The Left; Left within the Congress: Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose, Congress Socialist Party; Communist Party of India, Other Left Parties

The Left within the Congress: Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose, Congress Socialist Party and the Communist Movement

History Optional Notes {PDF}

Complete Notes Package (Paper I & II) | 4500+ Pages | Instant Download

Discounted Price | Buy Now @ ₹1,180 →

The rise of the Left in India was rooted in the specific politico-economic conditions that emerged towards the end of the First World War. Colonial exploitation, agrarian distress, the growth of an industrial working class, and the ideological pull of the Bolshevik Revolution together created fertile ground for socialist and communist ideas within the Indian national movement. This Left current did not emerge as a single, unified force — it grew along three distinct streams, ranging from socialists working inside the Indian National Congress to revolutionaries organised under the Communist Party of India (CPI), and finally, an assortment of independent radical parties and individuals. Understanding these three streams, the factors behind their rise, and the CPI’s shifting relationship with the Congress is essential to understanding the ideological diversity of India’s freedom struggle.

Three Streams of the Left Movement in India

• Stream I: Rise of the Left within the Indian National Congress
  • Best exemplified by the formation of the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) in 1934.
• Stream II: Rise of communism under the Communist Party of India
  • The CPI, formed in 1925, functioned largely as a branch of the International Communist Movement and remained, by and large, controlled by the Comintern.
• Stream III: Other radical organisations and individuals
  • Included parties such as the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), the Royists influenced by M.N. Roy, and the Forward Bloc, as well as independent radical leaders like Indulal Yagnik, Sahajanand Saraswati, and N.G. Ranga.

Factors Responsible for the Rise of the Left in India

• The colonial character of British rule. British exploitation of the Indian economy and of various socio-economic groups drove some patriotic intellectuals — particularly those who had lived in the West and formed links there — towards Leftist ideologies.
• Agrarian exploitation. The land-based exploitative system and the exploitation of agricultural labourers led directly to the emergence of the Kisan Sabha movement.
• Industrial capitalism and labour exploitation. The rise of modern industries under a capitalistic system, and the resulting exploitation of factory workers, created a large and concentrated working population. The growth of trade unionism that followed prepared the ground for the Leftist movement.
• The financial burden of the First World War. Rising prices of essential goods, famine conditions, and manipulative profiteering by the business class together exposed the evils of imperialist-capitalist domination.
• The romantic appeal of Marxism, reinforced by the success of the new regime in the USSR — the first practical triumph of Marxist ideas — which fired the imagination of Indian intellectuals. The Russian Revolution stood as proof of the power of mass struggle and offered an example for the anti-imperialist struggle in India.
• Pre-existing socialist sympathies among early Congress leaders, many of whom were not unaware of, and were in fact favourably disposed towards, socialism.
• Disillusionment after the Non-Cooperation Movement. Those who could not accept the Gandhian Constructive Programme or the parliamentary politics of the Swarajists sought an alternative guiding ideology — a quest from which Leftist thought was born.
• Gandhiji’s slogan of Swaraj, which gave the political movement a new orientation and drew workers and peasants into the mainstream of national life.
• Middle-class disillusionment with liberal economics. A volatile section of the educated middle class, faced with the spectre of unemployment, lost faith in nineteenth-century liberal economic ideology.
• Discontent with the exclusive emphasis on Swaraj. A section of radicals felt that Swaraj without a socio-economic dimension was inadequate, and viewed the cult of non-violence as an obstacle to a genuine revolutionary mass struggle against British imperialism.
• Emergence of leaders with a Leftist vision — M.N. Roy, Subhas Chandra Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru and others.
  • Leaders such as Nehru, Bose and Dange became instrumental in popularising Leftist ideologies, emerging as great publicists of the socialist idea and exponents of radical solutions to India’s socio-economic and political ills.
  • Their efforts made a vigorous appeal to the masses, the youth and students, giving socialist ideas real momentum.
• Growth of Leftist organisations, newspapers and journals, which helped propagate socialist thought.
• Successive waves of disillusionment — first after the suspension of the Non-Cooperation Movement, and later after the end of the Civil Disobedience Movement.
• The Great Depression of 1929.
  • It exposed the inherent weaknesses of the capitalist economy and brought the capitalist system into disrepute.
  • It worsened the plight of peasants and workers as production declined sharply.
  • By contrast, the Soviet Union remained unaffected by the slump, having successfully completed two Five-Year Plans — a contrast that drew wider attention towards Leftist ideologies.
• The role of foreign communists, such as H.L. Hutchinson, B.F. Bradley and Philip Spratt, notably in the Meerut Conspiracy Case.
• The suspension of the Civil Disobedience Movement in 1934, which generated a deep sense of despair. With popular aspirations left unfulfilled, the resulting discontent pushed many leaders and followers towards Leftist ideologies.
• International developments. The capitalist system’s crisis of overproduction bred ideologies like Nazism, which stood opposed to democratic ideals and human rights — and, by extension, to socialist principles — thereby drawing further attention to the Left.

