HISTORY Of Quit India, Nehru & CPI split
A.G. NOORANI
Stalin upbraided CPI leaders for not supporting the Congress on the Quit
India Movement.
OF all the Communist leaders interviewed in the Oral History
Programme of the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library in New Delhi,
Makineni Basavapunniah was the most outspoken. The armed struggle in
Telangana, which began in 1946, was directed against the Nizam's
government. But ?from September 1948 onwards it was regular armed
invasion. It was not a police action. Either the special armed police or
the Malabar Police or the army, nearly 50,000 were employed for three
full years to suppress the movement. Indian Army was not more than one
and a half lakh or two lakhs in those days. A good part of it was locked
up in Kashmir. Other part had to remain somewhere stationary. Then to
spare as nearly 40,000-50,000 armed forces at one spot was not a small
thing. So they concentrated their best and did their worst. Ten thousand
people were put as detenus for three-four years; nearly a lakh of
people were put in concentration camps for months on end; thousands of
women were raped.? Dr Hari Dev Sharma asked: ?By the military??
Basavapunniah replied: ?Of course, military and the other armed forces,
like Central Reserve Police, Malabar Police, Special Police, like that
so many.?
He added: ?Particularly after September 1948 when the Government of
India intervened, as I said earlier, it intervened with very big armed
forces. The entire modern military technique was used against us.
General J.N. Chaudhuri, who intervened there on behalf of the Government
of India, took hardly half a dozen days to manage the army of the Nizam
and the Razakars, etc. After that the main direction was against the
Communist Party which was leading the struggle.?
He explained why he developed reservations over the Ranadive thesis
adopted by the Second Party Congress at Calcutta in February 1948.
Experience in Telangana flew against the thesis. ?The Andhra document
was submitted in the month of May 1948. The Politburo was keeping its
discussions confined to it till the month of November 1948. So it was
only in the month of November and December 1948 that this reached all
the State units. The whole of the year 1949, there was an inner party
discussion going on. By March 1950 the whole cycle was complete and the
line that was adopted at Calcutta was proved wrong and we were asked to
take the responsibility of the Central Committee leadership. Then came
the question of going and meeting Stalin, and then working out all the
lines.? The Communist Party of India unit in Andhra disagreed with the
leadership. In the earlier articles, we have Basavapunniah's account of
the Moscow meeting, which was arranged to avert a split.
Like his colleagues, P. Sundarayya also dilated on the alliance with
the Congress Socialist Party in the 1930s and how the Kerala, Andhra and
Madras units of the CSP went over to the CPI. Conflict was inherent in
the alliance. ?Right from the beginning, from 1934 itself, this conflict
had been there. Because in the earlier period, some of our writings
[aid] that Congress Socialism was contradictory in words and would pave
way to fascism. Such kind of articles were written. The [Congress]
Socialist Party leadership also attacked [saying] that the communists
were responsible for fascism coming in Germany by not having a united
front. They had their own ideology; Gandhian ideology also influenced [
sic] that the communists were anti-national. They also used to say all
these things?. Similarly, Sajjad Zaheer, Dr K.M. Ashraf, Dr Z.A. Ahmed,
[Soli] Batliwala were all big Congress leaders; they were all leftists
and were in the Congress Socialist Party. They were all pro
[communists]; some of them were party members also.? So, this struggle
went on till they found that they could not function in a united way.
Then they decided to remove us and we also found that it was difficult
to convince a good chunk of them. We had to function more and more
independently than through the Congress Socialist party. That phase came
towards the end of 1938.?
Dange's role
Sadly, S.A. Dange's recorded Interview ends abruptly before the
crises of the 1940s. He was a fascinating character, a brilliant
pamphleteer, orator and a supple tactician. He was known to be close to
the mill owner Sir David Sassoon. On March 7, 1964, Current, a Bombay
[now Mumbai] tabloid, edited by D.F. Karaka, published a letter from
Dange to the Governor-General of India dated July 28, 1924, from Sitapur
jail in the United Provinces (U.P.) where he was serving a four-year
sentence in the Kanpur Conspiracy Case.
