Sobhanlal Datta Gupta’s ‘Comintern
and the Destiny of Communism
in India’
Dilip 10th June 2022
First posted February 18, 2016
Sobhanlal Datta Gupta; Comintern and the Destiny of Communism in
India: 1919-1943, Dialectics of Real and a Possible History
Second Revised and Enlarged Edition; 2011 – Reviewed by Sankar
Ray
Escaping ‘official Marxism’ Himal, April 2007
History is a slaughterhouse – G W F Hegel
But for the suppression of Communist International documents from the
post-Lenin years, the subsequent series of splits and divisions among the
world’s communist parties might have been nipped in the bud. This
dynamic cannot be blamed on the then-head of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union (CPSU), Nikita Khrushchev, whose controversial ‘secret
speech’ to a closed session of the 20th Congress of CPSU in 1956
denounced Josef Stalin for the personality cult he had fostered, and for
his reprisals against those who differed from him politically and
ideologically.
The ‘secret speech’ was not the only point at which the 20th Congress
saw a departure from Stalin’s ideas. On the opening day of the Congress,
Stalin had presented a report on behalf of the CPSU’s central committee
that interpreted the party’s ideology so as to allow for peaceful transitions
to socialism, and for the extension of an olive branch to ‘bourgeois
nationalist’ parties such as the Indian National Congress. Such
interpretations seemed to suggest a return to the ideals of Vladimir Lenin,
from whom Stalinist ideology had made a sharp departure. Following the
Congress, CPSU veterans who had collaborated with Stalin launched an
inner-party offensive against some of the major conclusions in the report.
The seeds of a schism were thus sown that were to quickly grow into a
global phenomenon – one of particular importance to the Third World.
Until the opening of the Communist International (Comintern) archives in
1987, historians had to depend mostly on the Comintern journal, Imprecor,
to try and understand these inner workings. Since then, however,
researchers have been able to uncover a mountain of information about
the Comintern’s actions around the world, including in India. University of
Calcutta political scientist Sobhanlal Datta Gupta’s new Comintern and the
Destiny of Communism in India, 1919-1943 – which also makes use of the
archives of the Communist Party of Great Britain and of the private
collections of a communist veteran – is a path-breaking contribution in
this genre. In particular, it gives new insights on revisions of the CPSU’s
position on the so-called ‘colonial question’ – its stance on the struggle for
liberation from imperialism. For students of the history of the process of
national liberation in the Subcontinent, this is exciting material.
At the Comintern’s Second Congress, in 1920, Lenin’s Theses on National
and Colonial Questions was accepted after a lively debate on the
comparative merits of two drafts, Lenin’s and the
alternative Supplementary Thesis, drafted by the Bengali communist M N
Roy. In his thesis, Lenin asked the communists of the Third World to forge
a “temporary alliance” with the bourgeoisie in the colonies for the sake of
the fight against imperialism, even while maintaining an “independent
class role” so as not to lose ideological orientation. Lenin argued that the
bourgeoisie in colonies such as India had two roles – one of conflict
against colonial rule, and another of compromise with it. Roy, a man Datta
Gupta describes as being of “ultra-left orientation”, disagreed with Lenin,
saying, “The salvation of India doesn’t lie in the nationalist movement” and
that there could be no cohabitation with the colonial bourgeoisie. Lenin’s
democratic mindset allowed Roy’s thesis to be accepted as well, after
substantial modifications.
During his research, Datta Gupta found that six months after Lenin’s death
in January 1924, Stalin revived Roy’s Supplementary Thesis, essentially
shelving Lenin’s thesis. Though he had been silent at the Second
Congress, Stalin now rephrased the Roy’s work so as to rule out any
acceptance of native nationalists such as the Indian National Congress as
anti-colonial forces. It thus becomes clear how Stalin, in the name of
Leninism, led a clean departure from Lenin’s approach to communism.
