamic city of Lucknow and the Marathas. The latter collaborated with the Awadh Nawabi against the Rohillas on the condition that they would acquire control over Mathura, Prayag (Allahabad), Banaras and Gaya—all urban centres prominent on Hindu pilgrimage routes. It is significant to the paradigm of cultural hegemony that this grid of commercial interests which no doubt attracted the Marathas was enmeshed with the network of Hindu pilgrimage centres. Thwarted in their economic ambitions when the British replaced the Awadh rulers, the Marathas remained culturally important in the city of Banaras. They financed most of the eighteenth century ‘Hindu reconstruction’ of the city including the present Vishwanath Temple in 1777, and the temples of Annapurna, Kalabhairava, Sakshivinayaka and Trilochaneswara. A large number of bathing ghats, for example, Amritrao, Ahilya, Scindia and Bhonsla ghats apart from dharmashalas (rest houses) were also built by the Marathas. Regular ceremonial feasts to support Brahman priests and acquire cultural prestige were also held by them.4 All this activity was part of the process by which cultural capital gets accumulated. There was, surely, a link between this and the Marathas’ projected goal of establishing ‘Hindu’ cultural hegemony. This project intermeshed with the economic importance of the urban centres where they were culturally active. The convertibility of the two forms of capital—cultural and economic—is obvious.5 A similar linkage between economic and cultural activities is apparent in the cultural collaboration of mendicant trader-soldiers (Gosains) with the Raja and merchantbanker families of Banaras. The Gosains combined, in their collective life, the religio-cultural attributes that were venerated by the mass of the people and their commercial activity as principal merchants dealing with the Maratha Empire. in the wider networks of ‘community’ embodied the moral and religious values upheld by them and lead to the accrual of what we characterise as cultural capital in interaction with other castes, p. 381. 4 Sandria B. Freitag, Culture and Power in Banaras: Community Performance and Environment, 1800–1980, New Delhi, 1989, pp. 1–5. 5 Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars.

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The adaptation of traditional non-Islamic ruling groups to the Mughal system was partly coercive and partly a contractual alignment of their respective interests. This adaptation was not an expression of cultural accommodation and synthesis. Reviewing the history of India, Muhammad Iqbal recognised that the Hindu and Muslim communities had guarded their collective existence and identities jealously and had shown no inclination towards absorption into a larger whole.6 The adjustments in the political system were transient and aimed at securing the specific and limited ends of wealth and status. The assertion of an alternative culture in outbursts of violent resistance and confrontation at moments of weakness and places of loose control in the declining Mughal system showed the character of the adaptation and compromise in politico-military power. Witness the alternative cultural assertions of the Sikhs and Marathas. The paradigm of hegemony which subsumes resistance enables one to see that accommodation–adaptation are unnuanced categories which do not reveal the resistance embedded in the so-called practices of adjustment with power. By defining the borders of what is possible to accommodate the adaptors resist encroachment beyond a certain frontier. The Akbar–Aurangzeb spectrum or scale of formations is the exemplar of how hegemony is both domination/resistance plus accommodation/ absorption. Domination is indissolubly linked to culture and always sets limits to what can or cannot be legitimated, thereby, setting cultural limits to the political system. Culture has, above all, to do with a sense of self-esteem and self-worth as symbolic power in society and it is this that is addressed by those seeking to evolve hegemonic patterns of rule. CULTURAL INTERNALITY AND ‘COMMUNITY’

The active organisation of ‘communities’ in the sense of aggregations perceiving themselves as linked entities vis-à-vis the ‘others’ and in relation to political and official authority, existed in India since centuries. These ‘communities’—call them Hindu, indigenous or non-Islamic—were not religious but jati-based and, different sects of Muslims also acquired jati status in the total picture. Though the boundary of the cultural faultline 6 Mohammad Iqbal, ‘Presidential Address’, in S.A. Vahid (ed.), Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal, Lahore, 1964, p. 169.

Outline of a Theory of Cultural Power

is observable between the Muslim and non-Muslim communities yet, their functional history is of the politics of each cultural segment being carried on separately as a history of jatis over a long period of time. The term jati does not denote castes in a simple sociological sense. In anthropological language these jatis constructed ‘moral communities’. These congregated in distinct neighbourhoods, conducted their own forms of ritual life and maintained their own social institutions. They not only shared an ethos and world view but a common cultural language and vocabulary of self-affirmation and mutual respect. This was as true of the ‘Muslim jatis’—the Bohras, Khojas, Ismailis—as of those jatis categorised as ‘Hindu’, for example, the merchant community of ‘Hindu Jains’ in coastal Gujarat.7 Even when appropriately deferential to the Mughal overlord and acknowledging Mughal hegemony over public and political culture the real social status and cultural prestige, the abru and izzat of Hindu jatis especially lay in solidarity with fellow members and co-religionists. This was the channel for earning cultural capital through seva to the collective and its deities: restoring temples, holding caste feasts, financing religious festivals and, in the case of merchant jatis specially, funding the upkeep of pinjrapoles and gaushalas, and charity for their ‘own’ poor, particularly, in times of crises such as famine or disease. These activities of the collectives were undertaken with a mix of jati and religious values which formed a distinct cultural pattern. The Muslim jatis’ or segments’ overall cultural protection, of course, was the responsibility of the Muslim ruler who was responsible for the corporate life of Islam. However, their social-cultural capital in the private sphere was acquired through the funding and support to mosques, shrines, religious festivals, anjumans, madrasas and maktabs. This accumulation of cultural capital by the various collectivities was not ‘religious’ activity in a simplistic sense but a process of long-evolved cultural practices.8 7

Frank Conlon, ‘Caste, Community and Colonialism, 1665–1830’, Journal of Urban History, Vol. XI, 1985, pp. 181–208; Ashin Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, 1700–1750, Weisbaden, 1979; for Muslim communities, see Satish C. Misra, Muslim Communities in Gujarat, London, 1964; Asghar Ali Engineer, The Bohras, Delhi, 1980; for the overlap between Jain and Hindu social forms, see Govindhbhai Desai, Hindu Families in Gujarat, Baroda, 1932. 8 Douglas Haynes, ‘From Avoidance to Confrontation? A Contestatory History of Merchant–State Relations in Surat, 1600–1924’, in Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash (eds),

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The politics of communities predated the attempts at the formation of new, broader ‘communal’ entities. However each of them related to the ‘internality’ of one or the other wider cultural conglomerations—the ‘Hindu’ and Muslim cultural enclosures. The norms, values and codes of social behaviour of various religious and moral collectives often overlapped with those of other collectivities within a broad cultural internality. Thus, when the larger collective of internality in the ‘Hindu’ cultural enclosure and its ethical world was invoked, the faultline between it and the internality of the ‘other’ Islamic culture would become visible. The ideologues of cultural contest focused on this faultline to mobilise the complex array of various collectivities on either side. The relationships of power in society grouped people on either side of the cultural faultline notwithstanding their internal variations. It is this play of power between broad cultural conglomerations that can be read as a long-drawn out struggle for cultural hegemony. The cultural faultline is not born of colour, creed, language, etc., but of ‘blood’ that is spilt in conquest or sacrificed in defence, in the cause of establishing power, retaining power or subverting and overthrowing it. It is when power relations are enforced or challenged that ‘blood politics’ is produced. Once this blood is staked in defence of or as a challenge to power it produces a cultural faultline. The earliest example in ‘modern’ times of the Irish Catholics and Protestants, and the later ones of the Lebanon or the Punjab, are illustrations of this generalisation. The cultural faultline in these examples tends to foster permanent civil war. When different religious beliefs, cultural practices and languages are separated through a caste system or hierarchy, then power is exercised by those at the top without, necessarily, any bloodshed. A ‘caste’ hierarchy of cultures, one might say, is clearly established even between different communities, regions and nations, and it functions without bloodshed Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia, New Delhi, 1991, pp. 239–89; E.W. Hopkins, ‘Ancient and Modern Hindu Guilds’, in India: Old and New, New York, 1902, pp. 169–205; M.N. Pearson, Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat, Delhi, 1976; Sushil Chaudhry, ‘The Gujarati Mahajan’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 1980, pp. 357–65; M. Torri, ‘Social Groups and the Redistribution of Commercial Wealth’, Studies in History, No. 5, 1985, pp. 57–86; Gokhale, Surat in the 17th Century: A Study in Urban History of Pre-Modern India, Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series No. 28, London. 1978; Philip Calkins, ‘The Formation of a Regionally Oriented Ruling Group in Bengal’, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 29, No. 4, 1970.

Outline of a Theory of Cultural Power

till its power is challenged. For instance, power relations between castes in India could largely and, in the main, did operate without perpetual warfare.9 The important thing, in this case, was not ‘caste’ as such, but the equations of power established between them. These relations of power need not be maintained coercively with physical force but through ideology—ideology as power and as a channel for hegemony—up till the point that it is challenged. Once, however, the challenge is mounted, power must either adjust to it or spill blood, thus, producing a cultural faultline. In this context, one might say, Brahmanism is not the characteristic of a caste per se, it is an ideology of power, social–cultural power, which is convertible into economic–political power. The mutual animosities and thrust for power and domination on the one hand, and cultural defence and resistance on the other, that are a constant feature of the ideologues struggle for cultural hegemony (expressed in medieval society through the hard polemics of the Brahmans and Ulama and the soft hegemonic discourse of the Bhakti saints and Sufis) are dormant but not absent at the popular mass level. The symbiotic relationship reflected in the daily life of the people is a strategy for mutual coexistence and survival. Nevertheless, their relationship is not free of tensions. Consequently, the battle for cultural hegemony joined by the ideologues, can activate, through specific constructions and articulations, the tensions produced by the cultural faultline among people. The powerlessness of the majority of people, in terms of political and economic capital, produces a cultural elasticity of day-to-day life. Their lives do not reflect the constant thrust for political power and the need to acquire cultural–ideological sanctions and legitimacy that is exhibited by the cultural elite and its ideologues. ‘Syncretism’ is the form in which their cultural elasticity is expressed. Nevertheless, the stimulation of the powerless peoples’ imagination and fantasy is often expressed through a symbolic assertion of cultural power and resentment at its symbolic violation. This bridges together the powerful and the powerless within observably common cultures in terms of the internality principle. Internality implies that despite heterogeneity in social and religious ritual practices various social segments retain an inclusive–exclusive world view that can be condensed into the symbols 9 Ainslie T. Embree and Mark Juergensmeyer, Imagining India: Essays on Indian History, New Delhi, 1989.

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of a particular culture for mobilisation: idol worshippers or idol breakers, cow killers or cow protectors, proselytisers or polytheists. Thus, the cultural elites and the ideologues who are the most active contenders in the struggle for hegemony have powerful, resonant cultural symbols to which they can appeal: the pride in one’s group culture, fears of domination by an alien culture, and this pride and fear enmeshed in the longings for a righteous community. It is these symbols which activate the cultural faultline and which provide the ballast for movements of cultural assertions of the ‘self’ vis-à-vis the ‘other’. The vertically increasing incidence and horizontal spread of the sites of such activation of cultural tensions correspond to the growing construction and articulations by the ideologues. Perhaps one can see the consolidation of Hindu and Muslim ‘interests’ in the colonial period as the state’s policy of strengthening and supporting one set of ideologues against the other, from time to time, as dictated by the colonialists’ own ‘third party interest’ as political hegemony. RELATIONS OF POWER

Cultural power should not be seen as an institution or a structure. It is the name that one attributes to ‘a complex strategical situation in a particular society … it is the moving substrata of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power …’.10 Perhaps, all power is cultural–ideological. Since the nineteenth century the concept of power has been reduced to its economic and social content. On the contrary, power should be understood as an ideological–cultural language in which wealth and status must also express themselves to become a power in society. Force, military or economic, can be imposed on human objects but for power to be established, that is, for force to be translated into power, human subjects must acknowledge and recognise it—happily or otherwise. As Dumont puts it, ‘[T]o legitimise force into power is to tinge with principle, or value ….’11 Moreover, the recognition and acceptance of power must be in a cultural language, shared

10

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, An Introduction, Harmondsworth, 1978, p. 93. 11 Louis Dumont, Religion, Politics and History in India, Paris/The Hague, 1970, p. 162.

Outline of a Theory of Cultural Power

by those who exercise power and over whom it is exercised. In other words, it must be encompassed within a predominant or primary value or ideology in a given society. There need be no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of cultural power relations. The manifold relationships of force that take shape and come into play at the local, group and institutional levels ‘are the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage that run through the social body as a whole. These then form a general line of force that traverses the local oppositions and links than together’. Power relationships also bring about ‘redistributions, realignments, homogenisations, and the convergences of the force relations …’. However, ‘major dominations are the hegemonic effects that are sustained by all these confrontations’.12 Where there is power there is resistance: but the relational character of power relations, the complicity of the hegemonised, disguises the nature of resistance. ‘There is no locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt.’13 There is a plurality of resistances, each of them a specific, special case in a special form: ‘[R]esistances that are possible, necessary, improbable; others that are spontaneous, savage, solitary, concerted, rampant, or violent; still others that are quick to compromise, interested or sacrificial ….’ These resistances are always distributed in an irregular fashion: the points, knots or foci of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities, at times mobilising groups or individuals in a definitive way, inflaming certain points of the social body, certain moments in social life, certain types of social behaviour. The ‘great radical ruptures and massive binary divisions’ (such as the ‘Hindu–Muslim’ partition of India) can only be examined through cultural power relationships with ‘mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society …’.14 Power, thus, is not an attribute that some possess more than others, but a network of relations whereby ‘power invests (the dominated), passes through them and with the help of them, relying on them just as they, in their struggle against power, rely on the hold it exerts on them’.15

12

Foucault, op. cit., p. 94. Ibid., p. 96. 14 Ibid., pp. 94–96. 15 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, Minneapolis. 1988, pp. 27–28. 13

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‘Sacred’ activities are often constituted negatively as ‘symbolic’—implying ‘spiritual’ or ‘cultural’ and not ‘real’—interests in opposition to ‘strictly economic’ interests, if there is such a thing. Consequently, symbolic interest is reduced to the ‘irrationality’ of feeling or passion. In fact, symbolic cultural activity, such as pouring wealth into religious endowments and charity or financing collective feasts and ceremonials, and thereby ‘acquiring’ moral prestige and social respect is as much a part of calculated ‘interest’ as economic calculations. The achievement and accumulation of repute in the cultural collective is seen to be as worthy of being sought after, if not more, than the accumulation of economic capital. Both economic and symbolic capital are interconvertible and together go into the making of power relationships. Symbolic capital is built up in the course of successive generations and provides a source of strength apart from, yet related to, economic strength, which can be called upon when extraordinary situations break in upon the routine of everyday life.16 Of course, symbolic cultural capital, in the form of the prestige and renown attached to a family, a caste or a community, is readily convertible into economic capital. What Marx called ‘naked self-interest’ that lives in the ‘icy water of egoistical calculation’ is not so distant and removed from the ‘sacred’ island of symbolic exchanges and solidarities which are impossible to assess.17 A great deal of ‘labour’ and ‘time’ (categories of economic capital) is invested in maintaining cultural relations in collectives even at the expense of economic capital. Authority and political and social power for the mobilisation of the collective rests ultimately on symbolic cultural capital—on prestige, generosity and concrete economic aid to cultural enterprises of the collective. The material investment that pays for collective ceremonials and festivals or supports the members of the collective in times of need is inextricably enmeshed with the symbolic investment in time and effort spent in acquiring authority and prestige. It is a truism that communities, classes, nations, groups and in the case of India one might add, castes, have fought and competed for control 16 For the concept of symbolic capital see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge, 1977, pp. 176–78. It has not been used here in the exact sense or context of Bourdieu’s work but is an insight derived from it. 17 Ibid., pp. 178–80.

Outline of a Theory of Cultural Power

over jobs, positions, money and resources. But one can also say that they have fought one another not about jobs and positions, but about honour. They themselves often said so, though, we tend to dismiss such assertions as rhetoric employed to camouflage ‘real’ interests. However, if we do not accept the reality of contests of honour we can never grasp and must continuously evade the reality of communities or castes that impoverish themselves in their efforts to maintain their honour.18 The two prizes of economic status and social–cultural honour are not alternatives: they are interconvertible and go together. When a community leader loses face, that is, prestige for his community, his followers must search for another leader. For, he who cannot retain the honour of his community can certainly not preserve the economic and social position of its members. On the other hand, economic power can also be used to subvert the legitimacy of established honour to gain recognition for the political and social credit of one’s own collective. In cultural contests, the challenges and counter-challenges, as well as the assertions and violations of power, are communicated to the other side in various stylised ways. Building for the collective and for oneself, financing processions and feasts, etc., are a form of confrontation and contest—demonstrating the honour and resources of both, the financiers (leaders) and the collective. Such cultural activities prove that they are persons of consequence and can help demonstrate that the collective is also of consequence in society at large. Thus, they create political credit for themselves and are venerated as leaders because they earn political credit for their collective. Of course, creating political credit through the accumulation of cultural capital can be an expensive process. Violence is not the criterion of contest and confrontation, money and courage are more important criteria sometimes. Symbolic cultural capital defines and signifies the collective’s capacity to preserve its ‘land’ and honour, and in particular the honour of its women in ‘contests of honour’. The hypersensitivity to the slightest slur or innuendo and the multiplicity of strategies designed to belie or avert them can be explained by the fact that symbolic capital cannot be as easily measured as economic capital. Symbolic capital is always ‘credit’—which 18 For a very good discussion of a caste which drained out large economic resources to fight cultural contests with upper castes, see F.G. Bailey, Strategems and Spoils: A Social Anthropolog y of Politics, Oxford, 1969, pp. 115–20.

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the group collective alone can grant and can also readily withdraw ‘as if in matters of honour, as in land, one man’s greater wealth made the others that much poorer’. Only a ‘reduced and reductive materialism can fail to see that strategies whose object is to conserve or increase the honour of the group’ are dictated by vital interests.19 This fact lies at the heart of cultural power struggles. For, cultural capital is the symbolic mode of seeking collective empowerment. Land and territory (conquered or lost), life and death and the circulation of women given and received are as much a part of economic as of cultural capital. A few examples in the contest of cultural struggle in the medieval state and society are: (a) instances of symbolic capital acquired by the state could be the Mughal grants to non-Muslim shrines, temples, etc. In the ‘contests of honour’ waged by collectives in the cultural sphere such grants would be perceived as giving and receiving honour. This, in turn, would strengthen the process of society and cultures giving respect and obedience to the established political power—which are concrete, material gains effected through the symbolic exchange; (b) on the obverse side would be instances of suppression of cultural practices and the prohibition of public celebrations. This is ‘symbolic violence’ in the cultural domain where the contest of honour gives and receives violation of honour in a bid to reduce or destroy the symbolic cultural capital of the other; (c) likewise, forced marriages and abduction of women would be symbolic violence to the other’s cultural capital, while voluntary matrimonial alliances would be symbolic capital in the form of honour given and received. SYMBOLIC CULTURAL POWER AND MODES OF POWER

Cultural hegemony is a mode of exercising power, which establishes relationships that are ‘moral’ and creates ‘affective’ obligations for the subordinated. These relationships which practice generosity and exchange of gifts, for example, the titles and jagirs granted to non-Muslims à la Akbar, ‘bring about the transmutation of economic capital into symbolic capital’,20 that is, ‘credit’ in the contest of honour. In Akbar’s case, both the ruler and the generously treated dominated people acquire capital: the ruler in the form of ‘honour’ that is cultural capital, and the latter 19 20

Bourdieu, Theory of Practice, pp. 181–82. Ibid., pp. 191–92.

Outline of a Theory of Cultural Power

in the form of titles and land deeds that is economic capital. Through this process, overt domination, that is physical and economic violence (apropos early medieval or later, Aurangzeb’s rule), now becomes socially recognised domination. In other words, it becomes legitimate authority and cultural hegemony. All control is power, but when the form in which it is presented denies the content of the act it symbolically transmutes a simple power relation into a hegemonic relationship inspired by respect for the culture and social conventions recognised by society. Culturally mediated power, thus, is hegemony. Power can be exerted durably only in the form of symbolic capital à la Akbar’s hegemonic paradigm of rule. Of course, this symbolic capital ‘obliges’ society to give honour, prestige, respect and loyalty to the powerful and is also the basis of economic capital in terms of services, material and military support extended to the ruler. However, this mode of control cannot succeed without the complicity of the group over which it is established. It must be jointly undertaken. It succeeds only to the extent that it is mutually effected and underwritten. The ‘dominant’ who chooses the mode of cultural symbolic capital through which to establish power has no other form available in which to serve his interest effectively. He has to expend a lot of time, care, attention and ingenuity—to invest a great deal of cultural capital—to be effective, and thus pays the cost of his power. The ‘dominated’, on the other hand, finds that nothing suits him/his collective better than to play his part in an interested fiction which offers him an honourable representation of his condition. The non-Muslims acceptance of the Sufi pirs and the Akbar paradigm were part of this complicitous role. In this sense, there are no dominant and no dominated, and power relations are manifest as a ‘collective work of euphemization’.21 It not only provides cultures/collectives the means to save their ‘spiritualistic point of honour’, it also provides a practical code of acceptable behaviour to the different constituents of society. In other words, it is an act of collective concealment of power relations and the willing acceptance of power in a ‘reasonable’ discourse. It is a historical process which often makes a virtue of necessity, for it was 21 Ibid. This discussion is inspired by Bourdieu’s analysis of modes of domination, pp. 194–96.

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equally possible for the controlled and hegemonised to have thought and acted differently but for the power arrayed against them. The unveiling of repressed meanings and functions and the emergence of the rock of overt power frorn the ambiguous waters of symbolic power can only result from a collapse of the social conditions which gave birth to the latter. These social conditions in Mughal society, for instance, changed under Aurangzeb and the repressed meanings surfaced. SYNCRETISM AND POWER

Syncretic practices socially repress the objective truth of power relations between cultures and communities (inter-caste relations, for example). Necessarily so, as everyday life and everyday order is only possible by the concealment of power relations. Syncretism functions as this act of social concealment not in a pejorative sense, for, it is a means of a collectively concerted make-believe involving both the contestants/participants in power relations. The contesting communities are not ‘religious’ but cultural collectives that share ways of living in the world and perceiving the world itself. This includes not only world views but a perception of the ‘self ’ and the ‘other’. The power relations between these cultural collectives even when not articulated is internalised and then symbolised as a series of significations. In crisis situations when the everyday order in which power relations lie congealed is challenged, the language of social order is also disrupted and ‘an extraordinary discourse’ takes over. Suddenly, it appears that harmonious syncretic life has been manipulated by an alien discourse invoking cleavages in the cultural past and projecting a future of cultural power over the ‘other’. However, the strength of this ‘extraordinary’ discourse ‘rests on the dialectical relationship between authorised, authorising language and the group which authorises it and acts on its authority’.22 ‘Words wreak havoc when they find a name for what had up to then been lived namelessly.’23 For the act of naming is an act in the exercise of power. The questions of a cultural past or cultural memory are not purely questions of historical time. Metapsychology uncovers the specific function of ‘memory’ to preserve promises and potentialities which live in the 22 23

Ibid., p. 170. Jean Paul Sartre, The Idiot in the Family, Paris, 1971.

Outline of a Theory of Cultural Power

imagination and fantasy of persons or entire peoples as ‘betrayals’ while the ‘reality principle’ takes over man’s actual existence in historical time. The deliberate activation of ‘memory’ by energising the promises of fantasy is undertaken by the ideologues. However, as the ‘constructors’ and activators of ‘memory’ the ideologues of a cultural past are not isolated villains. Complicity in this construction and reconstruction is offered by those whose ‘cultural memory’ is being activated and ‘restored’. Psychoanalytic theory uncovers the connection between restored memory and its content of fantasy. ‘The liberation of the past does not end in its reconciliation with the present … the orientation on the past tends towards an orientation on the future.’24

24

Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, London, 1969, p. 34.

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Chapter 3

The Power of the Past



Two Paradigms of Cultural Hegemony

The debate on whether the Mughal state was a theocracy or not, is wrongly posed. The ideological underpinnings of the state were not constant, fluctuating between what can be termed the ‘Akbar–Aurangzeb paradigms’ or ‘revisionism and dogmatism’ in Indian Islam. Concepts such as the Akbar–Aurangzeb paradigms and revisionism and dogmatism in Islam are novel to the prevalent discourse on Hindu–Muslim relations. So a word to explain our employing them is in order. We felt that the Akbar versus Aurangzeb paradigms were helpful in understanding the alternate paths to cultural hegemony in India. As broad constructs they give an insight into the specific modes of exercising power in a culturally plural society. Revisionism and dogmatism are well-known terms that are embedded in the Marxist/Communist discourse which employs them to describe varying, even contrary, interpretations of a master-text, in this case, Marxism. Given a master-text to which all interpretations subscribe and from which all claim legitimacy, the terms revisionism and dogmatism we felt could be usefully employed in the study of all ideological systems. Religions, we hold, are the earliest known ideological systems in the world, where the interpretation of the master-text is of crucial importance.



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Consequently, speaking of revisionism and dogmatism in Islam does not seek to limit the array of interpretative strategies that are present in the belief system of Muslims which are as varied or even contradictory as in any other ideological praxis. It only attempts to describe broad tendencies in interpretation and praxis and their relationship to power in society. In other words, it is a way of fixing the limits of the spectrum of interpretations contending as the ‘true’, ‘genuine’ and ‘relevant’ interpretations of the master-text. This methodological explanation is necessary as most ideologues do not acknowledge that they represent only one set of interpretation. They claim to represent the ‘essential’ and ‘original’ meaning of the text which, they believe, is ‘fixed’ for all times to come and can be discovered. Hanafi jurisprudence, a legalistic theology of beliefs and principles, conceived the state as ‘Islamic’ and detailed its prescriptions for the treatment of non-Muslims who were hostile, rebellious or to be protected. Undoubtedly Hanafism remained the ‘legal rite’ of the majority of the Muslim elite and masses not only in the heyday of Mughal rule but even during the period of Mughal decline and the rise of British power. Not even Akbar’s reign could break the continuance and growth of Hanafism as ‘the legal rite of Muslim India’.1 Consequently, the ideological thrust for running the state as a theocracy was, potentially, always available and the Sultans, first, and Aurangzeb, later, sought to orientate the state towards the legalistic principles. However, even under Aurangzeb, the contingencies of state power could never allow it to become a theocracy. Nonetheless, from the Hanafi ideological position, Akbar was seen to be practising eclecticism and heresy. It is important to remember that statements about the declining fortunes of Islam under Emperor Akbar are to be found in numerous important works of Mughal India. The Tarikh-i Khan-i Jahan written in Jahangir’s reign spoke of ‘the Prophet’s Shariat, which like the red flower had withered by the autumn wind’ of Akbar’s rule. Sheikh Ahmed Sirhindi wrote of the ‘greatest misfortune’ that had befallen Islam under Akbar, when ‘the Muslims had been allowed to practise their religion and the Infidels theirs’. Sirhindi added, in a rhetorical flourish: ‘[T]he 1 Aziz Ahmed, An Intellectual History of Islam in India, Edinburgh, 1969. Challenges to the Hanafite school were peripheral and doctrinaire without any mass appeal, pp. 1–7.

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Infidels openly practised their rites, while the Muslims were prevented from so doing; and if they did so, they were killed.’2 Akbar’s success in shifting the emphasis from the notion of a dominant state power more or less reflecting sharp theological principles towards hegemonic power inspired by ideological flexibility and accommodation of religio-cultural plurality was the fullest expression of the revisionist trend in Indian Islam. The culmination of Islamic revisionism in the Mughal polity found its apogee in Dara Shukoh. Here, it bears emphasis, that the Islamic orthodoxy’s castigation of Akbar as leader of a heretical messianic sect, due to his ethical construct of Din-i-lllahi, was based purely upon his predelictions towards Sufism. Whether it was Akbar’s association with Hindu yogis, or his thrust towards mystic exercises which freed men from the ritual of the Sharia, or even his allegedly solar monotheism, disapproval of animal slaughter and extolling of celibacy, the catholicity of Akbar’s personal ethical world found no correspondence in organisational or institutional elements outside of Islam. He remained squarely within the Islamic framework albeit strengthening and promoting revisionist elements ideologically. Thereby, he drew only partial legitimacy from the principles underlying the Hanafi Islamic state. The subscribers to Din-i-lllahi were certainly a group of Muslim revisionists with only one Hindu member. In any case this ideological ‘tendency’ slowly died a natural death in the last decade of Akbar’s reign and met the usual fate of internal dissent in a ruling group which has not gripped the imagination of sufficient numbers amongst its supporters and its social base.3 Similarly, although the charge sheet drawn up by Aurangzeb on the basis of which Dara Shukoh was executed accused him of apostasy, Dara at no point renounced Islam. For all his ‘syncretism’ his ideal, like that of Aurangzeb, remained the Holy Prophet of Islam and his wish remained to extend not to reject Islam. Indeed, he saw the Upanishads and Bhagwadgita in the Holy Koran. ‘The tragedy of his life is not the lack of commitment

2

M. Athar Ali, ‘Akbar and Islam (1581–1605)’, in Milton Israel and N.K. Wagle (eds), Islamic Society and Culture, Delhi, 1983, pp. 130–31. It is easy to find strong echoes of this type of sentiment in reverse in Hindu nationalism’s complaints today, that the minorities are free to impart religious indoctrination and education in secular India white the Hindus are denied this right. 3 Athar Ali, ‘Akbar and Islam’. Also see, Iqtidar Alam Khan, ‘The Nobility under Akbar and the Development of His Religious Policy, 1560–80’, JRAS, 1968, pp. 28–33.



The Power of the Past

to religious ideals but excess of it.’4 The theoretical basis for the ideological direction given by Akbar or, which could have been, potentially, given by Dara, to the Mughal state was the revisionism of mystic Sufis which aspired to go beyond formal ritualistic Islam towards establishing its hold over ever larger numbers in society, with moral fervour and passion.5 The Sufis, who were a moral influence on the Mughal state helping it to broadbase its influence over those it governed became, increasingly, the religious inspiration of the Muslim masses in India. The ideological struggle between the Ulama and the Sufis and, the rulers who reflected this tussle in the orientation of state ideologies, produced a recurrent sense of the ‘failure’ of Islam in India. Felt by Balban at the end of the thirteenth century and by Amir Khusro at the start of the fourteenth, it prevailed as an apprehension of ‘spiritual vacuum’ in the sixteenth century. Some sincere Ulama migrated to Hiyaz because they saw the ‘threatening chaos of spiritual bankruptcy in Muslim India’ and the need to make ‘a spiritual escape from the court of Akbar’.6 The majority of the Ulama, however, who were professionalised and ‘acting as tools of state’ acted as a powerful group to destroy the revisionist trends, by polemic and persecution, but failed. On the other hand, sincerely disturbed Islamic scholars and theologians of India began the movement of absorbing Sufism integrally into theology, culminating in Shah Waliullah’s call for a re-examination and reassessment of Islamic theology. The major objective of this movement in ideas was to recall the revisionist mystics from crossing over the cultural frontier into elements that blurred their separateness from Hindu practices and turned ‘Islamic mysticism’ into ‘syncretism’. The latter, as we know, had a close and responsive relationship with the popular Bhakti cults in India.7 4

Akbar S. Ahmed, Pakistan Society, Islam, Ethnicity and Leadership in South Asia, New Delhi, 1988. 5 The threat of the liquidation of Islam in the dark practices of India was ever present. In his memoirs, titled Baharistan, Alauddin Isfahani (alias Mirza Nathan) tells the story of how not only his wives, but many of his men as well, performed Jawhar in fear of losing their honour when faced by military defeat. As Qeyamuddin Ahmad, the author of the article on Isfahani, remarks this was an awful and ‘unIslamic’ rite. Isfahani was a provincial military officer of the seventeenth century who has left a detailed account of Jahangir’s reign and the early days of Shah Jehan. See Mohibbul Hassan (ed.), Historians of Medieval India, Delhi, 1968, pp. 69–81; Muzaffar Alam, ‘Competition and Co-existence: Indo–lslamic Interaction in Medieval North India’, in India and Indonesia: General Perspectives, Special Issue, Leiden, 1989, pp. 37–59. 6 Aziz Ahmed, An Intellectual History of Islam, pp. 1–7. 7 Ibid., pp. 6–7.

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The process of conquest, projected as the victory of Islam in preMughal India, which prevented the ‘garrison state’ from acquiring stability and a social base, itself produced the struggle between revisionism and dogmatism in Islam. As the Pakistani scholar Ishtiaq Husain Quereshi acknowledges, Akbar’s main opponents were the Rajput chief Rana Sangha and the ‘great Hemu’ who hoped to found a Hindu empire after the dissolution of the sultanates: ‘Akbar’s policy towards Hindus was but a recognition of the power which the Hindus had never lost … (and) but for Akbar, there would have been no Muslim empire.’8 In a contemporary view of medieval India quoted by Rizvi, the Chisti saint Jafar Maki held that conversions were primarily due to the ‘fear of death or of enslavement of families, promises of rewards and pensions, prospects of booty and, lastly, the bigotry of Hindus’. Muslim preaching by Madrasa teachers, official preachers, and qazis was widely prevalent, adds Rizvi, and proselytising activities as are known were close to conversion by force.9 All this certainly made for an instable polity, By withdrawing state support for proselytising activities and stopping forced conversions, Akbar launched upon a hegemonic cultural project and courted the hostility of preachers and the orthodox whose position of dominance was undermined. Consequently, according to Quereshi, ‘confusion’ existed in many Muslim minds and ‘heterodox and nonMuslim elements of the population gained an ascendancy ….’10 That Akbar’s revisionism grew out of the tension between practice and theory is dear from the fact that in his early years he was under the influence of Shaikh Abdun Nabi and allowed him and other Ulama to persecute Shias and others and put some of them to death. He was also party to the forcible conversions to Islam of a large number of Hindus. Abdun Nabi was later banished for life to Mecca and finally, was murdered by a mob when he returned to India in the hope that Akbar would be overthrown by rebellion.11 The practice of state power led to Akbar’s rejection of that version of Islam which he believed had been distorted by the Ulama in the name of old traditions. Logically, those who were made members of Din-i-lllahi 8 Ishtiaq Husain Quereshi quoted in S.M. Burke, Akbar: The Greatest Mogul, Delhi, 1989, p. 221. 9 S.S.A. Rizvi ‘Islam in Medieval India’, in A.L. Basham (ed.), A Cultural History of India, Oxford, 1984, p. 288. 10 Quereshi, in S.M. Burke, Akbar, p. 221. 11 Burke, Akbar, pp. 102–03.



