Index
Contents: This Issue
Search CHNN
CHNN Home
The Comintern and the Hidden History of Indian Communism
‘The Comintern and the Colonies’:
A Communist History Network seminar, Manchester, November 2002
On Friday 15 November 2002, the Communist History Network — in conjunction with the Manchester University International Centre for Labour Studies — organised an afternoon seminar at around the theme ‘The Comintern and the Colonies’. The paper-givers were John Callaghan, Allison Drew and Sobhanlal Datta Gupta. Here Sobhanlal Datta Gupta summarises his paper: ‘The Comintern and the Hidden History of Indian Communism’.
It is an irony of history that the official versions of Indian communism as provided by the two communist parties of India and the studies made by the liberal bourgeois scholars on the history of Indian communism converge on one point regarding the relationship between the Comintern and the shaping of communism in India. Both sides basically argue that the Communist Party of India (CPI) virtually accepted uncritically the Comintern position on India throughout its life. The only difference is that while the leaders of the communist parties defend this toeing of the Comintern line and are proud of their loyalty to it, the liberal bourgeois historians ridicule this loyalty. In other words, both the viewpoints present the relationship between the Comintern and the CPI as a kind of meta narrative which recognised no dissent, difference or alternative voice in this relationship. The opening up of the Comintern archives to researchers, however, has completely blasted this myth, and it is now possible to reconstruct the secret — the untold — history of Indian communism by arguing that, during the Comintern period beneath the layer of the official version, there was an unofficial, suppressed, alternative discourse of Indian communism, unrecognised and unknown until now. To have an understanding of this alternative version, what is necessary is to periodise the history of Indian communism during the Comintern period according to the following structure :
(a) From the Second to the Sixth Congress: It is generally believed that M N Roy was the sole spokesman of Indian communism in the Comintern in this period, who primarily upheld the line of a strong opposition to the forces of nationalism in India and argued that India was ripe for a socialist revolution, since it was populated by an industrial working class, thanks to industrialisation generated by British imperialism. The documents in the Comintern archives reveal that the ‘Berlin group’ of Indian revolutionaries, represented by Virendranath Chattopadhyay, Maulana Barakatullah, Bhupendranath Datta and others, in their documents submitted to the Comintern (which, however, were never discussed) put forward an alternative unerstanding of the strategy of anti-imperialist struggle, which was sharply different from Roy’s position in the sense that they looked upon nationalism from a positive angle and considered India primarily as an agrarian country.
(b) From Sixth to the Seventh Congress: This period was marked by two features, not mentioned in the official Comintern documents. First, after M N Roy’s exit from the Comintern and his subsequent association with the Thalheimer-Brandler group of the German Communist Opposition, there was a total shift in the theoretical position of Roy which had striking similarities with the position of Bukharin and Thalheimer on the Comintern after 1927, when Bukharin came to be associated with the ‘Right’. Basically, they argued in their suppressed documents that it was wrong for the Comintern under Stalin to direct that all communist parties would have to follow one undifferentiated strategy as framed by the Comintern, since what was necessary was to allow the individual communist parties to formulate their own strategies in conformity with their local conditions. Second, this was the period which witnessed the rise of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) as virtually the mentor of Indian communism, with the consequence that the Indian communists increasingly became dependent on the CPGB’s perception of Indian communism in the formulation of their strategy and tactics. At the same time, it is now evident from a number of documents available in the Comintern as well as the CPGB archives, that within the Communist Party of India there was a section which felt that the CPGB was on many occasions acting like ‘a big boss’. At the same time within the CPGB at the leadership level it was repeatedly admitted that the CPGB as a party was not sufficiently aware of the importance of the colonial question, that the average Party member was still infected by the Empire consciousness and a kind of Eurocentrism.
(c) Between the Seventh Congress and 22 June 1941: This was a period which espoused the ‘united front’ strategy without ever admitting that the acceptance of this line meant a rejection of the sectarianism of the Third Period. This created very serious problems within the CPI. From a number of inner-party documents now available in the Comintern archives it is evident that it was extremely difficult for the leadership of the CPI to persuade its ranks to accept the new line, since in their perception the position of the Sixth Congress was still in force. The silence of the Comintern on the position of the Sixth Congress after the adoption of the Dimitrov thesis led to an absurd situation which implied that the positions of both the Sixth and the Seventh Congress were equally valid and correct. This confused and contradictory understanding very seriously affected the CPI’s united front strategy, especially its relation with the Congress Socialist Party, since the sectarianism of the Third Period continued to dominate the minds of the party ranks.
(d) The period after 22 June 1941: It is now quite clear from the documents of the Comintern archives as well as the documents in the archives of the CPGB that the Comintern had issued a clear directive to the CPGB that — as the ‘imperialist war’ had now become a ‘people’s war’ — henceforth the primary task of every communist party would be to unconditionally uphold the cause of the USSR and thereby help the Allied war effort. This line was communicated by the CPGB to the CPI which the latter accepted after acrimonious debates. During this period, when the nationalist leaders were languishing in jail, the CPI’s support of the British war efforts, following its legalisation — coupled with the fact that the CPGB leadership sharply condemned the Quit India movement (launched by the Indian National Congress in August 1942), and hailed the CPI for aiding the British government — severely compromised the position of the CPI, although the latter defended its policy in the name of the Comintern and internationalism.
This, then, is the secret history of Indian communism in a nutshell. What follows from this presentation is this: had these facts and the suppressed viewpoints been known to us, there could have been debates and controversies within the CPI itself and outside the sphere of the party. This could have perhaps fundamentally changed the destiny of communism in India.