It said: ?Exactly one year back, the Deputy Commissioner of Police of
Bombay, Mr Stewart, was having a conversation with me, in his office
regarding my relations with M.N. Roy and an anticipated visit to me of
certain persons from abroad. During the course of the conversation the
Honourable officer let drop a hint in the following words, the full
import of which I failed to catch at that moment. Mr Stewart said, ?You
hold an exceptionally influential position in certain circles here and
abroad. Government would be glad if this position would be of some use
to them.' I think I still hold that position. Rather it has been
enhanced by the prosecution. If Your Excellency is pleased to think that
I should use that position for the good of Your Excellency's government
and the country, I should be glad to do so, if I am given the
opportunity by Your Excellency granting my prayer for release.
THE HINDU ARCHIVES
S.A. DANGE. HE was a member of the Communist delegation that met Stalin
in Moscow. Here, he is giving a talk on "My visit to Russia" in the
weekly BBC Marathi magazine programme "Radio Jhankar". The others in the
delegation were Ajoy Ghosh, M. Basavapunniah and C. Rajeswara Rao.
?I am given the punishment of four years' rigorous imprisonment in
order that those years may bring a salutary change in my attitude
towards the King Emperor's sovereignty in India. I beg to inform Your
Excellency that those years are unnecessary, as I have never been
positively disloyal towards His Majesty in my writings or speeches nor
do I intend to be so in future.
?Hoping this respectful undertaking will satisfy and move Your Excellency to grant my prayer and awaiting anxiously a reply.
I beg to remain,
Your Excellency's Most
Obedient Servant,
Shripat Amrit Dange.
Written this day 28th July, 1924
Endorsement No. 1048, dated 31-7-1924.
Forwarded in original to I.G. [Inspector General] of prisons U.P. for disposal.
Sd/- W.P. Cook
Col. I.M.S.
Superintendent of Jail.
Seal of I.G. Prisons
13070 Dated 1-8-1924.?
On March 16, Basavapunniah and P. Ramamurthi went to the National
Archives in New Delhi and again on March 17 and 19. What they found was
set out in a pamphlet published by the Communist Party of India
(Marxist) after the split later in the year. It was entitled Dange
Unmasked (for a detailed analysis of the texts of the documents,
including comments by the formidable Lt Col Cecil Kaye, Director of the
Intelligence Bureau, perhaps its most able ? ?he is personally, a mere
worm? ? vide the writer's article ?Dange Letters?; Survey (London)
Spring 1979; pages 160-174).
Years later I sought an interview with Dange. What he said of the
famous meeting with Stalin rang true. Stalin upbraided the CPI leaders
for not supporting the Congress on the Quit India Movement when they
mentioned that their stand had cost them dear. ?Why didn't you support
it? Do you think we won the war because of the 100 rifles you sent us??
Stalin was informality itself. Dange sat on the armrest of his chair
when Stalin pored over the map of India he had sent for. ?Is this your
Yenan?? he asked with unconcealed contempt. It lay at the very heart of
India. What followed the meetings is well recorded but not completely in
a single volume.
Significantly, later Soviet writers also criticised the CPI's 1942
decision. Dr Alexander I. Chicherov, Head of the International Relations
Research Department and Institute of Oriental Studies, Academy of
Sciences USSR in Moscow, was an erudite scholar. He found in the
archives a letter from Bal Gangadhar Tilak to the Russian Consulate in
Bombay in 1905 outlining his plans for intensifying the freedom
struggle. He admired Tilak.
On a visit to Bombay, Chicherov told Indian Express that the CPI's
decision to keep out of the Quit India Movement was ?tragic? (October
15, 1982).
One question arises. One of the interviewers said that they had no
direct contact with Moscow, only with the Communist Party of Great
Britain, that is, with Rajani Palme Dutt and Harry Pollit. Was it Palme
Dutt, then, who instructed the switch in 1942?