Datta Gupta quotes Stalin’s heretofore-unknown comments on M N Roy’s
draft: “I believe that the time has come to raise the question of the
hegemony of the proletariat in the liberation struggle in the colonies such
as India, whose bourgeoisie is conciliatory [with British imperialism],”
emphasising that the victory over the conciliatory bourgeoisie was the
main condition for liberation from imperialism.
This was a prelude to the so-called Colonial Thesis that came out of the
Sixth Congress in 1929, in which the Comintern, led by Stalin, decided
that the Indian bourgeoisie had surrendered to imperialism, and would
therefore have no role in the freedom struggle.
Russification
After 1989, those who felt the urge to insulate themselves from the
hangover of ‘official Marxism’ – the official, Stalinist Soviet ideology of the
post-Lenin years – were grateful to the CPSU leadership for opening up
the Comintern archives, itself a decision that came out of the glasnost of
the Gorbachev period. A milestone in post-1987 research on the
Comintern era was a 1992 conference, attended by Datta Gupta, called
‘The Communist International and its National Sections’, held in the
Netherlands. For the longtime Comintern researcher, the conference was
a watershed. It was here that Datta Gupta first began to fathom what it
would be to explore the wealth of the Comintern repository, an opportunity
afforded him three years later with an offer from the Asiatic Society in
Calcutta.
In November 2002, at a seminar hosted by Manchester University, Datta
Gupta presented a paper called “The Comintern and the Hidden History of
Indian Communism”. Here he proposed, “It is now possible to reconstruct
the secret – the untold – history of Indian communism by arguing that
during the Comintern period, beneath the layer of the official version,
there was an unofficial, suppressed, alternative discourse of Indian
communism, unrecognised and unknown until now.” His comments
referred most importantly to the ideas of the ‘Berlin group’ of Indian
revolutionaries, represented by Virendranath Chattopadhyay, Maulana
Barakatullah and Bhupendranath Dutt.
In a document submitted to the Comintern, Datta Gupta writes, these
thinkers suggested “an alternative understanding of the strategy of anti-
imperialist struggle, which was sharply different from Roy’s position in the
sense that they looked upon nationalism from a positive angle and
considered India primarily as an agrarian country.” The Berlin group’s ideas
were not taken up, however, and probably did not reach Lenin – something
that Comintern giants such as Grigory Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin, Leon
Trotsky and Roy himself worked to ensure.
Official Soviet ideology had massive sway on the workings of the world’s
communist parties. The Communist Party of India (CPI), too, blindly
accepted the ‘Russification’ of Comintern and its imposition on its
‘sections’ (affiliate communist parties) such that the sections became
completely subservient, despite dissension from European parties. Lenin
himself had sensed this problem. In his report to Comintern’s Fourth
Congress (1922), he praised the resolution on the organisational structure
as “excellent”, but curtly added, “It is almost entirely Russian”.
Material from the Comintern archives seems to have unnerved the one-
million-strong Communist Party of India (Marxist), the CPI (M). The CPI
(M)’s erstwhile general secretary, Harkishan Singh Surjeet, wrote in the
party’s journalThe Marxist in 1996 that the Sixth Congress’s Colonial
Thesis “bore a definite shade of sectarianism”. But one of the arguments
for splitting the CPI – and the subsequent creation of the CPI (M) – was
the endorsement of the same: those who had been readying for the 1964
split had supported the Sixth Congress thesis on the colonies as it helped
them to refute the ‘reformist’ CPI’s tacit support to Nehruvians.
Nonagenarian communist theoretician Narahari Kaviraj recently recalled to
this reviewer an episode in Calcutta’s Dum Dum Jail that took place after
the start of the 1962 Indo-Chinese war. That conflict had bitterly divided
the CPI between those who blamed either China or India as the aggressor.
