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Subsequent historical studies (15) have further confirmed that "Quit India" was not intended for a real headlong clash with the Raj, but as a pressure-tactic to persuade the latter, already threatened by the advancing Japanese, to negotiate transfer of power to the exclusion of the Muslim League. So, while repeatedly saying in public that there was no scope for a compromise, Gandhi tried out all options to strike a bargain. Thus in a letter dated 4 August 1942, he assured Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru that he was "doing all I can to avert the crisis, if by milder measures I can possibly reach the same results." On 6 August, he told the Associated Press that after the passing of the Quit India resolution, a "letter will certainly go to the Viceroy, not as an ultimatum, but as an earnest pleading for avoidance of conflict. If there is favourable response, then my letter can be the basis for negotiation". Even in his famous "Do or Die" speech of 8 August, he warned the people against precipitate action and urged them to wait until he wrote to the Viceroy. In case the pressure-tactic failed the Congress leaders believed, "a short and swift struggle" ("three or four days", as Gandhi had told Vinoba Bhave) synchronised with a Japanese attack would certainly bring the British over to the negotiation table. They, Nehru and Azad in particular, also expected that US President Roosevelt would get the UN to put pressure on Churchill to reopen negotiations with the Congress.

Belying all these hopes, and without waiting for Gandhi's promised letter to the Viceroy, the adamant authorities simply consigned the whole lot of Congress leaders to the prison. "If I have not ceased to be your friend" - the incarcerated Gandhi ruefully asked the Viceroy- "why did you not, before taking drastic action, send for me, tell me of your suspicions, and make yourself sure of your facts?"

Precisely because the 'leaders' were not left free to check the spontaneous popular upsurge, soon the Quit India movement became, in the words of Lord Linlithgow,"by far the most serious rebellion since that of 1857, the gravity and extent of which we have so far concealed from the world for reasons of military security" (Cable to Churchill). From behind the bars, of course, Gandhi and his associates repeatedly condemned the 'violence', asked the militants including Congressmen to "surrender to the police" and continued the efforts to restore goodwill with the Raj through emissaries like GD Birla.

Such dubious role of the Gandhian leadership was covered up, thanks to a successful media management, by the long prison terms. After the war they came out with enhanced prestige to start a fresh round of negotiations that culminated in the transfer of power in August 1947. The CSP under the able leadership of Jai Prakash Narayan, Achyut Patwardhan et al got full credit for its organised vanguard role in the militant movement. Both the Muslim League and the RSS-Hindu Mahasabha (HM) denounced the movement in most savage terms, with leaders of the HM such as Shymaprasad Mukherjee, participating in the repression as members of provincial ministries.

The Nature of CPI's Mistake
The CPI's PW line, particularly its role in 1942, came in for partial self-criticism in the Second Party Congress held in February 1948. The ideological root of the blunder was traced in the theories of automatic independence of all peoples with the defeat of fascism and of imperialism being a "prisoner in the peoples' camp".

"This total underestimation of the role of imperialism in the period of People's War made us lose sight of the task of exposing imperialism and fighting it within the framework of support for anti-fascist war"(16) Rather than carrying this self-criticism further and deeper in subsequent years, some veterans of the movement have chosen to do the opposite. Thus EMS Namboodiripad in his book "Reminiscences of the Indian Communist" points out the difficulty of the choice before the Indian Communists (whether to fight the national enemy to the detriment of the anti-fascist struggle, or to support the anti-fascist powers at the cost of isolation from patriotic people) and states: "The party leadership, after experimenting with the first alternative for six months, chose the second in December, 1941." (p.87)

The whole thing is presented here as a balanced and judicious decision taken by a united party leadership acting independent of outside interference, which is not true at all. In a shorter piece, Namboodiripad observes that "Communist movement therefore has nothing to be ashamed of in having adhered to the last to the position originally adopted by such top leaders of national movement as Nehru and Azad"(17). Rather than hiding under the shadow of "top national leaders", one should note here that the mistake was becoming more and more harmful and shameful the more doggedly the party persisted in it "to the last". Even if there was some theoretical justification for the initial opposition to the Quit India resolution of the Gandhiites, subsequently the party leaders should have grasped the revolutionary potential of the anti-British upsurge and come forward to lead it while simultaneously carrying on anti-fascist agitation and preparations against Japanese aggression. At least after the Soviet victory in Stalingrad, the party should have abandoned its exclusive anti-fascism and reincorporated anti-imperialism in its line of action.