Basavapunniah's interview mentions the disagreement between the
Andhra thesis and the thesis of the Central leadership. The party was on
the verge of a split. It was averted by Stalin. Like Dange, Mohit Sen
supported the Emergency. Both left the CPI, But Mohit Sen's memoir is of
absorbing interest. Sadly, it did not receive the review it deserved ( A
Traveller and the Road: The Journey of an Indian Communist; Rupa &
Co.; 2003). The two remained close.
Mohit Sen's account
Mohit Sen wrote: ?I was to have the privilege of carrying the ?China
path' document to China. The CPI leadership hoped and expected that the
leadership of the CPC would endorse this understanding and back it....
?At that time, I did not know that this line had been challenged by
an important section of the CPI leadership headed by Ajoy Ghosh, S.A.
Dange and S.V. Ghate. They had produced a joint document which had gone
down in the history of the party as the ?Three Ps' document?.
?This document shared the viewpoint that India had not won
independence and that the Nehru government upheld the interests of
British imperialism, landlords and those sections of the bourgeoisie
that collaborated with imperialism. The document also held the view that
armed revolution was the only path of advance. It differed from both
the Ranadive line and the China path line [ the Andhra thesis] on its
insistence that Indian conditions differed in the 1950s from both Russia
and China. The strategy of the CPI should, therefore, be that of the
Indian path. The armed revolution in our country would be a combination
of peasant guerrilla actions in the countryside with working class
insurrections in the urban areas. This was an updated version of what
S.A. Dange had advocated decades ago in Gandhi vs. Lenin published in
1920, which had caught the attention of Lenin himself.
RAJEEV BHATT
MOHIT SEN. HE wrote: "I was to have the privilege of carrying the `China
path' document to China."
?The other point of difference of ?the three Ps' document was its
realistic appraisal of the actual situation of the CPI. It was on the
verge of annihilation. Its mass organisations were shattered and the
party itself almost totally disintegrated. The first task was to save
the party itself and to reforge its ties with the masses, taking into
account the existing civil liberties.
?The proponents of the ?Chinese path' led by Comrade C. Rajeswara Rao
and those of the ?Indian path' led by Comrade Ajoy Ghosh had set up
their own centres and the CPI was on the verge of a split. It was then
that the Soviet Communists intervened.
?Four leaders, two from each centre, were brought to Moscow. They
travelled, incognito as manual workers on a Soviet ship from Calcutta.
They were Comrades Ajoy Ghosh, S.A. Dange, C. Rajeswara Rao and M.
Basavapunniah. None of them divulged any details of how they were
contacted and what their exact itinerary was. Nikhil Chakravartty, who
attended to all the technical details of planning the journey, has also
not said anything.
BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
A GROUP OF Telangana fighters. "[Stalin] strongly advised that the armed
struggle being conducted in various areas, especially the Telangana
region of Andhra Pradesh, should be ended."
?S.A. Dange and C. Rajeswara Rao have both told me about the meeting
with the leaders of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union]. The
first meeting was attended from the Soviet side by Comrades [Mikhail
Andreyevich] Suslov, [Georgy] Malenkov and [Vyacheslav Mikhailovich]
Molotov. It was on the third day that it was announced that Comrade
Stalin would attend. So he did for the subsequent days. Dange and
Rajeswara Rao said that he was an attentive listener though he rarely
sat at the table but kept pacing up and down smoking a pipe. But he
intervened subtly to turn the discussion beyond dogmatic disputes to
assessments of the existing situation and immediate tactical tasks.
Stalin's view on Nehru government
?Stalin's view also was that India was not an independent country but
ruled indirectly by British colonialists. He also agreed that the
Communists could eventually advance only by heading an armed revolution.
But it would not be of the Chinese type. His view on this point
coincided with that of ?the three Ps'. He also agreed with their
appraisal of the concrete situation in which the party was placed. He
strongly advised that the armed struggle being conducted in various
areas, especially the Telangana region of Andhra Pradesh, should be
ended. He said that it was Comrade Rajeswara Rao who should travel to
the different camps and see that the arms were surrendered. This would
be difficult but it was he alone who could do it. That, in fact, was
done and Rajeswara Rao later told me that this was the most difficult
task he had ever performed for the party.
