From late nineteenth century onwards, India’s national struggle against British imperialism had been quite responsive to international political currents. There is a lot of evidence to show that enlightened Indians were aware, though rather vaguely in most cases, of the Fabian and other streams of socialism (remember, for example, Vivekananda’s remark: “I’m a socialist”). Again, from the minutes of a meeting of the General Council of Marx’s First International held on August 15,1871, we learn that some radical elements from Calcutta had written a letter to the International Working Men’s Association (First International) asking for powers to start a section in India. Unfortunately, we know no more of details, except that in the said meeting the secretary was instructed to give a positive answer to the letter. Decades later, when Japan defeated Tsarist Russia in 1905, this victory of a tiny Asian country over what was considered a major European power greatly encouraged the Indian struggle. The Russian revolution of 1905 inspired leaders like Tilak and a few revolutionary patriots like Hemchandra Kanungo (the latter was among the first in India to get attracted to Marxism). In March 1912 Har Dayal Mathur, then in the USA, became the first Indian to write a biography of Karl Marx in the Modern Review, though he clarified that he was no Marxist. Towards the end of the year S Ramakrishna Pillai published the first biography of Marx in an Indian language, ( Malayalam) probably on the basis of the Har Dayal article. In October 1916, Ambalal Patel wrote an article on Karl Marx in a Gujarati magazine.
The progressive international impact, however, rose to a new plane after 1914. The First World War, arising out of intensified inter-imperialist contradiction for redistribution of limited world resources, markets and territories, snapped the global chain of imperialism at its weakest link and the new Soviet state was born in 1917. Across the earth there was a tremendous upsurge in struggles against imperialism and its lackeys. For peoples fighting for emancipation from colonial bondage, the Russian revolution and its leader Lenin emerged as a great source of inspiration. Founded in March 1919, the Comintern provided further impetus to the spread of communist ideals across national and continental frontiers and a number of communist parties came up in the early 1920s — among them those of China, Indonesia and India.
Russian Revolution and the Indian response
The soil of India was thus growing fertile for the growth of communism. The Raj sensed this accurately and early enough, as the following note prepared by the Government of India, Foreign Department, in August 1920 (that is, a good five years before the actual founding of the CPI) shows:
"Now there is no doubt that at present the lower classes in India, both in the towns and in the rural areas, are going through a very hard time. ... This growing atmosphere of social unrest opens the door to Bolshevik propaganda … In the first place, it will be directed against the British Government, for as long as the British Government exists, the present social structure will also exist.
... the embarrassment and overthrow of British rule is only the first step, after that will come the real Bolshevik programme of upsetting the wealthy, the educated, the well born, and placing in a position of mastery the lowest classes of the population…” (Foreign Department, Secret-Internal, August 1920, Nos. 8-26. Cited in Communist Movement in India by K. N. Panikkar, pp 222-24).
This was a fairly realistic observation. Dainik Basumati, then a leading nationalist daily of Calcutta, commented just ten days after Bolshevik power was established in Russia: “The downfall of Tsardom has ushered in the age of destruction of alien bureaucracy in India too”.
“Our hour is approaching, India too shall be free. But sons of India must stand up for right and justice, as the Russians did” — spoke out the Home Rule Leaguers in South India, as soon as they got the news of the great emancipation, in a pamphlet entitled Lessons from Russia (Madras, 1917).
And so on and so forth, exclaimed the exuberant Indian patriots, and this on the basis of the droplets of news that trickled through the British censorship net. The very first decrees and treaties of the Soviet Union (e.g., the unilateral renouncing of the imperial rights in China and other parts of Asia acquired under the Tsar; proclamation of the rights of nations to self-determination and its immediate implementation in Finland; and so on) electrified the people of India. The Soviet government on its part was also stretching out its hand of friendship in different ways to the radical nationalists fighting against imperialism, the common enemy.
It was in this atmosphere surcharged with a new hope, a new passion for liberation, that the most dynamic revolutionists of India got attracted first towards the new “Red” heroes and then towards Marxism/communism because, they were told, that was the great secret behind the Bolshevik miracle. They came basically from three backgrounds:
(a) Revolutionary patriots working from Germany (e.g., the Berlin group led by Virendranath Chattopadhyaya), Afghanistan (e.g., M Barkatullah of the “Provisional Government of Independent India” established in Kabul), USA (most notably Ghadrites like Rattan Singh and Santokh Singh who revived the movement in early 1920s) etc. and roving revolutionaries like MN Roy and Abani Mukherjee;
(b) National revolutionaries from the Pan-Islamic Khilafat movement and the Hirjat movement (involving those who went to Afghanistan and Turkey during and after the First World War (e.g., Shaukat Usmani, Mohammad Ali Sepassi etc.); and
(c) Radical patriots -- working from within the Congress movement or without -- who, disillusioned and shocked at the sudden withdrawal of the non-cooperation movement in 1921, turned to socialism and the working class movement in search of a new path. Among them were Dange and his associates in Bombay, Muzaffar Ahmad in Calcutta and Singaravelu in Madras, the Inquilab group of Lahore, and the Babbar Akali faction of the Akali movement.