Rise and Growth of the Communist Movement in India

• Indian communism sprang from roots within the national movement itself, as disillusioned revolutionaries, Non-cooperators, Khilafatists and labour-peasant activists searched for new paths to political and social emancipation.
• Its founder was the Yugantar revolutionary Naren Bhattacharji (alias Manabendra Nath Roy), who came into contact with the Bolshevik Mikhail Borodin in Mexico in 1919.
• In October 1920, M.N. Roy, Abani Mukherjee and Khilafatists such as Mohammad Ali and Mohammad Shafiq founded a Communist Party of India in Tashkent, along with a political-cum-military school, once hopes of penetrating India through Afghanistan had faded.
• In early 1921, some of the newly recruited Indians joined the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow.
• M.N. Roy shifted his headquarters to Berlin, where he started the fortnightly Vanguard of Indian Independence and, in collaboration with Abani Mukherjee, published India in Transition — a pioneering Marxist analysis of Indian economy and society.
  • Large numbers of copies of Vanguard of Indian Independence were circulated among individual nationalists, trade unionists and intellectuals in India.
• In 1923, S.A. Dange began publishing the English weekly Socialist from Bombay, while around the same time the Bengali weekly Janavani was launched from Calcutta.
• Other Indian revolutionary groups were also turning towards Marxism — most notably the old Berlin group led by Virendranath Chattopadhyay, Bhupendranath Dutt and Barkatullah. Their 1921 attempt to secure Soviet backing was blocked by Roy for essentially factional reasons, prompting them to start an Indian Independence Party in Berlin the following year.
• By the mid-1920s, an important section of the exiled Ghadar Movement had also turned communist under Rattan Singh, Santokh Singh and Teja Singh Swatantra.
• By the end of 1922, through emissaries such as Nalini Gupta and Shaukat Usmani, Roy had established tenuous, often intercepted links with embryonic communist groups that had emerged out of the Non-cooperation and Khilafat experience — in Bombay (S.A. Dange), Calcutta (Muzaffar Ahmed), Madras (Singaravelu) and Lahore (Ghulam Hussain).
  • In a letter to S.A. Dange dated 2 November 1922, Roy outlined a plan for a dual organisation — a secret communist nucleus operating within a broad-front Workers’ and Peasants’ Party.
• Most Indian historians accept that organised communism arrived in India through the followers of M.N. Roy.
  • Nalini Gupta returned to India in 1921 on Roy’s behalf.
  • Abani Mukherjee came to India in 1923 on behalf of Virendranath Chattopadhyay.
  • Both had earlier been members of terrorist organisations in Bengal before leaving India.
• Communist “Muhajirs” (Khilafat migrants) attempting to re-enter India were tried in a series of five Peshawar Conspiracy Cases (1922–1927), while in May 1924, Muzaffar Ahmed, S.A. Dange, Shaukat Usmani and Nalini Gupta were jailed in the Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy Case.
• This repression proved only a temporary setback. An open Indian Communist Conference was held in Kanpur in December 1925, organised by Satyabhakta — who proved to be a mere bird of passage — with Hasrat Mohani as chairman of the Reception Committee and Singaravelu as president.
  • Though floated by diverse groups keen to preserve their legality by distancing themselves from open Comintern affiliation, the skeleton organisation set up at this conference was soon taken over by more determined communists such as S.V. Ghate of Bombay.