?Stalin also cautioned the CPI leaders that the Nehru government was
not a puppet government. It had a social base and mass support and could
not be overthrown easily. He asked the leaders to unite, work together,
save the party and take it forward. He strongly advised them to make
the CPI participate in the general elections? (pages 80-81).
BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
P. SUNDARAYYA AND (below) Basavapunniah in the 1950s.
The record has him say: ?I cannot consider the government of Nehru as
a puppet. All his roots are in the people.? He was polite to the
visitors, but they did not win his respect. His interpreter and the
diplomat Nikolai Adyrkhayev's memoirs, released on Stalin's 118th birth
anniversary (December 21, 1879), reveal that later in the year Stalin
scolded a delegation of the Japanese Communist Party: ?In India they
have wrecked the party and there is something similar with you.?
BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
As it happens some interesting documents have surfaced in the pages
of a journal, Revolutionary Democracy, published by Vijay Singh. The
issue of April 2011 published documents from the papers of Rajani Palme
Dutt in the archives of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which are
deposited in the Labour Archive and Library, Manchester.
BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
THE NINE MEMBERS of the first Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of
India (Marxist) after the 1964 split in the Communist movement:
(standing, from left) P. Ramamurthi, Basavapunniah, E.M.S. Namboodiripad
and Harkishan Singh Surjeet; (sitting, from left) Promode Dasgupta,
Jyoti Basu, Sundarayya, B.T. Ranadive and A.K. Gopalan.
One was a letter dated November 1, 1962, from B.N. Datar, Minister of
State for Home, to P.K. Sawant, Home Minister, Maharashtra. It read :
?I am enclosing herewith in original a list handed over personally by
Shri S.A. Dange, to Home Minister recently giving the names and
addresses of CPI persons in Bombay and other individuals who in the
opinion of Shri S.A. Dange are pro-Chinese. I would request your
immediate comments and action in the matter under advice to me.? The
other letter contains charges too scandalous to be reproduced, still
less vouched for.
Authentic material on Moscow talks
Three other issues contain authentic material on the Moscow talks
from the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History
translated from the Russian by Vijay Singh. There is a stenographic
record of the discussions between the two delegations on February 4, 6
and 9, 1951 (September 2006; pages 162-200). As one might expect, the
Indians did most of the talking on the first two days, explaining
internal differences and replying to pointed questions by the hosts.
Stalin spoke at great length on February 9 (pages 186-200).
The issue of April 2007 published a record of the discussions with
Malenkov and Suslov on February 21 (pages 126-130). The issue of April
2010 has three letters by the CPI leaders; Stalin underlined parts of
the letters and gave his comments in the margin. All these documents
merit detailed analysis in the light of the CPI's internal debates in
1948-51.
Postscript: Aloke Banerjee of Hindustan Times reported from Kolkata
on November 26, 2005: ?Marxist Patriarch Jyoti Basu had been against a
split in the CPI and had urged all his comrades to keep the party
united. This was in 1963, a year before some CPI leaders left the party
and formed the CPI(M).
?Documents portraying the final days before the CPI split have been
made public with the CPI(M) publishing the fourth volume of Communist
Movement in Bengal: Documents and Related Facts. The book contains a
letter Basu wrote from the Dum Dum Jail on October 9, 1963, titled ?Save
the party from revisionists and dogmatic extremists'. ?We must stay
within the party and continue our ideological struggle against Dange's
revisionism. It will not be right to split the party,' Basu had said in
the letter. ?Yet, the reckless dogmatists seem to be determined to break
up the party.'
?Four decades on, Basu cannot remember having written such a letter.
Informed that his party had published his letter, Basu told HT on
Friday, ?I don't remember having written such a letter. But it's true
that I had tried till the last moments to stop the imminent split. I was
of the opinion that it would be incorrect to break the CPI and form a
new party. But I failed. There were many differences. We could not stay
together any longer.' The CPI(M)'s book also contains the minutes of a
crucial meeting of the party's working committee.? Unfortunately, the
book is in Bengali. An English translation is overdue.