The common urge that propelled these diverse forces was the liberation of the motherland. Herein lay the original impulse of communism in India. Of these three streams, the first two joined together in the Soviet Union to form a ‘Communist Party of India’ in Tashkent. However, being cut off from the internal dynamics of Indian society, this combination never developed beyond an emigre communist group. It was the third stream that arose out of the evolution of the Indian society itself and therefore became the real Communist Party of India.
MN Roy, the main leader of the ‘CPI’ founded in Tashkent on October 17, 1920, did try to build political bridges to India through journals, manifestoes, letters etc. and by sending emissaries and funds. In these efforts he was fully financed and politically assisted by the Comintern, on whose behalf he was acting (he was inducted into its leadership in 1921 itself). The emissaries and the funds were not of much help, but the Comintern reports and guidelines contained in magazines edited by Roy certainly was, notwithstanding the fact that many if not most copies of these magazines were routinely intercepted by the police.
The First Communist Groups in India
Almost simultaneously with but quite independently of the formation of a communist centre in Soviet Russia, the first communist elements and groups sprang up in India during 1921-22. These were:
(1) The Bombay group around Sripad Amrit Dange, who published his Gandhi vs. Lenin in mid-1921. Dange was then one among a group of student leaders just rusticated from Bombay’s Wilson College, which they had earlier boycotted as part of the non-cooperation movement. Based on very scanty information about Lenin and Russia available at the time and penned by a 21-year- old who was then just transforming himself, in his own words, from “Tilak’s chela” (meaning disciple) to “Lenin’s chela, the pamphlet is full of errors both in theory and in facts. But the importance of the book lies in its backdrop and the follow-up. It appeared in the course of a debate, among politicised students’ circles in Bombay and for that matter elsewhere too, as to what should be the correct path for India’s emancipation; and it remains the best available historical documentation of the very first phase in a generation’s ideological transformation. This is proved also by the fact that after the publication of Gandhi vs. Lenin, Dange and his friends engaged themselves in trade union activities and evolved into one of the earliest communist circles in India and began publishing Socialist, the first communist journal in India, from August 1922.
(2) The Calcutta group around Muzaffar Ahmad, a young man who did not participate in the non-cooperation movement but published, for a few months in late 1920, a literary-cum-militant nationalist journal in Bengali named Navyug (New Age) together with the firebrand Bengali poet Nazrul Islam. Towards the end of 1921 Ahmad bought a few books by Lenin and on Marx from the first secret consignment of such books to Calcutta and from the next year started organising the workers in Metiaburuz and other industrial centres near Calcutta.
(3) The Madras group around Singaravelu M Chettiar, a middle-aged Congressman already active on the working class front when he embraced Marxism. He played an active role at the Gaya session of the Congress (end of December 1922) and founded the Labour Kishan Party of Hindustan in 1923.
(4) The Lahore group around Ghulam Hussain, who used to teach economics at a Peshawar college and was brought towards Marxism by his friend Mohammad Ali, one of the founder members of “CPI” at Tashkent, in 1922. After this he left the job, went to Lahore, started work in the Railway Workers’ Union there and edited the Urdu paper Inquilab, only a few issues of which were published.
How come all these groups sprang up in literally the four corners of India just within one year, as if by some grand design? The fact is that they were totally unknown to each other and, barring Ghulam Hussain, of the activities of MN Roy or Comintern. Their development was conditioned by a peculiar combination of historical circumstances — of two internal factors and one external impulse: (i) the contradiction between Gandhian ideology and politics on one hand and the revolutionary sweep of class struggle and national liberation movement on the other; (ii) the new stage in Indian working class movement both in quantitative and qualitative terms; and (iii) the international appeal of the October Revolution.