Five Phases of the Communist Movement in India

The history of the communist movement in India can be divided into five distinct phases.

Phase I: The Period of the “Three Conspiracy Trials”

• After thorough training in Moscow at the Communist University, and with the assurance of financial support from Moscow, the first band of communist revolutionaries returned to India only to find themselves accused of conspiring against the King Emperor.
  • The movement gained ground only after the Communist Party of Great Britain took upon itself the task of supervising and energising the movement in India.
  • R. Palme Dutt became a key figure in this connection, remaining in closer touch with Moscow than most of his colleagues in the CPGB.
• One of its emissaries, Philip Spratt, arrived in India in December 1926 and organised several unions, edited newspapers, and launched youth and front organisations.
• A new form of political working-class and socialist organisation appeared in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Parties, which united militant elements within the trade union movement.
  • The first Workers’ and Peasants’ Party was formed in Bengal in February 1926, followed by similar parties in Bombay, the United Provinces and the Punjab.
• These were united in 1927 into the All India Workers’ and Peasants’ Party, which held its first Congress in December 1927.
• During 1928–29, the Communist Party organised a series of industrial strikes in Bombay.
• Perhaps the movement’s greatest achievement during this period was the influence it acquired within India’s trade unions — an influence that grew immensely between 1920 and 1928.
• Government repression could not check the advance of working-class awakening in India, and by 1926–27, socialist ideas were spreading widely.
• The movement drew considerable public attention through three conspiracy trials:
  • The Peshawar Conspiracy Trial (1922–23)
  • The Kanpur Conspiracy Trial (1924)
  • The Meerut Conspiracy Trial (1929–33)
• The Meerut Trial, which continued for over three and a half years and ended with the conviction of 27 persons — nearly half of them nationalists or trade unionists — turned the communists into martyrs in the public eye.
• The communists’ anti-British stance won them the sympathy of nationalists.
  • The Congress Working Committee set up a Central Defence Committee, sanctioned Rs. 1,500, and had the defence case pleaded by eminent nationalists such as J.L. Nehru, K.N. Katju and F.H. Ansari.
  • Gandhiji visited the prisoners in jail in 1929 and expressed sympathy for the communist leaders.
  • Amid this widespread sympathy, Congress members of the Central Legislative Assembly successfully opposed the enactment of the Public Safety Bill (1928), a measure directed against the communists.
• The prolonged trial also gave communist leaders a ready platform for politically charged propaganda speeches, which received wide coverage in the nationalist press.
• Between 1925 and 1929, the CPI cooperated with the Congress and sought to influence its programme.

Phase II: The Period of Political Wilderness

• Even as the nationalist movement under Gandhiji’s leadership made giant strides in mobilising the masses against imperialism, the CPI suffered from both organisational weakness and ideological confusion.
• Following the direction of the Sixth Congress of the Communist International, the CPI broke with the Congress. The Workers’ and Peasants’ Party was itself dissolved in 1929, as a two-class party was now considered ideologically irrational.
• Taking its cue from the Comintern’s 1928 decisions, the CPI attacked both the right wing and the left wing of the Indian National Congress.
• This was the period in which the Congress boycotted the Simon Commission (1928), adopted the Purna Swaraj resolution (December 1929), and launched the Civil Disobedience Movement (1930–31, 1932–34).
• The CPI attempted to steal the Congress’s thunder by projecting the freedom struggle as a triangular contest — a people’s struggle not merely against foreign imperialism, but also against Indian exploiters.
• It attacked the “petty-bourgeois-nationalist” leadership of Gandhiji, accusing him of acting as a tool of imperialism and of betraying the revolutionary struggle of the masses.
• It even denounced the Congress Left wing as a counter-revolutionary force and “a dangerous obstacle to the victory” of the Indian people, thereby setting itself adrift from the political mainstream.
• This tactical approach proved entirely unrealistic, and in July 1934, the CPI was declared an illegal organisation, causing the communists to split into several groups.