______________________________
A.G. NOORANI
Stalin upbraided CPI leaders for not supporting the Congress on the Quit
India Movement.
OF all the Communist leaders interviewed in the Oral History
Programme of the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library in New Delhi,
Makineni Basavapunniah was the most outspoken. The armed struggle in
Telangana, which began in 1946, was directed against the Nizam's
government. But ?from September 1948 onwards it was regular armed
invasion. It was not a police action. Either the special armed police or
the Malabar Police or the army, nearly 50,000 were employed for three
full years to suppress the movement. Indian Army was not more than one
and a half lakh or two lakhs in those days. A good part of it was locked
up in Kashmir. Other part had to remain somewhere stationary. Then to
spare as nearly 40,000-50,000 armed forces at one spot was not a small
thing. So they concentrated their best and did their worst. Ten thousand
people were put as detenus for three-four years; nearly a lakh of
people were put in concentration camps for months on end; thousands of
women were raped.? Dr Hari Dev Sharma asked: ?By the military??
Basavapunniah replied: ?Of course, military and the other armed forces,
like Central Reserve Police, Malabar Police, Special Police, like that
so many.?
He added: ?Particularly after September 1948 when the Government of
India intervened, as I said earlier, it intervened with very big armed
forces. The entire modern military technique was used against us.
General J.N. Chaudhuri, who intervened there on behalf of the Government
of India, took hardly half a dozen days to manage the army of the Nizam
and the Razakars, etc. After that the main direction was against the
Communist Party which was leading the struggle.?
He explained why he developed reservations over the Ranadive thesis
adopted by the Second Party Congress at Calcutta in February 1948.
Experience in Telangana flew against the thesis. ?The Andhra document
was submitted in the month of May 1948. The Politburo was keeping its
discussions confined to it till the month of November 1948. So it was
only in the month of November and December 1948 that this reached all
the State units. The whole of the year 1949, there was an inner party
discussion going on. By March 1950 the whole cycle was complete and the
line that was adopted at Calcutta was proved wrong and we were asked to
take the responsibility of the Central Committee leadership. Then came
the question of going and meeting Stalin, and then working out all the
lines.? The Communist Party of India unit in Andhra disagreed with the
leadership. In the earlier articles, we have Basavapunniah's account of
the Moscow meeting, which was arranged to avert a split.
Like his colleagues, P. Sundarayya also dilated on the alliance with
the Congress Socialist Party in the 1930s and how the Kerala, Andhra and
Madras units of the CSP went over to the CPI. Conflict was inherent in
the alliance. ?Right from the beginning, from 1934 itself, this conflict
had been there. Because in the earlier period, some of our writings
[aid] that Congress Socialism was contradictory in words and would pave
way to fascism. Such kind of articles were written. The [Congress]
Socialist Party leadership also attacked [saying] that the communists
were responsible for fascism coming in Germany by not having a united
front. They had their own ideology; Gandhian ideology also influenced [
sic] that the communists were anti-national. They also used to say all
these things?. Similarly, Sajjad Zaheer, Dr K.M. Ashraf, Dr Z.A. Ahmed,
[Soli] Batliwala were all big Congress leaders; they were all leftists
and were in the Congress Socialist Party. They were all pro
[communists]; some of them were party members also.? So, this struggle
went on till they found that they could not function in a united way.
Then they decided to remove us and we also found that it was difficult
to convince a good chunk of them. We had to function more and more
independently than through the Congress Socialist party. That phase came
towards the end of 1938.?
Dange's role
Sadly, S.A. Dange's recorded Interview ends abruptly before the
crises of the 1940s. He was a fascinating character, a brilliant
pamphleteer, orator and a supple tactician. He was known to be close to
the mill owner Sir David Sassoon. On March 7, 1964, Current, a Bombay
[now Mumbai] tabloid, edited by D.F. Karaka, published a letter from
Dange to the Governor-General of India dated July 28, 1924, from Sitapur
jail in the United Provinces (U.P.) where he was serving a four-year
sentence in the Kanpur Conspiracy Case.