The Power of the Past

renounced not Islam but the religion of ‘traditional and imitative Islam (majazi [o] taqlidi)’. Naturally, Akbar’s Rajput relations Bhagwan Das and Man Singh, and Birbal and Todar Mal remained staunch Hindus and did not join the Din-i-lllahi group. In fact Bhagwan Das is said to have expressed opposition to the concept itself.12 It would appear that it was not the integration of various Hindu castes into the state structure and the posts and rewards offered to them by Akbar but the ideological orientation of revisionist Islam that he gave to state power that hegemonised the society of his time. Quereshi points out that out of 415 Mansabdars listed by Abul Fazl there are only 51 Hindus, though, in population they were many times larger; no Hindu ever rose to become prime minister; during the long reign of Akbar only one Hindu was appointed to each of the offices of finance minister and Bakshi. Moreover, those orthodox Sunnis who were loyal never lost influence or the highest offices of the state. Consequently, after Akbar, the ‘rights and institutions of Islam’ were easily restored.13 Rizvi has also pointed out how, on Akbar’s death, a bitter struggle between various groups of Islam was unleashed and saw various ups and downs till, by the beginning of the eighteenth century the dogmatists were victorious strengthened ultimately by Aurangzeb’s ideological orientation.14 The ideological struggle implicit in the Akbar–Aurangzeb paradigms of governance, in the concrete conditions of India were a source of constant tension in the theory and practice of Mughal power. The effective practice of state power in the given conditions required a general devaluation of self-glorifying myths and legends of the coexisting cultures. S.A.A. Rizvi’s article on ‘Tarikh-i-Alfi’ recounts how Akbar disapproved of Badauni’s inclusion of legendary material he had compiled for a history of all the kings of Islam ordered by Akbar to commemorate the completion of one thousand years after the Prophet’s death. Akbar challenged Badauni’s account and had to be convinced by Badauni, seeking the support of Abul Fazl among others. Akbar, in fact, called for the source books Badauni had used to compile the legends and had them verified. Naturally, such behaviour was attributed to the infidel and atheistic propensities of Akbar and Abul Fazl by their contemporary critics.15 12

Ibid., pp. 124–27. Quereshi, in S.M. Burke, Akbar, p. 223. 14 Rizvi in A.L. Basham, A Cultural History of India, pp. 290–93. 15 Mohibbul Hassan (ed.), Historians of Medieval India, Delhi, 1968, p. 115. 13

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Akbar was, certainly, as Rizvi says, a man of disturbed conscience as anyone torn between theory and practice was bound to be. The exigencies of rule showed him the wisdom of suppressing rigid dogmas. Yet, as Akbar sadly admitted, his ‘mind was not at ease in this diversity of sects and creeds ….’16 The despair of the revisionists over fanatic trends was not confined to their struggle against orthodox theologians. Abul Fazl commented on the society of his time: people lacked wisdom and good nature to abstain themselves from the level of vulgarity and barbarism. They interfered with the religion of others, killed them and dishonoured them. They failed to realise that religious persecution was irrational and futile. Even if the opponents were on the wrong path, it was because of ignorance. They should be shown consideration and sympathy not hatred and bloodshed.17 Abul Fazl here, epitomised the revisionist’s call for blending the reality of political power with the hegemonic project of cultural flexibility and persuasive influence over society. An important indicator of the struggle against dogma was Abul Fazl’s terminology changing earlier usages: the terms mujahidan-i-Islam and ghaziyan-i-Islam, that is, the victorious soldiers of Islam, was changed to mujahidan-i-iqbal and ghaziyan-i-daulat (soldiers of the state).18 Shaikh Ahmed Sirhindi was to attempt a theoretical resolution to precisely this struggle between revisionism and dogmatism. Calling for a ‘creative application’ of Islamic principles and denouncing the ‘deviation’ of the revisionists, Sirhindi charged the revisionists of bidat under the guise of waging ijtihad, which was the creative application of texts to new problems and situations.19 The broad contours of the Akbar–Aurangzeb paradigms in our view, were comprehended by non-Islamic people in India as alternative ways of relating to Mughal power and hegemony. The desire and impulse to live with a coherent world view and normative values constantly urged adaptation and incorporation between cultures. The non-Islamic people in parts of northern India enrolled 16

Ibid., p. 114. Hardy, ‘Abul Fazl’s Portrait of the Perfect Padshah’, in C. Troll (ed.), Islam in India. Vol. 2, Delhi, 1985. 18 Mohibbul Hassan (ed.), Historians of Medieval India, pp. 130–38. 19 K.A. Nizami, Islamic Culture, Hyderabad, January 1965. 17



The Power of the Past

Prophet Muhammad amongst their ‘native heroes’ and the story of Muhammad being of Brahmanical descent was ‘traditionally current’ well into the period of colonial rule. The reputed Brahmanical origin of Akbar was included as a part of this tradition and appeared ‘reasonable’ even to a biased colonialist view as it could ‘be attributed to gratitude’.20 Muslims were also included in the Khandoba cult, a complex and widespread cult of Maharashtra with equivalents in Karnataka and Andhra. Khandoba, the God on earth masquerading as a pragmatic king, welcomed the Muslims as bhaktas or loyal followers. However, Aurangzeb was treated rather differently by this cult: according to legend, his army was driven away by 900,000 hornets sent by Khandoba.21 The characterisation of the ‘Akbar–Aurangzeb paradigms’ is a heuristic device. There can be summoned all kinds of contradictory facts in both Akbar’s and Aurangzeb’s attempts to consolidate their power and that of the Mughal state. For instance, Eaton refers to Maulana Muhammad Tahir, a Sunni Bohra who was most vociferous in attacking Shias in Gujarat and who was supported by Akbar in his ‘rectification campaign’ to cleanse ‘the blackness of Shiism’ from the Bohras’ hearts.22 Of course, political explanations could be that immediately on the conquest of Gujarat Akbar was confronted by chaos and determined local resistance to newly-installed Mughal authority. The Maulana could be seen only as instrumental in bringing a greater measure of loyalty to the Mughal throne through his missionary activity. Political and military exigencies and the alliances and enmities they dictated could not be the signifiers of either cultural domination or of hegemony. The closeness in the culturally hegemonic attitudes of Akbar and the Deccan Sultan Ibrahim II did not in the least affect their mutual rivalry and Akbar continuously invaded the Deccan. As we have argued, such alliances and confrontations apart, even the administrative-political association of non-Muslims with the state structure, was not the defining signification of cultural life.

20 Henry M. Elliot, Bibliographical Index to the Historians of Muhammedan India, Delhi, 1976, p. 218. 21 Gunther D. Sontheimer and Herman Kulke (eds), Hinduism Reconsidered, Delhi, 1989. See Sontheimer’s ‘Five Components of Hinduism’, p. 208. 22 Richard Maxwell Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur, 1300–1700, Princeton, 1978, pp. 114–15.

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For the point about political–military exigencies the example of the establishment of the Bijapur Adilshahi Sultanate is excellent. Sultan Ali I who established the kingdom first allied with the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar against the Muslim rulers of Ahmednagar. Then he forged a tripartite alliance with Ahmednagar and Golconda and together the three principal Deccan Sultanates overthrew the Vijayanagar empire.23 Cultural hegemony, however, is a different matter. The first task of Sultan Ali I, after establishing full control, was to build the Jami Mosque, ‘one of the most imposing and magnificent structures in the Deccan’, which was to become the physical embodiment ‘of Islamic orthodoxy in the capital city’.24 When Rizvi writes that Shah Jehan’s ‘punitive measures were marked by a revival of pre-Akbar vindictiveness’25 he personalises the logic of the Mughal state which swings like a pendulum on the spectrum of soft to hard hegemony or revisionism and dogmatism. Shah Jehan certainly demolished temples in rebel areas but he was not a ‘bigot’ adds Rizvi. But so was Aurangzeb not a ‘bigot’ in this sense of the term. When he was coronated for the second time, in Banaras and some other places, the Brahmans were harassed and Hindu temples were demolished by ‘orthodox mobs’ and not by the Emperor’s order. In fact he put a stop to the desecration which was spontaneously unleashed in the general sentiment that acclaimed the arrival of a man with a dogmatic orientation.26 The hard hegemony in state policy that the consolidation of his power promised was not ‘bigotry’ or wanton persecution but a controlled and clearly enunciated cultural hegemony; as Aurangzeb made clear, while admonishing against the destruction of existing temples, ‘in accordance with Islamic Sharia rules no new temples should be erected’.27 In the interests of state power Aurangzeb also sought to split and wean sections of non-Islamic people, for example, among the Sikhs, as we discuss later. His firman assuring justice and well-being to the Jain–Bania merchants of Surat against the cultural onslaught of a proselytising qazi is also known.28 Moreover, the ideological inspiration of Islam that was reflected in the Mughal state’s cultural hegemony over non-Muslims 23

Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 86. 25 Rizvi, The Wonder That Was India, Vol. II, p. 122. 26 Ibid., p. 133. 27 Ibid. 28 Haynes, ‘From Avoidance to Confrontation?’ p. 280. 24



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cannot be seen in localised terms of policy and expediency in the Indian context alone. Aurangzeb sympathised with the Ottomans over their European defeats at the level of this ideology though he could offer no concrete help.29 Here, we would like to draw attention to three signposts which lie along the road of struggle for cultural hegemony. They have been selected from Aurangzeb’s reign as illustrations of cultural struggle. They can easily be misread if one uses a narrow, modernist term such as ‘communal’ as Bayly does, thus reading them as incidents of the prehistory of ‘communalism’.30 Rizvi, on the other hand, rightly rejects bunching them into a history of long-standing communalism. However, Rizvi has no model of explanation which ties these incidents together or reveals any kind of pattern.31 Incident A: Gokula, a Zamindar, became a leader of jat peasants who revolted against the atrocities committed by Abdun Nabi the faujdar of Mathura. Aurangzeb captured Gokula and 7,000 peasants. Gokula’s limbs were hacked off and his son and daughter were converted to Islam. Incident B: The Satnamis’ (a Hindu devotional sect which waged a rebellion against the imperial army) early victories were followed not only by loot and plunder and the establishment of an independent government but by their demolishing mosques. Incident C: As against Jahangir condoning the beheading of the fifth Sikh Guru, Aurangzeb tried to split the Sikhs by encouraging and patronising Ram Rai the elder son of the seventh Guru, who was willing to accept Mughal hegemony unlike the parallel stream of Sikh militancy and challenge to the throne led by Guru Tegh Bahadur. Ram Rai was given land in the Sivaliks (later Dehradun). Ram Rai’s younger brother Hari Krishna was summoned by Aurangzeb to Delhi to settle the question of succession after the death of the seventh Guru. Thus, Aurangzeb offered support to a section of Sikh leadership which accepted his authority to intervene in their affairs and were ready to receive his patronage.32

29

Rizvi, p. 134. Bayly, ‘The Pre-history of “Communalism”’. 31 Rizvi, The Wonder That Was India, Vol. II. All three incidents are cited in Rizvi, pp. 134–38. 32 Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab. 30

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Clearly, the ‘Aurangzeb paradigm’ is hardly one which can be discussed in terms of tolerance or bigotry, benevolence or cruelty! When Guru Tegh Bahadur was executed by order of the Qazi of Delhi and the provoked Sikhs threw brickbats at Aurangzeb in Lahore there was no reprisal against the community. All political hegemonies must employ an ideological–cultural idiom in which to express, both, their prestige and invincible power and, their benevolence and patronage equally. It is this idiom which is reflected in the cultural hegemony of the victorious contender. As religious beliefs and collective practices are a source of cultural empowerment of all, rulers and masses, these are bound to be important in the struggle, for and against, hegemony. The ‘Aurangzeb paradigm’ in fact, most clearly shows the line that separates religious persecution from cultural hegemony. In 1679, Aurangzeb intimidated the Rajputs, reimposed jizya, demolished temples in Jodhpur but patronised the submissive Indra Singh Rathor and made him Raja of Jodhpur.33 Therefore, it is an oversimplification to speak of Aurangzeb’s lack of tolerance as against Akbar’s benevolence. The very basis of Akbar’s cultural expansiveness was a conception of hegemony in which the ruler and ruled consented to establish an equilibrium of cultural norms which acknowledged the cultural stamp of Islam on the Mughal state’s political hegemony without threatening the cultural practices of non-Islamic peoples. Of course, this was an open-ended process in which the cultural stamp could be reduced to a nominal or notional element, substantively abandoning its Islamic inspiration. Here, precisely, lay the threat to which Aurangzeb provided a countervailing orientation. Aurangzeb’s paradigm of cultural hegemony destroyed the equilibrium and open-endedness and sought to ensure the ideological–cultural nucleus of Islamic culture, embodied in the strong authority of the Ulama which sanctioned Mughal rule and gave it legitimacy. It was this Islamic nucleus and Ulama which felt beseiged and endangered by the cultural multiplicity of Mughal Indian society. This sense of being threatened started under Jahangir himself, with the flowering of Sikh counter ideology and culture, and increased relentlessly under Shah Jehan. Aurangzeb’s efforts to stop the ‘rot’ and to ensure that the state was not completely cut off from its ideological and cultural moorings and underpinning, had to strengthen

33

Rizvi, The Wonder That Was India, Vol. II, p. 137.



The Power of the Past

its ideological nucleus, the Ulama. This was his solution to the struggle for cultural hegemony getting tilted towards the non-Islamic people and consequently becoming a loss to Islam. When speaking of ‘culture’ we cannot conflate the ideological constructs of the ruler and the nucleus which inspires him with the ideological organisation of cultural practices in town and country. For example, Akbar’s constructs and the nucleus of his inspiration, the Sufistic ‘coterie’, as against the Ulama and the orthodox Sunni establishment, appear in ‘society’ as a struggle between the Emperor’s diktat and the already entrenched orthodoxy’s thrust towards Islamic cultural hegemony. The established relationships between the staunch Muslim and non-Muslim were more disturbed and in greater turmoil as a result of Akbar’s reorientation of the Mughal state, rather than resolved and pacified. As Abul Fazl recorded, Akbar’s interference in religious matters raised a storm against him: Every faction went about in the streets of ignorance and the backlanes of wickedness foolishly and spreading calumnies. On everyside there arose the dust of commotion and the black smoke of darkness. Assemblage of wickedness congregated together …. The pleasant land of India became full of the dust of opposition.34

The tension in cultural relationships would have settled down only slowly and not until the Ulama was fully marginalised by Akbar, and the Sufi and non-Muslim religio-cultural orders (for example, the Nanakpanthis) had had time to acquire footholds and develop their own platforms. Even then, one could not rule out the tensions and disputes in the social–cultural settings with the local Sunni ideologues—the teachers, qazis and preachers, fighting a low profile but determined battle with not only the emerging non-Islamic religio-cultural groups but equally with the ‘revisionist’ Islamic orders or the Sufis, pushing towards their curtailment and attacking their ‘deviations’. The same scenario would be exactly true of Aurangzeb’s dispensation in reverse order—with the Sufis and Akbarites fighting a battle of resistance against the upswing and restitution of the orthodoxy’s power and influence, not only at the court but in the towns and country. In both cases the nucleus around the Emperor would be trying to recover lost ground in society. 34 Iqtidar Hussain Siddiqui, Islam and Muslims in South Asia: Historical Perspec­tive, Delhi, 1987, p. 109.

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The overall scenario, though complicated, nonetheless reveals a continuous struggle for cultural hegemony in which the cultural resistance or adaptation of the people is caused or met halfway by internal struggle within the ruling ideology. For the professedly secular historians of medieval India, the scriptural texts made no sense to the power centred rulers who are seen as motivated solely by the desire for state power. The materialist explanation assumes and asserts that cultural–ideological impulses in the societal organisation of power were absent or immaterial. It splits the concept of power into political, military and economic power without any cultural implications. Counterposed to this is the historiography which views the rulers as the sword arms of Islam.35 As a rule both kinds of history writing treat the concepts of Dindari and Duniya Dari as bipolar categories counterposed to each other. To the secular historian, Abul Fazl thus appears as ‘secular’ and Badauni as ‘theocratic’. We believe that Abul Fazl’s Akbar shows the alternate mode of organising state power (from that of Badauni’s) and its social basis as a hegemonic project which is the opposite of the non-hegemonic domination advocated by Badauni. In neither case can one use the labels of ‘secular’ or ‘theocratic’. In fact, the method of seeking religious inspiration or the lack of it behind state power and the rulers’ policies is as faulty as eliminating everything except political expediency. On the other hand, the ruled, particularly, the elite, appear as only interested in wealth and status, in positions and posts. The Akbar–Aurangzeb paradigms were not mere abstractions but a profound experience for sizeable sections of the country’s population. The distilled essence of those two modes of governance became the common sense or folk wisdom of everyday life. In the mind of non-Muslims ‘acting like Aurangzeb’ became the symbol of inflexible domination.36 While, the wise monarch Akbar was counterposed and celebrated in popular 35 For the scholars who put forward the materialist explanation, see Iqtidar Alam Khan, M. Athar Ali, Irfan Habib, etc. (details in bibliography). For those who identify ‘Muslim rule’ with the rule of Islam, the historians of Pakistan, pre­eminently, Ishtiaq Husain Quereshi (see bibliography). 36 For cultural and mythic reversals, and divergent versions of local legends and narratives of cultural encounters among Hindus and Muslims that historically share events and characters, Aurangzeb and Akbar in particular, see Mary Searle-Chatterjee, ‘The Muslim Hero as Defender of Hindus: Mythic Reversals and Ethnicity Among



The Power of the Past

discourse. It is not a surprise, therefore, that Aurangzeb is portrayed as the demonaic figure and Akbar is largely invisible in the school texts of India and Pakistan, respectively. Peter Hardy has dismissed the portrait of Akbar ‘the ruler’ as an unacceptable basis for a political philosophy for Mughal rule in India because it was neither a ‘philosophy’ nor ‘political’.37 This is an oversimplistic conclusion because the ‘praxis’ of Akbar’s regime was a good basis for Mughal rule in as much as it addressed the problems of governing a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire. Of course, Hardy may be perfectly true in his feeling that the Akbar paradigm (or scenario for an ‘imperial theatre’ as he puts it) ‘was too much’ for Akbar’s heirs. As their problems of empire grew more challenging, the faster and easier they turned towards the familiar signposts of the Sunni elite and the Islamic tone. Yet, the Akbar paradigm was viable theoretically. Its practical efficacy depended upon many complexities and counter-finalities.

Banaras Muslims’, in Prima Werbner (ed.), ‘Person, Myth and Society in South Asian Islam’, Social Analysis, Journal of Cultural and Social Practice, Special Issue, No. 28, July 1990, p. 70. Also see, Asim Roy, The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal, for reversals of the Hindu counterparts of the Muslim hero pirs by drawing them into a comparative narrative, specially ch. 3. 37 Hardy, ‘Abul Fazl’s Portrait of the Perfect Padshah’, p. 131. Hardy uses the term ‘philosophy’ in a narrow textual sense, comparing Akbar’s ideas to the philosophical qualities of the Ishraqi tradition and those of thinkers such as Ibn Arabi and al-Nasafi or writers such as Nasiruddin Tusi and Jalaludin Dawani and finds Abul Fazl’s Akbar inadequate to their ‘philosophy’.

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Chapter 4

Power and Hegemony The Site of Cultural Struggle

CULTURAL HEGEMONY AND THE MEDIEVAL MUSLIM STATE AND SOCIETY

The text of cultural hegemony is marked by signs and arrows which can be read only at a distance from the existing parallel narratives of either ‘Muslim domination and persecution of Hindus’ or of ‘Hindu–Muslim partnership and participation’, jointly creating a composite culture. Both these narratives contain a core of empirical facts that only superficially run counter to each other. The paradigm of cultural hegemony enables a coherent exploration of the interface between relations of domination and subordination and power sharing. In the world of cultural symbolism which underwrote and superinscribed the power struggles in medieval society it was not of critical importance if the narrative was not accurate or verifiable in intention and execution. The significance of a narrative lay in its being presented contemporaneously and projected, whether by court historians, folk and popular traditions or bardic tales as a narrative of cultural hegemony and cultural resistance.1 1 For instance, the narratives of the Mirat-i-Sikandri, Mirat-i-Ahmadi, the Rasmala and other bardic legends. The cultural signification of the claim that the first person to be converted to Islam was Sidharan, of the Khatri caste, whose lineage went back to

Power and Hegemony

The narratives of a general persecution of non-Islamic people by the Muslim rulers cannot reconcile with the concessions and compromises which were also made by the latter. They have no explanatory value for understanding the logic of state power. The cultural symbols of Islamic domination—demolition of temples, the jizya or other taxes on nonMuslims, or bans on public ceremonials of other religio-cultural groups served the political function of undermining existing social structures. However, the relative cultural autonomy of various non-Muslim groups within the overarching framework of Muslim cultural hegemony is an apparent contradiction only if one is looking for categories of pure domination and pure victimisation. The concept of hegemony, on the other hand, helps to understand the permanent coexistence of consent and domination, though, one or the other predominates in place and time. The attempts to acquire the consent of subordinate groups to the existing social order leads to the creation of legitimating symbols à la Akbar. However, the cultural hegemony of Islam is not abandoned thereby for the threat of officially sanctioned force always remains implicit.2 That Islamic cultural hegemony was not ruled out by the adjustment to plurality effected by the Akbar paradigm is illustrated by the fact that Man Singh built an ‘exceptionally large mosque’ at Raj Mahal in Bengal, in 1592. That this mosque was a symbol of Islamic cultural hegemony in the local tradition, is revealed by its picture of Akbar as an orthodox Muslim sovereign. Local tradition, as reported, held that the place ‘was originally intended for a temple, but was afterwards turned into the Jama Masjid for fear of the Emperor.’3 Not to understand the force implicit in a policy of concessions is to misread what is considered ‘legitimate’ by the ruling group, and the transgression of which cannot be countenanced and must invite retribution.4 Ramchandra, the Hindu God, and whose son led an army to plunder the temple of Somnath, is obvious. See Mirat-i-Ahmadi, p. 34. 2 When Rajputs such as Man Singh fought for the victory of Akbar’s state Abul Fazl calls them ‘Mujahidin’ the ‘Warriors for Islam’ who wielded ‘the sword of Islam’ against all opponents. See Hardy, ‘The Perfect Padshah’, p. 130. 3 M. Athar Ali, ‘Akbar and Islam (1581–1605)’, in Milton Israel and Wagle (eds), Islamic Society and Culture, Delhi, 1983, pp. 131–32. 4 Akbar sought to dilute the dogma of Islam as the legitimator of his rule and widen the sources of his legitimacy. Yet, he could not condone or forgive Abdun Nabi’s Brahman victim publicly, nor punish or chastise his Ulama publicly.

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Only one-dimensional hegemony translates simply as the creation of legitimacy. Actually hegemony always holds the potential threat of domination and the power to take away that which is granted. If rulers acquiring legitimacy and claiming inspiration from an alternative world view and missionary Islamic culture did not make symbolic displays of their power over the cultural symbols of the subordinated ‘other’ (cows, temples, idols, etc.) then it would imply that they split their ideologico-cultural inspiration from the logic of political power. A stable political system required securing the social–economic bases of the state’s power and political arrangements could not be allowed to upset and disrupt the lives of the general populace. Yet, the needs of cultural hegemony, which bestowed legitimation on the state, demanded that the prestige and power of the ruler’s ideology be clearly conveyed in its potential if not its actual force. People had to recognise that they enjoyed varying degrees of autonomy and self-affirmation at the behest of the ruler. Those who give can take away. Therefore, the centrality of a structure of cognisable power relationships also lies at the heart of cultural hegemony. Simultaneously, hegemony is strengthened and structured in a more complex and integrated process with cultural accommodation by the State and by allowing cultural affirmation and self-esteem to a multiplicity of cultural groups. However, this conception of hegemony did not find full-fledged articulation in the Mughal state except in the strategic wisdom of ‘Din-i-Illahi’ Akbar and ‘Jagat Guru’ Ibrahim, the Adilshahi Sultan of Bijapur.5 The organic evolution and survival of an ideological and cultural basis for such an articulation was, perhaps, absent in the medieval state systems. This is why the culturally warm and expansive approaches of Akbar and Ibrahim II have conventionally been named with the adjectives 5

Ibrahim II’s conformity to Islamic orthodox practice was maintained at the personal level however, Richard Maxwell Eaton, The Sufis of Bijapur, 1300–1700, Princeton, 1978. p. 129. The Kashmiri ruler, Zain-ul-Abidin is the other example of hegemonic rule, which, however, did not imply an absence of inner tensions which were revealed by Brahman chroniclers and Sanskrit sources. ‘Persian was introduced as the official language for the first time during the reign of Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin … (and) the grave concern for the preservation of the Brahman identity becomes a dominant note in the Sanskrit historiography ….’ See Mohammad Ishaq Khan, ‘The Impact of Islam on Kashmir in the Sultanate Period (1320–1586)’, IESHR, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, April–June 1986, pp. 191–92, 194.

Power and Hegemony

of ‘tolerance’ and ‘permissiveness’ which gave subject populations more than was their due as subordinate entities. Moreover, their efforts at developing principles of hegemonic rule in place of the dominant/dominated and superordinate/subordinate social and cultural cleavages provoked increasingly vehement reactions by the ideologues of Islamic orthodoxy, that is, the proponents of the discourse of domination. The ideologues of an alternative discourse of hegemony amongst the Sufi orders were increasingly pressurised (from the Chishtiya order in Delhi to the Sufis in Bengal, Gujarat and the Deccan) into curtailing their expansiveness by the Ulama. The Indian Sufis, mainly, had to accommodate themselves with Islamic orthodoxy because of the challenge and risk of disintegration into Hindu mysticism.6 Despite sharing a catholicity of religious approach in many ways with the Bhakti saints what was at stake for the Sufis was their cultural differentiation as ‘Islamic mystics’ vis-à-vis the ‘Hindu mystics’. In the ultimate analysis, the Indo-Muslim states ‘were unable to find lasting compromises between the dictates of Islamic Law and the realities of governing a predominantly Hindu (or non-Islamic) society’.7 It would be an error to institutionalise the concept of cultural hegemony and to identify it with a ‘State’ or ‘ruling group’ understood as a monolithic entity, counterposed to an equally homogenous ‘society’. Some segments of society having experienced the cultural dominance and oppression of caste Brahmans need not have felt that the ‘Yavanas/ Mlecchas’ had suddenly enslaved them and ended their former free existence. There existed Brahman antagonists of the Vaishnavas who sought to persecute the latter even after the ascendancy of Muslim rulers. There existed also the text of the Sunya-purana which rejoiced in the Muslim conquest as ‘just desserts’ for the proud Brahmans. However, this did not imply that they identified with the ‘Yavanas’.8 Political conquest and control in India never was and was not now with the entry of the Muslims, fought for, or against, by the initiative of the people. They would, of course, follow their caste leaders or elite co-religionists lead whether in war or accommodation. Yet, most people 6

Aziz Ahmed, Studies in Islamic Culture, p. 131. Eaton, The Sufis of Bijapur, p. 106. 8 Edward C. Dimock, Hinduism and Islam in Medieval Bengal, p. 6. 7

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would lie low and wait for the tussle for political power and control to be over. Thus, the points of friction as well as coexistence must be explored not in the political–military power system nor the sphere of religious tenets, principles and beliefs. They have to be located in the cultural life of varied segments of society. This was coloured, above all, by the fact of who controlled the state, what its ideological legitimation was, and the resultant cultural limits that this placed on the project of hegemonising a multi-cultural and mainly non-Muslim society. These facts were crucial to the cultural ambience of society. Cultural ambience here signifies a ‘discourse of power’, a discourse that is particular and specific (for example, Muslim, Hindu, Western) because of its vocabulary, values, ethical system and social etiquette. Of course, the overall cultural hegemony of the medieval Muslim state and cultural ambience of society were mediated by the existence of ‘Hindu towns’ and ‘Hindu villages’ where the local ambience often hedged their contact with the broader, centralised hegemonic culture. For instance, an outstanding Alim of Sindh Makudum, Ibrahim Thattawi, wrote treatises on Jodhpur and Sind arguing that they had been turned into dar-al-harb over a period of 200 years (he wrote in 1794). Islamic proselytisation, the performance of public circumcision, the slaughter of animals publicly according to Islamic rules and the public call to prayers were impossible. The Hindus had insulted the Muslims by appointing an illiterate Muslim as the qadi and called him Qadi Ganga Ram. Moreover, heresy was so widespread in these areas that not only Hindus but Muslims also worshipped idols in shops and bazaars. No Muslim qadi could oppose the judgements delivered by Hindu headmen. Mosques had been desecrated and some had been reduced to rubble. In other words, the Hindu ambience had taken over in these areas even when Mughal hegemony prevailed.9 In contrast, Thattawi was impressed by the Maratha government of Mahadji Scindia in Delhi and Sikh rule in Multan and Lahore where in his view ‘reasonable conditions’ existed for Muslims. It bears emphasis here that both the Sikhs and Marathas sought to foster their own cultural hegemony on the lines of the Akbar paradigm which accommodated other cultural groups.

9 S.A.A. Rizvi, Shah Abd Al-Aziz: Puritanism, Sectarian Polemics and Jihad, Australia, 1982, pp. 70–71.

Power and Hegemony

In areas where Muslim cultural hegemony prevailed, the imposition of the jizya and pilgrimage taxes,10 the curtailment, if not prohibition, of non-Islamic public ceremonials, and the public slaughter of animals and call to prayers by Muslims were all symbols of this hegemony. When and where they were imposed they became the symbols of Muslim cultural power. When they were not imposed they were cultural concessions granted by the hegemonic power. Shah Abd al-Aziz who saw British power extending towards both northern and southern India nevertheless, considered the Sikh invasions of ‘Muslim territories’ a greater catastrophe. His famous disciple Barelwi led a jihad not against the British but against the Sikhs ‘whose plundering of Muslim property and rape of Muslim women’11 produced a vicious exacerbation of the cultural faultline. During the disintegration of Mughal power and after most of the states that got consolidated under the control of particular rulers, for example, the Nizam of Hyderabad, are termed independent states in a functionalist sense. Yet, the symbolic relationship of those states with Mughal hegemony continued. The source of symbolic legitimacy for Hyderabad continued to be Mughal authority. The Emperor’s name was read in the khutba (discourse in the mosque) and coins were struck in his name until after 1857. The independence of such successor states, apart from their consolidation under individual rulers, lay in their greater devolution of administrative power to local, indigenous notables, such as the Hindu families of Chitpawan Brahmans, Kayasths, Maratha or Punjabi Khatris and the upper caste zamindars. From among these appointments were often made to the positions of daftardars, revenue contractors, deshmukhs and deshpandiyas who were just above the village-level officers. Thus, administrative importance, specially in the field of revenue, would give Hindu participants in the state system material benefits and authority. Nevertheless, they were subordinate to the Nawabi hegemony which in turn continued to uphold Mughal superhegemony.12 10 For example, Bijapur, cf. Eaton. The Sufis of Bijapur. Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab, Cambridge, 1992. 11 Shah Abd al-Aziz’s letter quoted by Rizvi, Shah Abd Al-Aziz, p. 79. 12 For successor states, see Karen Leonard, ‘The Hyderabad Political System and its Participants’, Journal of Asian Studies. Vol. XXX, No. 3, p. 569. M.N. Pearson, ‘Political Participation in Mughal India’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review. Vol. IX, No. 2. June 1972.

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Thus, the political, economic and administrative system of these states absorbed new segments, or enhanced the role of some earlier groups, which were located on the margins of power in society. However, the cultural domain was pre-eminently either Muslim as in Hyderabad, or Hindu as in the case of successor states such as Banaras.13 The cooperation, collaboration and sharing of functional power was within the broader, wider ambience of a particular culture whether it was the Nizam’s state, or the Sikh or Maratha states. There is considerable evidence showing strong economic and commercial links between Hindu merchants and the governments of the Mughals as well as the Muslim rulers of Gujarat. However, the Muslim merchants often combined economic affluence with the direct exercise of political and military power as members of the Mughal administrative hierarchy. The cultural difference between the Muslim and Hindu merchants would be important. The Shahbunder of Surat, Haji Muhammad Zahid Beg built serais and a mosque, and this was part of his image as a good administrator.14 This cultural activity was not a result of his economic significance alone but of his common cultural bonds with the state. His predecessor and successor, Khwaja Jala-ud-din-Mahmud and Hajima Ahmad Ali, respectively, also played similar roles. On the other hand, the two eminent non-Muslim merchants, the Jain merchant Virji Vorah and the Nagarsheth of Ahmedabad Shantidas, while playing an important economic role, were culturally part of a subordinated segment of society. They loaned money to Murad Baksh, the fourth son of Shah Jehan, and Subahdar (governor) of Gujarat, in his bid for political power and the Mughal throne. Nevertheless, their own cultural self-protection, though negotiable, was not unassailable. A qazi could always interfere with their religious practices and launch a proselytising campaign despite their economic significance and their connections in high places. The Hindu merchants in Surat organised a protest against such a qazi in 1669 by closing down all business and shops and migrating to Broach till their pressure on the economy yielded concessions. This, however, did not change their culturally subordinate position which had to be continuously negotiated.15 13

Freitag (ed.), Culture and Power in Banaras. Pearson, Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat. 15 Douglas Haynes, ‘From Avoidance to Confrontation? A Contestatory History of Merchant—State Relations in Surat, 1600–1924’, in Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash 14

Power and Hegemony

Thus, though cross-cultural local participation was a fact of the medieval political system, the overarching cultural hegemony was not cross-cultural. There is substantial evidence of the interdependence between rulers and non-Muslim groups, be they merchants, bankers, rajas or landholders. Their role in the political system as a support base for various rulers and their consequent appeasement by aspirants to power (for example, Murad Baksh or Alivardi Khan) is well-documented.16 Likewise, Hindus participating in the revenue administration as diwans, quanungos, chaudhris and muqaddams were integrated into the administrative structure. However, the overall hegemony of the Sultanate earlier and the Mughals later was inspired by Islamic Muslim culture and its supremacy could not be challenged by anyone who sought absorption into the structure of their rule. This cultural hegemony had its rules, which were established through experience. It could be an accommodating, revisionist Islamic hegemony à la Akbar or a narrow, dogmatic Islamic hegemony apropos Aurangzeb. The cooperative acceptance of the first by non-Muslims and sullen resistance to the second were a constant feature of coexistence between populations of varying culture and religion. Notwithstanding the association of non-Muslims with the administration at subordinate levels Guru Nanak characterised medieval rule as ‘Muslim rule’. He was describing mainly the hegemonic cultural aspect of the rule and the succumbing of the Brahmanical–Hindu culture to it which inspired his quest for a new religious-moral system.17 While, participation by non-Muslims in the medieval administrative structure was more or less visible, what was not visible was the continuous negotiation of cultural power. Protest and resistance to the lack of public ceremonial rights and the privatisation of non-Islamic culture paralleled the constant striving for cultural esteem and its public affirmation. This was the sub-text of the power play that we have characterised as the struggle for cultural hegemony. The apparently contradictory, parallel phenomena of long-existing perceptions of ‘Hinduness’ or ‘Muslimness’, rather, Islamic and nonIslamic affiliations, of widespread Hindu–Muslim symbiosis from (eds), Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia, New Delhi, 1991, pp. 248–52. 16 Ibid., Pearson, Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat; Ashin Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat. 17 Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab, p. 28.

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medieval times, and of sectarian strife occurring even in what is called ‘syncretic culture’, cannot be reconciled with the notion of ‘religious conflict’. An explanatory framework of cultural hegemony describing an arrangement of cultural–ideological power relations, on the other hand, can subsume and interrelate all these elements. Symbiotic or ‘syncretic’ practices then, can be seen to evolve within the wider frame of a specific cultural hegemony, whether Muslim (Mughals), Hindu (Shivaji) or Sikh (Ranjit Singh). In such a framework of cultural hegemony, the ‘religious’ denotes an essential element of a legitimating ideology for the conquest and exercise of power. For example, when the Maratha chiefs challenged Mughal political authority in the eighteenth century, they also challenged its Islamic ideology of legitimation under their own banner of ‘Hindu Padpadshahi’. The Maratha incorporation of the Mughal lifestyle with its Islamic features in terms of architecture, court dress and ritual and association with Sufis and Sufi concepts continued the overt symbols of Mughal political power and authority as opposed to the Islamic-Muslim ideology and cultural hegemony of Mughal rule. The prostration of Daulat Rao Scindia at the feet of Bala Badis, son of the great pir Mansur Shah, before commencing Hindu worship and the permanent welcome Muslim holy men received in the Maratha camp, were examples of an alternate but flexible Hindu cultural hegemony. They were a ‘Hindu’ replay of the ‘Akbar paradigm’ which had allowed coexistence and ‘syncretic’ practices under the hegemony of a revisionist Islamic ideology. Likewise, Ranjit Singh’s Sikh kingdom sought the validation of his claim to the title of Sarkar from the Muslim Ulama and appointed Nizamuddin, qazi of all the Muslims who recognised his legitimacy. He sought to fulfil the criteria of Dar-ul-Islam in the Punjab, a land in which Islam could be publicly practised under Sikh hegemony. The Sikh character of his rule was hardly in doubt with coins issued in the name of the Gurmata and his continuing to associate himself with the Sikh Khalsa tradition. The banning of cow slaughter throughout his domains and an order restraining the public calling to prayers in the mosques in Amritsar were the symbols of Sikh or non-Islamic hegemony for Ranjit Singh. Elements of ‘compromise’ with the Muslim community of the Punjab which lend itself to the concept of ‘syncretic’ cultural practices coexisted with symbolic assertions of Sikh cultural hegemony. The destruction

Power and Hegemony

of mosques in Sirhind after the Sikhs conquered it in 1764 and the destruction of the Rakabganj mosque in Delhi and its replacement with a gurudwara were examples of this. Apropos this cultural struggle, C.A. Bayly’s theme of ‘sovereignty’ is culture-neutral.18 In the face of growing evidence of cross-community alliances and adjustments in political, military and administrative power structures, it cannot explain why mosques and temples, cows and pigs, or processional conflict became the currency in which power relations between communities were negotiated. Bayly’s very revealing phrase, ‘a symbolic draw’, to describe the outcome of the struggle over the Sisganj mosque cannot answer the very vital question: a ‘draw’ between whom and for what? Surely, not a draw between ‘communities’ which were not fighting such battles everywhere or continuously. In the Punjab context it was not a ‘draw’ between Sikh leaders and Muslims on the issue of ‘sovereignty’ which they had acquired militarily in the first place and, in the second, consolidated by building up support among Muslims for the most part. The significance of struggles and strife over the coinage of cultural hegemony while seeking to win legitimacy as sovereign powers by adjusting other communities in the hierarchy of political and administrative power was the common practice of Muslims, Hindu and Sikh contenders for power. It is only the theme of cultural hegemony that can reconcile the facts of the Sufis of the Chishti order forging ‘syncretic’ ties in the rural society of the Punjab, their being worshipped and venerated across communities, and yet providing the most stubborn opposition to the rise of Sikh power.19 The syncretistic movements fostered by the Sufis were a dimension of the hegemony of revisionist Islam and offered resistance when the Sikhs threatened to displace their cultural hegemony. Broad social antagonisms, processes of impoverishment and a material basis for conflicts feed into and fuel the sectarian strife that erupts along the cultural faultline. The translation of cultural hegemony into concrete material benefits and, in reverse, the desire to express increasing material prosperity in terms of cultural power is a circular process. C.A.

