Without ‘foreign’ masters

The Plight Of Indian Comrades

By Amulya Ganguli

There may be a simple explanation for the Left’s ideological rigidity on the nuclear deal which is taking the country towards a mid-term poll. The comrades are not getting good advice about the pros and cons of their stance. In the past, they had the advantage of turning to their friends, philosophers and guides in Moscow or Beijing to show them the way out of any difficulty which was beyond their ken. For instance, when the yeh azadi jhooti hai movement centred mainly in Telengana began to fade out, the undivided Communist party dispatched four of its stalwarts ~ Ajoy Ghosh, SA Dange, Rajeshwara Rao and M Basavapunniah ~ to Moscow in 1950-51 to seek guidance.
There is a delightful passage in Mohit Sen’s autobiography, A Traveller and the Road: The Journey of an Indian Communist, which recounts how Stalin paced up and down smoking a pipe as the four Indians interacted with Suslov, Malenkov and Molotov. It was as if the principal of a school was silently watching how the teachers were instructing their students.

Stalin’s suggestion

When the principal finally gave his opinion, it was a sensible one: call off the armed struggle. Not only that, Stalin said that although India was still under British colonial influence (yeh azadi jhooti hai), the Jawaharlal Nehru government was not a puppet, for it had a social base and mass support. The Indian communists should concentrate, therefore, on fighting elections.
It is this kind of practical guidance which Prakash Karat and Co. are unable to secure today. There is no principal or teachers to show them the right path even it means abandoning an armed uprising, which the ‘students’ evidently thought was the only course before a revolutionary, and participating instead in the bourgeois exercise of holding elections, which carries the danger of developing “an outlook which evades militant forms of mass action”, as a CPI resolution warned in 1971.
Although the Soviet advice meant a deviation from the prescribed text, the Indian communists had little hesitation in accepting it because their dogma also prescribed unquestioning obedience to their ideological lord and master. But now, in the absence of such a centre of gravity, the Indian communists are not only adrift in their ideological sea, but also lack the intellectual calibre to break out of their dogmatic straitjacket or even modify a doctrine in accordance with the existing situation. The revolutionary text, therefore, is now set in stone for them and the comrades have no option but to abide by it even if such blind adherence leads them into stormy waters.
It is obvious, for instance, that if Karat and Co were to be transported back to the fifties and left to their own devices without the benefit of Moscow’s advice, they wouldn’t have had the intellectual daring to admit that their path of armed struggle in Telengana was wrong and that they must switch to parliamentary politics. They would have marched on blindly towards disaster. Not surprisingly, they are now following a course which can have portentous consequences for them and the party ~ and not all of them beneficial.
Before examining such a scenario, it may be worthwhile to examine another instance of perceptive of lords and masters abroad steering the Indian communists along the right channels. This was when Kanu Sanyal, Jangal Santhal, Sourin Bose and several other Naxalites ~ 12 in all ~ went to Beijing in 1967 to find out about the ways to conduct a revolution. Then, as noted by Sumanta Banerjee in his book, In the Wake of Naxalbari, Sourin Bose went to Beijing again in 1970 when the Naxalites in India found that Radio Peking was no longer extolling them and not even mentioning their “achievements” in Srikakulam.
What he was told, however, by Zhou Enlai and Kang Sheng must have been hugely disheartening, for the Chinese leaders asked the Naxalites to stop raising the slogan, “China’s chairman is our chairman”, since they said, to quote Banerjee, “to regard the leader of one country as the leader of another party is against the sentiment of the nation; it is difficult for the working class to accept it”. Moreover, Zhou and Kang Sheng were against the gunning down of individual policemen, which was one of the favourite tactics of the Naxalties. The two Chinese leaders said that “secret assassination of police is anarchist, is isolated from the masses, is short-lived”. As is obvious, all this was good advice, just as what Stalin told the Indian communists made eminent sense.
Evidently, Indian communists need close supervision. Otherwise, they are liable to commit major mistakes. Their history confirms this flaw in their character. Whether opposing the Quit India movement in 1942 when the anti-imperialist World War II became a people’s war following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, or calling Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose a quisling and Rabindranath Tagore a bourgeois poet, the Left always seemed to be running against the national current.
But the Left’s biggest blunder was its curiously ambiguous response to the Chinese invasion in 1962. To quote Mohit Sen again, many in the CPI(M) “believed that the Chinese communists had done nothing wrong in attacking India. They thought that this was not an attack but a defensive action and that in the not so long run, the Chinese action would help the advance of the revolution by weakening the power of the ruling alliance, especially by pulling down the prestige of the Congress and its leader Pandit Nehru.”

The split

As is known, the undivided Communist party split within two years of the Chinese invasion as a result of the differences in the party on the issue. After the rupture, the CPI came to be known as a pro-Moscow organization and the CPI(M) as pro-Beijing, although the Marxists lost the label to the Naxalites five years later when the first of the many CPI(M-L)s were set up. However, the identification of the communists with foreign powers ~ either a friendly one like the Soviet Union or a hostile one like China ~ has remained a part of public consciousness.
Now, the Left’s attempt to scuttle the nuclear deal is likely to strengthen this unflattering impression because of the evident uneasiness in China and Pakistan about New Delhi’s growing ties with Washington. Such a perception will be all the more damaging to the communists because of the evident rise in Chinese bellicosity over Arunachal Pradesh. And Pakistan, of course, has long been a bugbear despite the recent marginal improvement in mutual relations.
Arguably, the current misgivings about the Left can be no less damaging than what happened in 1942 and 1962. Perhaps even more so because unlike in the earlier periods, India is seemingly poised today to become a major economic and political power. If the communists are seen, therefore, to be setting up roadblocks and that, too, at the behest of foreign powers, their electoral prospects cannot but be dim.

The writer is a former Assistant Editor, The Statesman