It said: ?Exactly one year back, the Deputy Commissioner of Police of
Bombay, Mr Stewart, was having a conversation with me, in his office
regarding my relations with M.N. Roy and an anticipated visit to me of
certain persons from abroad. During the course of the conversation the
Honourable officer let drop a hint in the following words, the full
import of which I failed to catch at that moment. Mr Stewart said, ?You
hold an exceptionally influential position in certain circles here and
abroad. Government would be glad if this position would be of some use
to them.' I think I still hold that position. Rather it has been
enhanced by the prosecution. If Your Excellency is pleased to think that
I should use that position for the good of Your Excellency's government
and the country, I should be glad to do so, if I am given the
opportunity by Your Excellency granting my prayer for release.
THE HINDU ARCHIVES
S.A. DANGE. HE was a member of the Communist delegation that met Stalin
in Moscow. Here, he is giving a talk on "My visit to Russia" in the
weekly BBC Marathi magazine programme "Radio Jhankar". The others in the
delegation were Ajoy Ghosh, M. Basavapunniah and C. Rajeswara Rao.
?I am given the punishment of four years' rigorous imprisonment in
order that those years may bring a salutary change in my attitude
towards the King Emperor's sovereignty in India. I beg to inform Your
Excellency that those years are unnecessary, as I have never been
positively disloyal towards His Majesty in my writings or speeches nor
do I intend to be so in future.
?Hoping this respectful undertaking will satisfy and move Your Excellency to grant my prayer and awaiting anxiously a reply.
I beg to remain,
Your Excellency's Most
Obedient Servant,
Shripat Amrit Dange.
Written this day 28th July, 1924
Endorsement No. 1048, dated 31-7-1924.
Forwarded in original to I.G. [Inspector General] of prisons U.P. for disposal.
Sd/- W.P. Cook
Col. I.M.S.
Superintendent of Jail.
Seal of I.G. Prisons
13070 Dated 1-8-1924.?
On March 16, Basavapunniah and P. Ramamurthi went to the National
Archives in New Delhi and again on March 17 and 19. What they found was
set out in a pamphlet published by the Communist Party of India
(Marxist) after the split later in the year. It was entitled Dange
Unmasked (for a detailed analysis of the texts of the documents,
including comments by the formidable Lt Col Cecil Kaye, Director of the
Intelligence Bureau, perhaps its most able ? ?he is personally, a mere
worm? ? vide the writer's article ?Dange Letters?; Survey (London)
Spring 1979; pages 160-174).
Years later I sought an interview with Dange. What he said of the
famous meeting with Stalin rang true. Stalin upbraided the CPI leaders
for not supporting the Congress on the Quit India Movement when they
mentioned that their stand had cost them dear. ?Why didn't you support
it? Do you think we won the war because of the 100 rifles you sent us??
Stalin was informality itself. Dange sat on the armrest of his chair
when Stalin pored over the map of India he had sent for. ?Is this your
Yenan?? he asked with unconcealed contempt. It lay at the very heart of
India. What followed the meetings is well recorded but not completely in
a single volume.
Significantly, later Soviet writers also criticised the CPI's 1942
decision. Dr Alexander I. Chicherov, Head of the International Relations
Research Department and Institute of Oriental Studies, Academy of
Sciences USSR in Moscow, was an erudite scholar. He found in the
archives a letter from Bal Gangadhar Tilak to the Russian Consulate in
Bombay in 1905 outlining his plans for intensifying the freedom
struggle. He admired Tilak.
On a visit to Bombay, Chicherov told Indian Express that the CPI's
decision to keep out of the Quit India Movement was ?tragic? (October
15, 1982).
One question arises. One of the interviewers said that they had no
direct contact with Moscow, only with the Communist Party of Great
Britain, that is, with Rajani Palme Dutt and Harry Pollit. Was it Palme
Dutt, then, who instructed the switch in 1942?