18

Bayly, ‘The Pre-history of “Communalism”’. D. Gilmartin, Empire and Islam, pp. 52–72. The desecration of mosques in the Punjab forced Hafiz Jamal Multani, a major leader of the Chishti revival, to emerge from meditation in his retreat, declare holy war and display his efficiency as archer against the massing Sikhs. Cf. Bayly, ‘The Pre-history of “Communalism”’, p. 192. 19

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Bayly’s description of ‘land wars’ between Hindu–Sikh zamindars and Mughal tenure holders in the Punjab is a good example of this process. Tenurial changes and proprietory rights appear in a framework of power relations, not as discrete economic facts but as the slow emergence of ‘Muslim India’, the growth and spread of ‘famous Islamic towns’ and the build up of ‘rural Muslim power’. In other words, concrete power was expressed and perceived in the language of a culturally expansive ambience. The reverse process was of increasingly prosperous and self-confident Sikh zamindars and peasants who sought cultural self-assertion in their attacks on the symbols of Muslim hegemony by the demolition of mosques, graveyards and Sufi shrines and the ‘obliteration of the old Muslim towns’.20 The widely attested syncretism of rural religion did not exclude the possibility of sectarian strife when the space to challenge overall hegemony was perceived and the confidence to provide counter-hegemony was felt. The same economic antagonism which seemed to erupt in ‘class wars’ between economically upwardly mobile and declining social groups lay unchallenged for long years when the cultural hegemony of the ruling group seemed overwhelming and its benefits had been internalised. All social and economic conflicts were expressed through cultural– ideological constructs in which ‘religion’ was not a set of metaphysical principles. It was a ‘social religion’ born of the function it performed as an ideological organiser of society, its norms and practices, creating bonds of culture and social life. Above all, it was an assertion of symbolic power and a symbolic violation of earlier cultural significations which were sought to be displaced. In Lakshmi Subramanian’s account, the Surat riots of 1795 are apparently the ‘response of a collapsing social order’.21 The once powerful Mughal ruling elite and the once wealthy Muslim shipping magnates having lost their former power were galled by the ascendancy of the Bania merchant and shroff. The Muslim artisan communities or ‘lower orders’ who fell upon the shops and houses of the Banias, looting grain, demolishing the images of their gods and tearing up their account books were also 20

Bayly, ‘The Pre-history of “Communalism”’, pp. 190, 192. Lakshmi Subramanian, ‘Capital and Crowd in a Declining Asian Port City: The Anglo-Bania Order and the Surat Riots of 1795’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1985, pp. 205–38. 21

Power and Hegemony

apparently acting out the ‘natural response’ of a material life characterised by uncertainty and abject poverty. However, as Subramanian is not consciously pushing an argument of economic causality she simultaneously speaks of the riots not being only a protest against Bania ascendancy. She notes the ‘fundamental antagonism’ between the Banias and the Muslims which had a ‘historical background, erupting spasmodically whenever provoked by circumstances’.22 Going back to the Ahmedabad riot of 1713, she can see the pre-existing tensions which pre-dated the economic rise of the Bania bankers, she also refers to the prejudices of the Muslim artisans, instigation by Muslim religious leaders, and the culturally offensive attitude assumed by some Bania shroffs during the Holi festival. She narrates how this offensive behaviour was countered by the mobilisation of the city’s Muslim population, their immediate appeal to the Waiz or religious preacher and the congregation of Muslims of all categories, preachers, artisans, Sunnis and Bohras, at the Jama Masjid. The problem is that she reads all this as a tight ‘communal’ organisation with strong ‘religious leadership’, and tries to explain her reading with economic explanations. ‘The daily rounds at the mosque’ and the ‘religious zeal, occasionally accompanied by aggressive social behaviour towards the infidels’ are presented as the ‘natural’ results of poor living conditions and seeking in religion a ‘source of relief ’.23 The rhythm of collective rituals is not a matter of religious zeal or economic insecurity. It structures not only the group’s representation of the world but the group itself, which orders itself in accordance with this representation. The fuzzy logic of practice, in everyday life, gets shaped and enables the group to acquire social and ideological integration amidst plurality through collective ritual. The ritualisation of practices ‘confers on them the sort of arbitrary necessity which specifically defines cultural arbitrariness’.24 Subramanian’s narrative reveals the manner in which tensions and conflicts between distinct collectives tend to cluster around what we have called the cultural faultline, even though she misreads all the clues. M. Torri’s refutation of the ‘geometrical elegance’ of Subramanian’s model may well be a closer portrayal of a complex society in eighteenth 22

Ibid. Ibid. 24 Pierre Bourdicu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge, 1977, p. 163. 23

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century Surat.25 Perhaps the Hindu Banias were not so central in importance, perhaps the Mughal elite was still quite significant, but that does not change the general direction of the processes at work. Torri has no inkling of all the cultural power play which Subramanian misreads. Torri’s use of categories such as ‘religion’ and ‘communal’ is as misplaced as Subramanian’s ‘Bania’ may be. Consequently, he would be as hard put to explain how a multi-cultural polity (‘trans-communal’ according to Torri) in which Hindus hold key financial and administrative roles and where the Mughal elite and Bania groups were not two hostile communities, witnessed riots which focused on symbols of cultural differentiation. Only in the absence of a conception of cultural hegemony and the struggle to adjust cultural power relations in society can Torri make statements on ‘religion’ being a visible divisive factor which gave rise to ‘communal’ phenomena.26 The ‘religions’ of Jains, Vaishnav Banias and Nagar Brahmans were as dissimilar as that of Sunnis, Shias, Bohras and Ismailis and, yet in moments of conflict and strife, they tended to rally around symbols defining their separate cultures such as temples and mosques. The communities of Islam were as wide ranging as those of nonMuslims, each following a specific form of Islam, often coloured by the group’s pre-Islamic traditions and by continuing contact with nonMuslims. And yet, the strong organisations (Jamats) sponsoring communal wedding feasts, or festival celebrations, supervising community morality, punishing violators of group norms with fines or social ostracism, maintained the ritual boundaries of these Islamic communities vis-à-vis non-Islamic social groups. Financing or acting as trustees of their own shrines, mosques, burial places or community halls, respectively, was a common cultural concern of all those who followed one or other form of Islam. In the final count, Islam provided much of the repertoire of symbols critical to collective assertions of cultural power for these communities. The cultural boundaries, thus, were well-demarcated but not necessarily as sites of hostility and conflict.

25 Michelguglielmo Torri. ‘Surat During the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century: What Kind of Social Order?’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 21, No. 4, 1987, pp. 679–710. 26 Ibid., p. 707.

Power and Hegemony

Conflicts between groups with clearly discernible local and specific economic grievances were expressed in the symbols thrown up by the cultural faultline. The discourse, the slogans, the world views and the language of the antagonists fell either within the ambit of hegemonic or counter-hegemonic culture. The perceivably superior power in an area or region defined which culture would be more assertive. The status that different religious traditions held in an obviously syncretic culture was determined by the centralised hegemonic power’s culture and ideology of legitimisation. All ‘synthesis’ and compromise occurred within this cultural hegemony, where one could ask for and expect protection but not equal status or primacy. Thus, what are called the historical background or preconditions or ‘prehistory’ of ‘communalism’ actually narrate the sectarian strife which occurred along the cultural faultline between the Islamic and non-Islamic cultures and society. These conflicts were contained, blunted and adjusted as long as the culturally hegemonic power of Mughal rule was sustained. The instruments or apparatus of control which cannot be split into a hierarchy of economic, political, administrative and cultural control, enmeshed as they were within a single hegemonic state, were conditioned and coloured by an overall cultural hegemony.27 The crisis of cultural hegemony of which the economic and military crises were a part, constricted and then destroyed Mughal power. It encouraged authoritarian and sectarian dominance rather than the hegemonic embrace.

27 Local systems of bargaining and compromise were modified in later years so as to safeguard this cultural hegemony under threat. Without viewing these modifications within the paradigm of hegemony they would become pure ‘class-struggles’ between the upwardly mobile and declining classes. See Bayly, ‘The Pre-history of “Communalism”’, p. 202.

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Chapter 5

The Cultural Faultline and Its Mirrors

THE CULTURAL FAULTLINE

Self-conscious religious traditions within ‘Hinduism’ include various Brahmanical schools of knowledge, redemptive traditions of ascetics, healing traditions, aesthetic traditions, and so on. These are not mere components of a ‘religion’ but entail aspects of culture such as social, physical, linguistic, philosophical and ideological. In this cultural context one might speak of a specifically ‘Indian structure of tradition’.1 The ‘ritual spokesmen’of Hinduism, Brahmans as well as ascetics of nonBrahman birth, translate the tradition they belong to in a way in which ‘a notion of ontic identity undercuts historiography’; and considerably diverse teachings and practices ‘share a meta-perspective’ enabling them to trace their respective traditions to a ‘common ontic identity and historical source’.2 Thus, ‘we can expect a civilisation which formed a close network of religious interaction and interdependence’.3

1

Richard Burghart, ‘Something Lost, Something Gained: Translations of Hinduism’, in Gunther D. Sontheimer and Herman Kulke (eds), Hinduism Reconsidered, Delhi, 1989, pp. 213–24. 2 Ibid. 3 Gunther D. Sontheimer, ‘Five Components of Hinduism’, in Sontheimer and Kulke (eds), Hinduism Reconsidered, pp. 197–209.

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Concepts are held together by ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing’ and ‘a family resemblance’ exists between the members.4 The concept of a ‘Hindu cultural enclosure’ describes this religious network while ‘syndicated Hinduism’ selectively and deliberately utilises some components to create a dogma.5 The reductionists of modern ‘Hinduism’ speak as if there is a ‘traditional Hinduism’ which has persisted on the subcontinent for the last two millenia with no relation or interaction with Buddhist, Jain or Islamic preaching. If ‘Hinduism’ is accepted as a convenient shorthand for an internally diversified cultural network then it must be understood as a cultural system characterised by degrees of disorder. Attempts to imbue it with unity are reductionist. And all reductionist theories are designed to serve, pre-eminently, the interests of power and control. Thus, ‘Hinduism’ was not a unified, monolithic religion. Yet, all its sects were quite visibly related and had developed under similar social, economic and political conditions, incorporated largely the same traditions, influenced each other continuously and jointly contributed to the ‘Hindu’ civilisational culture.6 Culture here denotes those symbolic structures of the ‘life-world’ which, in Habermas’s sense, are normative structures that do not follow economic or system imperatives but evolve according to their own logic.7 The continuous processes of appropriation or rejection of belief and practice, flexibility and coexistence of religious sects which sometimes agglomerated, and the conflicts and compromises between the Brahmana and other sects as between Brahmanism and local cults, threw up certain civilisational symbols in this ‘Hindu’ culture which need not have had any religious connotation.8 These symbols would be part of the Indian ‘habitus’ in which shared myths and shared ritual patterns would create a modicum of similarity 4 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford, 1967. 5 Sontheimer, ‘Five Components of Hinduism’. 6 H. Von Stietencron, ‘Hinduism: On the Proper Use of a Deceptive Term’, in Sontheimer and Kulke (eds), Hinduism Reconsidered. 7 Michael Pusey, ‘Jurgen Habermas: Reason and the Evolution of Culture’, in Diane J. Austin-Broos (ed.), Creating Culture, London, 1987, pp. 194–209. 8 Romila Thapar, ‘Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2, 1989, pp. 209–31.

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in ‘religious beliefs as moral systems’ not as a theology. This structural similarity or civilisational symbolism would be the ‘habitus’ which would demarcate a cultural boundary vis-à-vis the culture inspired by Islam. ‘The “habitus” is the dynamic element of culture, the basis upon which we are disposed to order the symbolism available to us, through which the colours, shapes, sounds, words, and so on become symbolic.’ In other words, the ‘symbolism of social interaction’ and our ‘spontaneous semiology’ are coordinated through the ‘habitus’.9 The material, physical-geographical setting for what is called IndoPersian culture was Indic. However, the inspiration of its cultural symbolism was Persian. Of course, in the qasbas, especially among non-sharif (non-elite) people, the linguistic, folk and ritual forms interacted resulting in new cultural forms. Nevertheless, both Muslims and non-Muslims perceived these cultural manifestations as Islamic. Perceived as the culture of the dominant group it was legitimated by its superior status as a culture fostered by the rulers at the Mughal court. Thereby, it became attractive as an object of emulation not only by lower caste Muslims but elite nonMuslims as well, who aspired to the cultural symbolism of power.10 The non-Islamic culture with its various religious streams, however, shared common signifiers when juxtaposed with a religious symbolism outside its cultural purview. A cultural faultline which separated the two cultures was discernible, perceived and mutually acknowledged. The discourse of the Muslim chroniclers of the medieval state and society and, its ideologues, the Ulama, pushed the broad, segmentary cultural system of India into the category of an ‘infidel’ culture. On their part, the non-Islamic ‘others’ of this discourse signalled a social and cultural differentiation of their ‘self ’ through categories such as Mleccha or Yavana for the ‘other’.11 These discourses of inclusion and exclusion were, in the given conditions of domination and subordination, discourses of power and not of religion. The Muslim–non-Muslim faultline was not religious but cultural in terms of power relations between the two. The varying religious practices of the non-Muslim communities, however, 9

Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge, 1977, p. 21; Don Miller and Jan Branson, ‘Pierre Bourdieu: Culture and Praxis’, in Diane J. Austin-Broos (ed.), Creating Culture, London, pp. 210–25, 217. 10 Sandria B. Freitag, ‘The Roots of Muslim Separatism in South Asia’, in Edmund Burke and Ira M. Lapidus (eds), Islam, Politics, and Social Movements, London, 1988. 11 Thapar, ‘Imagined Religious Communities’, pp. 223, 224.

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fell on one side of this faultline vis-à-vis the Islamic communities on the other side. They shared what Romila Thapar characterises as ‘the common civilisational symbols’ of the distinctive sects and cults of ‘Hinduism’.12 The ensuing struggle for cultural hegemony was not a matter of religious tolerance and religious coexistence. The discourse of religion and religious symbolism was the ideological vehicle of sorting out cultural relationships of power in society. For considerable periods of time and space the discourse of power was muted giving room to pluralistic religio-moral communities, corresponding with the expansive hegemonic drive of the Mughal state specially during the time of Akbar. In times of shrinking cultural hegemony with its inherent ‘purism’ and narrowing down of cultural space for various segments of society, the cultural faultline was activated by the ideologues and the banner of religious symbolism grouped the contenders for cultural hegemony around it. Religion was always used as an ideology of power—as a legitimation for power and a discourse of power in cultural struggles. However, the Mughal state and society provided only one channel and target for waging power struggles—the state itself. Under the colonial state, with its posture of cultural neutrality between Hindus and Muslims, the state was no longer available for influence and pressure by the ideologues of community and culture. Representation—through mass mobilisation and mass ideologisation, through naming the past—became the political norm, and the claims of power were constructed through building constituencies within separate cultural enclosures. The stronger the constituency, the more virulent the contests and greater the representation. Thus was born the power of the claim. Cultural artifacts and practices are the lifeworld—the habitus— which evolves over long periods of time. Cultural symbolism shared with the rulers/state makes this lifeworld more affirmative and self-empowering and gives it greater impetus to become an expansive culture and acquire hegemony as in the Mughal case. The claim that the Islamic and non-Islamic lifeworlds are integrated into a single culture but its people only hold different religious beliefs is empirically unsound. In fact, the Muslim and non-Muslim lifeworlds are distinct and even contradictory. However, to be cooperative and friendly segments of society it is not necessary to be part of a single culture. The 12

Ibid., p. 229.

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cultural faultline can be accepted as a boundary not to be transgressed or tampered with. What makes the different cultures unfriendly or hostile is the struggle for cultural hegemony when backed or validated by the state (for example, Aurangzeb) or when vigorously articulated by ideologues of culture and community (as began to be done in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Muslim and Hindu ideologues). The habitus generates cultural self-perception and self-representation vis-à-vis the ‘others’. This is different from group/collective political representation which fights for political power. The habitus, on the other hand, which generates the impulse of cultural power and sense of self, struggles for cultural hegemony in an amorphous, nebulous way in everyday life. Culture has no clear unambiguous referents. ‘People are ambiguous … they express themselves through ambiguity.’13 However, when the two separate struggles intersect and coincide, most often, as the result of the efforts of those who articulate the cultural struggle and its symbolisms and promise its fulfilment and empowerment in terms of cultural prestige if political representation and an equal share in power is given to them, then a ‘communal’ discourse becomes possible and the cultural faultline gets energised. The consent of people to the legitimacy of the state arises historically from the prestige and consequent confidence which the dominant group enjoys because of the power at its command. The state’s hegemony, however, is established by the creation of both ideological legitimation and the cooperation of a social base for its power. In its efforts to create an equilibrium between these two sources of power the state can never expect an unbroken, unchallenged consent. Both the rulers and the ruled decipher meanings within a framework of power relations. Consent involves a complex mental state, a mix between approbation and apathy, resistance and resignation. The outlook of subordinated groups is always divided and ambiguous. However, the line between dominant and subordinate cultures is a permeable membrane, not an impenetrable barrier.14 Adjustment to the other’s world view is a fact of everyday existence and the conduct of people in everyday life reveals

13

Don Miller and Jan Branson, ‘Pierre Bourdieu: Culture and Praxis’, in Austin-Broos (ed.), Creating Culture, p. 219. 14 T.C. Jackson Lears. ‘The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 90, No. 3, June 1985, p. 520.

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a complex combination of accommodation and resistance. Very often, the effect of the discourse and values of the dominant culture produce a deep and lasting sense of inferiority in the subordinated. As often, the pursuit of self-interest may only make a virtue of necessity. In this complex scenario the emergence of a third force, a critic of existing power relations and of the discourses of domination and subordination is not unusual. It manifests in a social tendency that seeks cross-caste and cross-religious alliances in a bid to create a new hegemonic culture. The Bhakti cults, the pre-Islamic bhaktas of the south and the bhakti sants coterminus with Islamic hegemony of northern India, and the phenomenon of Sufism can be seen as the emergence of precisely this form of resistance and transcendence. The devotional transformation of the religio-cultural life of pre-Islamic society started in the Tamil South in the seventh century. Known as the Bhakti movement, an expansive current which swept north, east and west, it reached its zenith between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. It bridged the gaps, at least theoretically, between the heterodox religious traditions of India—the Buddhists, the Jains and the Nath Yogis—and the orthodox Vaishnava tradition. The Bhakti sants also had many points of commonality with the Islamic Sufis who were present in India from the twelfth century onward and who contributed to the religio-cultural environment in which the Sant tradition evolved.15 The inner diversity of the Bhakti movement can be seen in the sants’ differing objects and varying expressions of devotion, wide range of philosophical positions and, at the level of social ideology and praxis, in the varying degrees of opposition and accommodation it effected vis-à-vis the orthodox tradition. However, from an overall perspective, the underlying unity of its segments and the role of the poet-Sants as religious and cultural integrators of non-Islamic caste society is palpable.16 The Mirrors: Mystical Hinduism

This religio-cultural integration effected by the Bhakti and Sant traditions is very important in any discussion of the cultural faultline that 15 Karine Schomer and W.H. McLeod (eds), The Sants: Studies in a Devotional Tradition of India, Delhi, 1987, pp. 1–2. 16 Ibid., p. 2.

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marked the Islamic and non-Islamic ways of life after Muslim rule was established. Though the Bhakti sants upheld peaceful coexistence and transcendent universality of all religions as their normative goals, their internal religio-cultural integration of the non-Islamic people was equally a point of cultural resistance to the Islamic ethos and world view presented as a discourse of power. The resistance was not to Islam as a ‘religion’ but as a discourse of power. Their cultural critique of Brahmanical power and prescriptions—i.e., Brahmanical hegemony—was powerful internally to the non-Islamic or ‘Hindu’ way of life.17 It was a decisive, forceful redefinition of what or who was a ‘Hindu’ (even if the term was rarely used) in contraposition to the dominant Brahmanical discourse of power. It thus followed the principles of ‘internality’, through which alone meaningful cultural change occurs, and sought to renegotiate the relationships of caste society. At the same time, the Bhakti movement and the Sant tradition established a forceful rejection of the alternate power discourse of Islam. Their own discourse was fashioned at a transcendent level, thus, sharing in Sufi concepts and practices. It was an attempt at transforming the cultural faultline into a harmless differentiation in cultures, arguing against tampering with its volatility and seismic properties. In other words, it was as much an argument against the power relations that were asserted between castes, and between elite and popular cultures as against the struggle for cultural hegemony being waged in the name of Islamic and non-Islamic cultures. The most crystallised awareness of the cultural faultline is to be found in the Bhakti poets and sants. The very men who sought to preach harmony and transcendence of the faultline, striving to end what appeared as the ‘endless strife’, also reflected the din of cultural contests and battles. Guru Nanak’s tortured sensibility was manifest in his description of the ‘dark age’ in which he found himself. He raised his cry of pain and sorrow against caste and corruption, cruelty and callousness with a moral fervour that he shared with the other sants of the Bhakti tradition. What stands out, significantly, in his denunciations of the existential reality 17 Of course, the critique was not simply reduced to lower castes versus Brahmans and upper castes. Many of the internal critics were, such as Eknath Maharaj of Maharashtra, proper Brahman scholars and masters of Sanskrit and orthodox scriptures. They addressed themselves, however, to a wide sweep of the non-Sanskritic world around them and on behalf of that world critiqued the Sanskritised Brahmanical power.

The Cultural Faultline and Its Mirrors 107

around him, is the total disintegration of the Brahmanical caste society under the impact of the ‘Turkish’ conquest. His lament against the kaliyug (dark age) was aimed, equally, against the dominant and subordinate cultures. The cultural faultline emerges in his binary oppositions: the pandit and the qazi, the Veda and the Koran. ‘A Qazi sits on the seat of justice; he tells his rosary and mutters the name of Khuda … he deprives one of his rights. On being questioned he quotes chapter and verse ... (of the Ketab).’18 Guru Nanak’s compositions reveal the cultural hegemony of Islam and describe the faultline it produced in society: God has changed into Allah. The Hindu Gods and places of worship are ‘subject to taxation’. It is now the shaikh’s turn to lead: the pitcher for ablution, the azan, and namaz and the musalla are supreme. The followers of God dress in blue, not in saffron. Men call their father ‘mian’. Rama and Krishna are forgotten … and the name of God is Allah. Turks and Pathans rule now and the blue dress prevails. The qazis administer the Shariat. Kaliyug forces the acceptance of the Koran. The Puranas and Brahmanical scriptures have gone ….19

This passage is a graphic display of all the cultural symbols ranged against non-Muslim society. Guru Nanak’s description of the hegemonised Brahmans and Khatris was equally graphic: they earned their bread from the Muslim rulers, helped the state which taxed the cow and Brahmans, learnt their language and read their books, flaunting their dress and culture in public and acting as junior partners in exploitation. Simultaneously, they performed the farce of maintaining their religio-cultural practices in private—with their dhotis, caste marks on foreheads, rosaries and cow-dung plastered floors. Their sense of honour had flown. For a mess of potage they were willing to drive their religion into a private hole, nursing a hidden culture.20 This was a meaningless, worthless culture at its best and a sham, hypocritical culture at its worst. Guru Nanak, thus, like the other sants, 18

Niharranjan Ray, ‘The Age and Social Message of Guru Nanak’, in K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar (ed.), Guru Nanak: A Homage, Delhi, 1973, p. 63. 19 Surjit Hans, ‘Social Transformation and Early Sikh Literature’, Journal of Regional History, Vol. III, 1982, pp. 1–3. 20 Ibid. Also J.S. Grewal, Guru Nanak in History, Chandigarh, 1969, pp. 171–95; and The Sikhs of the Punjab, Cambridge, 1992.

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not only produced an internal critique of caste society but also called for cultural resistance through self-affirmation and self-esteem vis-à-vis Muslim cultural hegemony. The fifteenth century sant, Kabir, uses Brahman and Shudra, Veda and Koran, Hindu and Turk as binary oppositions in an identical fashion to Guru Nanak.21 Hindu, Muslim—where did they come from? Who started this road? (sabda 84) Brother, where did your two gods come from? Tell me, who made you mad? (sabda 30) It’s a heavy confusion. Veda, Koran, holiness, hell. (sabda 75) Kabir says, plunge into Ram! There; No Hindu. No Turk. (sabda 75)

Kabir’s angry impatience at religious institutions—‘the puffed up Pandit!’ and ‘the lecturing Qazi’—and formally organised communities of sectarian groups pulling people apart reveals the ongoing religiocultural contests and the desperate need for a new transcendent voice. The vehemence of Kabir’s language and his fierce iconoclasm—the pandit and qazi, mulla and maulvi all writhe under his taunts—speaks of an age when the noise and din of religio-cultural battles was deafening. The Brahman with his ‘untouchability and thread’ and the qazi ‘going from house to house chopping heads’ were the backdrop to his fearlessness and solitariness. Kabir’s audience was in the throes of cultural struggle ranged behind traditional ideologues—who despise, deny, misinterpret, or ignore his message: ‘Nobody listens, nobody believes me, they’re happy only if I lie.’22 In comparison, Dadu ‘Dayal’, the sixteenth century mystic in the age of Akbar, reflects a less tense environment.23 Vaishnava perceptions of their relations with the Muslims in the sixteenth century suggest far less violence than earlier centuries. However, they provide more detailed accounts of disputes and confrontations 21 Linda Hess, ‘Kabir’s Rough Rhetoric’ and ‘Three Kabir Collections: A Comparative Study’, in Karine Schomer and W.H. McLeod (eds), The Sants, pp. 111–41, 143–65. 22 Ibid., Hess, ‘Three Kabir Collections’, p. 139. 23 W.G. Orr, A Sixteenth Century Mystic, London, 1947.

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between them as if, the cultural struggles were surfacing, out in the open from the recesses of fear and darkness—the metaphors of Kabir and Nanak. The biographies of Krishna–Chaitanya, the devotional mendicant of Bengal, are a rich source on this theme.24 The followers of Chaitanya, like the Bhakti cults elsewhere, were internal critics of caste society, believing that the mercy of God (Hari) is not bound by caste, way of life or social hierarchy. Brahmans figured in their narratives as hypocrites not as an entire caste but as a group of sinful persons who opposed the Vaishnavas. Most of the biographies were, in fact, compiled by Brahman (by birth) authors who were followers of Chaitanya. All the biographies clearly employ a binary classification of peoples and cultural phenomena into Hindu and Yavana or Mleccha (or even Turk). It appears decidedly, a cultural division for there is no suggestion that the difference is primarily a religious one. The texts reveal a ‘lingering anxiety’ over the stereotyped oppressive Yavana/Mleccha and their continuing potential for inflicting injury. It is an anxiety shared by other Hindus as well as by Vaishnavas and expressed in lamentations over the destruction of temples, violating the purity of high caste persons, arbitrarily taking advantage of military force. In fact Krishna had appeared in the form of Chaitanya precisely to overcome this anxiety and to establish a new normative order of devotion that was in principle available to persons of every social community and which was non-violent.25 Clearly, the escape from anxiety was the transcendence of conflict, a cultural strategy to resist force and violence. The cultural symbolism of their anxiety is rather revealing of the cultural faultline. Apart from the motif of temples and pollution the symbol of the cow is important. Lord Krishna descended into the world as Chaitanya when he beheld the earth suffering like a cow at the hands of Mlecchas. The explanation for why Haridas, the famed convert saint of the Chaitanya cult, was born into a Muslim family was, according to 24 J.T. O’Connell, ‘Vaisnava Perceptions of Muslims in Sixteenth Century Bengal’, in Milton Israel and N.K. Wagle (eds), Islamic Society and Culture, Delhi, 1983. All the information from these biographies used here is from this article. Also see, Sushil Kumar De, Early History of the Vaishnava Faith and Movement in Bengal, Calcutta, 1962; Edward C. Dimock, ‘Doctrine and Practise among the Vaishnavas of Bengal’, in The Place of the Hidden Moon, Chicago, 1966. 25 O’Connell, ‘Vaisnava Perceptions of Muslims’, pp. 294–95.

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the Krishna–Chaitanya–Charitamrta, a punishment for the offense in some past lifetime of carelessly having offered unwashed tulasi leaves to God after picking them from the ground.26 Expressions such as Kala Yavana (literally, time or death in the form of a Yavana) evoked the fierce warrior named in the Bhagvata Purana and conveyed a lingering fear of Muslim violence. A qazi, in confrontation with Chaitanya, is challenged on the issue of cow slaughter. A number of passages in the biographies revolve around issues such as hostile qazis and the Yavana reprisals against Brahmans and their persecution. A particularly vicious symbolism enters a dispute between several qazis and Chaitanya when one Balaramdas ‘burned the beard of a yavana’.27 Reminiscent of Guru Nanak’s condemnation of his society, Jayananda’s Chaitanya–Mangala consistently laments not religious beliefs but cultural attributes: In kaliyug even Brahmans wear stockings, grow beards, carry guns or kamans (crossbows) and speak and read Persian. To be fair, one must recognise that adopting the ‘other’s’ language and dress can often be a means of ‘impression management’ that communicates across a cultural boundary and facilitates one’s ambition of maintaining a maximum of control over one’s local society and its environment. Accepting the cultural trappings of the ‘other’ can, in fact, enhance one’s potential for continued existence as an autonomous enclave.28 The Brahmans’ hypocrisy and self-serving is emphasised as they were ‘excessively fearful of Muslim reprisals’ and willing to help the ruler in victimising Chaitanya. Objections to the public singing of kirtans by Brahman opponents were overruled by appeal to the qazis who in some cases authorised them.29 Thus, it would appear that the Bhakti cult of Chaitanya was the cultural strategy of resistance evolved as a weapon of the weak. The Brahmans and the qazis were engaged in the interplay of power and the bhaktas had to negotiate a path through the treacherous contest between Islamic and Brahmanic orthodoxies. In the context of the persecution of the Brahmans of Navadvip, Jayananda observed that the ‘conflict’ between Brahmans and Yavanas was ‘everlasting’. 26

Ibid., pp. 296, 299. Ibid., pp. 300, 302, 306. 28 For an interesting discussion on this theme see, Hanne Veber, ‘Why Indians Wear Clothes … Managing Identity across an Ethnic Boundary’, Ethnos, Vol. 57, Nos I–II, 1992. 29 Ibid., p. 300. 27

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The trial of Haridas, the Muslim disciple of Chaitanya, was apparently an issue of ‘religious’ obligation, as apostasy from Islam was a capital offence in Bengal at that time. However, the whole episode of his being sentenced, beaten and left for dead (from which he recovered miraculously) was presented in a manner indicating a fear of cultural persecution by the Bengali Vaishnavas. The Muslim governor passes the sentence due to the insistent prosecution by the actively hostile qazi and the Muslim witnesses to the dispute are sympathetic to Haridas’s purely religious plea on the unity of God despite a multiplicity of names. Yet, considerations of ‘communal prestige’ decide the final outcome. A public trial of this nature is a good example of the struggle for cultural hegemony.30 The Vaishnavas of the sixteenth century, nonetheless, convey the distinct improvement in cultural relations that occurred in Akbar’s reign. In the Chaitanya–Charitamrta of Krishnadas, composed between 1612 and 1615, the Muslims begin to appear in a more favourable light. The trial of Haridas is barely alluded to, and a new melodramatic adventure of his is narrated. The villain of this episode is a Sakta Brahman and the instruments of justice are the agents of the Muslim king. The account reflects the lessening of tension in Akbar’s age and the effects of his culturally expansive flexible hegemony.31 The huge silences, however, in the biographies and narratives are significant to the concept of a cultural faultline. A consistent refusal to mention Muslims as rulers—political hegemons—even when associated and familiar with them as officials, suggests a psychological device of pushing uncomfortable reality to the margins of consciousness. The cultural strategy of Bhakti could well be an escape, transcending the worldly contradictions of cultural existence. Though emphasising the private devotional piety in Islam the biographers pass over in silence communal public prayers.32 That is, the ‘public arena’ of cultural hegemony is ignored. They mention in political contexts the Muslim practice of breaking sacred images but are silent over their power to do so. In other words, the Vaishnavas retained their transcendental discourse of personal self-affirmation but did not link it with a power struggle as the transformation of the Nanak-panth into the Khalsa in the Punjab did.

30

Ibid., pp. 298–99. Ibid., pp. 295, 307. 32 Ibid., pp. 309, 310. 31

112 Culture, Community and Power Sants and Sufis: The Struggle for Cultural Hegemony

The turning point for the Nanak-panth is traced to Jahangir’s reign when Guru Arjan died in custody in 1606. His death came to be regarded as a martyrdom and, tradition holds, led to a deliberate arming of the Panth. It was from this point in time that the maxim of ‘There is no religion except the religion of the sword’ was expounded. Sticking to any form of belief and ritual that obstructed complete militarisation of the Panth was playing into the hands of the Mughals. The Gurbilas Daswin Patshahi (1797) portrayed faithfully the nature of politics and the new social imperatives that transformed the Nanak-panth into the Khalsa and gave new meaning to the old term abchal: ‘The Sikh kingdom on the bones of the enemies.’33 This was the clarion call to a struggle for cultural hegemony, albeit with a new ideology. The recasting of the panthic inspiration from common devotion to a perception of a common threat, the development of a sense of persecution, a genuine hostility, was presented in the language of cultural confrontation by the Gurbilas literary form. Its culmination was reached in the times of Maharaja Ranjit Singh when the successful establishment of political power necessitated the maintenance of some kind of equilibrium between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs and which generated a discourse of cultural hegemony à la Akbar. Of course, given the cultural limits of all discourses of power Ranjit Singh’s rule acquired a Sikh–Hindu cultural symbolism vis-à-vis the Muslims as we discuss later.34 This hegemonic experiment under the aegis of the Sikhs, however, lasted only as long as Ranjit Singh was at the helm. After him, the jat motif of the socially mobile peasantry, which formed the bulk of the Sikh converts, reintroduced the symbols of the cultural faultline: the succession of a Guru goes with the killing of butchers; marriage follows victory in battles.35 33 Surjit Hans, ‘Social Transformation and Early Sikh Literature’, pp. 11–12. Also see, W.H. McLeod, ‘The Development of the Sikh Panth’, in The Sants, pp. 229–49; and Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab. 34 Surjit Hans’s article referred to above discusses the changed nature of discourse in Gurbilas Patshahi 10 and the Gurbilas Chhevin Patshahi written in the times of Ranjit Singh and after him respectively. 35 This jat motif is reflected in the Gurbilas Chhevin Patshahi, which was ‘hybrid of janamsakhi and gurbilas forms and reflects the times and concerns of Sikh overlordship’. Cf. Surjit Hans, ‘Social Transformation and Early Sikh Literature’, pp. 13–14.

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Thus, from a transcendence of the cultural faultline to a struggle for cultural hegemony, from the power of the metaphysic to the cultural–social ideology of power, Guru Nanak’s vision of creating a new hegemonic culture through Bhakti got tied to the struggle for power. Those who persisted in the purely Bhakti strain formed a parallel stream of Udasis.36 The incident that marked the cultural faultline between the Islamic and the non-Islamic and established the relationship of non-Muslim Punjabi society with the Khalsa as an alternate power discourse to that of the Mughals was the story of the child boy, Haqiqat Rai. The story celebrated as ‘the victimhood of innocence’, when not even a child could be overlooked in the struggle for cultural hegemony, was also symptomatic of the Mughal retreat from the Akbar paradigm. Var Haqiqat Rai recounted the ‘martyrdom’ of a young boy of Sialkot who was executed in 1735 at Lahore. He was said to have exchanged insults with his Muslim classmates against Prophet Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima, in retaliation for their attack against Durga or Adi Bhawani, the goddesses whose honour he was defending. In itself, the episode is very revealing of the cultural faultline. However, the more significant aspect of it was the desperate attempts made by the boy’s parents who appealed for mercy, the mobilisation of relatives and supporters who accompanied them to Lahore to appeal to the Mughal governor, and the fruitless efforts of non-Muslim officials such as a chaudhri, a faujdar, and diwans from Lahore and even distant Delhi, and businessmen of various towns who tried vainly to bribe the qazi who first prosecuted him. The local Ulama of Sialkot and Lahore, several hundred of them swore to withstand and counter the influence of the Hindu diwans and mutsaddis at Lahore till, finally, the Mughal governor of Lahore yielded to their pressure. Haqiqat Rai was given the choice between Islam and death and, on refusing to accept Islam, was executed. A huge mourning procession followed the corpse and the Hindu shopkeepers of Lahore observed hartal to join the mourners. The author of the Var valourised Haqiqat Rai’s martyrdom at par with the Khalsa martyrs of the eighteenth century and the story was said to have spread like wildfire all over the Punjab.37 36 Sulakhan Singh, ‘Udasi Beliefs and Practices’, Journal of Regional History, Vol. IV, 1983, pp. 73–98. 37 Daljinder Singh Johal, ‘Heroic Literature in Punjabi’, Journal of Regional History, Vol. II, 1981, pp. 61–62.