Unfortunately for the Communist Party of India and the people of India, that was not to be. The dynamism and flexibility of approach required for that was simply not there. Unable to came out of the metaphysical ideological mould, and desensitized to the new march of events and of the people, the party clung to the old position.

Not that there was a dearth of saner voices around. To take one example, Swami Sahajanand who had been a very good friend of the CPI and who had generally agreed to the PW line, pressed for reviving the Bakasht movement in parts of Bihar. His argument was that Kisan Sabhas should, simultaneously with anti-fascist agitation and support to British war efforts, also carry on the agrarian struggles for which they were created in the first place.(18) But his sensible words fell on deaf ears and a parting of ways became inescapable. However, a number of CPI members individually participated in the Quit India movement in different places. Most notably Mao Zedong sent a friendly message to the CPI Central Committee on 5 April, 1943. While keeping within the limits of the principle of non-interference in each other's affairs, he dropped clear hints that a change of tactics was necessary:

"We belive that under the concerted efforts of the Communist Party of India and the Indian people, a way will certainly be found out of the present difficult situation so that both the objects - to vanquish Fascism and strive for Indian independence - will be attained."(19)

For CPI leaders who had fully inherited the colonial mindset of the progressive Indian intelligentsia, suggestions from an Asian party were not worth a serious consideration. Since nobody from London or Moscow was complaining, they self-assuredly continued with their obsolete understanding.

Having made all these self-critical observations, however, two points should be taken note of. First, allegations of communists acting as police agents or accepting money from the British during the PW phase are absolutely baseless. On the contrary, the government released the communist prisoners and granted legal status to the CPI (in July '42) with much hesitation and reluctance; even in August-September - at the height of PW activism, that is - the official assessment was that "It is primarily a nationalist party working for Indian independence... It is clearly impossible to expect communists to adopt a wholly loyalist attitude..." It was also noted that "they profess to be averse to the acceptance of financial or other assistance from government in their pro-war campaign and they seem determined not to submit to official control or direction in any sphere of their activity..."(20)

Secondly, mistakes notwithstanding, the PW phase was a period of wholesome growth for the CPI. The expansion took place most notably among various sections of the intelligentsia, who were aware of international trends and therefore in a position to appreciate the significance of the anti-fascist thrust. The party put to good use its first-ever opportunity to work legally between September 1942 and May 1943 and it organised two open plenums and the first Party Congress which laid proper stress on propaganda boost-up and party building. Membership rose from 4000 in 1942 to 15000 in mid-1943 and to 53,000 in mid-1946. The party recovered much of its lost goodwill through dedicated relief work for the Bengal famine in and after 1943. It set up or expanded the frontal organisations among women, students, workers, peasants and most notably among art-and-literature activists. The IPTA, launched in May 1943, attracted a veritable galaxy of talents like Salil Chaudhury, Debabrata Biswas, Sambhu Mitra, Balraj Sahani, Kaifi Azami, KA Abbas, and so on. Literary figures like Manik Bandopadhyaya, Sukanta Bhattacharya, Bishnu De, Samar Sen joined or became close friends of the communist party. All this bears testimony to the trust and respect enlightened Indians reposed in the party for its honest courage to move against the tide with a noble ideal (in this case the internationalist duty of saving human civilisation from fascism) and its glorious track record of sacrifices in the cause of the motherland.