Among the three, the first was the most fundamental. The compromising character of the Congress and the fact that it was basically a party of the rich unconcerned with everyday problems of the working people was already known, but it was during the non-cooperation-Khilafat movement and thereafter that the said contradiction manifested itself most sharply. Numerous incidents — e.g., Gandhi’s announcement in early 1921 that strikes “do not fall within the plan of non-violent non-cooperation”, his urgent directive to stop the no tax campaign started by Congressmen in Guntur under pressure from below and so on — led to the emergence of three parallel critiques of Gandhism.
One was from within the bourgeois camp -- concerning the question of expediency, tactics and timing. CR Das and the senior Nehru felt, for instance, that the Congress should have accepted the British peace gestures during the visit of Prince of Wales in return for some constitutional gains and they were angry because Gandhi, after refusing all compromise at that opportune moment, later beat a retreat suddenly and without any benefit. Another was from the petty-bourgeois revolutionary-patriots, who either supported the non-cooperation-Khilafat movement or at least suspended their activities during this period but strove to return to the ‘politics of the bomb’ after the movement collapsed. The third critique was developed by communists who emerged mostly from among Congress activists like Dange and based itself on the growing clash between the conservative bourgeois leadership and the militant popular forces. However, its beginnings bore the inevitable birth-marks: both the first communist pamphlet in India (Gandhi vs. Lenin) and the first communist speech at a Congress session (Gaya, 1922, by Singaravelu) accepted non-violence as an effective method in Indian conditions. In time the socialist critique would come into its own, but this could be achieved not simply by subjective theoretical exercises. An objective social force capable of completing this transformation was crucially needed.
And this was available in the second factor noted above: the working class movement. The working class in India had, by 1921-22, already established itself both as a front-ranking detachment of the national movement (though without a political programme of its own) and as a formidable fighter against the exploitation and injustice meted out to it as a class. Naturally, the new Marxists everywhere turned to work among this class and found there the social vehicle for communism. By this act they also took a crucial step forward in their ideological remoulding, differentiating themselves substantially and effectively from all shades of bourgeois and petty bourgeois critiques of Gandhism and thus started laying the real foundation of a communist movement. But for a certain level of development of the working class in India, all this would not have been possible. This necessary proletarian dimension, however, suffered from a basic weakness: the lack of serious work among the struggling peasantry. This weakness lingered on into the 1930s and deprived the working class of its crucial mass ally — the toiling peasantry — and thereby disabled it to snatch the leadership of the national liberation movement from the bourgeoisie.
About the third factor, the important thing to note is this. The anti-imperialist appeal of the Bolshevik Revolution was welcomed by all working people and even by enlightened sections of the propertied classes, but its socio-political content and world-historic significance were grasped only by Marxists — the ideologues of the working class. While the responses of all others were emotional and superficial, only the working class acquired and assimilated from the land of Soviets its philosophy of life and proceeded to build the political party of its own in that light.
So, these are the three sources of the communist movement in India. They are closely interconnected and one cannot ignore any of these.
The First Communist Conference in India
One of the many curious events in the history of communism in India was that the credit for organising the historic conference which united the scattered communist groups into one party — the CPI — goes to a person named Satyabhakt who left the party within days after foundation. This Satyabhakt was a former member of a patriotic-terrorist group in UP, and a disillusioned disciple of Gandhi who, after the withdrawal of the non-cooperation movement, got interested in Soviet Russia and communism. He set up an open “Indian Communist Party” in mid-1924 with a membership, according to his own claim, of 78 persons which grew to 150 by 1925. He felt emboldened to form the party openly when in May 1924 the Public Prosecutor (PP) in the Kanpur Conspiracy Case (Satyabhakt’s name figured in the first list of thirteen accused in this case, but not in the second list of eight persons) made a statement to the effect that the accused was being prosecuted not because they held or propagated communist views, but because they conspired to overthrow the government. From this Satyabhakt inferred that a communist party which is open and above board and manifestly Indian, i.e., having no connection with Bolshevism or the Comintern, would not perhaps incur the wrath of the authorities.
The existing communist groups did not take this party seriously (nor did Cecil Kaye, the British intelligence chief, though Satyabhakt was closely watched), but when he announced the decision to organise what he called the “First Indian Communist Conference” in Kanpur late in 1925, they took notice and sat up. Already in jail there had been a discussion among them on the propriety or otherwise of holding an open conference to set up the Communist Party on an all-India basis utilising the above-mentioned statement of the PP in the Kanpur case. The idea was Dange’s, so the Bombay group (Dange himself was in jail) co-operated with Satyabhakt and participated wholeheartedly in the Kanpur Conference (25-28 December 1925). Ahmad was against the idea but, released from jail just three months before the conference on the ground of severe tuberculosis, he also attended. Delegates from other places were also present.