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A bardic tale celebrating the heroism of the Chattha Muslims defending their power against Sikh attacks which lead to bloody encounters during the 1760s and 1790s was presented in the discourse of Islamic honour and hegemony. Invoking the power of Islamic motifs, the Prophet and great martyrs of Karbala, of Hazrat Ali the destroyer of infidels and the Quran, the ballad expressed ‘an unrestrained bias against the Sikhs and the Hindus’. Interestingly, it was recorded by the Punjabi Muslim poet, Pir Muhammad, during the reign of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and was richly rewarded for his efforts by the Chatthas.38 The poetry of the famous Sufi Muslim poets, Waris Shah and Bulle Shah, reflected the insecurity and frustration of Muslims at the visible reversal of cultural hegemony with the emergence of Jat Sikhs during the eighteenth century. That Hindus and Sikhs together were the ‘other’ across the cultural faultline as far as the Muslims were concerned, was illuminatingly revealed in Shah Muhammad’s Jangnama where he recorded the entry of the ‘tisri zat’, the British, as the third contender in the ongoing struggle for cultural hegemony.39 The phenomenon of the mysticism of the Sufis and the Bhakti saints which has been eulogised as a syncretic and composite culture has had as many ideologues of Islam and ‘Hinduism’ claiming them and incorporating them in their own ‘stream’ and ‘tradition’. The basic problem of squaring the circle of ‘revisionism’ associated with the Sufis and Akbar, the crowned Sufi, has also found its way into historiography.40 K.A. Nizami refutes the allegations of the orthodox that Sufism is ‘a blot on Islam’s reputation’. Nizamuddin Auliya maintained that a spiritual guide had to accept the Sharia and would not say anything against Islamic law. This, Nizami holds, reflects the attitude that is representative of mainstream Sufism in India. ‘Genuine Sufism’s foundation is the Sharia and its fountain-head is the Quran and hadith.’ Thus, Sufism is ‘Islamic mysticism’ and not mysticism in general. The central literary stimulus for Sufism is the Quran supplemented by Islamic traditions. Qalandars who consider themselves beyond law are exceptions as the writings of great Indian Sufis do not, in the main, have room for them.41

38

Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 65. 40 Iqtidar Alam Khan, ‘The Nobility Under Akbar’. 41 K.A. Nizami, Tarikh-i-mashaikhi-i-Chist, Delhi, 1980, pp. 31, 46. 39

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Nizami scoffs at orientalists who try too hard to find the impact of other religions on Sufism, in an oblique reference to S.A.A. Rizvi. The latter argues that the Sufis did borrow ideas and practices from Christian and Buddhist monasticism and philosophy from Neoplatonism and Upanishadic concepts. Their originality lay in incorporating these influences within the framework of Islam, thus making them an integral part of Muslim life.42 Thus the Sufis became, we could say, the channels of Islamic influence and cultural hegemony. With this Nizami would concur for, as he says, the Chishti Sufis paved the way for the establishment of Muslim political power in kingdoms such as Bengal. Malwa, the Deccan and Gujarat, by making Islam attractive to Hindus.43 Basically, the above discussion revolves around the sources of Sufi ideas and the nature of their social praxis. However, what is important for us is to understand their role in cultural hegemony. Historians far removed from each other in perspective find consensus in this context. The Sufis have been viewed as the ‘most effective agents of spreading Islam’ through the method of persuasion. In other words, the Sufis acted as the missionaries of Islam in India.44 They led a veritable mass contact programme and it is said that they made ‘so many concessions to the Hindu environment that they made Islam attractive to India’. The sociological reality was that ‘they formed a unitary Muslim community within India’.45 There is, of course, enough evidence that undermines the thesis of Hindu–Muslim rapprochement occurring through the agency of the Sufis. There were as many purifiers of Indian Sufism fighting to cleanse it of un-Islamic accretions as those who adapted Islam to its Indian environment.46 The tension between these two tendencies is beautifully 42

S.A.A Rizvi, Shah Wali-Allah, Canberra, 1980, pp. 282, 380, 386. As Muzaffar Alam puts it, ‘Both a Sufi and an alim saw the Hindus as the “others”. But they differed radically in their appreciation of the prevailing conditions and in the mechanism they preferred for bringing these others under the hegemony of their faith’, p. 47 of ‘Competition and Coexistence’ (see fn. 49). In our view, the project of dominance followed by the alim must be distinguished from the Sufi project of hegemony, and must be separated as currents of ideological thought advocating alternative modes of governance, which we term revisionism and dogmatism. 44 Aziz Ahmed, An Intellectual History of Islam, p. 36. 45 Khwaja Ahmad Faruqi, ‘Impact of Hindu Society on Muslims’, in Christian W. Troll (ed.), Islam in India, Vol. II, New Delhi, 1985. ch. 1. 46 J.S. Grewal, Medieval India: History and Historians. Amritsar, 1975, Introduction. 43

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brought out in an anecdote about the Sufi saint, Kirmani, who was distressed on a visit to Kashmir in the sixteenth century to hear Muslims reciting Aurad loudly in mosques, a practice he considered anti-Sharia. However, he dreamt in a state of spiritual ecstasy that Mir Sayyid Ali Hamdani (a venerated spiritual guide) appeared angry and reprimanded him: Don’t you know that it is because of Aurad-i-fathiyya (loud recitation) that Islam was understood by the common man in Kashmir? In other words, the moral drawn was that it was not the theologian but the activist missionary who knew how to inspire and mobilise people. The Sufis as we know were the decisive factor in the spreading and rooting of Islam in Kashmir.47 A different resolution to this tension, also in the sixteenth century (1517) was when a Chishti saint, Nizamuddin of Amethi (Awadh), snatched Ibn Arabi’s Fusus-ul-Hikam from the hand of another Sufi’s son and limited the readings of his disciples to ‘orthodox Sufi’ treatises. In the main, the ‘excessive’ adaptation of Sufis to local beliefs was always under attack and produced apologetic defensive explanations as is obvious from Saih Muhibbulah’s example in Oudh.48 However, it bears emphasis that differences in socio-cultural praxis—in the evolution of a ‘mass line’—notwithstanding, ‘in relations to Hindus, often it is difficult to distinguish between an orthodox theologian and a “liberal” mystic’. The same Sayyid Ali Hamdani referred to above and who translated the Fusus-ul-Hikam into Persian advocated stringent measures to keep the Hindus in control. They were to be forbidden all expressions of a ‘public culture’ such as possession of arms, wearing signet rings, riding horses with saddle and bridle and the observation of their traditional customs publicly. An infidel ought never to be made a wali (governor) lest he should control and impose his authority on Muslims—the route to a reversal of cultural hegemony.49 The process of the spread of Islam in Kashmir is an excellent example of our juxtaposition of the mode of dominance (which failed in this case) and the mode of hegemony (which succeeded). This latter mode was a process of Islamic acculturation. The limited success of pious missionaries, 47

Mohammad Ishaq Khan, ‘Islam in Kashmir’, in Troll, Islam in India Muzaffar Alam, ‘Religion and Politics in Awadh Society, 17th and 18th Centuries’, paper presented at a conference on ‘Varieties of Islam in Medieval South Asia’, University of Heidelberg, July 1989, p. 10. 49 Ibid., ‘Competition and Coexistence: Indo-Islamic Interaction in Medieval North India’, in ITINERARIO, Vol. XIII, No. 1, 1989, p. 46. 48

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such as Sayyid Ali Hamdani and Sayyid Mir Muhammad Hamdani in converting the masses to Islam led the former to conclude ruefully that it was beyond the people of his times to grasp the message of Islam. However, only a few years after his death, the Rishis of Kashmir, who were the upholders of his mission, effectively spread the influence of Islam, mainly through a wide range of mystical songs composed by Nur-ud-Din Rishi Kashmiri whose disciples spread in every nook and corner of the valley. The significant aspect of this process of Islamic acculturation was that ‘no conscious effort to convert people to Islam’ was made, yet not only the common people but ‘some prominent non-Muslims’ were brought within the fold.50 Nevertheless, this mode of hegemonising the people to Islamic influence, was a channel for what could later be labelled the ‘Islamisation’ of Kashmir. Though the Sufi mystics stretched the arena of influence with flexible, elastic accommodations to local cultural practices, they did not leap out of the Islamic moral order and eventually affirmed their umblical links to the Ulama. The dichotomous historiography of the medieval Indian encounter between Muslims and non-Muslims split into a linear narrative of ‘Muslim domination and Hindu resistance’ versus the ‘efflorescence of a composite and syncretic culture’ has received more complex treatment in recent years. However, the parallel recounting of amity and interaction as well as tension and animosity becomes, merely, ‘this as well as that’ in the name of analysis. We would emphasise the need to recognise the dialectic in their relations—coexistence and even cordial relations in everyday life, as well as their struggle for cultural hegemony, as part of the same totality. The accommodation and adjustments (‘composite culture’) were part of the project of Islamic cultural hegemony. As Muzaffar Alam remarks: ‘Both a Sufi and an Alim saw the Hindus as the “others”. But they differed radically ... in the mechanism they preferred for bringing these others under the hegemony of their faith.’ However, the concept of hegemony is rather inappropriately used for the Alim’s method of ‘confronting the Hindus indiscriminately with the alternative of “death or Islam”’.51 This is the discourse of dominance, not hegemony, which was adopted by the Sufis. 50 Mohammad Ishaq Khan, ‘The Impact of Islam on Kashmir in the Sultanate Period (1320–1586)’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, 1986. p. 200. 51 Muzaffar Alam, ‘Competition and Coexistence’, p. 47.

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In the long process of conversion to Islam, war and enslavement played a role. However, in the framework of cultural hegemony it was less important or even effective, than the part played by Sufi shaikhs and pirs in the countryside and villages.52 Thus, they were a part of the modalities of establishing cultural hegemony, as opposed to the ‘domination’ of Islamic rule. Of course, the legends and oral traditions examined by historians have shown the earliest Sufis as militant ‘warrior saints’—Islamic activists juxtaposed to the theologians. Such warrior saints, for example, Pir Mabari Khandyat, accompanied military expeditions to Bijapur. However, they appear during the first invasion of ‘infidel’ territory and disappear on the establishment of political–military power. With the stabilisation of Islamic frontiers, Dar-al-Islam, the Indian Sufis gradually withdrew from frontier warfare like their counterparts, the Turkish and Iranian Ghazi-babas.53 Sufis were sought out by the Sultans’ armies as religious preceptors and as venerable men of God for the legitimacy it gave to their expansionist marches. However, even when Sufi orders distanced themselves from the rulers, adjusted to the local environment and began quiet missionary work in their khankahs and silsilahs, they never questioned the role of the state as upholder and protector of Islamic precepts and culture and that it derived its legitimacy from the theologians. Naturally, therefore, even the early Sultans ‘had no difficulty in reconciling their Sunni orthodoxy to their regard for the Sufis’.54 The latter, though representing ‘revisionism’ in Islam in the course of their hegemonising project among the people, nevertheless, provided a channel for greater and stabler influence over society than the Ulama who constituted themselves as the ideological nucleus or core of Islamic culture. It was only in times when political–military power was challenged or weakened that the retreat to state-sanctioned dogmatism ensued. Written and oral records of some of the eminent early Sufis undermine the notion that they had any concern for religious freedom and cultural synthesis. In fact, they had a heightened sense of superiority and finality of their faith and often made a plea for discrimination on religious grounds. There abound a large number of stories and legends on their 52

Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab, p. 13; also Gilmartin, Empire and Islam. Eaton, The Sufis of Bijapur, 1300–1700, pp. 28–34. 54 Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab, p. 14. 53

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‘competitive spirituality’ with Hindu yogis—stories establishing their cultural hegemony.55 On their own testimony, the Sufis perceived their role as the civilian arm of Islamic hegemony. Sufi literature, specially at moments when land grants were less forthcoming from the state, emphasised that they had made ‘equally significant contributions to the building of Muslim power as the military and political commanders did with their sabres and spears’.56 They appealed to the rulers to help their work of influencing minds and hearts and achieving wider and enduring victories of Islam. This was the discourse of cultural legitimation even if their interests in sharing power and revenue prompted it to some degree.57 The Sufi poet of Hindawi, Malik Mohammad Jaisi, emphasised the adoption of local languages (Punjabi and Hindi) in this context. As did the Bengali Muslim ‘cultural mediators’ of Bengali Sufi folk literature, reflected in the ‘Musalmani Puthis’ vis-à-vis the foisting of Urdu by the Ulama in Bengal. The object of both, nevertheless, ‘was the ultimate vindication, refurbishing, and diffusion of Islam as they interpreted it’.58 Eaton’s work on the Sufis of the Deccan area provides rich and wide ranging evidence for a few definite conclusions on the role of the Sufis. The Bijapuri Sufis of the Chishti order, distant and safe from Delhi and Gulbarga, drew inspiration from local influences and were seen as deviationists from Islamic orthodoxy. Eaton, nonetheless, puts both Gisudaraz of Gulbarga and Ghaus of Gwalior squarely on the side of orthodoxy. Precisely because of their distance from central power, the local Chishti order tended to forge close ties with the courts in the Deccani kingdoms. This was the normal pattern in the history of Sufism: as the Sufi’s political sympathies (what we would term ideological–cultural identification) merged with the court, his doctrinal position became more orthodox. He began playing the theologian’s role of giving legitimacy and religious sanction to state power, in return for patronage and protection.59

55

Muzaffar Alam, ‘Competition and Coexistence’, p. 41. Ibid., p. 47. 57 See Bayly, ‘The Pre-history of “Communalism”’, for the argument that economic interests were the source and basis for their discourse. For a similar argument in nineteenth century context, see Freitag, Collective Action and Community. 58 Asim Roy, The Islamic Synergistic Tradition in Bengal, p. 207. 59 Eaton, The Sufis of Bijapur, pp. 45–55. 56

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The Chishti order in Delhi, famed for its unyielding position before a hostile imperial court had to draw the line and follow the court’s conception of the Sufis’ ‘proper role in the Muslim state’ or cease functioning effectively. ‘Orthodoxy’ in any case, was traditionally described more in terms of conformity of practice than conformity in belief. There was, most often, simultaneously, a pattern of Sufi ‘revisionist theory’, and generally acceptable ‘Islamic practice’. There is therefore barely any contradiction between the apparently opposed views of Eaton and his reviewer, Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui. To Eaton’s view, that the Chishtis’ doctrine clashed with Koranic theology but they gave up all practices which could clash with orthodoxy, is counterposed the view that they were ‘orthodox Sufi scholars’ from the beginning, adhering to the Sharia.60 The Qadiri and Shattari Sufis in fact established a tradition of ‘orthodox Sufism’ which no Alim could challenge in the Deccan and north India. The Sufis as a whole shifted to Bijapur after the dissolution of the Bahamani Sultanate and made it an important centre of ‘Muslim power’. Innumerable tales of the success of their ‘competitive spirituality’ in displacing the Brahmans, yogis and sanyasis—the traditional ideologues of non-Muslim society—are part of Sufi literature. Most upheld doctrinal positions indistinguishable from the Ulama.61 Elements of ‘Bijapuri culture’ that are termed ‘syncretic’ reveal a process of Islamic acculturation within a framework of hegemonic—as opposed to dominant—power. The Perso-Marathi of the Maharashtrian officials, Dakhni, the vehicle of creative literature and popular communication with its syntax identical to Urdu and its Perso-Arabic script, were the language of ‘Islamic power’—the currency of power in the markets and the armies. The strong ‘Hindu current’—absorption of Sanskrit vocabularly from Telugu and Kannada—‘a revolution in Dakhni civilisation’62 was the form in which Islamic cultural hegemony manifested itself in the Deccan. It was the best example of the Akbar paradigm—a form that was un-Islamic even for many Sufis and for the Mughal court. Not surprisingly, Ibrahim II—Akbar’s counterpart in the 60 Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui, ‘A New Look at Deccani Sufism’, in C. Troll (ed.), Islam in India, Vol. 2, p. 243. 61 Eaton, The Sufis of Bijapur, p. 54; for north India see Muzaffar Alam, ‘Religion and Politics in Awadh Society’, pp. 24, 26–30. 62 Herman Geetz, ‘The Fall of Vijayanagar and the Nationalisation of Muslim Art in the Dakhan’, Journal of Indian History, Vol. 19, 1940, pp. 249–55.

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south—was charged with heresy by many orthodox Sufis, many of whom represented a ‘passionately puritanical’ reformist zeal which was ‘Islamic rather than syncretic’.63 The Sufis were generally apologetic at using ‘Hindi’ or ‘Dakhni’ or ‘Bengali’—the inferior, low status languages of the ‘others’—but defended their practice on the grounds of more effective diffusion of ‘popular Islam’. The victories of pirs such as Shah Musa who compelled the Hindus to abandon their math through ‘spiritual struggle’ and converted it into his khanaqah and Sufis such as Abul Hasan who not only broke the influence of a yogi on the people but converted the yogi himself to Islam by miracles, were allegorical tales justifying their practices.64 Flexibility and innovation, therefore, were always on leash for the anxiety over loss of Islamic cultural influence was shared by the Sufis with the Ulama. This is dramatically revealed in the Deccani context in Abul Hasan Qadiri’s verse: You should read (the Kalima) as quickly as possible, Oh Muslim, And you must be a believer. If not, the Devil will drop the sacred thread Around your neck in a minute, And drag you with him wherever he goes Until he makes you as he is.65

The eminent Chishti Sufi Burhan at Din wrote that without Islam one could not understand the path of the Sufis for the ‘meaning’ of their work was to spread Islam even if the ‘other’s’ language, metaphors and concepts were used to ‘bring home Islamic virtue to the Muslim’.66 The Sufi attitude towards the non-Muslims—even of the most compromising Chishtis—ranged from indifference towards the Kannadiga and Maharashtrian masses to hostility towards their sants and yogis.

63

Ira Lapidus, ‘Muslim Cities’, in Edmund Burke and Ira M. Lapidus (eds), Islam, Politics and Social Movements, London, 1988, p. 106. 64 Eaton, The Sufis of Bijapur, pp. 110, 111, 133. For Bengal, see Asim Roy, Islamic Syncretistic Tradition. 65 Ibid., p. 132. 66 Ibid., pp. 133, 145, 152.

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As Clifford Geertz says, Sufism was ‘a diffuse expression of that necessity ... for a world religion to come to terms with a variety of mentalities, a multiplicity of local forms of faith, and yet maintain the essence of its own identity’.67 Clearly, we cannot examine the role of Sufis apart from the relations of power that obtained in the medieval state and society. Whatever their theory, concepts and intellectual positions and their concrete spiritual roles as pirs and shaikhs, their location in the interplay of power between Islamic cultural hegemony and non-Islamic cultural strategies of adjustment and resistance is essential. For some rulers the Sufis could become the soft face of Islamic hegemony through cultural compromise while, for others, they were a constant threat to the state’s ideological nucleus and legitimators, the Ulama. The constant pull of the venerating mass and consistent pressure of the theological centre allied to the state, made the Sufis retreat invariably from their hegemonic praxis. The cultural ideological framework of their existence was, like that of the revisionist monarchs, constituted by Islam. Thus, in decline and crisis the Sufistic state of the Adilshahi Sultans instituted the Dastur al-Amal regulating Hindu–Muslim relations and separating them as ‘distinct and unequal communities’. This was similar to what Aziz Ahmed refers to as the ‘Naqshbandi reaction’ in Mughal India after Akbar, marking the retreat from hegemony towards domination. Muslims were forbidden to participate in Hindu festivals while Hindus were to pay special taxes on their celebration, and jizya (khankhushi) for the Lingayats was collected all over again. The same state that had employed the Brahmans and Marathas employed a significant cultural symbolism in its confrontation with Shivaji. Afzal Khan’s army followed a zig zag path to accomplish the desecration and destruction of temples of particular importance to the Maharashtrians: beginning with the great shrine of Bhavani to which Shivaji’s family made an annual pilgrimage at Tuljapur to the temple ofVithoba at Pandharpur, the centre of the Bhakti movement in Maharashtra. Marathi chronicles recorded the oppression of Hindus, Brahmans and cows of Tuljapur and Pandharpur, the cultural symbols of the faultline and of the assertion of cultural hegemony.68

67 68

Geertz, Islam Observed, p. 48. Eaton, The Sufis of Bijapur, pp. 178, 195, 198.

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By the 1680s, sectarian strife between Muslims and non-Muslims with all its cultural symbolism was frequent. The ‘accursed Hindus’, recorded a farman, murdered the brother of the Sajjade-nishin of Bandanawaz dargah when he obstructed a crowd of villagers and some revenue officials from ritually ‘killing’ an effigy of ‘Kans—a foe of Krishna’, their god.69 The relationship of landed Sufis (pirzadas) with non-Muslims in the Deccan tended to be generally strained and sometimes violent. The Sufis appeared to have been participating in the various struggles that erupted in the late seventeenth century. Careri, the Italian traveller reported in 1695, when Muslim fakirs and bairagis (ascetics) meet ‘they fight desperately’. There was a sort of throwback to the warrior Sufis of the early fourteenth century who began to give Hindu–Muslim conflicts the sanctions of jihad. A riot in Kurnool in which Pir Abd-Allah Laubali’s brother declared general jihad and, the jihad joined by the pir himself in 1671 in Chitradurg (Karnataka) in which he was also killed, were only two of several such conflicts. The Laubali Sufis were the first to be killed by Hindus since the fourteenth century. As Hindu–Muslim relations deteriorated the Sufis threw in their lot with the establishment unequivocally.70 In Awadh, in the 1660s, a similar pattern of bloody clashes between non-Muslim zamindars and Saiyids and Sufis is recorded. Baiswara was a ‘region of infidelity’ and the religious divines had always been at war with the Bais zamindars, a war they had been unable to win. The zamindars of Harha and the Chauhan and Gaur zamindars captured and harassed the Saiyids and religious divines, devastating their settlements.71 Large numbers of saints and their followers had to flee from the area. These conflicts may have been to an extent due to competition for land but we cannot disregard the language and vocabulary of cultural struggle employed by the combatants—the rebellious zamindars and Sufi Shaikhs in the countryside. The one attacked the other as ‘infidels’ and ‘Muslims’ and the khankahs had to move away from such areas. The historical analysis of ‘religion’ as a motif and ‘religious conflict’ as a category for medieval India is focused on a wrong problem. These were not religious conflicts but very worldly confrontations negotiating 69

Ibid., p. 234. Ibid., pp. 237–39. 71 Muzaffar Alam, ‘Religion and Politics in Awadh Society’, pp. 18–20. 70

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power relationships in culture and society, employing religious but more often, cultural symbolism. The difference between ‘inner culture’ and outer or ‘public culture’ is the difference between metaphysics and ideology, a philosophy of belief and a discourse of power. Akbar the ‘crowned Sufi’ mirrored the coexistence of both. He saw the contention between Muslims and Hindus had increased to a point where he had to solve it.72 For this purpose, he, clearly, saw the Sufis as the most helpful force in establishing equilibrium in a strife-torn society. As ‘the great forerunner of secular nationalists’ he sought solutions in encouraging translations of each other’s religious texts and religious debates. This was the metaphysical solution. The sociological reality of power relations on the other hand, though mediated by many concerns and expediencies, demands that the discourse of power must present itself in the language of cultural power. Abul Fazl quotes a letter from Akbar to Abd Allah Khan Uzbeg which exemplifies this: as a result of his conquests, said Akbar, ‘the places of worship of unbelievers and heretics have become mosques and shrines for the faithful and Hindu armies and others have become submissive’.73 The elements of interaction between Hindus and Muslims that have been glorified as a ‘composite culture’ were, in Iqbal’s mind, the remnants of the failed experiments of Akbar and Kabir. The experiments were rejected by the great religious groupings and shrivelled into ‘syncretisms’ instead of taking root and nurturing an emotional and psychological homogeneity which could inspire the will to create a nation.74 Sensitive minds, such as Mohammad Iqbal’s, were rivetted to the question of power. He is said to have greatly regretted that India failed to carry on the lead given by Kabir and Akbar. The reasons for this failure he said were the suspicion of each other’s intentions and the tendencies to dominate each other.75 In other words, the suspicions that are generated by the cultural faultline and the dominance that tends to flow from the struggle for cultural hegemony. Just as the Sufis were, effectively, the channels through which Islamic cultural hegemony penetrated the masses, the Bhakti sants were the conduits forcing hegemonic ties (as opposed to dominant/subordinate) 72

Peter Hardy, ‘Abul Fazl’s Portrait of the Perfect Padshah’, p. 121. Ibid., p. 129. 74 Aziz Ahmed, Islamic Modernism in India and Pakistan, Oxford, 1967. 75 Shamloo, Speeches and Statements of Iqbal, Lahore, 1944, p. 30. 73

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between Brahmanical culture and the people. When we characterise them as channels of hegemony they must not be seen in an instrumentalist manner. The internal contest of the Sufis (who expressed knowledge as power) and the Ulama (who expressed power as knowledge) was not insignificant. Likewise, the internal contest between the Brahman pandit and the Bhaktas was consistent. The anti-caste, anti-Brahman rhetoric of the Bhakti sants was, in effect, a re-adjustment of relationships of power within non-Islamic caste society—in short a cultural strategy. Somewhat differently, the Sufis’ practical disagreement with the high theologians which was manifest in their separate institutional life in the khankahs and silsilahs was a cultural strategy for exercising hegemonic influence in the milieu which surrounded them. Of course, the form and content of both Islamic-Sufi and Brahmanical ideologues changed and adjusted correspondingly, changing the nature but not the fact of power relations in society. We need to recognise the Sufi and Bhakti cultural strategies as modes of cultural integration and, simultaneously, as channels of hegemony integral to the ideological influence of Islam and Brahmanism and to locate them in the interplay or power between them. Mohammad Iqbal saw the rise and growth of Sufism as developing ‘under influences of a non-Islamic character’ and as chiefly responsible for the ‘conservative thinkers (of Islam)’ who sought to ‘utilise the binding force of Shariat, and to make the structure of their legal system as rigorous as possible’.76 This observation pointed towards the internal dynamic of Islam and its inner struggle between what we call revisionism and dogmatism. This was the ‘inner party’ struggle between the advocates of a discourse of domination and the exponents of a discourse of hegemony. The Sufis’ hegemonic activity was actually on the terrain of cultural contest and the Bhakti and Sant traditions met it halfway. This meeting of two bridges with their own internality, has been labelled ‘syncretism’ in the sense of a mixing and merging of cultures. However, it was not a synthesis but a cultural contest for hegemony. Contest here, does not mean strife and war—war occurs only when the discourse of domination takes over in the interplay of power.

76

Mohammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Delhi, 1974, p. 150.

126 Culture, Community and Power

The eminent Sufi, Shah Abd al-Aziz, saw British power extending towards both northern and southern India, but more catastrophic for him were the Sikh invasions: ‘The incursions of Sikhs, Marathas and Jats into Muslim territories, and their plundering of Muslim property and rape of Muslim women have made the heart and soul uneasy. The entire doab has been devastated by the hoofs of these wicked people’s horses.’ His disciple, Barelwi, not surprisingly, led a jihad against the Sikhs and not the British.77 ‘Islam arrived in India as an idea whose institutionalisation was first that of a state: conquest, dominion, power, social order, were the forms around which primarily it clustered.’78 The culturally expansive Islam which sought hegemony through the Sufi discourse was on the organisational level a parallel order that gave Islam its structure apart from the state. Consequently, when the dogmatic attack began the Sufi structure was bound to be under intense pressure. If it did not make an orderly retreat it would tend to lose the banner of Islam and have anathema pronounced against it. The only plea it had was that it was actually Islamising the lifestyle of ordinary Muslims while the Ulama claimed it was compromising Islamic precepts and theology. Logically, therefore, ‘it was in the end the Sufis who called a halt to what eventually seemed the excessively Sufistic trend of Indian Islam’.79 The crucial role played by the ideologues of dogmatic Islam—as a closed ideological system—such as Baqi Billah and Shaikh Sirhindi is very important in another context. That context is the fact that the community, the effective group in Muslim society to begin with, chose during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to move in this direction, rather than in the revisionist direction.80 If the role of the effective leader and ideologue is seen in his grasping the inner movement of his society and strengthening certain feasible tendencies then one must consider that Baqi Billah and Sirhindi were expressing and formalising the anxieties of their cultural community and the probable solutions to them. 77

S.A.A. Rizvi, Shah Abd Al-Aziz, Australia, 1982, p. 79. W.C. Smith, On Understanding Islam, The Hague/Paris/New York, 1981, p. 203. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., p. 185. For a very weak and superficial argument against paying any attention to Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi and Shah Waliullah, on the grounds that they were attached to ‘the ruling classes’ and had their ‘eyes fixed upon the kings and nobles’, see, Irfan M. Habib, ‘The Political Role of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi and Shah Waliullah’, in K.M. Shrimali (ed.), Essays in Indian Art, Religion and Society, Delhi, 1987, pp. 219–35. 78

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‘Probable solutions’ because they promised to remove confusion and a sense of cultural diffuseness, thus, leading to soothing those anxieties. The anxieties themselves can only be located in the concept of a cultural faultline—howsoever blurred it had become in the thirteenth–fourteenth centuries. The ideologues had but to dig around the faultline to uncover its edges and, in the process, were bound to produce the trench—with their use of cultural-religious history and memory to build a trenchant, dogmatic critique of Islamic revisionism and its practices. That ‘a broad socio-cultural movement was on foot’81 in Indian medieval society is illustrated not only in the symptomatic roles of Sirhindi or Aurangzeb, the ideologue and the ruler. In the field of education it was evident in the founding of the Firangi Mahal at Lucknow as an attempt at Islamic consolidation. On the other side of the cultural faultline, the Bhakti movement which epitomised a socio-cultural movement saw the Nanak-panth grow over into the Khalsa as a counter-hegemonic drive against dogmatic Islam allied to military and state power.82 Aziz Ahmed writes: ‘[T]he transformation of Sikhism from an eclectic faith … into a fanatically anti-Muslim militant group idealising destruction, is perhaps the most tragic instance of the failure of syncretism in India.’83 However, in the context of what W.C. Smith calls the ‘broad socio-cultural movement’ and the ferment that characterised it, ‘syncretism’ is only a euphemism for practical coexistence in everyday life—it should not be seen as a cultural–ideological phenomenon. It was, basically, the survival of folk, popular religion which was imbued with animism and had gathered Hindu as well as Islamic accretions. The struggle of the ideologues was, essentially, and rather successfully, to bring these popular practices under their own cultural banner, modify but not alter each detail of belief and practice. As a matter of fact, sociocultural ferment unleashed further cultural contests, however, no longer in the old way which were upheld by elites and ruling groups in a binary opposition between Islam and Brahmanism. Now the contests involved greater numbers, the followers of Bhakti cults, the followers of the sants 81

Ibid., p. 189. Karine Schomer and W.H. McLeod (eds), The Sants, pp. 229–49. Also see W.C. Smith, p. 178, cited above for the interrelations of Islamic and Sikh developments as two facets of a single development and the formalisation of Sikhism into a system; D.S. Sharma, Hinduism through the Ages, Bombay, 1961, for various schools of Hinduism hardening into sects during A.D. 1400–1750. 83 Aziz Ahmed, Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment, p. 155. 82

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and gurus, and the followers of Waliullah and Barelwi. The numbers of the combatants, of course, were to dramatically increase en masse only in the colonial situation with the new opportunities it offered. The socio-cultural ferment of Bhakti eclecticism has been precisely seen as ‘paving the way for anti-Muslim militarism’. The example cited is Tukaram, the Maharashtrian sant, who was comparable to Kabir in his concept of God and worship. His effective role, however, as a contemporary of Shivaji and the main inspirer of the spirit which welded the Marathas into a people leading to a successful mobilisation of counterhegemony under Shivaji has been observed.84 Thus, divergent readings and reconstructions of Bhakti ideas were possible as Shivaji showed by utilising Tukaram’s culturally integrationist role for non-Muslim society, by mobilising the Maratha masses under ‘Hindu pad-Padshahi’ on one side of the cultural faultline. As a result, the Sufi cultural hegemony and Bhakti cultural resistance to both, dogmatic Brahmanism and dogmatic Islam, a war fought by transcendent means was transformed into a struggle for cultural hegemony. This process of welding the Maharashtrian people into a support base for cultural counter-hegemony has been seen originating much earlier in fact. Eknath Maharaj, the sixteenth century Bhakti sant, provided a universalising belief system across elite ruling ideology and mass popular culture (the Sanskritic tradition and non-Sanskritised lower classes) into a devotional circle of belief. Eknath’s philosophical and ideological thrust can, in this context, be seen as an aspect of the cultural resistance of non-Muslim society on one side of the cultural faultline which was easily appropriated by the Maratha kingdom.85 The general socio-cultural milieu of the non-Islamic cultural enclosure decisively influenced what constructions or reconstructions were open to the cultural ideologues and the political formations that they legitimated. It was this milieu that led Guru Nanak to place equally the ‘Sufis under the same condemnation as the conventional qazis and mullahs’.86 The general perception of the Sufis’ role could only be that of extending the state’s hegemony under the banner of Islam and, thus, associated with the power

84

Ibid., pp. 150–66. Eleanor Zelliot, ‘Eknath’s Bharuds: The Sant as a Link between Cultures’, in The Sants, p. 91. 86 W.H. McLeod, Guru Nanak and the Sikh Religion, Oxford, 1968, p. 68. 85

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contests ongoing in society. In other words, the Sufis did not represent a break from the ideology in the name of which power was exercised. As Nanak reminded the Sufis, a true darvish abandons everything, God alone is everlasting and ‘neither the Veda nor the Ketab know the mystery’. To live up to these precepts the Sufis would have to abandon the revenue-free lands granted by the rulers for their service to the Ketab. Otherwise, said Nanak, they were like the ‘mouse which itself is too big to enter the hole and yet ties a winnowing basket to its tail’.87

87

Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab, p. 34.

Chapter 6

The State in Medieval North India and the Cultural Faultline

It was in India that Islam faced its most interesting set of challenges. Confronted with a well-established and sophisticated civilisation, it had to substantially adjust to it in its search for a new stable polity. The nature of this new polity which was established during the thirteenth century and flourished until the beginning of the eighteenth century has been a question of considerable controversy among the scholars. Some of the scholars have characterised this period as ‘Muslim rule’1 while others have sought to dispute it without, however, replacing it with a more satisfactory characterisation. Such analyses invariably underline the fact that ‘Muslim rule in India’ did not destroy the ancient culture of India, as did the onslaughts of the Muslims in Persia. One reading of medieval India is as follows: Under the rule of some of the Delhi Sultans of the middle ages there was persecution, and we read of temples being razed to the ground and Brahmans put to death for practicing their religion in public, but in 1

A.L. Basham, The Wonder That was India, Vol. I, London, 1954. This notion of ‘Muslim rule’ is also retained by S.A.A. Rizvi, The Wonder That Was India, Vol. II: A Survey of the History and Culture of the Indian Sub-Continent from the Coming of the Muslims to the British Conquest, 1200–1700, London, 1987.

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general the Muslims were reasonably tolerant, and at all times Hindu chiefs continued to rule in outlying areas, paying tribute to their Muslim overlords. There were numerous conversions to Islam, though this was restricted to a few particular regions. Hindus in those parts of India dominated by Muslims often accepted the situation as normal. In such conditions mutual influence was inevitable. Hindus began to learn Persian, the official language of their Muslim rulers, and Persian words found their way into the vernaculars. Well-to-do Hindu families often adopted the system of ‘strict parda’ from the Muslims, and made their women veil their faces in public. Nevertheless, the Muslim invasions and the enforced contact with new ideas did not have the fertilising effect on Hindu culture which might have been expected. Hinduism was already very conservative when the Lieutenants of Muhammad of Gaur conquered the Ganges valley.2

Apart from ignoring the questions of cultural clash such an analysis even flattens the internal contradictions. Consequently, an important fact gets almost ignored or distorted. Here was a classic situation of ‘resistance without protest’3 where the weapons which the weak employed for putting up cultural resistance have been dismissed as conservatism, and a reluctance to assimilate new fertilising ideas. There are situations when human beings come to a realisation that any open and organised resistance was almost invariably doomed to defeat and eventual massacre. While the patient, silent struggles, stubbornly carried on over the years, would accomplish more than the violent insurrections—those flashes in the pan.4 The resistance was not to Islam as a ‘religion’ but as a discourse of power. For example, when Sultan Firuz (1351–88) imposed jizya on Brahmans they protested and resorted to hunger strikes, but the Sultan did not relent.5 Though this poll tax naturally hit the poorest section most, it was probably also the source of resentment for the non-Muslims in general. 2 This is the first part of a long quotation from. A.L. Basham (Vol. I) cited by S.A.A. Rizvi at the beginning of his above mentioned book to provide a sort of perspective to his second volume of The Wonder That Was India, pp. XVII–XVIII. 3 James C. Scott, ‘Resistance Without Protest and Without Organisation: Peasant Opposition to the Islamic Zakat and the Christian Tithe’, Journal of Comparative Society and History, 1987. Also see Scott. Weapons of the Weak. New Haven/London. 1985. 4 Marc Bloch, French Rural History: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics, Berkeley. 1970, pp. 170–71. 5 Rizvi, The Wonder That Was India, Vol. II, p. 182.