During the Post-War Upsurge
The period we now enter upon has been described with great accuracy and precision by Sumit Sarkar in the following words:
"Two basic strands emerge from the maze of events during the last two years of British rule: torturous negotiations between British, Congress and League statesmen..., and sporadic, localized but often extremely militant and united mass actions - the INA release movement and the RIN Mutiny in 1945-46, numerous strikes throughout the period, and in 1946-47, the Tebhaga upsurge in Bengal, Punnapura-Vayalar in Travancore and the Telangana peasant armed revolt in Hyderabad" (21)

While not keeping aloof from the first "strand" of events, the communists made the second, i.e., the extra-parliamentary arena, their main field of operation. The Tebhaga, Punnapura-Vayalar and Telangana uprisings organised by them remain great chapters in the annals of peasant movement. No less active were the party's TU and student wings and in many cases they came forward as ardent champions of militant communal unity against imperialism. Thus in November 1945, Calcutta saw students, tram workers, municipal employees and others under communist influence joining followers of FB (which was remarkable in view of prolonged CPI-FB clashes over the assessment of Subhas Bose) and Muslim League (ML) in a trend-setting city upheaval against the INA trails. The militant political and communal unity was soon to be experienced again in February next year when Calcutta exploded against the seven-year rigorous imprisonment meted out to Abdul Rashid of the INA. A highpoint in this struggle was a completely successful general strike in Calcutta on 13 February. Calcutta comrades repeated the feat - with zealous support of people from all communities - on 29 July (just 18 days before the infamous communal holocaust) - this time as an expression of solidarity with the postal employees on strike. And barely five months after the riots, Hindu and Muslim tram workers united under communist leadership to launch a successful 85-day strike. The day of launching the strike, that is 21 January 1947, Calcutta saw the communist-led "Hands of Vietnam" demonstration by students against the use of Dum Dum airport by French warplanes. During the great RIN mutiny, the CPI, with the cooperation of the CSP, called a solidarity hartal in Bombay on 22 February, 1946. Despite opposition from both the Congress and the Muslim League, the strike accompanied by barricade fights was highly successful, and could be crushed by the army only at the cost of hundreds of casualties on both sides.

All these fine episodes, however, suffered from one fundamental weakness. They were isolated initiatives taken by local cadres and ranks with the central leadership doing nothing to plan, execute or coordinate them on an all-India plane. The party headquarters, advantageously situated in Bombay, never tried to lead the RIN mutiny although the ratings were quite eager for that. Nor did it have any plans to spread and heighten the demonstrations against INA trials taking place in different parts of the country. The all-India leadership hardly tried to guide Tebhaga and Punnapura-Vayalar struggles from a primarily economic plane to a higher political plane; in Telangana the Central Committee's intervention was belated, confused and largely negative. In a situation variously described as "the edge of a volcano", "almost revolution" and so on, the CPI leadership was thus running after the events. There was no political resolve to combine all these revolutionary currents - with the peasant rebellions as the axis - into a concerted all-India upsurge for overthrowing the British imperialists and Indian reactionaries.

That the party's guiding ideology was not proletarian revolutionism but petty bourgeois reformist tailism, becomes self-evident when one takes a look at the documents of this period. The August '46 CC resolution entitled "for the final assault" heaped all sorts of legitimate criticism on the Congress and League, yet expressed the hope that pressure from below would prompt these "patriotic parties" to join a united front of different forces including the communists to accomplish the democratic revolution. The June '47 resolution entitled "Mountbatten Award and After" made a correct assessment of the award, noting that it was "the culmination of a double-faced imperial policy which while making concession to the national demand to transfer power, sets in motion disruptive and reactionary forces to disrupt the popular upsurge, obstruct the realization of real independence, throttle the growth of democracy and destroy the unity and integrity of India." And yet, the partners in this conspiracy, the Congress and the ML, were eulogised as "national leadership", and later on, all support was pledged to the governments run by these parties.