The conference was attended by 300 delegates according to the February 1926 number of Kirti (a communist-sponsored Punjabi magazine, where young Bhagat Singh worked as deputy editor), though intelligence sources put the figure at 500 (probably an exaggeration aimed at overplaying the ‘communist menace’). The British communist MP Shapurji Saklatvala had sent a short message to the “Congress which I hope will be the beginning of a large and stable Communist movement in India”. It was read out at the first session, followed by the speech of the reception committee chairman Hasrat Mohani (who had moved the famous “Independence Resolution” at the Ahmedabad session of Congress in December 1921). Next came the presidential address by M Singaravelu.
The second session met in the evening of 26 December and adopted the resolutions placed before it by a resolutions committee comprising S V Ghate, Satyabhakt, KN Joglekar (Bombay), JP Bagerhatta, S Hassan (Lahore) and Krishnaswamy (Madras). There was no debate in the conference, but earlier, in the committee itself, there was a sharp controversy. While all others, following the Comintern norm, were for naming the party as “Communist Party of India”, Satyabhakt smelt a Bolshevik flavour in it and stuck to the name of his own party. He was alone and therefore defeated, but within a few days he founded a new party and to stress his point more conspicuously, he named it as the “National Communist Party”!
To come back to the conference, the third session on the 27th adopted the Constitution and elected the Central Executive Committee. The CEC was to consist of 30 persons, but only 16 were elected, leaving the rest for co-option from different provinces. The next day the CEC elected the office bearers. We reproduce below a slightly abridged version of the party’s Press Communique.
“Communist Party of India: Aims and Objects
“… The ultimate goal of the party will be the establishment of a workers' and peasants' republic in India. And the immediate object of the party shall be the securing of a living wage for the workers and peasants by means of nationalisation and municipalisation of public services; namely land, mines, factories, houses, telegraphs, telephones, railways and such other public utilities which require public ownership. The party shall, for the attainment of the above object, form labour and peasants’ unions in urban and rural areas, enter district and taluk boards, municipalities and assemblies and by such other means and methods carry out the ideal and programme of the party with or without the cooperation of the existing political parties in the country.
“The party shall have a central executive of 30 members returned by provincial committees and a council of seven members to execute all emergency matters.
“The party shall consist of communists only who will pledge themselves to carry out its objects and no one who is a member of any communal organisation can be admitted as a member of this party.
“Every member shall pay eight annas annually as subscription for his membership to the enrolling secretaries.
“The office of the central executive shall be in Bombay with comrades Janaki Prasad Bagerhatta and SV Ghate as general secretaries for the year. Maulana Azad Sobhani of Kanpur has been elected as its vice-president … Comrade Krishnaswamy Ayyangar (Madras), S Satyabhakt (Kanpur), Radha Mohan Gokulji and Muzaffar Ahmad (Calcutta) and SD Hassan (Lahore) will be working as provincial secretaries to organise provincial committees in their respective provinces. The next meeting of the central executive will meet early in April to begin effective work and formulate a scheme of work for the year.”
After some initial hesitations, M N Roy on behalf of Comintern accepted the CEC elected at Kanpur as a basis for further work and put forward the following main suggestions or directives: (a) “the Communist Party of India in the process of formation” should immediately and formally affiliate itself with the Communist International (CI) and repudiate the statements of Satyabhakt, Singaravelu and Hasrat Mohani which gave an opposite impression; (b) “the CPI shall make a UF with the nationalist movement” on the basis of Roy’s “Programme” placed before the Gaya Congress session; (c) “the foreign bureau” (meaning Roy and other Indian communists working abroad under CI auspices) to act as “the ideological centre” and “the organ through which the party’s foreign relations will be maintained”; (d) a book shop should be opened and arrangements made for the receipt and distribution of the Masses (a magazine brought out by Roy from abroad) via Pondicherry and Madras, and (e) there must be no “illusions” about “a legal communist party” — “We must be prepared for attack any moment and organise the party in such a way that an attack on legality will not destroy the party.”
Of these suggestions, the fourth was fully implemented and the first and fifth completely ignored. The suggested “united front with the national movement” would be attempted, but not on the basis of Roy’s “Programme”. As regards the third suggestion on “foreign bureau” and “ideological centre”, it was accepted with conditions which sought to ensure that the party in India will not be dictated by a foreign bureau, rather the latter must work in accordance with the party’s decisions:
“The Presidium [of the Central Executive or CE] with the sanction of the CE will maintain a foreign bureau as an ideological centre, composed of comrades who are not in a position to work inside the country. The foreign bureau will be representative of the CE and will act as the organ through which the international relations of the party will be maintained. But it will not in any way work inconsistent with the party's program and resolutions. The foreign bureau will have a regular office at a place of their convenience and will keep a constant touch with all the CPs and the Comintern and will give publicity to Indian affairs.”