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The outcry and demonstrations by Hindus of Delhi, particularly the artisans, money-lenders, and cloth merchants, were of no avail. Several Hindu demonstrators were trampled to death under the feet of the elephants and horses, and ultimately they surrendered. The literary evidence suggests that the Muslim Jizya collectors were generally harsh ….6

A cultural resistance is a sort of clandestine, undeclared war beneath the surface which always falls short of riot and rebellion. It stops short of the more dangerous forms of protest and confrontation and manifests itself more as repetition of habits and dogmatically observed ritual practices in everyday life. In the middle ages, for every tolerant and progressive teacher there must have been hundreds of orthodox Brahmans, who looked upon themselves as the preservers of the immemorial Aryan Dharma against the barbarians who overran the holy land of Bharatavarsha. Under their influence the complex rules of the Hindu way of life became if anything stricter and more rigidly applied.7

Cultural resistance is a quiet piecemeal process where the aim of those who are struggling to survive is to work the system to their minimum disadvantage.8 In this context coexistence and flexible accommodation are in actuality the forms of everyday resistance. The limits of such resistance are fluid and subject to constant testing and pressure. But just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly a coral reef, so do thousands of individual acts of dogmatic ritual behaviour and evasion create a cultural barrier reef of their own.9 Here was a sort of permanent conspiracy of those whom we may call ‘the weak’ against those who believed themselves to be ‘strong’ notwithstanding the participation of many of the subalterns in the structure of governance. Even the movements of social protest led by Kabir (1425–1505), a poor weaver of Banaras, and Nanak (1469–1539), a teacher of the Punjab, who taught faith in one God, and opposed

6

Ibid., p. 183. Basham. The Wonder That was India, 1954, quoted in S.A.A. Rizvi, op. cit., p. XVIII. 8 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Peasants and Politics’, Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1973. 9 Scott, ‘Resistance Without Protest’, p. 422. 7

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idolatry and caste practices, need to be placed in this context of cultural resistance. It was an attempt to occupy an autonomous space between the two sets of dogmas—the dogmas of the ‘weak’ and the dogmas of the ‘strong’—for those who were culturally oppressed by both. The historians of peasant resistance have argued that if social movements, in the strict sense, are rarely found among peasants, this is in large part the result of a prudent, calculated, and historically tested choice favouring other strategies more attuned to the particular social structure, strengths and defensive capacities of this group. The choice of forms of resistance which do not involve observable protest and organisation is based on the premise that persistent practice of invisible acts of insubordination underwritten by a sub-culture of complicity can achieve many, if not all, of the results aimed at by social movements. ‘It is also extremely rare,’ writes James C. Scott, … that officials of the state wish to publicise the insubordination. To do so would be openly to confess that their policy is unpopular and, above all, to expose the tenuousness of their authority in the countryside. Thus the nature of the acts themselves and the self-interested muteness of the antagonists conspire to create a complicitous silence that is reflected in the historical record.10

Scholars have observed a strange kind of ‘silence’ on the part of Hindu authors about their Muslim contemporaries. Perhaps this fact of deliberately ignoring the ‘objective reality’ was an expression of wish fulfilment designed as a programme of survival. It could be an act of denying space to the ‘other’ in one’s imagination and fantasy. Since India possessed an accumulated practical heritage of peasant folk culture it seems natural that such a culture should have encouraged resistance in the form of habits and practices in everyday life. Let us look at jizya11 in this context. To limit the discussion of jizya to the domain of political economy is to completely miss the range of its cultural semiotics. More than an economic imposition it was an attempt to proclaim the cultural superiority of Islam over non-Muslims in too brazen a fashion. ‘The object is their humiliation 10

Scott, op. cit., p. 422. Income from jizya has been reckoned at about 15 per cent of the total income. ‘Thus, the yield’, writes Satish Chandra, ‘from Jizyah was not a negligible sum’. Satish Chandra, Mughal Religious Policies, New Delhi, 1993, pp. 173, 174. 11

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and the (establishment of) prestige and dignity of the Muslims.’12 Here was a situation where the people were willing to submit politically and economically because of their powerlessness to put up open resistance. Yet they were not willing to abandon their gods. Violence, even unbriddled violence, could crush only military forms of resistance. It could not but be equally helpless and powerless in the face of resistance which is without organised protest, ‘In particular,’ writes Satish Chandra, ‘the Hindus had stubbornly clung to their faith despite the prevalence of Muslim rule in large parts of the country for over four hundred years. During most of this period, they were required to pay Jizya’.13 B.S. Sonavane narrates an hagiographical account of an encounter between Eknath, a sixteenth century Marathi bhakti poet, and a Muslim. The incidence is given by Sonavane as an example of Eknath’s forbearance and determination (sahansilta) when he was confronted with an hostile and humiliating situation.14 Nath was on his way home after taking a bath in the Ganga (Godavari river). A Muslim after chewing a pan spat on him. Nath, without uttering a word went back to the river and took his bath. He again encountered the Muslim who, it seems, was waiting for the freshly bathed Eknath’s arrival only to spit on him. These acts of spitting and bathing went on for a while. A crowd gathered to see who would win the ‘contest’. In the end the Muslim gave up spitting and withdrew shamefacedly.

Even when provoked by demolition of their temples and killing of animals venerated by them, they were not willing to be drawn out in open retaliation and combat. Was it not a proof, and also a necessary and sufficient condition, for entertaining the belief on the part of the ruling elite, especially the religious elite, that the infidel populace lived in utter fear. But was it fear or a deliberately designed strategem of denying the state an easily discernible target? Fear eats the soul and permanent fear eats it permanently: moreover, fearful human beings could not have 12 Maktubat-i-Mulla Ahmad, I, Part 3, p. 84, Quoted by S.R. Sharma, The Religious Policy of the Mughal Emperors, New Delhi, 1972, p. 68. 13 Satish Chandra, Jizyah and the State in India during the 17th Century’, in his Mughal Religious Policies, p. 172. 14 Quoted by N.K. Wagle in his article, ‘Hindu–Muslim Interactions in Medieval Maharashtra’, in G.D. Sontheimer and Herman Kulke (eds), Hinduism Reconsidered, Delhi, 1989, p. 64.

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continued to love their gods and insisted on not exchanging them for worldly rewards. Also a fearful human being could not have maintained his sanity and control over his immediate social environment for long let alone continue to participate in the normal activities of daily life. But this strategic inward withdrawal was premised on the shared knowledge that a major interest of all rulers was stability and peace so as to ensure an uninterrupted appropriation of economic surplus. At moments, even if a ruler desired to convert those over whom he ruled to his own faith, it was precisely to ensure this stability and peace, security and identification. After willing submission and conformity to the political order had been openly declared one could confidently appeal to a ruler’s sense of protection and justice. ‘Thus we have the incongruous sight,’ writes Irfan Habib, ‘of a Hindu agent of a Hindu Jagirdar extorting Jizyah, a tax the theoretical purpose of which was to show the superiority of the faithful over the infidels.’15 The fact that it was collected by employing the most ‘barbarous rigour imaginable’ meant that the psychological implications of its imposition could not but have gone beyond the merely ‘theoretical purpose’. The purpose was to draw a line of division in society and enable the population to internalise the perceptions of ‘inferiority’ and ‘superiority’. On one side of the division were all those (rich and poor)—‘Hindus’ or ‘infidels’—who always carried with them the ‘badge of the inferior and dependent status’ wherever they went. On the other side were those privileged sections of society who were expected to look upon the state as ‘their state’. We are told by one of the historians that this generated ‘enthusiasm’, ‘opinion’, and ‘sentiment’ in the population which could be mobilised one way or the other.16 This could not but have led to the creation of two mutually contradictory wider cultural identities.17 But the sociological question, of how many embraced such wider identities, would not be easy to answer. This was also an attempt to create a ‘social basis’ for the state. Once the fundamentally Islamic character of the state had to be granted in theory, the state had to define its social basis more in cultural terms and less in economic terms. The increase or decrease in the number of Hindus in 15 Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India: 1556–1707, Bombay, 1963, p. 99. 16 Satish Chandra, Mughal Religious Policies, pp. 180, 183. 17 ‘There were the religious traditions coming from ancient India, which by Mughal times began to be described under the term “Hindu”.’ Irfan Habib, ‘Akbar and His Age’, Social Scientist, Vol. 20, Nos 9–10, September–October 1992, p. 68.

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the various echelons of the nobility did not make any difference to this ‘strategic location’ of the state.18 Such a ‘location’ was a sine qua non for the existence of the medieval Indian state. If required the rulers could pursue tactical policies which contradicted the ‘strategic logic’ of the state in order to create a different ideological equilibrium. But even this shifting equilibrium could not be allowed to transcend the point where it completely neutralised this ‘strategic location’.19 Athar Ali has shown that the number of Hindus in the various echelons of the nobility did not decline, but actually increased after 1679. From this he draws the conclusion that Aurangzeb was not anti-Hindu. We are of the opinion that it is wrong to pose the question of ‘social basis’ of the state in terms of the ruler’s personal disposition at a particular moment in time. The Muslim rulers were not anti-Hindu but they had to conform their policies to the framework of the state. If the ‘strategic location’ of the state itself was ‘cultural’ rather than ‘economic’, then the ruler could make only tactical changes so long he was not willing to disrupt this ‘strategic location’.20 It could not but be common sense that forced conversions would fail to serve this political purpose. Genuine conversions could happen only through persuasion, and that presupposed a cultural dialogue and openness on both sides. It implied that one was not only trying to influence the others one-sidedly but was also equally open to the power and influence of others’ arguments.21 That is, even when it possessed immense

18

M. Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb, Bombay, 1966, p. 31. Abul Fazl mentions in the Ain-i Akbari that Akbar ‘occasionally’ joined namaz to ‘hush the slandering tongues of the bigots of the present age’. It is a candid admission of the fact that, towards 1601, Akbar’s beliefs and his attitude towards namaz were being widely criticised by his ideological adversaries. This, perhaps, made him concerned about the reaction of the common Muslims forcing him to soften his attitude on the performance of namaz from around 1601 onwards.’ Iqtidar Alam Khan, ‘Akbar’s Personality Traits and World Outlook: A Critical Reappraisal’, Social Scientist, Vol. 20, Nos 9–10, September–October 1992, p. 28. 20 It seems that there are two types of states in history: One type is based on the stratification created through ‘cultural policies’ while the other conforms to the logic of the ‘framework of political economy’. Today, the South African state is a state of the first type. 21 For a detailed discussion of such a dialogue in the Awadh region see Muzaffar Alam, ‘Competition and Co-existence: Indo-Islamic Interaction in Medieval North India’, in India and Indonesia: General Perspectives, Special Issue, Leiden, 1989, pp. 37–59. 19

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political power, Islam could not avoid entering into a contest for cultural hegemony. This contest was about power, about the right to define things, to impose a moral vision, to make institutions reflect ‘what ought to be’. Within two centuries, and Akbar recognised it openly, the realisation began to dawn that the hard face of Islam could appropriate only the ‘worldly India’. The fact that there were thousands who were willing to pay jizya, not only for themselves but also for poor Brahmans, clearly demonstrated Islam’s helplessness to displace the cultural practices of the non-Muslim population.22 However, life could not have been lived under conditions of complete helplessness and powerlessness without developing qualities of patience, restraint and steadfast calmness; without casting the worldly events in the mould of spiritual events, i.e., trials and tribulations through which God was testing the devotion of his bhaktas. The heritage of yogic practices developed for mental training through the centuries and philosophies of renunciation might have proved a perennial source of solace in these times. This provided the basis for the growth of new ideologies of self-worth and self-esteem thereby generating the cultural resources to withstand the pressures of everyday life. These ideologies provided powerful rationale to face with fortitude any sense of worldly loss. One might not be in a position to turn the world upside down but one could certainly acquire this inversion in one’s own mind and share a common world of fantasy with like-minded others. One was a slave as long as one shared one’s values with the master and sought his recognition. If one could not be a master and be free in the real world one could at least achieve a sense of individual freedom by genuinely imbibing these new values of inversion. The Bhakti cults embodied this inversion. The dogmatic commitment of various Hindu castes to their cultural rituals in the face of many odds did not fail to create a sneaking sense of admiration even in the minds of their opponents. ‘The Brahman’s adherence to his faith was amazing and so was his silent but stubborn resistance.’23 In his conversations Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya recounts

22

The exact incidence of the jizya on each section is not easy to compute. A modern estimate is that the city labourer had to pay about one month’s wage in the year as jizya. Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, Bombay, 1963, pp. 246–47. 23 Muzaffar Alam, ‘Competition and Co-existence: Indo-Islamic Interaction in Medieval North India’, p. 48.

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a story about a Brahman who possessed untold wealth. The Wali (administrator) of that town forcibly took away all his wealth from him, reducing him to a pauper. The Brahman, however, expressed no grief, let alone protest, over the loss. He would instead appear to be happy. To the query of a friend of his as to how he managed to be so unconcerned even after he had lost all his belongings, the Brahman replied that his Brahmanical thread was still with him. ‘The anecdote,’ notes M. Alam, ‘certainly has a bearing upon the existing situation, even if the Shaikh related it to console his disciple, Amir Hasan, who was distressed and rightly so far having not received his overdue emoluments’. On another occasion, the Shaikh observed, reportedly with tears in his eyes, that ‘the heart of these people (Hindus) is not changed through one’s sermons. However, if some of them are persuaded to join the company of some pious man, they may become Muslims.’24 In 1658, when Aurangzeb was camping outside Agra and had rejected all Shah Jehan’s invitations to visit him, fearing for his own safety, Shah Jehan shut the fort gates on 16 June. Aurangzeb responded by stopping the supply of Jamuna water. Shah Jehan himself, sick of drinking the bitter well water in the fort, wrote a pathetic letter complaining to Aurangzeb:25 Praise be the Hindus in all cases As they ever offer water to their dead, And thou, my son, art a marvellous Mussalman, As thou causest me in life to lament for (lack of) water.

This mode of comparing the Muslim with the infidel and shaming the former into righteous action was later to be used by Iqbal in the twentieth century. However, the point which we want to emphasise is that the form of cultural resistance on the part of various Hindu castes played an active part in shaping the patterns of political and cultural hegemony. Such resistance needs to be looked upon as a form of action and participation in the evolution of a new political and cultural system. The questions regarding the character of the Mughal state have been generally posed in ‘either–or’ terms. For example:26 24

Cited in M. Alam, op. cit., p. 49. Quoted in S.A.A. Rizvi, Vol. II, p. 130. 26 Akbar S. Ahmed, Pakistan Society, New Delhi, 1986, p. 6. 25

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Was Aurangzeb the impartial Emperor of a polyethnic, multireligious state or the Muslim leader of the Muslim community in India, the Umma, exclusively treating non-Muslims as lowly conquered subjects? … Was Mughal India, for Muslims, the ideal state, madinat al-tamma, or the imperfect state, madinat al-nagisa? If the latter, was India the dar al harb, the land of war, as distinct from dar al Islam, the land of Islam?

In this sort of historiographical approach it is implied that the state could not be conceptualised as a system where these contradictions located themselves in a series of shifting equilibriums. Over the years three broadly conflicting historiographies have emerged to explain and comprehend the realities of state and society in medieval India. One approach reduces history to an open conflict between Hindus and Muslims and the activities of the state are supposed to be solely guided by religious considerations. No wonder, the state emerges in such analyses as a conversion machinery and an instrument to bring Hindus under Islamic domination. It was a different matter if the state, it is argued, failed in fulfilling its chosen mission because of formidable Hindu resistance. While for others, informed by different ideological inclinations, the medieval period saw the evolution and efflorescence of a composite culture to which medieval rulers, nobles, Sufis and Persian and Urdu poets contributed significantly.27 The perspective of cultural hegemony which subsumes both these contradictory processes within a single totality is thus split into two independent, mutually exclusive perspectives opposed to each other. Under the influence of the ‘Aligarh School’ a third approach began to crystallise in the 1960s. In this culture-neutral historiography based on the assumptions of ‘political economy’ the medieval state and society emerge as a series of interconnected institutions regulated by the pulls and pressures of appropriation of economic surplus and its distribution. In certain cases production relations are focused upon to lay bare the mechanisms of exploitation of the peasantry and its implications for the overall functioning of the political system.28 In their writings, and writings 27

Muzaffar Alam, ‘Competition and Co-existence’, p. 37. A large volume of work has been done by these scholars, all of which need not be mentioned here. Their major works, however, can be referred to Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India: 1556–1707, Bombay, 1963; Habib, An Atlas of the Mughal Empire, Delhi, 1982; S. Nurul Hasan, Some Thoughts on Agrarian Relations in Mughal India, Delhi, 1973; M. Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb, Bombay, 28

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of many others influenced by them, a portrait of the ‘Mughal System’ is projected in which the role of religion and culture is almost bracketed out and thus marginalised. The variety of analyses attempted centre on the ability or inability of the state to appropriate a large portion of the economic surplus; the functional problems faced in the enforcement of uniformity of government in all parts of the empire to sustain a systematically centralised state of truely gigantic proportions. The Cambridge Economic History of India represents the summing up of this approach in which the economic processes have been explored as if they were operating in a religio-culturally neutral environment.29 It seems that the shifts in historiographical trends occur not only as a reaction to the earlier historiography but also as a result of changes in the academic discipline globally coupled with a tacit and complicated response to the contemporary socio-political situation. To what extent the rise of this new trend was a sort of belated response to the ideological needs of the post-independence state’s developmental agenda carried on under the flag of ‘secular nationalism’ is problematic. Starting with Burton Stein and Frank Perlin, scholars have now begun to question this schema of highly centralised character of the medieval Indian state.30 Their questions, directed at the levels of social organisation of production, surplus extraction and the formation of local socio-political elites, reveal that the formation of state in medieval India was a far more complex process.31 Similarly, Muzaffar Alam and C.A. Bayly have unveiled the subtle intricacies of state and society in India during the 1966; Ali, The Apparatus of Empire, Delhi, 1985; N.A. Siddiqi, Land Revenue Administration under the Mughals, 1700–1750, Bombay, 1970; Medieval India—A Miscellany, 4 Vols, Bombay, 1969–77; Irfan Habib, ‘Potentialities of Capitalistic Development in the Economy of Mughal India’, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. XXIX, No. 1, 1969; Irfan Habib, ‘The Technology and Economy of Mughal India’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. XVII, No. 1, 1980; M. Athar Ali, ‘The Passing of Empire: The Mughal Case’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. IX, No. 3, 1975; Shireen Moosvi, The Economy of the Mughal Empire c. 1595: A Statistical Study, New Delhi, 1987. 29 Irfan Habib and Tapan Raychaudhuri (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. I, Cambridge, 1982. 30 Burton Stein, Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India, Delhi, 1980; Frank Perlin, ‘Concept of Order and Comparison, with a Diversion on Counter Ideologies and Corporate Institutions in Late Pre-colonial India’, in T.J. Byres and Harbans Mukhia (eds), Feudalism and Non-European Societies, London, 1985, pp. 87–165. 31 Burton Stein, ‘State Formation and Economy Reconsidered’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3, 1985, pp. 387–413; ‘Politics, Peasants and the Reconstruction of

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seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively. M. Alam scrutinises the manner in which the Mughal state was being transformed in the very region that was considered integral to its survival while Bayly’s work is primarily concerned with social and economic changes occurring in parts of upper India between 1770 and 1870.32 Alam’s conclusion that the efforts of the nobles in the first half of the eighteenth century towards independent political alignments with the zamindars in order to carve out their own fortunes invites us to look upon the origins of the ultimate fragmentation of the Mughal empire in a different perspective. But the earlier emphasis on economy to the exclusion of religio-cultural issues is still evident in these new advances. For example, Muzaffar Alam still conceives the Mughal state merely as a ‘co-ordinating agency between conflicting communities and various indigenous socio-political systems at different levels’.33 Some recent monographs (in particular two by Douglas Streusand and Stephen Blake) seem to mark a departure from the earlier trend. They invoke comparative perspective by their frequent reference to the Ottoman and Safavid states.34 Perhaps, today, no researcher, not even the historians belonging to the ‘Aligarh School’, would disagree with the idea that the Mughal state should be seen ‘not as a finished product in 1600, but as a state that was still evolving, and struggling to come to grips with a variety of local and regional institutional regimes.35 Also, a ‘wider approach’ would require that the formation of the Mughal state be placed in a ‘larger Asian context’ and investigations should be directed towards exploring its relationship Feudalism in Medieval India’, in Byres and Mukhia (eds), Feudalism and Non-European Societies, London, 1985, pp. 54–86; R. Champakalakshmi, ‘Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India: A Review Article’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. XVIII, Nos 3 and 4, pp. 411–26; D.N. Jha, ‘Relevance of “Peasant State and Society” to Pallava-Chola Times’, Indian Historical Review, Vol. VII, Nos 1 and 2, pp. 74–94. 32 Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India, Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–1748, New Delhi, 1986. C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870, Cambridge, 1983. 33 Muzaffar Alam, op. cit., pp. 5–6. 34 Douglas Streusand, The Formation of the Mughal Empire, New Delhi, 1989; Stephen P. Blake, Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India, 1639–1739, Cambridge, 1991. 35 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘The Mughal State—Structure or Process? Reflections on Recent Western Historiography’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. XXIX, No. 3, 1992, p. 321.

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with ‘the institutions of the later Afghan states of north India’ as well as ‘the Central Asian roots of the Mughals’.36 But what is important, and a serious neglect from our point of view, is that this critique of the ‘Aligarh School’ remains within the same ‘economistic paradigm’, only more eager in pushing the idea of the ‘missing merchant’—the heart of the historiography which centres on ‘decentralised polity’ and ‘long-term trade linkages’. Sanjay Subrahmanyam criticises only the ‘structural aspects’ of this historiography but does not question the assumptions which make it a culture-neutral historiography. How does the ‘encounter’ of two civilisations and the fact of power relations between elites, cultures and communities enter into the formation of the institutional-ideological apparatus of the Mughal state thereby ensuring it an extraordinary stability? It is the posing of this question which underlines the specificity of the Mughal state as distinct from the Ottoman state. It is the memory of experience of these ‘power relations’ which continues to be of crucial importance even today. While the conceptualisation of the Mughal state as an extreme systematisation of administration37 is certainly an oversimplification but the big question still remains: how centralised was the Mughal state? Was it less or more centralised than, say, the Ottoman state? Sanjay Subrahmanyam is mistaken in his belief that answers to such questions can be satisfactorily given solely on the basis of ‘historical evidence’.38 It is futile to accuse, as he does, a particular group of historians of ‘ignoring or suppressing’ certain facets of the available evidence because ‘selection’ (which implies ‘ignoring’, ‘over or under estimation’, etc.) is inherent in the very methodology of constructing the ‘past’. In fact, this is precisely the point where ‘present’ (‘prevailing ambience’ of contemporary history) begins to enter into the construction of the ‘past’. Looked from this angle, it should be clear that the ‘extreme centralisation’ thesis arose within the ambience created by the nationalist project of building a modern centralised secular state in India capable of realising the ‘potentialities of capitalistic development’ by transforming the outdated ‘agrarian system’ and ‘property rights’ inherited from the ‘past’. Let it be stated here that apart from ‘cultural synthesis’, this thrust towards ‘centralisation’ appears in Nehru’s writings as one of the special 36

Ibid., p. 320. M. Athar Ali, ‘Towards an Interpretation of the Mughal Empire’, in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘The Mughal State’. 38 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, op. cit., p. 302. 37

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characteristics of India’s past history. Today, the strong aversion against the centralising tendencies of the contemporary Indian state has generated an intellectual ambience which invokes moods and disposition favouring ‘decentralisation’ and all that goes with it. It is the contestatory tendency of today which makes possible the assertion of a new contestatory ‘reading’ of the ‘past’. Therefore, it was not a question of ‘ignoring’ the ‘evidence’. Sanjay Subrahmanyam questions the nature of the sources (master-texts) of the ‘Aligarh School’ while simultaneously drawing their attention towards sources which he thinks are ‘alternative sources’. The form in which this occurs is the form of assertion—assertion that for a ‘proper understanding’ (whatever this might mean) of the evolution of ideology under Akbar, the ‘more important’ texts are Tarikh-i Alfi and Tarikh-i Khandan-i Timuriyya and not the Ain-i Akbari. The point which we want to emphasise is that all that a historian can do on the basis of ‘evidence’ (without taking up an ideological stance) is to point out the contestatory nature of various contradictory processes in the past. To go beyond this (i.e., to enter into the domain of assertion) would be to inject a heavy dose of ‘present’ (‘decentralisation’ and ‘globalisation’) into the construction of a ‘new medieval past’. It is this that Sanjay Subrahmanyam seems to be doing wittingly or unwittingly in this article. Apart from being other things, all imperial formations act as a centralising, coordinating agency and the Mughal state was no exception to it. But imperial states also bring together by force people belonging to diverse cultures, religions, and languages into a system of power relations within the framework of a guiding ideology; this ideology not only determines the overall direction of authority and subordination but also the codes of exercising power and social mobility. The economic activities of everyday life are reproduced within the constricting webs of these power relations regularly favouring some while simultaneously discriminating against the others.39 The defining ideology of the empire, inspired as it was by the theological and historical traditions of Islam, could not but pass through the contradictory processes of negotiation and adjustment in its search for a stable polity. It is a different matter that it failed to resolve its inner tensions—tensions produced by the need to gain legitimacy from 39 In commercial centres such as Gujarat, jizya yielded 3.5 per cent per annum of the total gross revenue of the province and was quite sufficient to provide the Ulama with a holy source of livelihood.

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the sources of inspiration and the requirement of evolving a peacefully functioning stable economy and polity by winning over sections of the non-Muslim population. Torn between the two polarities it constantly vacillated between them. Akbar chose one end of this polarity while Aurangzeb chose the opposite. Unlike the modern nation-states where the economy is separate and distinct, pre-modern economic relations were mediated through political, religious or kinship institutions.40 Maurice Godelier further clarifies this perspective by positing that economy is a field of activity that has both an exterior and an interior relationship to society. From the exterior point of view, the economy is a separate sector which could be analysed according to standard economic principles. From the interior point of view, economic processes take place within a larger context and may be described in terms of kinship, religion and politics.41 In other words, in pre-modern societies, religion, politics and economics are inseparably linked. Let us take one simple example: ‘The Mughals,’ writes S.A.A. Rizvi, ‘resorted to threats, intimidation, force, and rewards to control the zamindars. In an attempt to break the caste monopolies in certain areas, Aurangzeb, by a mixture of force and economic temptations, converted the more abdurate zamindars to Islam.’42 Islamic hegemony of the state did not mean that the non-Muslim traders were discriminated against, deliberately and systematically at all levels. Contrary to this, even within the framework of religiocultural restrictions, many of them could and did accumulate wealth. As Barni says, from the very beginning of the thirteenth century the Delhi Sultan’s aristocracy could save nothing and was always in debt. The Multanis (Hindu merchants) and Sahs (Hindu money-lenders), who advanced loans to the nobles against drafts on their iqta revenue, grew exceedingly rich. Besides charging exorbitant rates of interest, the money-lenders also received gifts from the debt-ridden aristocracy, in order to keep them quiet.43 It would be extraordinary if a heavily indebted noble was

40 Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arenberg and Harry W. Pearson (eds), Trade and Market in Early Empires, Glencoe, 1957. 41 ‘Peasant Strategies in Asian Societies: Moral and Rational Economic Approaches—A Symposium’, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 42, 1983, pp. 753–868. 42 S.A.A. Rizvi, Vol. II, p. 210. 43 S.A.A. Rizvi, Vol. II, p. 215.

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not sometimes pressed to provide political or other advantage to his creditor.44 But this accumulation of wealth in no way helped them to influence the state or seek social reputation in the domain of cultural activities. The fact that between 1648 and 1857, only 96 temples were erected in Shahjahanabad, twelve of which had inscriptions and could be dated, reveal their own story. Ten of these twelve were constructed during the British period (1803–57), the remaining two during the period of Mughal decline in the eighteenth century (1739–1803). No temple was constructed during the century of Shahjahanabad’s glory (1639–1739). Yet most of the temples were concentrated in the central bazaars near the homes of Khatri merchants. The lack of temple building in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries speaks of their cultural subordination.45 As opposed to this, during the period when the British took over, rajas and zamindars built about 100 temples in Ayodhya alone. Carnegy’s report of 1870 mentions an enormous growth of building activity in the period between 1850 and 1870 and importantly, it was sustained at a high level until the 1920s. Thus the new political set-up allowed a relatively fuller expression to the cultural activities of Hindus’ newly acquired prosperity. The fact that even the strongest of Hindus felt powerless and helpless in the face of a local ruler’s onslaught on their cultural practices points to their position of cultural vulnerability in the society. A temple of Chintaman was built by Shantidas, a Jain merchant around 1638, at a cost of Rs. 9 lakhs. In 1644–46, Aurangzeb, then Governor of Gujarat, converted it into a mosque, after defiling and desecrating it by killing a cow. The temple was however subsequently restored to the Jains under the orders of Emperor Shah Jehan. Shantidas had succeeded in saving the principal image and he built another temple for it in the city.46 If we look closely into this incident the complicity between the rulers and the Jains becomes obvious. Without the tacit consent of the Emperor, Shantidas would have never been allowed to remove the idol and

44 M.N. Pearson, ‘Political Participation in Mughal India’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. IX, No. 2, 1972, pp. 113–31. 45 Stephen P. Blake, ‘The Urban Economy in Pre-modern Muslim India: Shahjahanabad, 1639–1739’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 21, No. 3, 1987, pp. 447–71. 46 Indian Travels of Thevenot and Careri, New Delhi, 1949, pp. 13, 285.

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install it in a new temple. The policy of the state was not one of general destruction of temples and religious persecution. It was symbolic of declaring a particular area as Darul-al-Islam and conveying the message to other faiths that they were there on sufferance. It is clear that despite their strategic location in the Surat economy the Hindu merchants’ own cultural self-protection though negotiable was not unassailable. The atmosphere of cultural suffocation is further underlined by the Royal farman issued by Aurangzeb:47 1. Kolis in Gujarat do not allow Muslims to recite Friday prayers in Masjid. They should be dealt with (item 19). 2. Temples demolished in Ahmedabad and other parganas by Royal order, have been repaired and idol worship continues. Take action (item 20). 3. Hindus light lamps on Diwali in bazaars, light holi in every Chakla and Bazaar. They should not be allowed to do so (item 21). 4. Hinduisation of Id, Shab-i-Barat, etc., should be stopped. Animals moulded out of mud are sold in bazaars. No animal object be moulded (item 22). 5. Sales tax on cows should be imposed. One-fortieth of price from Muslims and two-fortieth from Hindus (item 28). 6. Imams and Muezzins should be appointed in Masjids of Bohras of bad religion and see to it that prayers are held five times a day. The building of a state in India with Islam as a discourse of power was faced with an inherent flaw. It started as the rule of an alien group of people over a vast population which had its own traditions of religion, culture and philosophy. The indigenous civilisational lifestyles could not but have attempted to absorb the newly arrived, even if they were rulers with strong convictions of their own. In other lands the Muslim minority, after establishing its domination, strengthened its position by winning over the overwhelming majority of the people to Islam and thus obliterating the distinction between the conquerors and inhabitants. Here, from the very beginning, the ‘integration principle’ began to operate in a reverse form seeking to transform the conquerors into inhabitants. The task of obliterating cultural alienation was stupendous but not an 47

Ali bin Mahmud al-Kirmani, Mirat-i-Ahmedi, translation by Syed Nawab Ali, Baroda, 1928, pp. 232–33.

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impossible one so long as the king was not determined to champion the cause of orthodox Sunnism in India and make it the dominant religion of the state. In other words, a form of Islam which did not identify itself with the state could easily be reconciled or brought within the already existing civilisational purview. It did not matter much so long as the Muslim superiority was purely in terms of administrative power because sooner or later it was bound to lose its monolithic character through mutual contest between various elite groups. It is true that the ruler could not do without a religious ideology to legitimise his actions but he could certainly choose the main motifs of this ideology, interpret it and give it an institutional direction. Slowly the rulers discovered that it was possible to successfully reconcile the population to the broad principles of their administration without, however, converting them to their creed. The sections of population, especially of the elites were willing to show loyalty to certain principles of governance. Yet the state evoked not that kind of loyalty which was based upon an identity of outlook and ideology, and which could have emerged only if the population was brought round to accept Islam. Thus two interconnected but analytically separable projects were underlined by the problems which stood in the way of converting a military garrison state into a socially stable and broad-based state: first, the need for an attempt to broaden the scope of loyalty by primarily emphasising efficacy and rationality of the principles of new governance where the ideological loyalties were given a secondary place; the second, while striving equally hard for the attainment of loyalty through material rewards to nonMuslims yet constantly keeping in view that a more desirable state of affairs would be to influence the people towards accepting Islam. The second project had embedded in it a different kind of self-consciousness, a self-consciousness highly imbued with orthodox Sunni Islam and its traditions. For the purpose of convenience we can label these projects as one of ‘revisionist Islam’ and the other of ‘dogmatic Islam’. Here were two different approaches towards the same ultimate goal, i.e., attaining a sense of closeness between the state and society. Even when it shared the policy of involving non-Muslim elites in the power structure, ‘dogmatic Islam’ chose cow-killing, forced conversions, demolition of temples, imposition of jizya and sometimes even extortion of women as the symbols of its self-identity and expression of its desire for cultural domination. It consciously sought to achieve something impossible, i.e., a state of cultural distance and political accommodation simultaneously. While ‘revisionist

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Islam’ rejected these symbols as symbols of Islamic prestige and glory and sought to define itself more in terms of open-ended Sufism. In its passage towards becoming a socially broad based state the state in medieval India was continuously caught between these two contending trends. During the Mughal era, especially under Akbar, it seems that the state had decisively moved in one direction in its search for stability. It was also under Akbar, that the ‘principles of governance’ sought to differentiate themselves as an autonomous system only remotely linked to the religious faith of the ruler. Therefore, it is more appropriate to characterise these principles as ‘Mughal hegemony’ as distinct from ‘Islamic domination’ associated with the symbols of ‘dogmatic Islam’. These contradictory trends were to take an identifiable pattern through the method of ‘trial and modification’ over a long period of time. Qutab-ud-din Aibak founded his independent kingdom in 1206 in Lahore. Then he proceeded to Delhi. Spoils from 27 temples were used to build the Quwwat ul-Islam mosque in Delhi—Lalkot, whose minaret, the Qutab Minar, points to early Islamic presence in India. Amir Khusrau describes in poetical metaphors the destruction of Hindu temples and their transformation into a mosque: Whenever a temple had girt up its loins for the worship of an idol, the tongue of the pick-axes with an elegant discourse dug out the foundation of unbelief from its heart, so that the temple at once prostrated itself in gratefulness ….48

In 1292 Sultan Jala-ud-Din Khalji mounted an expedition against Ranthambhor, conquered Jhain and destroyed the beautifully carved idol in its main temple. Ala-ud-din’s most memorable conquest was that of the Deccan and the far south which were ruled by three important dynasties. The Sultan did not annex these dynasties but fleeced their treasuries and forced them to pay annual tributes. The destruction of temples during the invasions of south India under Khalji and Tughlaq have been documented in detail by the historians.49 The controversy regarding the role of Khusrau Khan shows that the seed of these two 48

Annemarie Schimmel, Islam in the Indian Subcontinent, Leiden-Koln, 1980, p. 10. S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar, South India and Her Muhammadan Invaders, Madras, 1921; H.K. Sherwani and P.M. Joshi, History of Medieval Deccan: 1295–1724, Vols I and II, The Government of Andhra Pradesh, 1974. 49

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above mentioned trends had already begun to sprout around 1320s. Introducing with the permission of Mubark Shah a body of 10,000 Baradus from Malwa, Rajasthan and Gujarat, he got possession of the palace and succeeded in assassinating the Sultan and proclaimed himself the emperor. It was not without reason that his doings were looked upon by Muslim historians as a deliberate Hinduising attempt with a view to putting an end to the power of the hereditary nobles among the Muhammadans and raising to their positions renegades and slaves with a view ultimately to bring about the restoration of Hindu monarchy, an attempt we witness again in the reign of Muhammad-bin-Tughlaq, perhaps in a much more pronounced form.50 It was said that Khusrau’s design was to increase the power and importance of the Parwaris and Hindus, and to make their party grow. Under his regime, it was alleged that copies of the holy scripture were used as seats, and idols were set up in the pulpit of mosques.51 Feroz Shah succeeded Muhammad Tughlaq in 1351 and Hindu ‘unbelievers’ still played an important role in the kingdom and even erected new temples: In the capital and in the cities of the Mussalmans the customs of infidelity are openly practiced, idols are publically worshipped, and the traditions of infidelity are adhered to with greater insistence than before .... Openly and without fear, the infidels continue their rejoicing during their festivals with the beat of drums and dhols and with singing and dancing. By paying merely a few tankas and the Jizya, they are able to continue the traditions of infidelity by giving lessons in the books of their false faith and enforcing the orders of these books.52

Malwa, south of Delhi, reached its greatest expansion under Mahmud Khalji (1436–69), who tried to extend his borders to Jaunpur, Gujarat and the Deccan. Mahmud was asked for help by the ruler of Champaner, a non-Muslim who had been attacked by Muhammad Shah of Gujarat in 1450. But this politically expedient task was undertaken only after he obtained a fatwa from the Ulama who sanctioned this assistance. Those non-Muslims who accepted his supremacy and protection enjoyed the right to worship without interference while he destroyed temples in the enemy’s territory. 50

Ibid., p. 131. Also see, S.A.A. Rizvi, Vol. II, pp. 42–43. Ibid., p. 130. 52 Barni quoted in K.A. Nizami, Religion and Politics, Introduction by H. Habib, p. xxi. 51

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In Kashmir, Sultan Sikandar (1389–1413), known as butshikan, according to Firishta tried to convert the Brahmans, who resorted to various excuses to avoid and survive this conversion.53 The Kashmiri Brahmans were dismissed from top positions. Important temples, including the famous sun-temple of Martand, were desecrated and destroyed. For the first time jizya was imposed on the non-Muslims. His youngest son, Zain-ul-Abidin (1420–70) was, unlike his father, broadminded in his views. He wrote Persian poetry under the pen name Qutab and also read Sanskrit works. His rule of half a century could be compared to the almost equally long reign of Akbar. He conferred both glory and popularity on the laws of infidelity and error and on the customs of the idol worshippers and the ignorant. He reconstructed and rehabilitated all the temples and non-Muslim places of worship which had been destroyed or pulled down during the reign of the late Sultan Sikandar.54

And the non-Islamic customs, to the palpable dismay of the historians, seemed to have prevailed to such an extent that ‘even Muslim scholars, ulema, sayyids, and qadis of the country followed these customs without any hesitation’.55 Zain-ul-Abidin abolished the jizya as well as the cremation tax; he even permitted sati.56 Several Sanskrit books, including the Mahabharat, were translated into Persian under his patronage. Sikander Lodhi continued the tradition of granting iqtas to loyal Hindu chiefs. Persian historians enthusiastically relate stories of the Sultan’s bigotry and zeal to destroy Hindu temples; nevertheless the Sultan and his nobles were deeply interested in non-Muslim culture and institutions. If Ahmad Shah (1411–42) was praised for his devotion to Sufis and for his determination to destroy idols, Ibrahim Qutab Shah (1550–1580) was denounced equally for his policy of awarding land grants to Brahman and Hindu temples and not realising jizya. 53 Kashmir offered a fertile ground for the zealous Sufi missionaries. Sayyid Sharaf-ud-Din, popularly known as Bulbul Shah, was probably the first Sufi to visit Kashmir in the reign of Suhadeva (1301–20). For details, see Mohibbul Hassan, Kashmir under the Sultans, Srinagar, 1974, 2nd edition, pp. 230–37. 54 Schimmel, Islam in the Indian Subcontinent, p. 45. 55 Quoted in Comprehensive History of India, Vol. V, p. 753. 56 It is said that Sultan Qutabuddin once performed a Hindu yagna and distributed large gifts among the Brahmans. Mohammad Ishaq Khan, ‘The Impact of Islam on Kashmir in the Sultanate Period (1320–1586)’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, April–June 1986, pp. 187–205.