Basavapunniah's interview mentions the disagreement between the
Andhra thesis and the thesis of the Central leadership. The party was on
the verge of a split. It was averted by Stalin. Like Dange, Mohit Sen
supported the Emergency. Both left the CPI, But Mohit Sen's memoir is of
absorbing interest. Sadly, it did not receive the review it deserved ( A
Traveller and the Road: The Journey of an Indian Communist; Rupa &
Co.; 2003). The two remained close.
Mohit Sen's account
Mohit Sen wrote: ?I was to have the privilege of carrying the ?China
path' document to China. The CPI leadership hoped and expected that the
leadership of the CPC would endorse this understanding and back it....
?At that time, I did not know that this line had been challenged by
an important section of the CPI leadership headed by Ajoy Ghosh, S.A.
Dange and S.V. Ghate. They had produced a joint document which had gone
down in the history of the party as the ?Three Ps' document?.
?This document shared the viewpoint that India had not won
independence and that the Nehru government upheld the interests of
British imperialism, landlords and those sections of the bourgeoisie
that collaborated with imperialism. The document also held the view that
armed revolution was the only path of advance. It differed from both
the Ranadive line and the China path line [ the Andhra thesis] on its
insistence that Indian conditions differed in the 1950s from both Russia
and China. The strategy of the CPI should, therefore, be that of the
Indian path. The armed revolution in our country would be a combination
of peasant guerrilla actions in the countryside with working class
insurrections in the urban areas. This was an updated version of what
S.A. Dange had advocated decades ago in Gandhi vs. Lenin published in
1920, which had caught the attention of Lenin himself.
RAJEEV BHATT
MOHIT SEN. HE wrote: "I was to have the privilege of carrying the `China
path' document to China."
?The other point of difference of ?the three Ps' document was its
realistic appraisal of the actual situation of the CPI. It was on the
verge of annihilation. Its mass organisations were shattered and the
party itself almost totally disintegrated. The first task was to save
the party itself and to reforge its ties with the masses, taking into
account the existing civil liberties.
?The proponents of the ?Chinese path' led by Comrade C. Rajeswara Rao
and those of the ?Indian path' led by Comrade Ajoy Ghosh had set up
their own centres and the CPI was on the verge of a split. It was then
that the Soviet Communists intervened.
?Four leaders, two from each centre, were brought to Moscow. They
travelled, incognito as manual workers on a Soviet ship from Calcutta.
They were Comrades Ajoy Ghosh, S.A. Dange, C. Rajeswara Rao and M.
Basavapunniah. None of them divulged any details of how they were
contacted and what their exact itinerary was. Nikhil Chakravartty, who
attended to all the technical details of planning the journey, has also
not said anything.
BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
A GROUP OF Telangana fighters. "[Stalin] strongly advised that the armed
struggle being conducted in various areas, especially the Telangana
region of Andhra Pradesh, should be ended."
?S.A. Dange and C. Rajeswara Rao have both told me about the meeting
with the leaders of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union]. The
first meeting was attended from the Soviet side by Comrades [Mikhail
Andreyevich] Suslov, [Georgy] Malenkov and [Vyacheslav Mikhailovich]
Molotov. It was on the third day that it was announced that Comrade
Stalin would attend. So he did for the subsequent days. Dange and
Rajeswara Rao said that he was an attentive listener though he rarely
sat at the table but kept pacing up and down smoking a pipe. But he
intervened subtly to turn the discussion beyond dogmatic disputes to
assessments of the existing situation and immediate tactical tasks.
Stalin's view on Nehru government
?Stalin's view also was that India was not an independent country but
ruled indirectly by British colonialists. He also agreed that the
Communists could eventually advance only by heading an armed revolution.
But it would not be of the Chinese type. His view on this point
coincided with that of ?the three Ps'. He also agreed with their
appraisal of the concrete situation in which the party was placed. He
strongly advised that the armed struggle being conducted in various
areas, especially the Telangana region of Andhra Pradesh, should be
ended. He said that it was Comrade Rajeswara Rao who should travel to
the different camps and see that the arms were surrendered. This would
be difficult but it was he alone who could do it. That, in fact, was
done and Rajeswara Rao later told me that this was the most difficult
task he had ever performed for the party.