Before we move on, a word on Satyabhakt would be in order. A journalist, he also used to sell imported communist literature, maintain contact with Hindustan Republican Association, and had links with workers in Kanpur. In his own way, he sincerely sympathised with communism, but he was too narrowly nationalist (and perhaps afraid of the repression that even a presumed link with the Comintern would invite) to tolerate international connections. He was one of the fellow-travelers of the communist party. His post-conference “National Communist Party” remained confined to UP and become defunct by 1927.
26 December 1925: Party Foundation Day
Major weaknesses notwithstanding, it was this conference that adopted the first Party Constitution and elected the nucleus of an all-India leadership where all the existing communist circles were represented. This leadership or CEC (minus Satyabhakt, who resigned in February, 1926 and Bagerhatta who became aware of other comrades’ suspicions about him and resigned in mid-1927) met irregularly from time to time till the Meerut arrests (March 1929) and played a commendable role on the working class front and in organising the Workers’ and Peasants’ Parties during this period. Satyabhakt’s narrow nationalist attitude was defeated, and the CPI started its journey as a part of the international communist movement. So, the foundation of the party should be counted from the Kanpur conference and not from the Tashkent initiative, as indeed was decided by the Central Secretariat of the (undivided) CPI on 19 August, 1959. At the time there was no debate about this, at least in public.
After the CPI-CPI(M) split, however, a peculiar position was taken by Muzaffar Ahmad, who had sided with the CPI(M). In his book Amar Jiban O Bharater Communist Party (Myself and the Communist Party of India) published by National Book Agency in 1969, he describes the Kanpur conference as a “tamasha” and declares the Tashkent formation as “the real date of the foundation of the CPI”. His main logic is that the CPI formed in Tashkent was affiliated to the Comintern and the CPI established in Kanpur was not. Ahmad thus takes international recognition as the sole criterion in determining when and whether a communist party comes into existence, and disregards all other factors like organic links with the mass movements in the country concerned. And on this point also his argument is far from perfect, for as we have seen before, the CPI at Tashkent was indeed registered with the Comintern (with its Turkestan Bureau to be more precise), but the Comintern was certainly not so stupid as to recognise the motley group as a full-fledged party.
However, the question remains as to why did the CPI formed in Kanpur not appeal for affiliation with the Comintern? Ahmad, who was elected to the CEC in the Kanpur conference, explains this before the CPI-CPI(M) split in this way: “... as the party members did not consider the membership sufficient, so they did not apply for the party being affiliated to the CI. All the same, the CI considered the CPI as a part of itself.” Ahmad, thus, did not consider non-affiliation as a great crime at that time, as he did after the split. In fact, just like his other comrades he took the Kanpur decisions in all seriousness and made a fervent appeal to all “Communists in Bengal” to “come together and build the party” in a statement published in Langal on 21 January,1926.
Without wasting time in explaining Ahmad’s self-contradiction, let us record here our own views on this matter. First, the absence of formal recognition did not prevent the CPI founded in Kanpur, either during the 1920s or later, from making reports to and seeking advice from the Comintern, which on its part guided, assisted and issued directives to it just as it did in relation to other affiliated parties. For all practical purposes, therefore, the CPI acted very much as a part of the international communist movement. May be a formal affiliation with the Comintern was avoided for the sake of legality, but that does not render this party and its founding conference less bona fide or legitimate than the still-born Tashkent group.
Second, we regard the entire historical period between the Bolshevik revolution and the second world war as the formative years of the CPI, in the sense that a more or less full-fledged communist party actually developed only in the second half of 1930s after overcoming major ideological-political problems and reorganisation of the leadership structure. It is in this overall historical context that we take 26 December 1925, when representatives of all the active communist circles of the country met together and adopted the resolutions founding the all-India party, as the foundation of the CPI. If the October Revolution ushered in a great new stage in national liberation struggles worldwide, for India this general advance was concretely realised — for the first time and therefore in an embryonic form — through this conference. Ideologically this meant a historic leap from petty bourgeois revolutionism to proletarian revolutionism guided by Marxism-Leninism and in terms of organization, laid the foundation for building the Communist Party in India.