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The two contesting and criss-crossing trends seem to be taking a definite shape only under the Mughals. If the direction of one trend was towards facilitating and encouraging patterns of hegemonic culture then the other was acting in the opposite direction of domination and was constraining the process associated with the earlier trend. It was a very complex history experienced at many levels by different sections of the society in different ways. The non-Muslim elites were given few high offices, were treated as being not in the same class as the rulers, and were subjected to different taxation. A more important factor which might have played an important role in moulding the new centralised state, was that the lower ranks of the bureaucracy had of necessity to be non-Muslims. The existent officialdom must have helped the rulers in restoring order promptly.57 The consciousness of this indispensibility certainly would have added muscle to the sense of cultural resistance which perhaps stopped the upper sections’ mass conversion to Islam under economic inducement. There was no post or dignity which was not open to a non-Muslim who accepted Islam. It was remarkable that Muslims in preindependence Uttar Pradesh,58 which was continuously under Muslim rule for 600 years, numbered only 14 per cent in the 1940s. It becomes clear from the history of the first 150 years of Islam’s conquest of India that the religo-political project which sought to create a social base for the new state through Islamisation was doomed to failure. Akbar’s policy of consciously de-emphasising ‘dogmatic Islam’, establishing a dialogue with leaders of other religions and encouragement to ‘revisionist Islam’ should be placed in this historical context. The uninterrupted practice of this policy for almost 100 years created new social habits, new expectations and a new atmosphere in the empire. This placed the other trend under tremendous social pressure threatening to marginalise it completely. It was natural for the ideologues of this trend and those who sympathised with it to view the emerging situation with alarm, as one where Islam stood the danger of being submerged and permanently diluted. Aurangzeb championed the cause of this Sunni orthodoxy and his attempt to uproot the other trend at this advanced stage, where its historical thrust was towards a further deepening of itself, could not but have resulted in disrupting the cementing sinews of the empire. The changes 57

K.M. Panikkar, A Survey of Indian History. Bombay, 1956, p. 129. For details, see B.D. Chattopadhyaya, ‘Political Processes and Structure of Polity in Early Medieval India: Problems and Perspective’, Presidential Address, Burdwan, 22–24 December 1983. 58

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in policy should not be understood, as has been done traditionally by a number of scholars, purely in terms of religion and therefore effecting only the non-Muslims.59 In fact, it was the reassertion of a continuing trend of orthodoxy which prescribed a different ‘scope of loyalty’ for the stability of the empire. In accordance with its logic, it demanded new orientation and new pressures of centralisation on the parts of regions, zamindars and nobles. The notions of service and loyalty to the imperial authority, fostered in the preceding decades, must have become second nature with some of them who were in positions of power. The change could not but have produced deep-seated disturbances, reservations and even resentment among sections of the Muslims who had earlier supported Akbar’s hegemonic paradigm. Coping with the newly emerging situation involved unsettling old codes of alignments and deference to authority. In short it was an attempt to restructure the nature of Mughal hegemony and articulating it with the strident voice and images of ‘dogmatic Islam’. It meant a change in policies with a view to appease the orthodox sections of society. The resultant crisis of hegemony was neither caused by the needs of surplus appropriation and its concomitant problems of distribution nor the relative economic growth of various regions within the Mughal system.60 To the extent these problems were there, they certainly would have provided the additional obstacles in the attempt at restructuring. The crisis of hegemony does produce confusion and bewilderment, conflicts and chaos, and above all a sense of cultural disorientation both for the rulers as well as the ruled. But it ought not to be conceptualised as a linear progression towards erosion or decline of political control, beginning at the ‘economic base’ and finally entering the ‘political superstructure’. In the absence of an economic crisis the new attempts at reconfiguration of hegemony might have remained partial for a fairly long time, before it could have moved either towards a relatively stable equilibrium or further destabilisation. The failure of the crisis of hegemony to be resolved in the direction in which it was sought to be resolved by Aurangzeb led to 59 This attempt at restructuring the Mughal hegemony was resisted by many Muslim nobles, officials and jagirdars. For details, see Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India, Introduction. According to Manucci, some of the highly placed and important men at court had opposed the imposition of jizya. S.R. Sharma, The Religious Policy of Mughal Emperors, p. 197. 60 For a summary of explanations of the crisis of the Mughal empire, see M. Alam, op. cit., Introduction.

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unintended consequences, of stoking the forces of regional autonomy. Thus, the thrust of the nobles’ actions in the first half of the eighteenth century, and their endeavour towards independent political alignments with the zamindars in order to carve out their own fortunes need not be traced back to an earlier origin.61 The organising principles of all empires involves an interplay between ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ forces to ensure flexibility and adjustment. The moment the equilibrium of such a delicate balance tends to transcend certain limits the forces of regional autonomy which have so far been lying dormant suddenly begin to stir and be visible under the ‘umbrella’.62 Perhaps the motive is not to break up the empire, though that might turn out to be an unintended consequence, but to seek new legitimacy for a greater degree of autonomy and decentralisation. Perhaps even the emerging sense of regional identity, economic prosperity and resultant regional interconnections had gained in strength in the wake of relative peace and political stability achieved under Akbar’s hegemonic arrangement. The rituals and the ceremonial spectacle of the court would have struck the ordinary people as a dazzlement invoking a sense of awe and submission. The recognition by the ‘hypnotic eye of power’ meant enhancement in status and prestige. ‘Wherever power deifies itself, it automatically produces its own theology; wherever it behaves like God, it awakens religious feelings towards itself.’63 The imperial symbols built and rooted in the invincibility of the Mughals evoked a sense of loyalty and emotive ties. Only a seat of authority looked upon by others as a place for dispensing arbitration and justice, could have bestowed honour and prestige on the ambitious aspirants for regional power. Implied in the idea of hegemonic empire was the fact that local chiefs and nobles could reshuffle power equations but could not by themselves generate sources of legitimacy. This legitimacy could only be received by seeking recognition from the Mughal emperor.

61

For details of the ‘regional autonomy’ argument, see M. Alam, op. cit., pp. 5–10. Here we are inclined to agree with Pearson when he argues that locally powerful people did not suddenly emerge into a political role as Delhi’s authority weakened in the early eighteenth century. M.N. Pearson, ‘Political Participation in Mughal India’, IESHR, Vol. IX, No. 2, 1972, pp. 113–31. 63 Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, Calcutta, 1992, p. 102. 62

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When Man Singh fought against Rana Pratap, the orthodox Muslims were stunned to note how gallantly the ‘Hindus wielded the sword of Islam’. Perhaps, in their minds, Man Singh and his followers, were not fighting for Islam. Perhaps they were motivated by their newly inspired loyalty to the empire which had already registered a radical departure from orthodox Islamic ideology.64 The system of state administration aiming at public good and serving the ambition of creating a strong centralised Mughal empire was sought to be divorced from personal religious beliefs of the state functionaries and the ruling elite. The new ‘religion’ of loyalty to the state was proclaimed which required of the officials’ readiness to sacrifice their lives, prosperity and honour to promote the interest of their imperial master. It was the spirit of devotion to this ‘new religion’, of grand imperial order, which made Rajput fight Rajput and Muslim fight Muslim to strengthen the Mughal hegemony. This shift in emphasis from orthodox Islamic cultural/political discourse to a discourse of Sufi-oriented ambiguous Islam was more than an attempt to incorporate the religious susceptibilities, ambitions and opinions of the non-Muslim elites into the institutional structures of the state. This was not merely a gesture of tolerance but a bold approach to go beyond the attempt to secure passive loyalty and reconciliation; to achieve a new sense of accommodation, symbiosis and participatory loyalty by redressing the balance of power between communities.65 Yet the cultural environment remained suffused with Islam. Mughal hegemony was closely associated with and inspired by ‘revisionist Islam’. It was just not an attempt at building political alliances. However, the new balance of power could not be in favour of the non-Muslim elites as no rule in 64 To begin with Bharmal’s heir, Bhagwandas, and his adopted son, Man Singh, were given senior positions in the imperial hierarchy. Slowly a powerful section of the Hindu Rajas was co-opted into the higher echelons of power thereby raising them from a subaltern status to the status of allies. In 1563 Akbar remitted pilgrimage taxes throughout his dominion although, according to Abul Fazl, they yielded millions of rupees in revenue. In March 1564 he lifted jizya on Hindus. The abolition of these Islamic discriminatory laws paved the way for a more broad-based rule. 65 Akbar certainly continued to show reverence to things Islamic and we can probably discard Badauni’s statement that ‘it was impossible even to mention the name of prophet’ in his presence. But certainly Akbar seemed to have acquired the conviction that all religions contained some truth and that this was not the prerogative of Islam. However, during the wars the practice of demolishing the places of worship of the opponents continued. Destroying the places of worship of the enemy seems to be a routine practice in the medieval context. For example, victorious satnamis plundered Narnol, demolished mosques, and established an independent government. S.A.A. Rizvi, Vol. II, p. 135.

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practice is culturally neutral.66 But what was important was that the scales of balance were no longer seen as being deliberately held against them. This was perhaps the maximum limit to which the state institutions could extend themselves. Having initiated a new statecraft of managing power in a multi-religious and multi-cultural society, Akbar began his search for a religious idiom to give this new experiment a sound philosophical grounding. Perhaps Din-i-Illahi was symptomatic of an attempt to find a completely neutral, non-partisan legitimising ideology of the empire. Perhaps it was natural for the orthodox forces to perceive this redressal of power balance as the beginning of a process, the logic of which was likely to push the state to the other end of the continuum. The removal of all restrictions upon the public religious worship by non-Muslims, abolition of jizya, discouragement of cow slaughter, and above all, allowing some of the ‘Hindu’ customs and practices to enter into the precincts of the royal court and palace must have given the appearance of a drastic cultural change to them. When non-Muslims could dispute with impunity with the Muslim scholars the viewpoints of their respective theologies in the palace, some sort of freedom of views was naturally secured outside its walls as well. The new atmosphere afforded opportunities to the subaltern nonMuslim elites to feel a sense of reassurance and to slowly reassert their cultural identities while simultaneously combining these endeavours with a passionate sense of political loyalty to the ruler. Consciously seeking to preserve and expand the arena of cultural freedom was perhaps a deliberate response of the elite groups saddled with uncertainty. Wisdom taught that it was better to grasp half the freedom by voluntarily surrendering the other half. Partly, this cultural assertion took the form of building numerous public temples, especially in the famous places of Hindu pilgrimage. This also becomes clear from Aurangzeb’s firmans which constantly referred to the fact that ‘temples demolished by royal orders have been repaired and idol-worship continues’.67

66 Akbar was not against promoting orthodox elements, especially when they were willing to serve him loyally. 67 Mirat-i Ahmedi, p. 233. ‘If we come to the Sikh movement, in Akbar’s time’, writes J.S. Grewal, ‘we notice, first of all, the increase in their numbers, their relative prosperity which enables the Gurus to undertake public projects, like Ramdaspur which is now known as Amritsar and a few other towns’. Social Scientist, Vol. 20, Nos 9–10, September–October 1992, p. 67.

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As far as orthodox circles were concerned, this amounted to an open affront to the cultural elan of Islam, the raison d’être of their selfconfidence and the feeling of superiority. After all, in a place where minority rule was constantly under pressure to seek a wider social base, political control could not but become primarily a question of cultural visibility, of images, scenes, ceremonies, rituals, sounds and gestures. The disproportionate powers of the Muslim elite and its perpetuation depended upon the visible and felt cultural superiority of Islam. Therefore what Aurangzeb was attempting was precisely to stem the tide of the other’s cultural visibility and once again reverse the power balance between the communities. Despite the fact that there was much which was common between them, the so far intertwined and contending projects of seeking different kinds of loyalties for the state reached a point where they now became relatively differentiated and came to be symbolised by the names of two different rulers.68 This in a way underlined the original dilemma which Islam as a discourse of political power had faced in the cultural environment of this subcontinent. To begin with Aurangzeb’s crusade to re-establish a sense of selfconfidence and superiority amongst the sections of the ruling elite was circumscribed by caution. But, in 1969, the general order issued for the destruction of all schools and temples of the ‘Hindus’ was not, and perhaps could not be, implemented at all places due to actual or anticipated resistance. But what is important is that it opened the gates for civil strife between elites and sections of the population under their influence to violently settle the disputes of balance of power locally or regionally. It seems that mob riots did break out at many places. Given the fact that the local Muslim communities were closely tied up with local administration, the riots could not have lasted long. For example, in August 1669 the temple of Visvanath at Banaras was demolished. What follows is a contemporary account of the sectarian confrontation which took place at that time.69 68 Feeble attempts were made under Jahangir and Shah Jehan to partially narrow the widening gap between the orthodox ideology of Islam and the state power’s expressions in non-Islamic and revisionist Islamic forms. Under Aurangzeb pilgrimage and jizya were reimposed. Holi ceased to be celebrated by imperial orders issued on 20 November 1665. 69 Quoted in S.R. Sharma, op. cit., pp. 183–84. The original reference is to Ganj-i-Arshadi quoted in Farukh, pp. 127–28.

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The infidels demolished a mosque that was under construction and wounded the artisans. When the news reached Shah Yasin, he came to Banaras from Mandyawa and collecting the Muslim weavers, demolished the big temple. A Sayyid who was an artisan by profession agreed with one Abdul Rasul to build a mosque at Banaras and accordingly the foundation was laid. Near the place there was a temple and many houses belonging to it were in the occupation of the Rajputs. The infidels decided that the construction of a mosque in the locality was not proper and that it should be razed to the ground. At night the walls of the mosque were found demolished. Next day the wall was rebuilt but it was again destroyed. This happened three or four times. At last the Sayyid hid himself in a corner. With the advent of night the infidels came to achieve their nefarious purpose. When Abdul Rasul gave the alarm, the infidels began to fight and the Sayyid was wounded by the Rajputs. In the meantime, the Musalman residents of the neighbourhood arrived at the spot and the infidels took to their heels. The wounded Muslims were taken to Shah Yasin who determined to vindicate the cause of Islam. When he came to the mosque, people collected from the neighbourhood. The civil officers were outwardly inclined to side with the saint, but in reality they were afraid of the royal displeasure on account of the Raja, who was a courtier of the Emperor and had built the temple (near which the mosque was under construction). Shah Yasin, however took up the sword and started for Jihad. The civil officers sent him a message that such a grave step should not be taken without the Emperor’s permission. Shah Yasin, paying no heed, sallied forth till he reached Bazar Chau Khamba through a fusillade of stones .... The doors (of temples) were forced open and the idols thrown down. The weavers and other Musalmans demolished about 500 temples. They desired to destroy the temple of Beni Madho, but as lanes were barricaded, they desisted from going further.

Here, a distinction must be made between ‘sectarian riots’ in the medieval period and modern ‘communal’ politics which emerges within the framework of colonial constitutional representation in the first decade of the twentieth century. The scale and sweep which the sectarian riots acquired towards the end of the nineteenth century presupposed the disruption of existing state power thereby undoing the equilibrium of locally existing power balances and cultural compromises. In due course, the memories of the experience of the population under Akbar and Aurangzeb came to be ordered in the mythical mould and were recast into two mutually exclusive symbols of ‘attraction’ and

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‘repulsion’, of admiration and denunciation. For example, local tradition credits Akbar with the presentation of a golden umbrella to the shrine of the fire-goddess, Jwala Mukhi, in the modern district of Kangara in Himachal Pradesh. ‘Oh my mother! Akbar came barefooted. He donated a gold umbrella’, runs a popular song in praise of the Goddess. The Akbar Nama, however, declares that though Akbar intended to visit this shrine, the visit did not materialise due to difficulties. He may, however, have sent a donation. Akbar’s visit to the neighbourhood is perpetuated in the existence of a Dharmasala at Churru in the district of Kangara. Its mahants claim that it was established with the help of a personal grant from Akbar who allowed the founder, a recluse, to claim as much land as his cow could cover in a day.70 Through inclusive strategies Akbar was made by non-Muslims an inseparable part of the indigenous historical tradition while Aurangzeb was excluded from this honour. However, cultural traditions and memories, especially the memories of traumatic experiences, continue to persist beyond the immediate context of their production. Not only that, from now onwards they begin to furnish readymade criteria and standards of human conduct even in new historical situations. Ultimately, they end up providing reference points around which myths are woven by invoking nostalgia and aspiration.71 The Mughal officials were keen to arrest Jain pontiffs on the slightest pretext either on the charge of forceful conversion or enlisting the child for diksha-acceptance of ascetism or responsible for creating natural calamities. Given this background, when Akbar invited Suri as a representative of the Jain Sangh, it was hailed by the Jains with tumultuous ovation. It was Akbar’s patronage which enabled the Jains from Punjab, Bengal, Rajputana and Gujarat to gather at Santrunjaya under the leadership of Suri. In the imagination of Jain scholars and

70 71

S.R. Sharma, The Religious Policy of Mughal Emperors. Modern historiography has also contributed to the reconstruction of the Akbar myth. Akbar could say that Muslim daughters should inherit the same share as their brothers. I wonder how many ministers today would be able to make that statement. Akbar could say that in the Hindu attitude towards women there is male chauvinism. How many people would be able to make these kinds of statements today …. Let us then freely and without inhibition celebrate those figures.

Irfan Habib, ‘Akbar and His Age: A Symposium’, Social Scientist. Vol. 20. Nos 9–10. September–October 1992, p. 72.

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poets, Akbar emerged as someone who was omniscient, all pervading and a ‘Chakravarty Raja’. Among the Mughals, only he could be compared to the moon—the heavenly body, considered the most auspicious by the Jains.72 In the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Rajasthani literature, many songs ( geet) were composed by contemporary poets in praise of Akbar. He was portrayed as an incarnation of Lord Rama, Krishna, Lakshman and Arjun.73 Interestingly, even till today some historians are busy digging up ‘facts’ to prove that Akbar never ceased to be a Muslim, that Badauni’s assertions were not correct. But Badauni’s way of thinking continues to be a part of the popular Muslim consciousness. In the guise of historiography, the struggle between ‘dogmatic’ and ‘revisionist’ Islam is still continuing in the name of ‘scientific history’.74 The simple fact of Aurangzeb’s rejection by indigenous traditions made him a part of an alternative history which went back to Prophet Muhammad and was enacted on a much bigger canvas. In the nineteenth century, Bankim was to construct the memories of this popular experience into a discourse of modern historiography. If people from another country come to rule a land, this leads to an infliction. Those who are of the ruler’s community then enjoy greater eminence than the natives. This leads to oppression of the people by a foreign race. Cases in which there is such distinction between subjects of the native race and subjects of the ruling race we would call unfree. A country which is free of such racial oppression is free. Therefore, even countries which are under rulers from other parts can be free. For example, Hanover at the time of George I, or Kabul under the Mughals. Conversely, even independent kingdoms can be unfree, for instance, England under the Normans, or India under Aurangzeb. We regard India under Qutabuddin unfree and colonised; and India ruled by Akbar free and independent.75 72 Shirin Mehta, ‘Akbar as Reflected in the Contemporary Jain Literature in Gujarat’, Social Scientist, Vol. 20, Nos 9–10, September–October 1992, p. 58. 73 Ibid. B.L. Bhadani, ‘The Profile of Akbar in Contemporary Rajasthani Literature’, p. 47. 74 M. Athar Ali, ‘Akbar and Islam (1581–1605)’, in Milton Israel and N.K. Wagle (eds), Islamic Society and Culture, Delhi, 1983, pp. 123–34. Also see Iqtidar Alam Khan, ‘Akbar’s Personality Traits and World Outlook: A Critical Reappraisal’, Social Scientist, Vol. 20, Nos 9–10, September–October 1992, pp. 16–30. 75 Quoted in Sudipta Kaviraj, Imaginary History, Second Series, No. VII, Occasional Papers on History and Society, NMML, New Delhi, p. 67.

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Later on, this experience of ‘medieval’ history formulated as a discourse of polarities was to provide a point of reference for many who commented on the British policies vis-à-vis Hindus and Muslims. Akbar’s policy was evoked as an image of an acceptable ‘state policy’ to the Hindus on the part of the new rulers. Writes Bishan Narayan Dar, a Lucknow lawyer, social reformer, Urdu poet and known ‘friend of the Muslims’ who was president of the Congress in 1911: Our present rulers have forgotten the lesson of Akbar and have adopted the policy of Aurangzeb. But the policy of Aurangzeb can end only in one way. Akbar founded and consolidated the empire; Aurangzeb shattered it to pieces. The conciliating policy of the one made the Hindus devoted supporters of the Mogul throne; the religious fanaticism of the other produced the Mahratta power and sealed the doom of the Empire.76

The statement implied two very important convictions: Hindus could coexist peacefully only with those Muslims who were willing to accept ‘Akbar’ as a paradigm of religo-cultural relations between the communities. A state which mediated power relations between the communities in the ‘Aurangzeb paradigm’ would sow the seeds of discord between the communities. In the context of the Partition of Bengal in 1905, G.K. Gokhale described Curzon as an ‘English Aurangzeb’. Addressing the annual Congress session held at Banaras, he observed: In order to find a parallel to this administration, we will get evidence of such a centralised personal rule, the same kind of dedication to objectives as in the case of Aurangzeb, the same supreme conscientiousness, the same strange capacity for action, the same feeling of loneliness, the same suppression and lack of trust, and observance of policy underlying all these concepts on account of all-round irritation and anger.77

The ‘Akbar paradigm’ which under conditions of parliamentary democracy meant the stamp of ‘revisionist Hinduism’ on the state as a normal way of cultural life, was firmly rejected by a section of the Muslims. The majority of the Muslims who stayed on in India after partition entered into a complicity with Congress leaders to call this paradigm 76

Bishan Narayan Dar’s Appeal to the English Public on Behalf of the Hindus of the NWP and Oudh. Quoted in Gyanendra Pandey, op. cit., p. 220. The appeal was produced in the aftermath of the Hindu–Muslim riots in Azamgarh on the occasion of Baqr-Id of 1893. 77 Quoted in M. Chalapathi Rao, Govind Ballabh Pant, New Delhi, 1981, p. 21.

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by a different name—‘secularism’—but of a non-European variety. Muslim League’s ideologue Zafar Ali Khan’s satiric verses derided Sikandar Hayat Khan’s government in Punjab, in 1937 as ‘daur-e-Akbar’. Thus ran one of the verses of Maulana Zafar Ali Khan:78 Koai din men yahan phir Daur-e-Akbar ane wala hai Sikandar hai Abul Fazl Aur Manoharlal, Todarmal. (Before long will come here again The regime of Akbar Sikandar will be Abul Fazl and Manoharlal, Todarmal)

Most of the time cultural contests and assertions take place through symbolic practices, rituals and displays. Those engaged in the contest convey and interpret messages through symbolic communication. For example, ‘killing of cow’ and ‘defence of cow’ has remained an enduring symbol of cultural contest in this country. Badauni could not help poking fun at the Hindu raja who ‘once set the whole court to laughter by saying that Allah after all had great respect for cow, else the cow would not have been mentioned in the first chapter of the Koran …’79 Thevenot, who arrived at Surat in 1666, tells us about the region under the jurisdiction of the town governors or Nawabs at Surat. The governor of the town judged in civil matters and commonly rendered speedy justice: If a man sue another for a Debt, he must either produce two witnesses, or take an oath: if he be a Christian he swears upon the gospel; if a Moor, upon the Alcoran, and a Heathen swears upon the cow. The Gentils Oath consists only in laying his hand upon the cow, and saying, that he wishes he may eat of the flesh of the beast, if what he says be not true; but most of them chuse (choose) rather to lose their cause than to swear because they who swear are reckoned infamous among the idolators.80 78 Quoted in Yusuf Meherally, A Trip to Pakistan, Bombay, 1943, p. 108. Sikandar Hayat had tried to transcend, though in a limited sense, the religious divide by uniting various individuals among the Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. 79 Quoted in Schimmel, Islam in the Indian Subcontinent, p. 81. 80 Surendra Nath Sen, Indian Travels of Thevenot and Careri, Delhi, 1949, p. 27. Cow dung and urine of cow play an important role in various Hindu rituals. For example, if

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In the following quotation, Shah Muni, who lived under the Peshwa’s rule during the late eighteenth century, places the ‘killing of cow’ at the centre of the myth to explain the local origins of the Muslims: Dilva was a great rishi (sage). Yavanas called him Adam. Dilva worshipped Mahavisnu (God in the Muslim sense) and hated Siva. Karfava worshipped Siva constantly and ridiculed Mahavisnu. Their enmity grew day by day. Karfava built a Siva temple (sivalaya) and propitiated (the image) with regular rituals. Dilva built a masjid (mosque) and started praying in it (Karita Jahala namaj). One day Karfava’s cow, entering Dilva’s abode, stood in his masjid. Dilva said to himself ‘this cow is standing in the centre of my house of worship’. With Anger, he ran to beat her with a stick. The cow counter-attacked and gored him to death with her horns. His hotheaded, son, Musal, became extremely furious and with a weapon killed the cow and avenged his father’s death by eating her flesh. The sons born in his lineage became like him and started killing cows and eating them. Dilva’s house is called din and Musal’s descendants are known as Musalmans. The enmity against Karfava was maintained (in Musal’s lineage), hence Maharashtra is called Kafar (infidel). They (Musalmans), therefore, break the images and Siva temples and hate their gods. This is the origin of the Yavana Jati.81

The symbolic importance of the cow in the system of cultural values of the Hindus is also underlined by Guru Nanak (1469–1539). In one of his verses he says: Haq Paraya nanaka, us sooar us Gaye (Appropriating someone’s rightful share tantamounts to an act of eating cow for the Hindus and a pig for the Muslims). For Gandhi what distinguished Hinduism from every other religion was its cow protection, more than its Varnashrama.82 Ibn Batuta, who visited India in the first half of the fourteenth century, mentions some cases of reaction to cow slaughter. Some Muslims, who had slaughtered cows, were wrapped by the Hindus

a well is defiled, Ganges water or cow’s urine is poured into it to purify it. The popular belief is that the human soul is called upon to cross the Bhav Sagar before it could reach its destination. The cow helps one’s soul to cross this mighty river. 81 N.K. Wagle, ‘Hindu–Muslim Interactions in Medieval Maharashtra’, in G.D. Sontheimer and Herman Kulke (eds), Hinduism Reconsidered, Delhi, 1989, pp. 58–59. 82 For Gandhi’s views on ‘cow protection’ and ‘Hinduism’, see M.K. Gandhi, The Essence of Hinduism, Ahmedabad, 1987.

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(most probably Brahmans) in the skins of the slaughtered animals and burnt alive.83 Perhaps, it was due to such violent reactions on the part of some Hindus that the Kashmiri King Sultan Zainul-Abidin (1420–70) prohibited cow slaughter. It is well known that during Akbar’s rule cow slaughter was prohibited, at least in the Punjab, and this prohibition was continued by Jahangir.84 Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi, known as Mujaddid Alf-i Sani (1564–1624), urged the Muslim nobles in Jahangir’s court to persuade their Emperor to revoke the order prohibiting the killing of cows.85 It seems that the orders of the Emperor were implemented very selectively. For, we are told by a foreign visitor, Manucci, that ‘badly cooked cow’s flesh of low quality’ was ‘abundant in the Mogul country and very cheap’.86 A reference to cow slaughter also appears in one of the biographies of Chaitanya (1486–1533), composed by Krishnadasa Kaviraja between 1612–15. While responding to challenges from Chaitanya on the issue of cow slaughter, the qazi purportedly tells him that there are two levels to Muslim scripture, one level of action (pravrtti) at which cow slaughter is permitted and the other a level of inaction or contemplation (nivrtti) at which the practice is forbidden.87 The killing of cows must have been widely resented by the various non-Muslim castes since the bravery of the protectors of the cow has been celebrated by the bards. One of the accounts in bardic chronicles about a Rajput Raja Veerum Dev Row, a contemporary of Akbar, runs as following:88 Row, having no son, made many vows to many Devs and Devees and performed many pilgrimages, but no prince made his appearance. 83

M. Alam, ‘Competition and Coexistence’, p. 49. M. Athar Ali, ‘Akbar and Islam (1581–1605)’, p. 132. 85 S.A.A. Rizvi, Vol. II, p. 162. 86 Ibid., p. 215. 87 J.T. O’Connell, ‘Vaisnava Perceptions of Muslims in Sixteenth Century Bengal’, in Milton Israel and N.K. Wagle (eds), Islamic Society and Culture, p. 306. 88 Alexander K. Forbes, Rasmaia, op. cit., p. 313. The liberators of cows have been celebrated in some of the kissas written in Gurumukhi. Mythological hero Pabuji Rathor, the patron saint of wandering camelherds and goatherds in western Rajasthan is a minor deity in the local pantheon of Gods. Even today people sit up through an all-night performance of the Pabuji epic in dusty Rajasthani hamlets. John D. Smith has just finished writing an authoritative and exhaustive account of this hero in The Epic of Pabuji which is going to be published by Cambridge University Press. Says Dr. Smith: ‘He is a Hindu warrior overthrowing the cow-killing Muslim warrior Mirza Khan ….’ The Times of India, Sunday Review, 11 August 1991, p. 5. 84

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At last someone said to him that if he would go to Unkulesur (on the Narbada river opposite Broach), and there bathe with his chief Ranee, he would obtain a son. The Row accordingly made a progress thither, accompanied by his family. Meanwhile, the followers of a Shahzada of the emperor’s, had encamped there, and some butchers had collected eight or ten cows for them which they were driving along the road. Some of Veerum Dev’s servants saw them, and asked them who they were, and where they were taking the cows to. They said they were butchers, and were taking away the cows for the Shahzada. When Row was informed that the butchers had brought the cows from a distance of a hundred miles, he offered them from ten to a hundred pounds for each cow, but they refused his offer. Then the Row thought within himself, ‘I am styled protector of cows and Brahmins, so it is a good thing to die at a place of pilgrimage in defence of cows.’ Thus considering, he took away the cows by force, and then sent off his family immediately towards Eedur, the Ranee saying that if he came to use in protecting the cows, she would not remain a moment in the world behind him. Now the butchers went to the Shahzada, and complained, and the prince sent a herald to demand the cows. The Row humbly replied, ‘I am a Hindoo and in a place of pilgrimage like this I cannot give up the cows as long as there is life in me, but whatever price you may command to pay for them I am ready to give.’ Then the Shahzada ordered his guns to open on the Row’s party. Many men fell on both sides, and after a time the Row retired to a place two miles off, where he halted. In the night time he reflected that there were very many butchers with that cavalcade, and that if he were to kill them, that would save the life of many a cow, so he fell upon them while it was yet dark, and slew numbers of the butchers.

From Aurangzeb to Titoomir, the practice of killing cows was continued.89 In the regional states which replaced the Mughal empire, the practice of killing cows was banned by Ranjit Singh in the Punjab and Shivaji in the Maratha controlled areas. One great resentment which Baba Ram Singh, leader of the Kuka movement, developed against the British was over the killing of Kine 89 In 1831 in the villages of Purwa and Lawghata, Titoomir and his followers in the course of rebellion committed ‘no excess beyond killing cows in market places, defiling Hindu temples with cow blood and ill-treating one or two Hindus.’ ‘The Freedom Movement in Bengal’, History of Freedom Movement, Vol. III, Karachi, 1963, Ch. XVIII. p. 552.

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for beef.90 Some of the Kukas (namdharis) killed seven butchers in Amritsar and Ludhiana. Eventually, eight Kukas were sentenced to death. While the suggestion of Baba Ram Singh’s removal from the Punjab was under consideration, a band of the Kukas, in January 1872, struck at Malaud and Malerkotla in search of arms to overawe the Kine killers all over the Punjab. In the conflict ten persons were killed and seventeen wounded. L. Cowen, the Deputy Commissioner of Ludhiana, blew forty-nine Kukas from the canons at the spot. Later on, T.W. Forsyth ordered sixteen more Kukas to be blown by the canons.91 Symbols continue to be the well springs of emotional energy and a storehouse of passions. The motivating power of symbols, is shaped by political conditions. But the symbols of ‘temple’, ‘cow’ and ‘Brahman’ did not exhaust the cultural content and meanings of Hindu beliefs and attitudes. As pointed out earlier, ‘cow’, ‘temple’ and ‘Brahman’ were chosen as indicators of non-Muslim cultural assertion and were closely tied up with symbolic violation on the part of ‘dogmatic Islam’. Their violation at will indicated cultural vulnerability and subaltern position of non-Muslim castes vis-à-vis the communities of Islam. Jizya, demolition of temples and killing of cows came to be invested with certain meanings in the popular social consciousness. A cultural frontier—a sort of ‘cultural faultline’—however vague, ambiguous and amorphous its boundary line, separated the two cultures. Due to the attempts to smoothen the unequal power relations the ‘blurred edges’92 of the boundaries between the communities wore the appearance of ‘composite culture’ on the surface. This sometimes gave the impression as if the seething discontent underneath had acquired a state of tranquillity. The above-mentioned symbols became potential signposts on this subterranean ‘cultural faultline’. Over a long drawn period and under the overall umbrella of the central or regional ruler a complex system of power equilibrium between the communities 90 Baba Ram Singh was a head of the Namdhari movement in the 1860s and was the first reformer to emphasise the importance of Singh identity. Many of his followers believed in the veracity of the Sau Sakhi attributed to Guru Gobind Singh in which the end of British rule in the Punjab was foretold as a prelude to the establishment of Sikh rule under a carpenter named Ram Singh. 91 Grewal, The Sikhs of the Punjab, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 142–43. 92 The phrase ‘blurred edges’ figures in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Trans. by G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford, 1967, p. 71. Some of the Indian political scientists and journalists have replaced it with ‘fuzzy boundaries’.