Phase III: Communists and the Anti-Imperialist United Front

• The CPI was reorganised in 1935 under the leadership of P.C. Joshi. Following the direction of the Seventh Congress of the Communist International (1935), which called for a united front against the threat of Fascism, the CPI once again began cooperating with the Congress.
• Acting on the deliberations of the Seventh Congress (Moscow, 1935), R.P. Dutt and Ben Bradley published their thesis, The Anti-Imperialist People’s Front in India, in March 1936.
• The Dutt–Bradley Thesis described the Indian National Congress as, in effect, the united front of the Indian people in the nationalist struggle.
  • It advised communists to join the Congress, make use of its solid organisational structure, strengthen the Left wing within it (the Congress Socialist Party), and work to oust its reactionary right-wing elements.
• The Communists, the CSP and trade unionists planned to organise a Front Populaire on the basis of a common minimum programme.
• However, the communist leadership failed to capitalise on these favourable circumstances or broaden the social base of the movement, and the proposed popular front never materialised.
• Even so, riding the tide of rising mass upsurge and quickening political activity in the latter half of the 1930s, the communists emerged from their political quarantine and reclaimed a place among the radical forces in Indian politics.

Phase IV: The Second World War and the Communist Somersault

• When the Second World War broke out, Indian communists, acting on Comintern advice, continued their united front policy against all forms of imperialism, including Fascism and Nazism.
  • The communists initially scored a point over the Congress, which had shown early vacillation and a somewhat pro-British attitude under leaders like Gandhiji. By 15 September 1939, however, the Congress too described the war as an imperialist war.
• The Indian communists were placed in a deeply awkward position when, in June 1941, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, the “Fatherland of Socialism.”
  • The communists performed a complete about-turn, relabelling the conflict a “People’s War” and announcing full support for the Allied–Soviet war effort.
• The Government of India rewarded the CPI by declaring it a legal organisation in 1942.
• The communists extended full support to the British war effort and even acted as informants in suppressing the Quit India Movement (1942).
  • They refused to celebrate India’s eventual attainment of freedom, dismissing it as a “farce.”
• This abrupt reversal in policy drew strong condemnation from nationalist circles and made it evident that the CPI’s decisions were dictated by external, international wire-pullers rather than domestic considerations.

Phase V: The Transfer of Power Negotiations and the Communists’ Multi-National Plan

• During this period, the CPI adopted a pro-Muslim League posture, seeking to widen the Congress–League divide and encourage separatist tendencies in the hope of dividing India into several sovereign states.
• Its strategy was to secure control of at least one such state and use it as a base for the “liberation” of the rest of India.
• The Muslim League, however, spurned any alliance with the communists, leaving the CPI a discredited organisation.
• In 1942, the CPI adopted a resolution declaring India a multi-national state, identifying as many as 16 Indian “nations.”
  • In 1946, it placed before the Cabinet Mission a plan to divide India into 17 separate sovereign states, modelled on the Balkans or the USSR.
• By 1947, the communist movement had lost whatever standing it once held in Indian politics, and the CPI found itself in complete disarray.
• At a moment when national emancipation from British imperialism was the dominant instinct of the Indian people, the CPI’s extra-national loyalties and dependence on European models rendered it a suspect organisation.
  • The communists’ concept of proletarian internationalism proved impossible to reconcile with India’s national aspirations.
  • Marxism’s core tenets of class antagonism and violence also sat uneasily with Indian tradition.
• That said, Marxist-Leninist philosophy, once shorn of its extra-national loyalties, retains relevance for independent India. The wide gap between rich and poor, and the underdeveloped state of the Indian economy, provide favourable conditions for Marxist socialism to take root and serve as a guiding light for the country’s downtrodden masses.