The revolutionary road

Indian Communist Prasthanam: Aadya Pathikar (Indian Communist Movement: The Pioneers) by C. Bhaskaran; Chintha Publishers, Thiruvananthapuram, 2002; pages 496, Rs.250.

"EACH communist party," wrote the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, "was the child of the marriage of two ill-assorted partners, a national Left and the October Revolution." Hobsbawm's thesis holds true, though with certain qualifications, in the case of the Communist Party of India (CPI) too. Formed in October 1920 in the Soviet city of Tashkent by a small group of revolutionaries, the CPI became a section of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1921. The emigre party, which did not have more than 10 members at the time of formation, elected Muhammad Shafiq its first secretary. Prominent among the founding members were M.N. Roy, his wife Evelyn Roy, and Abani Mukherjee. Simultaneously, efforts were undertaken to build the party in India. The British government hit back with the Peshawar (1922), Kanpur (1924) and Meerut (1929) communist conspiracy cases. The accused in the cases included, among others, important Communist organisers who worked in India, such as Muzaffar Ahmad, Nalini Gupta and S.V. Ghate, and members of the emigre party, such as Rafiq Ahmad and Shaukat Usmani.

In fact, it was only by 1933, when the leaders who had been convicted and sentenced to various terms of jail in the Meerut case were released, that the CPI could set up a centralised organisation and adopt a proper programme. Accepting the understanding of the Comintern's Colonial Thesis as the basis for its strategy, the fledgling CPI actively participated in the anti-imperialist movement and simutaneously carried on its efforts to organise workers and peasants.

The book under review, Indian Communist Prasthanam: Aadya Pathikar (Indian Communist Movement: The Pioneers) comprises brief biographical sketches in Malayalam of 72 eminent communist leaders of the first generation who made substantial contributions to build the party.

Authored by C. Bhaskaran, the first all-India president of the Students' Federation of India (SFI) and the current editor of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-run Chintha publishers, it gives an overview of the early history of the CPI through the stories of the lives and struggles of its pioneer leaders. Bhaskaran, a prolific writer, has to his credit several books and pamphlets in Malayalam on the history of the Communist, youth, student and trade union movements in the country. As distinguished Marxist intellectual P. Govinda Pillai notes in the foreword to the book, after veteran Communists and scholars such as E.M.S. Namboodiripad, K. Damodaran, N.E. Balaram and M.S. Devadas, only a few people like Bhaskaran might have gained an in-depth understanding of the history of the Communist movement in India and abroad.

Reading through the book, one is struck by the political backgrounds of the various people who joined the CPI and then went on to become its towering leaders. In fact, representatives of almost all major currents of nationalist Left joined the nascent CPI and strengthened its revolutionary spirit. Prominent among them were the colleagues of Bhagat Singh in the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) such as Ajoy Ghosh, Shiv Verma and Pandit Kishorilal; revolutionary terrorists from Bengal such as Promode Dasgupta, Saroj Mukherjee, Kalpana Joshi, Harekrishna Konar and Benoy Krishna Chowdhary; veteran trade unionists such as B.T. Ranadive, S.A. Dange, S.S. Mirajkar and M. Singaravelu Chettiyar; Ghadar Party leaders such as Sohan Singh Josh, Baba Karam Singh Cheema and Baba Sohan Singh Bhakna; leaders of the Telengana armed struggle such as P. Sundarayya, M. Basavapunnaiah and C. Rajeswara Rao; and Left-wing Congressmen and Congress Socialist Party acitivists such as E.M.S. Namboodiripad, A.K. Gopalan and P. Krishna Pillai. Interestingly, senior CPI leaders such as Rahul Sankrityayan, K.M. Ashraf, P. Jeevanandam, Sajjad Zahir and G. Adhikari were also outstanding scholars and intellectuals.

As Malayalam writer and critic K.E.N. points out in a brilliant essay attached to the book, the biographies make it clear that the Communist pioneers shared a common political consciousness on a crucial element of socialist theory - that contemporary social criticism should look for its roots in the overbearing and oppressive reality of imperialism. At a time when attempts are on to do away with structural concepts like imperialism in social and political analyses, it is intellectually refreshing to read about a generation that understood the primary contradiction of the age as one between imperialism and socialism.

In fact, it was this realisation that made the party view the freedom struggle as the result of a fundamental contradiction between the Indian people as a whole and British colonialism. Brief periods of left-wing adventurism notwithstanding, this understanding underpinned its strategy in the pre- and post-Independence periods. (A Communist party ought to play a dual role in Third World countries with bourgeois governments. It must have limited unity with the local bourgeoisie in combating imperialism and must struggle against the anti-people policies of the same bourgeoisie. Failure to grasp this dialectic of unity and struggle in praxis will result in left sectarian or right opportunist errors.)

But the book is largely silent on the strategic debates within the party and its theoretical interactions with the international Communist movement that helped it arrive at such an understanding. An otherwise painstakingly researched and lucidly written volume would have got a value addition with a brief outline of the relevant debates. However, the book, arguably the first of its kind in an Indian language, is a `must read' for anybody who wants to know about the history of the Indian communist movement and its early leaders. One hopes that the book will soon be translated into English and major Indian languages so that it will be accessible to more people.