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came to be established in every region, city or qasba or village and was, over time, legitimised by local traditions. It was this balance of power which gave these cities and qasbas an overall distinct cultural personality leaving on them a stamp of ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’ pre-eminence. It is this ‘cultural stamp’ which separated Banaras—a ‘Hindu city’—from Mubarakpur—a ‘Muslim qasba’93 With the arrival of the British once again there was a change in the ‘authority’. The locally existing power balances and cultural compromises were seriously disturbed and the boundaries of division in the cultural space became disputed and contentious thereby giving rise to a fierce contest. Earlier when justice was sought from the ruler/administration in cultural matters it was for the ruler/administration to draw the line and deliver the judgement. Nothing falling short of a rebellion could be launched as a protest, in case the judgement was not acceptable. After the British took over, the public sphere (earlier non-existent) was now available for registering all sorts of protests. The arrival of the new rulers opened the channel through which sections of the population could now be mobilised to exert influence and pressure. With the change in ‘authority’ under colonialism the cultural assertion/defence came to be mediated by a political power which now spoke the language of the rights of the individual and community. Community mobilisation on cultural issues became the new mode for demonstrating collective strength. As was discussed at the beginning of this chapter, once the immediate issue of political power was decided through open warfare and the supremacy of the new ruling elite was established, an open challenge to it was no longer practical. After their victory all rulers are faced with the important question: How should the controlling power be exercised so that the defeated are not only placated but also reconciled? In the process of coming to terms with the question they make the discovery that actually the military conquest had won ‘a barren and precarious hegemony’ while ‘the permanent and the most profitable form of conquest was that over the mind’.94 As both sides set into motion the process of adjustment and accommodation—one side desiring to rule, the other side 93 For a detailed discussion of communal violence in these two places, see Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, New Delhi, 1990. 94 Quoted in Bhagwan Josh, Struggle for Hegemony in India, 1934–41, Vol. II, New Delhi, 1992, p. 28.

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desiring to resist that rule—they are forced to enter into a complicity, the codes of which are slowly evolved as both parties get along to work out the new experiment. During the Sultanate period itself the rulers and their ideological supporters were fully aware of the contradiction between the demands of religion and worldly expediency as in the Indian context where ‘Muslims were merely like salt in one’s food’. Moreover, the slaughter or forced conversion of the Hindus would have brought about an ‘uncontrollable conflagration.’ ‘It is singular,’ writes Irfan Habib, ‘that Barni desists from criticising Muhammad Tughluq for his tolerant attitude towards the Hindus and Hinduism, a crime for which his contemporary and fellow historian Isami even demanded the sultan’s head’.95 This is how Tara Chand describes this civilisational encounter: The Muslims who came into India made it their home. They lived surrounded by the Hindu people and a state of perennial hostility with them was impossible. Mutual intercourse led to mutual understanding. Many who had changed their faith differed little from those whom they had left. Thus after the first shock of conquest was over, the Hindus and Muslims prepared to find a via media whereby to live as neighbours. The effort to seek a new life led to the development of a new culture which was neither exclusively Hindu nor purely Muslim. It was indeed a Muslim–Hindu culture.96

What Tara Chand calls ‘via media’, we call ‘complicity’. In the reproduction of daily life, mutual influences, of course, were expected, but to say that it led to the ‘development of a new culture’—popularly known as composite culture—is to go too far. The ‘arrival’ of Islam as a discourse of state power had introduced a ‘cultural faultline’ between the Muslims and the non-Muslims. Irfan Habib hints at the existence of this ‘faultline’ when he writes: There were the religious traditions coming from ancient India, which by Mughal times began to be described under the term ‘Hindu’. The author of Dabistan-i-Mazahib is hard put to describe what the beliefs 95

Irfan Habib, ‘Barani’s Theory of the History of the Delhi Sultanate’, Indian Historical Review, Vol. VII, Nos 1 and 2, July 1980–January 1981. 96 Tara Chand, Influence of Islam on Indian Culture, Allahabad, 1946, p. 137. The essay was written in 1922 after the first wave of massive communal riots.

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of a Hindu are and ultimately he takes shelter in a very convenient position but the only possible position—Hindus are those who have been arguing with each other within the same framework of argument over the centuries. If they recognise each other as persons whom we can either support or oppose in a religious argument, then both parties are Hindus. The Jains, although they rejected Brahmanism, were still Hindus because they were arguing and polemicising with Brahmins. Such arguments were not taking place between Hindus and Muslims. The Muslims did not share any basic terminology with the others. Muslims had their own framework, an ideological framework, the semitic framework ….97

True, the ‘faultline’ could not be wished away but the reproduction of daily life forced both the sides to ignore it, to pretend as if it did not exist. But this required that society, involving ideologues from both sides, must undertake a project which not only forbade the people from raking up the destructive potential of this ‘faultline’ but also advocated its transcendence—by positing a different vision of a new God which was neither ‘Hindu’ nor ‘Muslim’.98 The evolution of Akbar’s ‘religious policies’ and the rise of Sufi and Bhakti movements, which preached coexistence and tolerance, were thus two mutually reinforcing projects. The new movements advocated monotheism, casteless society, and the transcendence of cultural barriers and prejudices. But what is amply clear in the utterances and writings of these sants is the existence of a continuous cultural strife which must be brought to an end. They all advised the people to undertake serious introspection, which they believed, would lead them to discover that they were the children of the same God; differences were only prejudices and there were no rational grounds for mutual distrust and hostility. The idea of the ‘cultural faultline’ cannot be understood unless a distinction is made between what the sants desired, preached and advocated and what was actually going on between the Muslims and the Hindus.

97

Irfan Habib, ‘Akbar and His Age: A Symposium’, Social Scientist, Vol. 20, Nos 9–10. September–October 1992, p. 68. 98 Ibid., p. 66. In 1604 a book which is now called the Guru Granth Sahib was compiled by Guru Arjun and in this are included the compositions of Kabir. There is one particular composition in which it is very emphatically stated: ‘We are neither Hindu nor Musalman. We are God’s men’, J.S. Grewal’s intervention.

The State in Medieval North India and the Cultural Faultline 169 EKNATH AND HIS HINDU–TURK DEBATE (SAMVAD)99

Eknath (1553–99), one of the most famous Marathi bhakti poets, illustrates in his Hindu–Turk (Muslim) debate the intensity of religious tensions and polemics between the two communities in sixteenth century Maharashtra. The debate is full of recrimination. Consisting of 66 stanzas, it subsumes the issues arising out of dharmasastric rules of purity and worship, the theology of the epics, Puranas and Vedas (II). The justification and rebuttal of image worship appear as a key point of the debate. The Quranic rituals, hadith and Sharia, are incorporated as points of the debate. The debate ends significantly on a note of mutual accord and harmony of thought, a kind of idealised version of the symbiosis the two communities would achieve. Hindu: Really, you and I are of one mind. The dispute became aggravated over the question of the norms of social order ( jnati dharma) (lit. caste-dharma); in the realm of God these do not apply (vs. 60, 414). Turk:

What you say is true. For God, caste does not exist. There is no separateness between God and his devotee (bande), even though Hazrat Rasul (Prophet) has spoken that God is unapproachable (vs. 61, 414).

Eknath: They (Hindu–Turk) greeted each other and with respect they embraced .... The dispute resulted in a settlement. From differing views, a consensus was achieved (vs. 62, 64, 414).

The actual debate (only a few excerpts are given below) was full of hostile exchanges of views. Eknath: The Turk says to the Hindu that he is a ‘kafar’ (Hinduku Turak kahe kafar). The Hindu answers, ‘I will be contaminated (vital), stay away from me.’ A quarrel started between the two. And it was the start of a great debate (vs. 2, 412). Turk:

Listen to what I say, Brahman, your sastra (sastar) is useless. You affirm that God has hands and feet. What a stupendous thing to say (vs. 3, 412).

99 N.K. Wagle, ‘Hindu-Muslim Interactions in Medieval Maharashtra’, in G.D. Sontheimer and Herman Kulke (eds), Hinduism Reconsidered, Delhi, 1989, pp. 53–54.

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Hindu: Listen, Turk, you great idiot (mahamurkha), ignoring the truth that God is in all living things, you have become an atheist (sunyavadaka) (vs. 4, 412). Turk:

You Hindus are really bad (tumhi Hindu assal bure). The stone statue governs your lives. You make that into God. With an ektari (one string instrument) you draw his attention. In its presence you read the puran. Men and women, all stand in front of it. You bow down and fall flat on the ground. Is it not the case, you great idiot (bade nadan)? Dressed in nimb leaves, the (half ) naked (sadhus) congregate, and young women follow them about. Your Vedas are a poor show. All its sayings are useless. You make such a noise, your God must be lying unconscious (vs. 30–3, 413).

Hindu: God is in all places: in water, in wood and in stone. This is the essential import of your book. Look, you yourself are unaware of it. The Turk is totally ignorant. Even as the ghee, melted or solid, is one material, God is one, with attribute or without (saguna, nirguna). You abhor images. You are an utterly senseless idiot. God fulfills the wishes of his devotees (bande). This is the doctrine of your book. Why don’t you grasp it? I have pointed out your shortcomings to you. God is near you, yet you shout at him from a distance ek bar Allha, ek bar Allha (one time Allah, one time Allah—obviously a pun on ‘Allah-o-Akbar’, the Muslim prayer call). The rest of the time is whiled away. He has not met you yet. You hail people at a distance; to those who are near you, you whisper. You should meet him at a close range (fig. you should worship the image). By shouting you merely wake the children. You consider God is towards the west (Mecca). Are all directions empty? You say God is everywhere, yet you cannot comprehend this, you idiot. Five times a day are devoted to God. Are other times lost? You have cheated your own sastra. For you, God is in only one direction. You tell us, we worship stones. Why do you place stones over the dead? You worship the Haji (spirit) of the stone. You believe the tomb to be the true pir. Why do you conserve the bones of those who are only corpses? You cover the stones (tomb of the pir) with flowers and cloth and burn incense before it (vs. 34–42, 413).

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Turk:

You say God resides in all living beings. Tell me the place where you people all eat together. They do not touch each other and stay apart from one another. There is a cleavage between every two castes (jamat). If so much as a grain of his food falls on you while you eat, you will be at his throat (vs. 44, 45, 413).

Hindu: You Turks are total idiots (param murkha). You cannot distinguish between faultless and faulty. When one starts administering pain to another, how can he reach heaven? Because of God (i.e., by natural cause), the animal dies, it becomes carrion. When you dispose of an animal, that is holy and pure, you have indeed, become more pure than God. The Yavanas are full of deceit and guilt. When you sacrifice a chicken, it flutters (in pain) in front of you. What do you gain from this. The sacrificed goat reaches heaven. Then what use is your praying and fasting. Why don’t you kill yourself to attain heaven. Both Hindu and Muslim (Musalman) are God’s creation, brother. (But) observe the determination of the Turk; he has to catch a Hindu and make him a Muslim (vs. 50–55, 413).

Even a Sufi Darvish like Sheikh Mahammad, who was praised as a sant by Ramdas, was distrusted by the Hindus. His following statement reflects the points of friction between the two communities:100 People say of me, he is of a mleccha jati (Muslim). That is why he reviles our gods. We cannot trust him. We see Musalmans smashing the images and destroying our temples. He is surely one of them. The images have been turned to dust. What is there left to worship now. The tradition ( parampara) of the Yavanas is to destroy our gods. He is of their lineage (ha tyamcyaca gotya). We shall not, therefore, listen to what he says. Sheikh Mahammad says, Musalmans are also created by God. Born as a Musalman, he is well versed in Quran and Puran. For his own welfare he listens to the perfected holy ones (siddha sadhakas manalo). One should not search for the origin of a person who exalts God ( jyala navajita Isvara tyaca sadhu naye kulacara) (Yog. 16, 62–67).

Eknath’s contemporary, Guru Nanak, in the Punjab, also points to this recriminatory contestation when he writes: Hindu kahan ta mariya, 100

Ibid., p. 58.

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musalman bhee nahe; panch tata ka putla, Nanak mera naam (If I call myself a Hindu, I will be beaten up, and Muslim I am not; an entity made of five elements; I am only a human being; Nanak is my name). Bhai Gurdas, a prominent scholar and contemporary of Guru Arjan (1563–1606), also notes this continuous cultural strife going on in the Punjab. In one of his verses, he observes: Pushan kadd kitab Nu Vadda Hindu Ya Muslimnoi, Babe Aakhya Hajia Bin Amlan Bajhon Doven Roi.101 (They take out the book and ask: Who is greater, Hindu or Muslim? The Guru replied: O Haji! without the right action both would regret.) Similarly, we are told by Abul Fazl that having observed the fanatical hatred prevailing between Hindus and Muslims, and convinced that it arose only from their mutual ignorance, the enlightened monarch (Akbar) wished to dispel the same by rendering the books of the former accessible to the latter.102 Shah Muni, the eighteenth century Muslim bhakti poet, in his Marathi work, Siddhanta Bodha, observes:103 The avindhas (Muslims) consider the ways of the Maharashtra dharma as being twisted and upside down. And these people abhor the doings of the yavanas (Muslims). Avindhas say, ‘The Maharashtra dharma is false.’ The Maharashtras say, ‘The avindhas’ way is upside down.’ There is a rift between the two. No one knows whose dharma is better. Some say that the ways of both are identical. Isvara and Allah are one and the same. But due to ignorance they (Hindus and Muslims), do not understand the meaning (of this statement).

J.T. O’Connell’s fascinating article ‘Vaisnava Perceptions of Muslims in Sixteenth Century Bengal’ offers significant insights into the process of cultural interaction going on in that part of the subcontinent. O’Connell has used biographical writings on Chaitanya (1486–1533), composed within about eighty years of his death, as a source material to construct the cultural scene in Bengal. In sixteenth century Bengal Vaisnava Hindus were placed in a triangular cultural contest, the other two being Brahmans and Muslims. As in Maharashtra, when referring to 101 Gyani Hazara Singh Pandit, Waran Bhai Gurdas (in Gurmukhi), Amritsar, 1962, War I, Pauri 33, p. 29. 102 Schimmel, Islam in the Indian Subcontinent, quoted on p. 85. 103 Quoted in G.D. Sontheimer and Herman Kulke (eds), op. cit., ‘The Expression Maharashtra Dharma is used by Shah-Muni as a comprehensive term of reference for Brahmanical and folk practices, theology from the Vedas, Puranas, Mahabharata and Ramayana, Dharmasastra and dvaita and advaita philosophical tenets.’

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persons, individually or collectively the texts occasionally mention Turk or Pathan, but far more often speak of Yavana or Mleccha.104 There is the total absence of such basic terms as Muslim, Mussalman and Islam. Each of the terms, Yavana and Mleccha was used in Sanskrit language prior to its application to the Muslims. Over a period, Yavana came to stand for foreigner, especially the foreigner coming from the north-west. Many of the contexts in which Yavana appears in these biographies of Chaitanya suggest that the connotations of foreignness, vigour and potential for violence were still alive even as the term was straining to become a proper name in sixteenth century Bengal. In pre-Muslim days, Mleccha indicated a person or group perceived as alien, barbarous or boorish. The pejorative connotations of Mleccha more or less remained in tact even when used in a new cultural context. The sensibility which permeates the Chaitanya-Caritamrta of Krishnadasa Kaviraja is that Vaishnavas in Muslim dominated Bengal are reasonably secure provided they observe sensible precautions and maintain faith in Krishna. A cautious circumspection stands out as the dominant attitude of Vaishnavas in the presence of Muslims. J.T. O’Connell’s conclusion is that none of the biographers exhibits a profound or thoroughly informed knowledge of the Islamic faith, doctrine or practice. None of these texts mentions Islam, Muslim, Mussalman, the Prophet Muhammad, Shari’ah, Umma or ulema. ‘The consistent use of outsiders’ somewhat pejorative terms, yavana and mleccha, rather than an insiders’ term, Muslim or Mussalman, suggests that whatever knowledge the Vaisnava writers had gained did not come from any sustained courteous dialogue with Muslims.’105 Kabir and other saints repeatedly reminded the Hindus and Muslims that as they were the children of the same God, therefore, God should not be the issue of discord between them. But despite these efforts the cultural strife between the communities was not visibly coming to an end. Towards the end of his life, Kabir records a sense of disenchantment with his social milieu in his famous verse, ‘Dekho Re Jag Baurana!’:106 104 J.T. O’Connell, ‘Vaisnava Perceptions of Muslims in Sixteenth Century Bengal’, in Milton Israel and N.K. Wagle (eds), Islamic Society and Culture, Delhi, 1983, pp. 289–313. 105 Ibid., p. 309. 106 Hazari Prasad Diwedi, Granthavali, Delhi, 1981, Vol. 4, p. 452. Appendix, Pad No. 168.

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Sachi kaho to maran lage Jooti kaho patiana Hindu kehit Hai Ram Hamara Musalman Rehmana Aapus main Doe lare marat Hai maram na koi Jana Dekho re Jag Baurana! If I tell the truth they beat me up with lie they are pleased. Hindus say: Ram is ours while the Musalmans stake their exclusive claim to Rehmana They quarrel and kill each other nobody knows solution to the problem Kabir! the world is really crazy!

Similarly, Bulle Shah, an eighteenth century Punjabi Sufi poet, also refers to this endless strife but characterises it as futile: Kahian Ramdas, Kahian Fateh Mummad yahi Kadimi shor Musalman chita se chirte Hindu chirte Gor Khatam Huae sab Jhagre Raghre Nikal parah koai hor107 (At some places they are extolling Ram at other places they are extolling Muhammad this noise is there from the very beginning Musalmans are irritated with the pyre while Hindus are irritated with the grave All quarrels would come to an end if they discover the real God)

Like some of his contemporaries, Dadu was a believer in a God without attributes who was formless and beyond description. Dadu’s

107

Dr. Harbhajan Singh, Bulle Shah (in Hindi), Delhi, 1990, p. 111.

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concept of non-sectarianism (nipakh) and his distrust of the orthodox religious leaders of the two major communities coincided with Akbar’s approach of Sulh-kul. Dadu was, of course, aware that such a non-sectarian (nipakh) path was a difficult one, and that it would be chosen by only a few. As he sadly admitted: Dadu parva parvi sansar sab Nipakh virla koai108 (Everyone in this world is partisan only a few are truly non-sectarian)

The evidence of ‘cultural texts’ invariably leads us to the conclusion that in order to obliterate the ‘faultline’, some of the Sufis and sants might have preached the vision of composite culture but they certainly did not succeed in influencing vast sections of the population. Yet they did succeed in a limited sense, by driving this ‘faultline’ underground where it virtually lay buried. This certainly helped in the creation of an atmosphere which helped the successful functioning of the ‘complicity’, for a fairly long time. Its allegiance and commitment to ‘Mughal hegemony’ led to the development of complex relationships of loyalty and competition, of closeness and friction, between the elites involved in the complicity. It was this common commitment to the myth of ‘Mughal hegemony’ which was sought to be defended in the revolt of 1857. But once the myth of ‘Mughal hegemony’ was violently smashed, the historic compromise between the communities enshrined in the more or less successfully functioning complicity, premised on the existence of Muslim rule, fell apart. Once the basic cultural premise of the medieval Indian state was replaced by a new state with different cultural premises, the indigenous communities were now thrown into the turmoil of re-negotiating the power relations between themselves. But with one important difference: now they could not settle this issue through open warfare as they had done earlier; they had to do this through the new state apparatus which was seen by both as the alien rule of non-Hindustanis. This struggle for renegotiation of power relations of the respective communities was

108 Savitri Chandra, ‘Akbar’s Concept of Sulh-kul, Tulsi’s Concept of Maryada and Dadu’s Concept of Nipakh: A Contemporary Study’, Social Scientist, Vol. 20, Nos 9–10, September–October 1992, p. 35.

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manipulated by the new state to prolong its existence. Each community’s discourse aimed at manipulating the state in its own favour while this need of the communities was manipulated by the new state in order to perpetuate itself. But each manipulative act/gesture of the community as well as of the state carried a ‘price tag’ in political terms which had to be paid before each transaction of reward/compromise between a particular community and the colonial state.

Chapter 7

Women and Sexuality in the Discourse of Communalism and Communal Violence

… Unlike so many tyrants, he has not used his power to possess himself of other men’s wives and children by force; he has been mindful of how attached men are to their spouses and their progeny and of how often political crises and revolutions originated in abuses of this nature: he has therefore taken the greatest care to avoid such reproaches .... About Prince Nicoclces of Greek in Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, Vol. 2, 1985, p. 172. When some active women members of Neo-Nazi groups were recently asked why they joined these organisations, they replied that they ‘felt strong’ within the group and found that they could ‘identify with them’. They say they feel threatened by sexual harassment and other crimes by foreign men. They also consider foreigners to be ‘dirty’—people who litter the roads and public places. Consequently, German men find it easy to legitimise their hostility towards foreigners, through the need to ‘protect their women against the strong sexual instincts and the aggression’ of foreigners. And then, an authoritarian state would seem to be the right instrument ‘to protect personal integrity’. Hostility towards foreigners is not a phenomenon peculiar to Germany. Rightwing racist attacks have recently been on the rise elsewhere in Europe too, particularly in France, Italy, Spain and

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Austria—nations caught in the crosscurrents of a myriad political and socio-economic pressures. The Pioneer, 15 December 1992, ‘Fear of the Foreign Strikes German Women’. In this age of political correctness, where every self-respecting black girl should tuck herself up with nobody other than a self-respecting black partner, more and more successful black women are choosing to go out and stay out—with white men. Ten years ago, it would have been blasphemy against my own race to do so—a betrayal of the highest order.... Black women leaping over racial barriers and doing what black men have been doing for ages is, however, causing considerable conflict within black circles. Black men don’t like it one bit. They never did. In the past, the daring black stars who had enough money and power to be immune to the haranguing from their brethren like Shirley Bassey and Diana Ross who both married white husbands—suffered constant insults and some time threats. Today things are little better. Boris Becker’s black girl-friend has suffered public taunts that hit the headlines. Less famous black girls have suffered far worse. Paul King, a successful black accountant in the city, explains: ‘Girls like Noami and Iman are first-class traitors.’ ‘For black women to turn around and willingly give white men what they used to grab forcibly without permission is like rubbing salt into a centuries-old wound,’ says King. Underlying the average black male’s resentment of the new trend are several issues that go beyond simple, classic knee-jerk male sexual jealousy or sheer possessiveness ... if you opt for a white man who is somebody, you are allying yourself with a descendant of supremacist forces that colonised, enslaved and raped us. Times of India, 27 May 1992. ‘Black Women Find White Men More Desirable’, by Donu Kogbara.

The object of this chapter is to understand the ‘power of ideologies and ideologies of power’ in terms of historical formation of discourses in the context of long-term social processes. The argument in this chapter, a bit complicated, ploughs through a number of fields. From a discussion of literary sources we move on to politics and political propaganda in the 1930s; in the next section we browse through bardic histories and legends and compare this sort of evidence with the evidence provided by standard historical texts. Following a circular route we tend to come back to the beginning at the end. Perhaps all discourses, but especially the nationalist discourses, are formed of four vital human elements: kam (sexuality), krodh (anger), lobh



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(greed) and ahankar (i.e., pride or arrogance). How these elements are fused together by the ideologues to construct an idiom of contest and difference depends upon the ways in which the proportion of this mix and hierarchy of these elements is decided by those who employ them to create the myth of a nation and its institutional embodiment in the nation-state. Political discourses are not formulated arbitrarily. They will be of no use if they do not touch an emotional chord and appeal to a sense of security, self-worth and pride. Their aim is always to rally the vast masses, arouse them to a point where they are able to completely identify themselves with certain abstractions. Here, a distinction must be made between the formation of a discourse by an intellectual elite and its systematic dissemination to the wider sections of society claiming to provide solutions to certain long-term critical problems agitating the minds of considerable sections of society. Such a discourse might remain marginalised and a fringe phenomenon forever or for a fairly long time before it could break the psychological barrier to grip the minds of the broad masses in a specific conjuncture. In this chapter our discussion is limited only to some aspects of the formation of a discourse popularly labelled as communalism. The basic structure of the aggressive Hindu communal discourse as a specific form of nationalist ideology was formulated by the Hindu Mahasabha and R.S.S. in the 1930s. But it was left to V.D. Savarkar, to work out its essential cultural stereotypes, its popular propagandistic form and its combative spirit which, with little variations, are deployed even till today. It is mainly the question of these essential stereotypes and their historical field which interests us in this chapter. After all, it is through cultural stereotypes that a particular past is selected, mythified and transformed into an activating ideology. The following questions, regarding the negative peculiarities of this discourse, have always attracted our curiosity: Why is this discourse so thoroughly imbued with stereotypes of sexual inferiority and emasculation revealing an insecurity and lack of self-confidence in one’s cultural identity which is supposed to be more than 2,500 years old? Why is it that the ‘self-assertion and self-affirmation of this discourse springs more, if not exclusively, from its ‘anti-ism’? How does one explain its deep sense of injured pride, victimhood and obsession  with the past where it conceptualises the present mainly in terms of  inversion of the past and history as an arena for settling scores?

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It has been suggested that sections of the traditional Brahmanic–Kshatriya elite were convinced that it was the defeat at the hands of Muslims and the British, which had led to emasculation of the Hindus and made them nirveerya or sterile and napunsak or impotent. The theory of action associated with such ‘scapegoating’ was that the Hindus would have to redeem their masculinity by fighting and defeating the Muslims and the British.1 But as is clear from the track record of the movement guided by the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS, this deep-seated feeling of impotence and Hindu search for self-esteem was directed exclusively, and con-  tinues to be so, against the Muslims. Therefore, the general fact of defeat and subjugation cannot explain the power of specific stereotypes in the self-representation of this movement.2 It is true, that the theoretical foundations of this discourse were laid down by the Bengali intellectuals in the nineteenth century by making ‘Muslim tyranny’ an essential part of nationalist historical perceptions. But one must resist the temptation of reading a linear development between this early nationalist tradition and the political perspective developed by Savarkar and his associates  in Maharashtra and other parts of the country in the 1930s. The fact that their ideas could lend themselves to selective readings and con-  flicting interpretations made it a complex cultural heritage with contradictory strands. The theme of ‘Hindu impotence’ was employed by Savarkar as a mode of provocation and instigation, i.e., shaming the Hindus into action by deliberately stoking the fires of dormant hatred. He would often hurl the phrase at his audience: ‘Look at the gutless Hindu. He cannot even defend his women from Muslim goondas!’ But Savarkar was not alone in invoking the stereotype of ‘Muslim goonda as an abductor or a rapist’.3 In 1919, Muslim leaders requested Arya Samaj leader Swami Shraddhananda who was leading anti-Rowlatt bills satyagraha in Delhi, to preach to the congregation from the pulpit. Swami’s speech at the 1 Ashis Nandy, ‘The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi’, in Nandy, At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture, New Delhi, 1980, p. 86. 2 For details, see Tapan Raychaudhuri, Three Views of Europe from Nineteenth Century Bengal, Calcutta, 1987. 3 Referring to the ideas of Nathuram Godse, Ashis Nandy comments: ‘His writings were punctuated by references to the British and the Muslims as “rapists”, and Hindus as their “raped, castrated, deflowered victims”’, op. cit., p. 86. But I am not sure whether Godse brackets British with the Muslims in such descriptions.



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Jama Masjid had national repercussions. This was followed by Hindu Sadhus addressing from Muslim pulpits and masjids and Musalman divines addressing mixed audiences in Hindu temples, in all parts of the country.4 Summing up the dramatic character of the Hindu–Muslim fraternisation, Shraddhananda observed: ‘For full twenty days it appeared that Ramraj had set in .... Goondas had ceased to exist: every Hindu woman was treated like his own mother, sister or daughter by every Musalman and vice versa.’5 It is one of the ironies of history that this symbol of communal unity was to one day perform suddhi on a Muslim woman and be shot dead at the hands of a Muslim. The oscillation of Swami’s consciousness from one extreme to another encapsulated the drama of the national movement in a microcosm, in a way anticipating its unfolding denouement. Madan Mohan Malaviya, the well-known  Congress leader and one of the founder-members of the Hindu Mahasabha, toured throughout the country to put across the message that ‘Hindu Sanghatan’ was required because the Hindus were unable to protect their ‘honour and religion’. The only way to establish communal harmony was that the Hindus should become strong enough to successfully ward off an unjust attack.5a ‘I am convinced,’ he declared in his Presidential address to the Gaya session of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1922, … no unity can be maintained unless both Hindus and Mussalmans individually felt strong enough to defend themselves against attacks by bad elements of the other. The breaches in the past were due mainly to  the weakness of Hindus; bad elements among Mahomedans, feeling sure that Hindus were cowards, attacked them. The Hindus instead of coming out of their homes to take to task the disturbing factor and put it down, cowardly ran away. The moment the strength of opposition was realised the aggressor would disappear.6 4 Swami Shraddhananda cited in J.T.F. Jordens, Swami Shraddhananda: His Life and Causes, New Delhi, 1981, p. 111. 5  Ibid., p. 111. 5a The Punjab was the only place where Islamic hegemony was reversed by the Sikhs. This involved a lot of bloodshed on both sides. A different kind of stereotype of the Sikh was projected among the Muslims and continues to be projected even today. In a  kindergarten book of Urdu alphabets in Pakistan ‘za’ in the book stands for Zaalim (tyrannical) and to illustrate it there is a picture of a fierce looking Sikh. The Indian Express, 13 December 1992. 6  Pandit Malaviya’s Message—Hindu Sanghatan the Only Way, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee Papers. File No. 53.

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Pandit Malaviya wanted the Indian manhood and womanhood to realise its duty of defending itself. For this it was necessary that ‘our women’ were armed with guns and revolvers like English women to defend their honour against those who attacked them. In 1924, he returned to this theme once again at the Belgaum special session of the Mahasabha. Addressing the audiences, he said: I am convinced that but for the weakness and cowardice of the  Hindus some of the recent Hindu–Muslim riots could have been averted. These disturbances had created a situation of national importance.  It was, therefore, a national necessity that the weakness and cowardice of the Hindus, which had brought these disturbances about, should be removed.7

In the aftermath of Khilafat movement, Gandhi was faced with the reality of communal conflicts. In September 1924, when Mahadev Desai wondered what error Gandhi had committed for which he was offering penance in the shape of his fast, the latter exclaimed: My error! Why, I may be charged with having committed a breach of faith with the Hindus. Even today I am asking them to practice ahimsa. to settle quarrels by dying but not by killing. And what do I find to be the result? How many temples have been desecrated? How many sisters come to me with complaints? As I was saying to Hakimji yesterday, Hindu women are in mortal terror of Mussalman goondas. In many places they fear to go out alone.8

Gandhi felt so intensely on this issue that he talked in this vein not only to persons like Hakim Ajmal Khan, but to all and sundry. In fact  for some time, during 1924–25, this became a constant refrain in 

7  Ibid. What some Hindus characterised as the ‘bellicose disposition’ of the Mahomedan was, in the self-perception of some Muslims, their inherent behaviour indicating spontaneous courage and fearlessness. After the first phase of the Calcutta riots, the Muslim newspaper Mohammadi declared: ‘Mohammadans have proved … that however inferior they may numerically be they can fight against people ten or eleven times as numerous ....’ Suranjan Das, Communal Riots in Bengal: 1905–47. New Delhi, 1991. pp. 78–79. 8  The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. XXV, New Delhi, 1967, pp. 174–75.



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his writings.9 Thus in a long article on ‘Hindu–Muslim Tension: Its Causes and Cure’, published in Young India on 29 May 1924, he observed: My own experience but confirms the opinion that the Mussalman as a rule is a bully, and the Hindu as a rule is a coward. I have noticed this in railway trains, on public roads, and in the quarrels which I had the privilege of settling. Need the Hindu blame the Mussalman for his cowardice? Where there are cowards, there will always be bullies.10

When some persons protested that such a sweeping generalisation was not valid that most of the Hindus and Muslims after all belonged to the same racial stock, Gandhi explained: The Mussalman, being generally in a minority, has as a class developed as a bully. Moreover, being heir to fresh traditions, he exhibits the virility of a comparatively new system of life. Though, in my opinion, nonviolence has a predominant place in the Quran, the thirteen hundred years of imperialistic expansion has made the Mussalmans fighters as a body. They are therefore aggressive. Bullying is the natural excrescence of an aggressive spirit. The Hindu has an age-old civilisation. He is essentially non-violent.11

Gandhi’s analysis was rational but far from convincing. This problematisation of the theme of Hindu ‘cowardice’ and ‘tolerance’ and Muslim ‘virility’ was different from the way it was problematised by other Hindu leaders. It could be argued, that the need for national unity demanded that he should have refrained from expressing what he strongly felt in his heart. But Gandhi was one of those who strongly believed that Hindu–Muslim unity could not be built on duplicity  and double-speak. A cursory survey of the history of social relations between upper caste non-Muslims and Muslim elite over the centuries points towards an area 9 Bimal Prasad, ‘Gandhi and India’s Partition’, in Amit Kumar Gupta (ed.), Myth and Reality: The Struggle for Freedom in India, 1945–47, Delhi, 1987, p. 101. 10  Collected Works, Vol. XXIV, New Delhi, 1967, pp. 141–42. 11  Ibid., pp. 270–71. Referring to a recent riot in Saharanpur (UP), Gandhi remarked that as a Hindu he was more ashamed of ‘Hindu cowardice’ than angry at ‘Muslim  bullying’. ‘Between violence and cowardly flight’, he added. ‘I can only prefer violence to cowardice’. Ibid., p. 142.

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of experience located in the primordial realm of sexuality. The way the cultural stereotypes of sexuality came to be embedded in creative and popular modern Indian literature points to the selective construction of memory of this experience and the lines of psychological force and hegemonic effects emanating from it. The general matrix of inferiority activated by these stereotypes reproduced a structured psychological behaviour in everyday life. Towards the first quarter of the twentieth century some of the Muslim ideologues began to assert that in many of the novels and dramas written by the Hindu writers historical Muslim personages, even Begums and princesses, were maligned and vilified. Such literary activity was con-  sidered as ‘all part of the build-up of Hindu national prestige’.12 By reading non-Muslim novels which ‘insulted our religion and society and  lowered our national prestige’, claimed Choltan (Soltan), the Muslim readers were becoming accustomed to think that ‘to be a Muslim is a sign of inferiority ….’13 Bengali Hindu authors had, since the mid-nineteenth century, been awakening a spirit of nationalism. Many of these writers invariably glorified not merely what they thought was the ancient Indian culture but also began to dwell upon the struggles of the Rajputs, the Marathas and the Sikhs as instances of the Hindus’ urge for freedom.14 The specific kind of anti-Muslim sentiment in Bengali literature was underlined in an article published in Islam Pracharak. ‘They have dragged out from their solitary rooms in the harem,’ observed Ismail Hossain Siraji, … even the daughters of the Badshah, who had been kept in strict purdah, and by the help of their hemp addicted imaginations they have depicted some of them as desirous of love of Shivaji ...15 and some of them as languishing for the love of pig-eating Rajputs16 … 17

The heroic portrayal in novels and dramas by Hindu writers of Shivaji in love with a Muslim heroine and at war with Muslim powers provoked 12

Mustafa Nurul Islam, Bengali Muslim Public Opinion as Reflected in the Bengali Press, 1901–1930, Dacca, 1973, p. 136. 13  Choltan (Soltan)? 6 July 1923. Quoted in ibid., p. 140. 14 Amit Sen. Notes on Bengal Renaissance, Bombay, 1946, p. 57. 15 Ayesha in Durgesnandini, Rosinara in Rosenara and Zulekha in Madhabikankan, all three were supposed to be languishing for the love of Hindus. 16 The reference here is to Bankim’s novel Rajsinha, 1882. 17  Islam Pracharak, No. 11–12, 1903.