This sort of critical tailism - if one may call it so - remained as distinct a feature of CPI politics in the period of upsurge as in most of the years left behind.

Historic Defeat in the Contention for Hegemony
At this point we are in a position to sum up our survey of about 25 years of communist intervention in the Indian struggle for independence.

From the very start communists have distinguished themselves by a relentless effort to combine the struggle for national liberation from imperialist yoke, for national dignity and sovereignty, with the fight for socio-economic emancipation of the downtrodden, for social justice and national upliftment for all the toilers. In many parts of the country it was the communists who pioneered the national movement - and that in this unique fashion. Thus in Travancore and Cochin as well as in Malabar it was men like AK Gopalan, Krishna Pillai and EMS Namboodiripad who founded the CSP and the Congress as a mass movement. Arising at the confluence of India's national liberation movement and working class movement, the communist party has always (barring the 1942-45 period) strove - even with its mistakes as well as through great movements - to give the national movement a leftward thrust. When in the years 1928-35, for instance, the party was practicing a left sectarian line, it was guided by the same honest aspirations. The Congress leaders, particularly the left ones like Nehru and Bose, were sabotaging the national movement and hence they must be ruthlessly exposed and isolated - such was the communists' sincere, though immature and unsuccessful, endeavour. In other periods the CPI as a constituent of the Congress protected the unity of the "mother organisation" as the apple of its eye - at times even at the cost of its own political independence - thus going to the opposite extreme out of the same concern for advancing the freedom movement. Again when it opposed the Quit India movement and indulged in the most grotesque kind of criticism against Bose, the motive lay not in any sectional interest or personal malice, but in a genuine though misdirected desire to promote the anti-fascist struggle on the soil of India.

Well, mistakes are part of life in every communist party. And on the other hand it is common knowledge that right from the days of the Peshawar and Kanpur conspiracy cases - i.e., even before the foundation of the communist party in 1925 - the communists in their struggle for national and social liberation bore the brunt of repression by the British as well as Congress governments. And yet, unlike our Chinese and Vietnamese counterparts, we failed to come anywhere near the leading position in our freedom movement. Why? What went wrong, basically?

This question has been haunting us for a pretty long time, and in 1991 we came up with a provisional sort of answer in the form of the concluding chapter of Volume I of our proposed five-volume documentation of the history of communist movement in India (22). Presented below is an abridged reproduction of that assessment as a convenient basis for further discussion.

"The strategic perspective of the communist movement during the period under review was determined by the principal contradiction between the emerging Indian nation and British imperialism and two other major contradictions, viz., feudalism versus the broad masses, particularly landlords versus peasants; and British and Indian big bourgeoisie versus the Indian working class. The CPI operated on all three levels, but its failure (and the Congress' success) in mobilising the peasantry, i.e., the bulk of the nation, pushed it to the sideline in the freedom movement, and for that matter in the country's political life.

Let us elaborate. In the 1920s and '30s, the struggle against British imperialism with all its ramifications was a multi-class movement that was coming more and more under bourgeois hegemony, but was also amenable to proletarian or communist influence. Bourgeois hegemony sought to establish itself both through the Gandhian 'peasant' value system and the Nehruvian socialist phraseology. And the communist movement arose as the proletarian challenge to that hegemony. In between the two, various petty bourgeois trends like patriotic terrorism and spontaneous peasant/tribal uprisings also surfaced from time to time, but sooner or later they disintegrated as distinct trends and got merged with either of the two main streams or simply died down.

The forces of both bourgeois nationalism and communism had to recognise the multi-class character of the anti-imperialist struggle (hence the UF approach on the part of both) while each strove to consolidate its own class position to the maximum possible extent (which gave rise to a constant contention). In this protracted game of unity and struggle, which determined the main ideological dimension of the national liberation struggle, each side utilised the other, but the overall initiative and domination belonged to the nationalist leadership. And this finally decided the character of incomplete independence India achieved in 1947.