?Stalin also cautioned the CPI leaders that the Nehru government was
not a puppet government. It had a social base and mass support and could
not be overthrown easily. He asked the leaders to unite, work together,
save the party and take it forward. He strongly advised them to make
the CPI participate in the general elections? (pages 80-81).
BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
P. SUNDARAYYA AND (below) Basavapunniah in the 1950s.
The record has him say: ?I cannot consider the government of Nehru as
a puppet. All his roots are in the people.? He was polite to the
visitors, but they did not win his respect. His interpreter and the
diplomat Nikolai Adyrkhayev's memoirs, released on Stalin's 118th birth
anniversary (December 21, 1879), reveal that later in the year Stalin
scolded a delegation of the Japanese Communist Party: ?In India they
have wrecked the party and there is something similar with you.?
BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
As it happens some interesting documents have surfaced in the pages
of a journal, Revolutionary Democracy, published by Vijay Singh. The
issue of April 2011 published documents from the papers of Rajani Palme
Dutt in the archives of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which are
deposited in the Labour Archive and Library, Manchester.
BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
THE NINE MEMBERS of the first Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of
India (Marxist) after the 1964 split in the Communist movement:
(standing, from left) P. Ramamurthi, Basavapunniah, E.M.S. Namboodiripad
and Harkishan Singh Surjeet; (sitting, from left) Promode Dasgupta,
Jyoti Basu, Sundarayya, B.T. Ranadive and A.K. Gopalan.
One was a letter dated November 1, 1962, from B.N. Datar, Minister of
State for Home, to P.K. Sawant, Home Minister, Maharashtra. It read :
?I am enclosing herewith in original a list handed over personally by
Shri S.A. Dange, to Home Minister recently giving the names and
addresses of CPI persons in Bombay and other individuals who in the
opinion of Shri S.A. Dange are pro-Chinese. I would request your
immediate comments and action in the matter under advice to me.? The
other letter contains charges too scandalous to be reproduced, still
less vouched for.
Authentic material on Moscow talks
Three other issues contain authentic material on the Moscow talks
from the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History
translated from the Russian by Vijay Singh. There is a stenographic
record of the discussions between the two delegations on February 4, 6
and 9, 1951 (September 2006; pages 162-200). As one might expect, the
Indians did most of the talking on the first two days, explaining
internal differences and replying to pointed questions by the hosts.
Stalin spoke at great length on February 9 (pages 186-200).
The issue of April 2007 published a record of the discussions with
Malenkov and Suslov on February 21 (pages 126-130). The issue of April
2010 has three letters by the CPI leaders; Stalin underlined parts of
the letters and gave his comments in the margin. All these documents
merit detailed analysis in the light of the CPI's internal debates in
1948-51.
Postscript: Aloke Banerjee of Hindustan Times reported from Kolkata
on November 26, 2005: ?Marxist Patriarch Jyoti Basu had been against a
split in the CPI and had urged all his comrades to keep the party
united. This was in 1963, a year before some CPI leaders left the party
and formed the CPI(M).
?Documents portraying the final days before the CPI split have been
made public with the CPI(M) publishing the fourth volume of Communist
Movement in Bengal: Documents and Related Facts. The book contains a
letter Basu wrote from the Dum Dum Jail on October 9, 1963, titled ?Save
the party from revisionists and dogmatic extremists'. ?We must stay
within the party and continue our ideological struggle against Dange's
revisionism. It will not be right to split the party,' Basu had said in
the letter. ?Yet, the reckless dogmatists seem to be determined to break
up the party.'
?Four decades on, Basu cannot remember having written such a letter.
Informed that his party had published his letter, Basu told HT on
Friday, ?I don't remember having written such a letter. But it's true
that I had tried till the last moments to stop the imminent split. I was
of the opinion that it would be incorrect to break the CPI and form a
new party. But I failed. There were many differences. We could not stay
together any longer.' The CPI(M)'s book also contains the minutes of a
crucial meeting of the party's working committee.? Unfortunately, the
book is in Bengali. An English translation is overdue.
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