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bitter criticism from the Muslim press. The vigorous anti-Bankim campaign was attributed to the fact that he had a predilection for making Muslim girls fall madly in love with Shiva-like Hindu boys who possess tremendous self-control and reject these girls. Bankim was singled out as one author who deliberately maligned the Muslims.18 Even when the relationship was shown between a Hindu woman and a Muslim male it was the latter who was unable to resist the charms exuded by the powerful female.19 Not to speak of the novelist sometimes even the historian could not resist this temptation. Commenting on the life of Aurangzeb around 1637–38, the well-known historian Jadunath Sarkar observed: At this period, too, occurred the only romance of his life, his passion for Hira Bai (surnamed Zainabadi), whom he procured from the harem of his maternal uncle. It was a case of love at first sight, and Aurangzeb’s infatuation for the beautiful singer knew no bounds; to please her he even consented to drink wine! The affair was cut short by her death in the bloom of youth, which plunged her lover in the deepest grief.20

Certain sections of the intelligentsia felt a strong need for an alternative Muslim ‘national literature’ which would show ‘how Muslims ought to be, how their domestic life ought to be, how their political life ought to be’.21 According to Islam-darsan, not only were educated Muslim males dressing up ‘like any Hindu Ram, Shyam, Jadu or Madhu’, but also Muslim girls of good family were rejecting traditional Muslim dress in favour of ‘fine, semi-transparent saris from Farasdanga’. They were 18 Bankim’s Durgesnandini, Sitaram, Anandamath, and Rajsinha were considered offensive by the Bengali Muslim press. T.W. Clark writes, ‘… usually they (Muslim characters) are cast in the roles of tyrant and oppressor. They are the abductors of women, and the rapacious collectors of taxes.’ T.W. Clark, ‘The Role of Bankimchandra in the Development of Nationalism’, in C.H. Philips (ed.), Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, 1962, pp. 439–40. 19 Nurul Islam, Muslim Public Opinion, pp. 147 and 161. Commenting on the performance of Pratapaditya which depicted ‘the disagreeable spectacle of old Torap falling head-over-heels in love with a Hindu young lady, named Fuljani’ and ‘mauling’ of a young Brahmin wife by the foot soldiers of Sher Khan, Naba Nur stated in 1905 that ‘the aim of these authors is to exalt Hindu ideals at the expense of Muslims’. Ibid., p. 144. 20 Jadunath Sarkar, ‘Aurangzeb’, The Modern Review, Vol. VI, July 1909, p. 55. According to Sarkar, the title Bai was ‘a title which was applied to Hindu women only.’  The Modern Review, Vol. VI, No. 2. 1909, p. 101. 21 Nurul Islam, Muslim Public Opinion, p. 156.

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modelling themselves apparently upon Hindu novel-heroines ‘Ashalata, Premlata, Anupama and Nirupama’. Young Muslim men in general were abandoning moustaches and beards, wearing fine dhutis and panjabis and creating ‘in sophisticated male society the illusion of being women’.22 It was argued that Muslims must cultivate their ‘national history’ so as to refute ‘with incontrovertible historical evidence the base, far fetched tales about our princesses and queens’. The benefit of the study of history was further underlined by asserting: ‘No other branch of literature can inspire people, can awaken their self-respect and can bring high aspirations into their hearts as can ancient national history.’23 In retaliation against the unsympathetic treatment of Muslim characters by Hindu authors, some Muslim authors produced historical novels, in which Muslims were victors, Hindus the vanquished; Muslims displayed heroism, Hindus cowardice; Hindu heroines fell madly in love with Muslim heroes and eventually embraced Islam.24 It has been pointed out by a researcher, that in Bengal, the Hindu press had systematically built up a stereotype of the bestial Muslim male lusting after Hindu women.25 The conscious attempts to evolve two separate national literatures was indicative of the fact that two separate psychological and emotional worlds were already in the process of crystallisation.26 Much before Jinnah arrived on the scene with his pet idea of the two-nation theory the seed had already been planted by ninteenth century Bengali literature. Equally, this pattern of popular Hindu remembrance of Muslim rule was manifest in the writings of the writers who pioneered the transition of Hindi literature to its modern phase. Covering a brief span of two decades—from the early 1870s to the early 1890s— these writings belong to the formative phase of Indian nationalism. Like their counterparts in Bengal, Hindi writers too used the terms Mleccha and Yavana for 22

Nurul Islam, Ibid., pp. 255–56. Mohammad Shahidullah in Al-Eslam, 1916, p. 156. 24 Nurul Islam, Muslim Public Opinion, p. 162. 25 Tanika Sarkar, ‘Communal Riots in Bengal’, in Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India, 1986, p. 296. 26 In 1918 Al-Eslam published an article eulogising Mir Mosharraf Hossain who ‘set fluttering our flag marked with the crescent moon beside the Hindu flag in the literary sky of Bengal.’ Though attacked for showing considerable Hindu influence in his book of verses (Dali, 1912) Emdad Ali was, nevertheless, praised bySaogat in 1919 for having written such ‘a national poem ... to awaken a sense of identity amongst Muslims by releasing  them from their trance of self-forgetfulness.’ Nurul Islam, Muslim Public Opinion, pp. 157, 153. 23



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Muslims. In a poem, written in 1878, Bharatendu Harishchandra talks of the Muslims ‘who had taken away the religion, wealth and women of the Hindus’.27 Harishchandra wrote: Jin javanan tum nari dhan tinahun lino. (Bharatendu-Granthavali, Vol. II, p. 764).

Vamadev, a character in a small play—Bharat Mein Yavan Raj—by Radha Charan Goswami, is shown thanking the British for saving the Aryas from the clutches of the Muslims who had been killing cows, defiling temples, raping women and robbing the people.28 This play was translated from a Bengali play entitled Bharater Yavan. By way of preface, Goswami assured the Muslims that it was not aimed against them. It only brought out, he said, their bravery and the cowardice of the Hindus. Pratap Narain Mishra shared this belief in the multi-  faceted oppression perpetrated on Hindus by the Muslim rulers. Lashing out at the Hindus, he wrote that nothing could be expected of these eunuchs.29 Mishra wrote:

27 Sudhir Chandra, ‘Communal Consciousness in Late 19th Century Hindi Literature’, in Hasan (ed.), Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends, p. 174. Sudhir Chandra discusses what he calls ‘communal consciousness’ in the writings of three leading Hindi writers, Bharatendu Harishchandra (1850–1885); Pratap Narain Mishra (1856–1894), and Radha Charan Goswami (1859–1923). 28  Ibid., p. 183. The ideologues of the RSS systematically carried on the propaganda that the Congress tradition of Gandhi and Nehru was making the Hindu society ‘impotent’ and ‘imbecile’. ‘The exhortion of the (Congress) leaders,’ wrote M.S. Golwalkar,

... did not stop at that. The Hindu was asked to ignore, even submit meekly .... In effect he was told: ‘Forget all that the Muslims have done in the past .... If your worshipping in the temple, your taking out Gods in procession in the streets irritates the Muslims, then don’t do it. If they carry away your wives and daughters, let them. Do not obstruct them. That would be violence’. To cite an instance, in these days, a Hindu girl was abducted by a Muslim in NWFP and the problem was posed before the Central Assembly where our prominent leaders were present. A Muslim Congress leader lightly brushed aside the incident saying: ‘After all boys are boys and girls are girls.’ At that insulting remark not one of the Hindu leaders present there raised a voice of protest. None dared to ask why, if it was just a case of boys and girls, it always happened that the Muslim boys kidnapped only Hindu girls, and not Muslim girls? On the other hand, they enjoyed it as a piece of humour!’ Bunch of Thoughts, pp. 149–50. Quoted in D.R. Goyal, Gandhi Murder to Babri Demolition, New Delhi, 1993, p. 5. 29  Ibid.

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Jahan rajkanyan ke dola Turkan ke ghar janya Tahan dusari kaun bat hai jehaman log lajanya, Bhala in hijran te kuchh hona hai. (Pratap Narain-Granthavali, pp. 2–7).

In consonance with this reconstruction of the past, even the practice of sati was attributed to the lecherous character of the Muslims. In order to evade their clutches, it was argued, the brave Kshatriya women of Rajputana had invented this practice. This pattern of consciousness, with its implicit assumptions and attitudes, pervading the literary production in Hindi was not confined to just these three writers.30 The ways in which postmodernist thought opens up the rapprochement between history and literature and the possibility of recovering a text’s  historical meaning is at the forefront of contemporary literary debate.31 The text is at once constituted by and constitutes history. At work in shaping a literary text is a host of unstated desires, beliefs, misunderstandings and interests which impress themselves upon the work. The power of discourse shapes the ways in which a certain ideology of a period creates embodiments of the cultural constructs governing mental and social life.  The references to some of the literary texts of Prem Chand are included here with a view to show that power and history work through texts in ways that their authors cannot fully control. Rosa Luxemburg once remarked: ‘Unconscious comes before the Conscious, the logic of historical process comes before the subjective logic of those who participate in this process.’ The Unconscious, avers Lacan, is the discourse of the Other. In other words, if we are looking for the discourse of the Other we are more likely to find it in the cultural stereotypes constantly at work at the site of the Unconscious. It is well-known that Munshi Prem Chand consistently struggled against communalist ideas in the field of literature and culture. More than any other Hindi writer it was Prem Chand who made conscious attempts to re-educate his readers and eradicate the popular prejudices about the Muslims, their traditions and spiritual leaders. ‘Karbala’, ‘Nabi Ka Niti Nirvah’, ‘Hinsa Parmodharam’, ‘Mandir-Masjid’ and ‘Muktidhan’ are some of the writings embodying his solid ‘secular’ stance and criticism of 30

 Ibid., p. 172. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, A Journal of Medieval Studies, Vol. 65, 1990, pp. 59–86. 31



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communalist attitudes. Yet the stereotype of ‘Muslim male lusting after Hindu female’ and ‘Hindu cowardice’ seems to be lurking somewhere in the recesses of his unconscious and fragments of these keep surfacing in his novels and stories. For example, at one place in Kaya Kalap (1926) he describes the contemporary communal scene.32 afgUnqvksa us egkohj ny cuk;k] eqlyekuksa us vyhxksy ltk;kA Bkdqj }kjs esa dhrZu dh txg ufc;ksa dh fuUnk gksrh gSA efLtnksa esa uekt+ dh txg nsorkvksa dh nqxZrA [oktk lkgc us iQrok fn;kµtks eqlyeku fdlh fgUnw vkSjr dks mM+k ys tk,s mls ,d gt+kj gtksa dk lokc gksxk] ;'kksnkuUn us dk'kh ds iafMrksa dh O;oLFkk eaxok;h fd ,d eqlyeku dk o/ ,d yk[k xksnku ls Js’ gSA (Hindus forged the contingent of ‘great warriors’ while the Muslims banded together as ‘servants of Ali’. In the temples, criticism of the Muslim Nabis replaced Kirtan while the masjids denounced the Hindu devtas instead of reading namaaz. Khwaja sahib issues a fatwa: The Muslim who could abduct a Hindu woman would receive the  fruits of a thousand Haj pilgrimages. Yashodanand got the pandits of Kashi to rule that the killing of one thousand Muslims would be greater than gifting one lakh cows.)

Similarly in Seva Sadan (1918), a ‘secular’ Muslim character Teg Ali declares:33 vktdy iksfyfVdy eiQkn dk tksj gS] gd vksj bUlkiQ dk uke u yhft,A vxj vki eqnfjZl gSa rks fgUnq yMdksa dks iQsy dhft,] rglhynkj gSa rks fgUnqvksa ij VSDl yxkb;s] esftLVªsV gSa rks fgUnqvksa dks ltk,a nhft,] lc buLiSdVj iqfyl gS rks fgUnqvksa ij >wBs eqdnesa nk;j dhft,] rgdhdkr djus tkb;s rks fgUnqvksa ds c;ku xyr fyf[k;sA vxj vki pksj gSa rks fdlh fgUnw ds ?kj Mkdk Mkfy;s] vxj vkidks gqLu vkSj b'd dk [kCr gS rks fdlh fgUnw ukt+uhu dks mM+kb;s] rc vki dkSe ds [kkfne] dkSe ds eqgflu] dkSeh fd'rh ds uk[kqnk lc dqN gSaA (These days politics rules us, do not speak of man or human rights. If you are a Muslim teacher fail the Hindu boys, if a tehsildar then tax the Hindus, if a magistrate then punish the Hindus, if a police sub-inspector then file false cases against the Hindus, and if you go to investigate report the statements of Hindus incorrectly. If you are

32

 Quoted in ‘Communalism and Prem Chand’ by Kunwarpal Singh in Communalism and Media, Report of a seminar organised by the Aligarh Muslim University, October 1989. 33  Ibid.

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a thief rob a Hindu house, if obsessed with love and beauty abduct a Hindu maiden. Then you will become the defender, the beloved and leader of the community’s destiny.)

But the interplay of these stereotypes at a very subtle and deeper level is evident in his powerful story Lanchhan34 (The Accusation). It is a story about a middle class man Shyamsundar’s family being ripped apart as a result of the protracted dissolution of his relationship with his wife. And all this happens because of two Muslim characters who slowly worm their way into their relation and ultimately succeed in creating distrust and suspicion between the two of them. In the opening scene, we see, Munshi Shyamsundar’s wife flattered by the praises showered upon her by Munnu Mehtar. eqÂwµljdkj dk fetk+t cM+k vPNk gSA gqtwj bruk [;ky djrh gSA nqljs ?kjksa esa rks ekyfdusa ckr Hkh ugha iwNrhaA ljdkja dks vYykg us ldy&lwjr nh gS] oSlk gh fny Hkh fn;k gSA vYykg tkurk gS] gqtwj dks ns[kdj Hkw[k&I;kl tkrh jgrh gSA cMs+&cMs+ ?kj dh vkSjrsa ns[kh gSa vkids ryqoksa dh cjkcjh Hkh ugha dj ldrhaA nsohµpy >wBsa! eSa ,slh dkSu [kwclwjr gw¡ A eqÂwµvc ljdkj ls D;k dgw¡A cM+h&cM+h [k=kkfu;ksa dks ns[krk gw¡] xksjsiu ds flok vksj dksbZ ckr ughaA muesa ;g ped dgk¡] ljdkj A (Munnu: Madam, you have a very good disposition. You are so concerned about one—other ladies I work for do not even speak to me. Allah has given you as beautiful a heart as your face. Allah knows, all hunger and thirst vanish on beholding your face. I have seen women of great class and affluence—but none compare with even the soles of your feet. Devi:

Come on! you liar! I am not such a beauty.

Munnu: What can I say to convince you madam? I have seen so many ladies belonging to great Khatri families. They have nothing but fair skins—none have your charm.)



Then one day while talking to her Munnu innocently introduces a reference to Raza Mian. eqÂwµvc ljdkj dqN u dgyk,¡] gqtwj dks NksM+dj vkSj rks dksbZ ,slh ccqvkbu ugha ns[krk] ftldk dksbZ c[kku djsA cgqr gh NksVk vkneh g¡w] ljdkj] ij ccqvkbuksa dh rjg 34

Mansarover, Vol. 5, pp. 120–45.



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esjh vkSjr gksrh] rks mlls cksyus dks th u pgkrkA gqtwj ds pgsjs&eksgjs dh dksb vkSjr eSaus rks ugha ns[khA (Munnu: Now I can’t say any more—besides you I have’nt seen any Babu’s wife worth describing. I am a poor, lowly person madam but if I had a wife like any of those women I would’nt want to speak with her. I have seen no other woman who compares with you.) nsohµpy >wBs] bruh [kq'kken djuk fdlls lh[kk\ eqÂwµ[kq'kken ugha djrk] ljdkj] lPph ckr djrk gw¡A gqtwj ,d fnu f[kM+dh ds lkeus [kM+h FkhaA jtk fe;k¡ dh fuxkg vki ij iM+ xbZA tqrs dh cM+h nqdku gS mudhA vYykg us tSlk /u fn;k gS] oSlk gh fny HkhA vkidks ns[krs gh vk¡[ksa uhps dj yhaA vkt ckrksa&ckrksa esa gqtwj dh ldy&lwjr dks ljkgus yxsA eSaus dgkµtSlh lwjr gS] oSlk ljdkj dks vYykg us fny Hkh fn;k gSA nsohµvPNk] og yk¡ck&lk lk¡oys jax dk toku gS\ eqµgk¡ gqtwj] oghA eq>ls dgus yxs fd fdlh rjg ,d ckj fiQj mUgsa ns[k ikrk] ysfdu eSaus Mk¡Vdj dgkµ[kcjnkj! fe;k¡] tks eq>ls ,slh ckrsa dhaA ogk¡ rqEgkjh nky u xysxhA (Devi: Oh you liar, where did you learn so much flattery? Munnu: I’m not flattering you madam; I speak the truth. One day you were standing at your window when Raza mian’s eye fell on you. He has a big shoeshop—Allah has blessed him with as great a heart as wealth. The moment he saw you he lowered his eyes. Today he suddenly began praising your face and figure. I said to him—Allah has given madam as beautiful a heart as her face. Devi:

Listen—is he that tall, darkish young man?

Munnu: Yes madam, that’s him. He said to me: if only I could somehow see her again! But I shut him up and told him: you can’t pull anything with madam.)

With the help of Munnu, Raza Mian begins to follow Shyamsundar’s wife. Shyamsundar is very upset by this development; irritation and annoyance creeps into their relationship. But instead of confronting Raza Mian, Shyamsundar decides to leave (this mohalla) and shift to the other side of the town. But soon Munnu and Raza Mian catch up with them and re-establish the pattern of flirtation. The story moves through twists and turns and finally Shyamsundar’s wife leaves him and seeks

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shelter with her confidants. At the end we see him engrossed in a mood of contemplation. Prem Chand records for us what is going in the mind of his character: ftl L=kh ds fy, ge thrs gSa vkSj ejrs Hkh] ftldks lq[kh j[kus ds fy, ge vius izk.kksa dk cfynku nsrs gSa] tc og viuh u gqbZ] rks fiQj nwljk dkSu viuk gks ldrk gS\ L=kh dks izlUu j[kus ds fy, mUgksaus D;k ugha fd;k\ ogh L=kh vkt muls nxk dj xbZ dsoy xq¡Ms ds cgdkus esa vkdj muds eqag esa dkfy[k yxk xbZA xq¡Ms ij bytke yxkuk rks ,d izdkj ls eu dks le>kuk gS! ftlds fny esa [kksV u gks] mls dksbZ D;k cgdk ldrk gS\ tc bl L=kh us /ks[kk fn;k] rks fiQj le>uk pkfg, fd lalkj esa izse vkSj fo'okl dk vfLrRo gh ughaA ;g dsoy Hkkoqd izkf.k;ksa dh dYiuk&ek=k gSA (The woman for whom we live and die, for whose happiness we lay down our lives, if she cannot belong to one then who else can be loyal? What had he not done to keep his wife happy? And she had betrayed him today and left him in shame, all because of a goonda’s clever manipulation. To blame the goonda was nothing but self-consolation! Can an unflawed heart be so misled? This woman’s deception proved that love and trust had no value in this world—they were a figment of an emotional person’s imagination.)

Premchand wanted to convey a simple message: suspicion and distrust inevitably end up destroying good relations between individuals. In this story, Prem Chand who was extremely sensitive to communal susceptibilities, casts a Muslim but not a Hindu in the role of a ‘goonda’. Would that have made a difference to the basic thrust of the story? It is difficult to say anything with certainty. But one thing seems certain that he was not aware of what he was doing. Moreover, and this is an other stereotype, the dialogues are supposed to be characteristic of a stereotyped Muslim male. But it is in his story Hinsa Parmodharam35 that the stereotype figures in an explicit manner. Through this story, Prem Chand wants to convey a simple message that all Muslims cannot be tarred with the same brush. There are good Muslims and bad Muslims as there are good Hindus and bad Hindus. But the interesting thing is the mode he chooses to put across his message: a Qazi is shown trying to rape a Hindu woman while another Muslim saves her. To begin with, the simpleton villager Jamid comes to the town. The whole day he roams around and finally 35

 Ibid., pp. 56–65.



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in the evening he happens to be standing in front of a temple. Soon we find him sweeping the rubbish scattered around in the courtyard of the temple. One fine morning a crowd assembles in the temple and suddhi is performed on poor Jamid, of course without his knowing what was  happening. Next day the newspapers carry the news that an ‘alim maulvi’ has been converted to Hinduism. The villager is shown to be so stupid that even now he does not know what has happened. Suddenly, one day we see Jamid saving a poor old Muslim from being beaten up by a young Hindu (literally a tilakdhari). In this attempt he himself gets badly beaten up by the young man’s compatriots. But Jamid still did not understand why those people were beating him up. Subsequently, he is brought to the Qazi who declares him as a true defender of Islam and who also tells him: Rkqeus vdsys brus dkfiQjksa ds nk¡r [kV~Vs dj fn,! D;ksa u gks] esfeu dk [kwu gSA dkfiQjksa dh gdhdr D;kA lquk lcds lc rqEgkjh 'kqf¼ djus tk jgs Fks_ exj rqeus muds lkjs eulwcs iyV fn,A bLyke dks ,sls gh [kkfneksa dks t:jr gSA rqe&tSls nhunkjksa ls bLyke dk uke jks'ku gSA xyrh ;gh gqbZ fd rqeus ,d eghus Hkj rd lcz ugha fd;kA 'kknh gks tkus nsrs] rc etk vkrkA ,d ukt+uhu lkFk ykrs] vkSj nkSyr eqÝrA oYykg! (You bravely confronted so many kafirs and foiled their game! Why not—you have the blood of a momin! Can kafirs withstand that? I hear they were planning to purify you—but you upset all their plans. Islam needs defenders just like you. Believers like you uphold the greatness of Islam. The only mistake you made was not to be patient for a month—you should have let the marriage take place first. That would have been fun—you would bring home a maiden plus wealth! Praise be to Allah!)

From now onwards he comes to stay with the Qazi and begins to learn Quran from him. It is here that the central incident of the story occurs. One day a Hindu woman arrives in the town and through  deception a tongawala brings her to the Qazi’s house. The frightened woman was just trying to run back when the Qazi grabs her hand: Efgyk us rk¡xsokys dh vksj [kwu Hkjh vk¡[kksa ls ns[kdj dgkµrw ew>s ;gk¡ D;ksa yk;k\ dkth lkgc us ryokj pedkdj dgkµigys vkjke ls cSB tkvks] lc dqN ekywe gks tk,xkA vkSjrµrqe rks eq>s dksbZ ekSyoh ekywe gksrs gks\ D;k rEgsa [kqnk us ;gh fl[kk;k gS fd ijkbZ cgw&csfV;ksa dks tcjnLrh ?kj esa can djds mudh vkc: fcxkM+ks\

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dkthµgk¡] [kqnk dk ;gh gqDe gS fd dkfiQjksa dks ftl rjg eqefdu gks] bLyke ds jkLrs ij yk;k tk;A vxj [kq'kh ls u vk;sa] rks tcz lsA vkSjrµblh rjg vxj dksbZ rqEgkjh cgw&csVh dks idM+dj csvkc: djs] rks\ dkthµgks gh jgk gSA tSlk rqe gekjs lkFk djksxs] oSlk gh ge rqEgkjs lkFk djsaxsA fiQj ge rks csvkc: ugha djrs] fliZQ vius etgc esa 'kkfey djrs gSaA bLyke dcwy djus ls vkc: crs Fks] vkSj vius bedku Hkj jksdus dh dksf'k'k djrs FksA rkyhe vkSj rgthc dh rjDdh ds lkFk dqN fnuksa esa lg xqaMkiu t:j xk;c gks tkrk_ exj vc rks lkjh fganw dkSe gesa fuxyus ds fy, rS;kj cSBh gqbZ gSA fiQj gekjs fy, vkSj jkLrk gh dkSu lk gS\ ge detksj gSa] blfy, gesa etcwj gksdj vius dks dk;e j[kus ds fy, nxk ls dke ysuk iM+rk gS_ exj rqe bruk ?kcjkrh D;ksa gks\ rqEgsa ;gk¡ fdlh ckr dh rdyhiQ u gksxhA bLyke vkSjrksa ds gd dk ftruk fygkt djrk gS] mruk vkSj dksbZ etgc ugha djrkA vkSj eqlyeku enZ rks viuh vkSjr ij tku nsrk gSA esjs ;g ukStoku nksLr (tkfen) rqEgkjs lkeus [kMs+ gSa] bUgha ds lkFk rqEgkjk fudkg dj fn;k tk,xkA cl] vkjke ls ftanxh ds fnu clj djukA vkSjrµeSa rqEgsa vkSj rqEgkjs /eZ dks ?k`f.kr le>rh gw¡A rqe dqÙks gksA blds flok rqEgkjs fy, dksbZ nwljk uke ughaA [kSfj;r blh esa gS fd eq>s tkus nks_ ugha rks eSa vHkh 'kksj epk nw¡xh] vkSj rqEgkjk lkjk ekSyohiu fudy tk;sxkA dkthµvxj rqeus tcku [kksyh] rks rqEgsa tku ls gkFk /ksuk iM+sxkA cl] bruk le> yksA vkSjrµvkc: ds lkeus tku dh dksbZ gdhdr ughaA rqe esuh tku ys ldrs gks_ exj vkc: ugha ys ldrsA dkthµD;ksa ukgd ftn djrh gksA vkSjr us njokts ds ikl tkdj dgkµeSa dgrh gw¡] njoktk [kksy nksA tkfen vc rd pqipki [kM+k FkkA T;ksa gh L=kh njokts dh rjiQ pyh] vkSj dkth lkgc us mldk gkFk idM+dj [khapk] tkfen us rqjar njoktk [kksy fn;k vkSj dkth lkgc ls cksykµbUgsa NksM+ nhft,A (The woman glared at the horse cart driver and angrily asked—why have you brought me here? Qazi sahib flashed his sword and said: First sit down quietly, you’ll soon find out.



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Woman: You look like a Maulvi—is this what God has taught you, to abduct other men’s daughters and assault their dignity? Qazi:

Yes, God has commanded that kafirs should be brought to the path of Islam in every way possible. If they don’t come willingly then coerce them.

Woman: If someone were to humiliate your daughter like this? Qazi:

It is already happening to us. We will do unto you as you do to us. Moreover, we don’t humiliate you, only absorb you into our religion. Acceptance of Islam increases your dignity. The Hindu community has proclaimed a war of annihilation against us, they want to wipe us out from this country. Muslims are being turned into unbelievers—through  deception, bribery and force—will Muslims watch this without retaliation?

Woman: Hindus can never commit such atrocities. Possibly, the lower classes are taking revenge against your mischievous activities. But no true Hindu would approve of such revenge. Qazi:

Undoubtedly, this type of michief was indulged in by Muslim goondas till now, but respectable people disapproved and tried to stop it. With education and culture such goondaism would surely have disappeared. But now the entire Hindu community is raring to swallow us. What alternative do we have? We are weak, so we have to perforce use deception to survive. But why are you so afraid? You will have no discomfort here. No other faith respects the rights of women as much as Islam. And a Muslim man would give his life for his woman. This young friend of mine (Jamid) stands before you, we’ll marry you off to him, and you can live your life in peace then.

Woman: I despise you and your religion—you are dogs—there is no other name for you. You better let me go or I’ll scream the place down and expose your religious posturing. Qazi:

If you dare open your mouth, you’ll lose your life, Let that be clear.

Woman: Life has no meaning when virtue is at stake. You can take my life but not my virtue.

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Qazi:

You are needlessly obstinate.



The woman went to the door and said: Open the door. Jamid had been silent thus far, but as the woman went to the door and the Qazi sahib pulled her back, Jamid quickly opened the door and said to the Qazi—‘let her go’.)

Would it not have been better if Prem Chand had chosen a different way to convey what he wanted to convey? For instance, by involving a Pandit instead of a Qazi.36 Once again we are not very certain about it. But one thing seems to be clear that he was not aware of it. It seems that the stereotypes have something to do with the way a writer negotiates the terms of thematic structure in his/her creative process. The writer cannot control language to make it say only what he intends. Language ends up saying other things as well, even contradictory things. Here we have one of the most nationalist and progressive Hindi writers who vehemently  denounced ‘communalism’ and fervently advocated Hindu–Muslim unity. What to speak of an ordinary political activist if a critical consciousness like Prem Chand’s fails to dissolve the popular cultural stereotypes which ultimately provide the source springs and a ready-made anchorage for ‘communalist’ propaganda. Prem Chand also provides us a clear example that historically formed cultural stereotypes possess a remarkable quality of circumventing and ducking the critical gaze of a consciously inculcated ‘secular’ ideology.37 Such cultural stereotypes were being created not only in Bengali and Hindi literature but also in other languages, for example, Punjabi literature written in Gurumukhi. Bhai Vir Singh’s novels are replete with the stereotyped characters projecting ‘Muslim wickedness’, ‘Hindu 36

On 7 April 1992, Delhi Doordarshan showed a Hindi play based on Prem Chand’s story Lanchhan. The play was the production of Bombay Doordarshan and directed by Joyti Vyas. Interestingly, in this play the Muslim character Raza Mian was changed into a Hindu character Raja Babu. 37 It would be futile to fit Prem Chand into the strait-jacket of a ‘communalist’ or a ‘secularist’. Because, if like Gandhi, Prem Chand is not secular one wonders who else could be characterised as secular. Perhaps the dilemma could be resolved by characterising  him as a ‘Hindu secularist’ and perhaps that was the only way in which mass of the people could be secular in their given cultural context, unless of course, they were willing to become atheists. If this is an appropriate way of looking at Prem Chand then it leads us to another important generalisation: secular mass politics works within the frame of cultural internality; it cannot transcend the cultural limits. Moreover, it had to be created from within and could not be imposed from outside the cultural internality.



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cowardice’ and ‘Sikh bravery and virility’. The ‘Sword arm syndrome’ forms a significant aspect of the delineation of these stereotypes. Sundri, the heroine of Bhai Vir Singh’s first novel (1898)—also the first novel in modern Punjabi literature—was born as Surasti, in the family of a Hindu Khatri, Shaman. On the auspicious day of her marriage she was abducted by a high ranking Mughal officer. Later she was rescued from the Mughals by her heroic brother Balwant Singh, who had converted to Sikhism. Now both brother and sister join hands in their struggle against the Mughals. In one of the fights both of them are captured by the troops of a Mughal Nawab who wants to convert Balwant Singh to Islam and have Surasti for his harem. They are saved from this dishonour by Sham Singh. Back in the jungles, Surasti is baptised according to the Sikh rites and she is transformed into a heroic woman, Sundri. She takes part in various campaigns and because of her help to a Hindu Khatri in recovering his wife and wealth from the Mughals, the grateful couple converts to Sikhism.38 The vision found in these novels, poems and dramas must have been, as is always the case, more influential in fashioning the image of the Muslims for contemporaries as well as posterity than that found in more reliable scholarly works. How far was the construction or invention of these literary char-  acters, episodes and situations a response to the already current prejudices prevalent in society? Were they completely false in the sense of not having even a tenuous link with actual experience of any social group in  pre-colonial society? Even if the existence of such prejudices is recognised it would always be difficult to guess how widespread these prejudices  were. The fact that writers, separated in space and time, were employing similar stereotypes points towards an area of shared appropriation of medieval Indian history. It is in this context that we shall be discussing the historical evidence deduced from bardic histories and legends about the dominant social values in medieval Indian society in a later section. In fact what was happening in India was not unique. A similar image of Islam as an adversary was created by the ‘Latin Christian World’s gradually developing ideological unity’. ‘Therefore,’ observes Maxime Rodinson:

38 Harjot Singh Oberai, ‘Literature and Society: An Approach to the Novels of Bhai Vir Singh’, M.Phil, thesis, JNU, New Delhi, 1981, pp. 91–92.

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… during the period from 1100 to 1140, Latin authors responded to the public’s demand by concentrating on Muhammad’s life with almost no regard for accurate details. In the words of R.W. Southern, they gave free rein to ‘the ignorance of triumphant imagination’. Muhammad became a sorcerer whose magic and deceit destroyed the Church in Africa and the East. By going on to sanction sexual promiscuity, his success was assured. Legends growing out of popular folklore, classical literature, Byzantine texts on Islam, and viciously distorted tales from Muslim sources embellished this image. Southern points out that  Guibert of Nogent (d. ca. 1124–30) admitted that since he had not relied on written sources, he had no way of separating fact from fiction and had only presented the plebeia opinio, or popular opinion.39

In the 1890s, Christian missionaries in Bengal had launched a powerful campaign to propagate Christianity and this made the educated Muslims uneasy about their activities. As a part of their propaganda, on many occasions, they used an extremely objectionable language in describing the heroes of Islam, deriding even the personal character of the Prophet. The author of Satya Dharma Nirupen (Finding the True Faith) wrote: Muhammad’s character was worse than his religious teachings. It is doubtful if there is any other person who can equal him in licentiousness and the doing of wicked acts. Not content with his wife and mistresses, he even took other men’s wives.... He did not consider age or rela-  tionship in gratifying the cravings of the flesh.39a

In 1927, a book in Hindi entitled Radd-e-Hindu—Refutation of the Faith of the Hindus40—was discovered in Bhusawal (Maharashtra) and brought to the notice of the authorities by a Marathi weekly  Shraddhanand (17 November 1927). The book was described as a ‘volley of abuse’ and an ‘unfounded and scurrilous attack’ on deities like Rama, Krishna, Pandavas, Kunti, Draupadi, Sita and Parvati. Detailed enquiries by the police established the fact that the book was being circulated in Urdu, Hindi and Gujarati. One objectionable passage ran as follows: 39 Cited in Maxime Rodinson, ‘Europe and the Mystique of Islam’, Near Eastern Studies, University of Washington, No. 4, 1987, p. 10. 39a Rafiuddin Ahmed, The Bengal Muslims: A Quest for Identity, New Delhi, 1981, p. 98. 40 Home Department (Political) Branch, File No. 139/1928. Maharashtra State Archives.



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The ten-headed Ravan kidnapped Sita, the wife of Rama, and indulged in sexual enjoyment with her for seven years .... Rama was not an  incarnation of God; if he were an incarnation, he would not have bewailed the loss of his wife and an ordinary man like Ravan could not have dared to rob the incarnation of his wife. And even if he dared to do so, he could have protected his wife and prevented her from being defiled .... (pp. 65–66. Gujarati edition. The book consisted of 110 pp.)

The book was a ‘polemical dissertation’ in the form of a dialogue between a Hindu and a Musalman. The original in Urdu was written by Maulvi Muhammad Ismail of Ratnagiri and published in Bombay in 1845–46. Its subsequent editions were published in 1861–62 and 1882–83. The Punjab government proscribed the book in 1927. Another Urdu edition was published in Kanpur in January 1913. It seems from the various editions in different languages that such provocative material was being widely circulated and invariably came to the notice of the authorities only when it was brought to their notice by the aggrieved party. According to the District Magistrate, Ahmedabad, the book contained matter which was ‘deliberately and maliciously intended to outrage the religious feelings of Hindus by insulting their religious beliefs’.41 Ideologues of both the communities, who were involved in the cultural contests, understood very clearly that the sexuality-centred diatribes could prove very lethal in inflicting psychological wounds in cultural contests. Moreover, such literature attracted the young and was popularised by them amongst friends as entertainment. It seems that oral discourse in the form of ‘dirty’ jokes, anecdotes, stories, tappas or dohas, and poetry-pieces plays an important role in constructing the images of sexual prowess and manliness of the community. The attack on Prophet Muhammad by the Arya Samajis was similar in style and content. It is vaguely known that Arya Samajists played an important role in building a ruthless, polemical and hostile image of Muslims. The publication of the Urdu booklet Rangila Rasul (The Playboy or Debauched Prophet) in 1924 composed by Mahashe Rajpal, a member of the Lahore Arya Samaj, marked a watershed in the history of communal

41

 Ibid.

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developments.42 This text about Muhammad, in fact, represented an accumulation of all the possible abuse which could be derived from morbid sexual fantasies. Perhaps, it was an attempt to influence the semieducated circles of society. It was not simply a case where Muhammad was being presented in an unfavourable light. It was a complete distortion of the historical context of Islam seeking to balance the demand of a moral life with an understandable respect for the needs of the senses and healthy social interaction. Given the explosive nature of the text we quote only a few lines of a less objectionable nature to underline the offensive impact which could be created by a highly motivated ideologue. The pamphlet opens with a so-called Gazal: fdlh dh fcxM+h cukuk gS C;kg dj ysaxs] cq>k fpjkx tykuk gS C;kg dj ysaxsAA fdlh dk :i lqgkuk gS C;kg dj yssxs] fdlh ds ikl [ktkuk gS C;kg dj ysaxsAA peu esa gksus nks cqycqy dks iwQy ds lndsA eSa tkaÅ vius jaxhys jlwy ds lndsAA (If someone is out of sorts, marry her! To light an extinguished lamp, marry her! If she is a beauty, marry her! She has a treasure, marry her! Let the flowers in the garden entice the Bulbul (bird), I am enticed by my Rangila Rasul!)

Setting forth his objective, the ideologue declares: ^eqgEen* us 'kknh dh] ^ugha* 'kkfn;k¡ dha] gj rjg ls 'kkfn;k¡ dha] csok ls] dq¡okjh ls] cqf