In the course of some 25 years of unity and struggle within the freedom movement, both the two main forces made tactical errors and suffered setbacks. At times the nationalist leadership took steps that alienated the fighting masses, while at other junctures the CPI, overzealous to attack bourgeois betrayals or (as in 1942) to mechanically uphold the internationalist duty, got isolated from the national mainstream. But overall, the Congress leadership - with Gandhi and the junior Nehru playing complimentary parts in it - succeeded in defeating the communists in a contention for people's hearts and brains: while Gandhi's saintly appeals worked very effectively at the emotional plane, Nehru's eloquent socialism often stole the wind from communists' sails. The failure of early Indian communists is thus expressed most pointedly as a political defeat against the unique Gandhi-Nehru combination. Gandhi carried with him the peasantry, the most vital force of Indian society, and Nehru (at times aided by others like Subhas Bose) won the hearts of left-leaning youth - the harbingers of any revolutionary change. None of them could carve out any stable base among the working class (for the workers' class instinct born of their objective conditions of life and struggle, made them a difficult prey for Gandhi's trusteeship concept or Nehru's sentimental socialism), which therefore remained largely a communist constituency; but it was peasant support that decided the issue - as it did in China the opposite way. In China, Mao personified the revolutionary proletarian leadership of the toiling peasants; in India history shaped his mirror image in the person of Gandhi, whose innate appeal to the peasant masses (and of course his charming reformism) prompted the bourgeoisie to prop him up as their leader - nay, the leader and father of the nation, the Mahatma. Here let it be noted in passing that without this class-backing of the bourgeoisie - which was conscious, calculating and organised - and without the Britishers' acceptance of him as the safest leader to negotiate with, Gandhi's acceptance of him as the safest leader to negotiate with, Gandhi's strategy of non-violent satyagraha and all that would never have succeeded; but that is another story.

Thus it was above all the failure to forge a revolutionary alliance with the peasantry that incapacitated the Indian proletariat and its party to decide the course of India's freedom struggle and emerge as its leader. The CPI generally recognised the decisive importance of agrarian revolution as the axis of the national liberation movement, but did not properly orientate itself or devise the concrete method, organisational form and style of work necessary for the purpose. Wherever the communists carried on a consistent work (as in Malabar in mid 1930s), the Gandhian influence proved to be quite superficial if not imaginary, but such occasions were regrettably few and far between.

If the communist party's relation with the peasantry is one fundamental question of policy in colonial/semi-colonial countries, the other one is the relation with the bourgeoisie and its party, the INC. Here the Indian communists faced a much more complex situation than their Chinese counterparts. The Congress was originally more a movement than a party. At later stages, even as the Gandhian coterie was consolidating its grip on the top, in popular perception it remained a broad national platform necessarily open to all anti-imperialist forces - a perception that was in the interest of the bourgeoisie to preserve. Therefore, the much-accredited accommodating character of the Congress was rather in-built or inalienable and not a token of generosity on the part of Gandhi or Nehru. They did admit various revolutionary democratic forces into the Congress fold, but only to curb the militancy of, and politically absorb, the latter. In fact this explains the inverse relationship, noted by many authors, between the consolidation of the Congress organisation on the one hand and growth of mass militancy and advancement of various radical political forces on the other. Historians of the liberal nationalist school always downplay this aspect and ignore the difficulties of Congress-CPI united front. They are all praise for the WPP model and much regretful for its discontinuation, precisely because this model was actually leading to political assimilation of the CPI in the Congress. Of course, we have our own criticism for the abrupt and total end of the WPP practice and for the isolationism that followed, but that is from an entirely different perspective...

As regards developing a theory of Indian revolution or Indianisation of Marxism-Leninism, the CPI's record has been decidedly poor. In neighbouring China, Mao from the beginning firmly emphasised and worked strenuously for the integration of Marxism-Leninism with peculiar Chinese conditions, and this tacitly implied the possibility of denial of Comintern instructions if necessary. By contrast, the CPI leadership lacked this creativity, this courage of conviction, and always looked up to the Comintern for deciding the course of action in India. This overdependence or uncritical acceptance of international 'suggestions', which would prove so fatal in 1942, was both the cause and effect of the non-emergence of an authoritative Party leadership in course of leading class struggle and two-line struggle.

The problems of leadership - including that of factionalism - naturally percolated to lower levels. Scant attention was paid to strengthening the party through a system of ideological education, practical-political training and organisational campaigns, check-ups, regularisation of membership etc. In other words, Party building was never taken up as a task so important in itself..."

The above observations were primarily based on the 1917-39 period. On the basis of our further survey in this essay, we may add up the following.

We have seen that even during the excellent revolutionary situation of the second World War and thereafter, the CPI persisted in its old habit of depending on the Congress for giving the lead to the struggling people. And this despite all the rightist consolidation in the Congress leadership, and despite all the repressive measures adopted by the provincial Congress ministries. This dependence was always 'balanced' by very many criticisms, thus giving rise to a centrist position that effectively camouflaged the line of inaction from the ranks. We have called this "critical tailism", which made the party averse to go in either for independent assertion or for a bold drive to forge a militant Left unity with FB and other forces ranged against the Congress right.

This bankruptcy in politics, it is necessary to stress, was a corollary of dependence on European comrades in matters of theory, and both went hand in hand with - one might even say were products of - a definite lack of faith on the masses, on their creative energy and wisdom.

So much for now, let us carry the probe further. This August, when others indulge in light nostalgia, let us do some serious soul-searching, so that we can get to the roots of our historic failure during the freedom movement. So that, in other words, we can do justice to the responsibility now placed on us for leading the second battle for liberation from neo-colonial bondage to a successful conclusion.

For that, however, we must ask ourselves: are all these deviations and deficiencies matters of the past? By no means. So it is really not possible to understand the 'past' deviations in theory without overcoming their current continuation in practice. This is how communists make the past serve the present and this is the whole motive behind our historical studies - whether in this two-part study or in our multi-volume work.

Notes & References
7. From the article "The Dissentients" in Harijan, 20 January 1940.
8. From the March 1940 manifesto "Proletarian Path Inside the National Front"
9.Ibid
10. "Soviet German War: Statement of the Politbureau (July 1941)
11. An official Party Letter issued as late as in October 1941 lashed out at the opponents: "Reliance on the people, on the working class and Not on the imperialists, this is the core of a truly internationalist policy... They are false internationalists and deceivers of people who say that we can side [with] the Soviet or win the war for the people by aiding the British Government's war efforts."
12. Stalin or other eminent Soviet leaders preferred not to comment on the Indian controversy, though the Soviet party organ Bolshevik carried one article by I.Lenin which argued, rather crudely for the People's War line. 13."People on Our Side" by Edgar Snow, p.56
14. Jawaharlal Nehru. A Biography Vol.I 1889-1947, p.300
15. See, among others, India and The Raj 1919-1947 Glory, Shame And Bondage by Suniti Kumar Ghosh, Vol.II; The Communist Party of India and India' Freedom Struggle 1937-47 by Utpal Ghosh
16. Documents of the History of the CPI, Vol.VII, edited by Utpal Ghosh, op cit, p.165
18. Hunkar (Hindi weekly brought out by Sahajanand), January 3, 10 and 17, 1943
19. For details see Communist Movement in India. Historical Perspective and Important Documents Vol.II (A CPI(ML) Liberation publication; forthcoming)
20. Cited in Utpal Ghosh, op cit, pp.158-60
21. Modern India, op cit, p.414
22. Communist Movement in India. Historical Perspective and Important Documents Vol.I (A CPI(ML) Liberation publication)

Home > Liberation Main Page > Index July 1997 > ARTICLE