“We asked Muzaffar Ahmed, aka Kakababu, the oldest communist, to take
a party class [ie, a lesson in politics and ideology]. When Kakababu
defended Stalin’s characterisation of the Indian bourgeoisie, I asked what
he thought of [Bulgarian Comintern leader Georgi] Dimitrov’s thesis, which
recommended a united front with the Indian National Congress against
fascism. He only reiterated his stand.” Ahmed had considered Jawaharlal
Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose to be reactionary and pro-imperialist.
His jail-time assertion of the Sixth Congress line was therefore consistent.
Not long afterwards, he and other like-minded CPI members split to form
the CPI (M), a party that stuck to Stalinist ideology.
The Indian communist movement suffered due to a blind adherence to
Stalin and Stalinism that led to a poor, sectarian understanding of the
national freedom movement and the Indian National Congress. Marxism-
Leninism, the CPI failed to note, is based on dialectical logic: real change
is understood to come about through a struggle between opposing forces
– not by rigid adherence to a single, predetermined path. In Marxism,
revolutionary perspective is constructed through a balanced combination
of internationalism and national specifics; no two successful revolutions
are similar.
Stalin’s understanding of dialectics was shallow and one-sided. It is of
little surprise, then, that a CPI that was carried away by Stalinism came to
make formulations and analyses that seem quaint and dangerous today. A
ludicrous brand of sectarianism throttled the ‘revolutionary possibilities’ of
the Subcontinent. The Comintern archives strongly suggest that many
socialist states failed due to adherence to an official Marxism created
during the Stalin period. Through studies such as Datta Gupta’s, the
opening of the archives now provides an opportunity to salvage Marxism
from ‘official Marxism’, which the international communist movement has
still been unable to overcome…
http://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk/collections/journals/hsa/pdf/HSA_20_0
4_2007.pdf
Extracts from the review by Mike Jones
M.N. Roy was the dominant figure vis-à-vis Comintern and Indian
communism until the late 1920s, and helped shape policy on the National
Question, but in his research SDG has been able to flesh out the views of
other Indian currents that were not so dismissive of mainstream
nationalism in India, namely, the Indian Revolutionary association located
in Tashkent, and the grouping in Berlin. The former insisted that a
proletarian revolution under CP leadership was not just around the corner
in India, and that one had to take into account not just of nationalism(s)
but religion, caste and community. Neither could one gain influence by
pure hostility to Gandhi. The Berlin group favoured an anti-imperialist front
perspective uniting communists and non-communist revolutionaries.
SDG was also able to find materials relating to the political and military
training of Indian revolutionaries in Soviet Russia and the key role played
by the Soviet Embassy in Kabul in transporting them back to India. Amir
Amanullah of Afghanistan was friendly disposed towards Soviet Russia,
and his relations with Britain were strained. The break-up of empires,
emergence of new states; wars in the Caucasus, the Bolshevik appeal to
Muslim and oriental peoples, all helped create fear regarding India. This
led to literature from or about Soviet Russia or Lenin being seized at
special checkposts set up all over India. Indian communists residing in
Russia during the purges suffered from the terror, and SDG found out
what had happened to prominent figures.
With the exit of M.N. Roy from Comintern in 1929, the CPGB became de-
facto guardian of the CPI, and SDG examines the reason why no Indian
was entrusted with Indian affairs there. This was problematic from the
start, he discovered, as the CPGB, was, as were European parties in
general, “Eurocentric”, and seemed to be indifferent to the colonial
question, and moreover, tended to “boss” Indian communists. Documents
were found from the 20s to the 40s in which CP leaders express
exasperation at an “empire consciousness” present within the ranks of the
party, whereby the plight of India was absent from their minds.
One can imagine the existence of such a consciousness within the
working class in general, perhaps among some party members, but I
doubt that it was a common feature. Surely communists would have faced
great difficulties advancing policies opposed to British imperialism,
perhaps they chose to prioritise other matters and put India on the back-
burner, The private papers of both Palme Dutt and Bradley confirm their
vehement hostility towards Gandhi, continuing a line set out by Roy, which
harmed the CPI. It turns out that the CPGB maintained a close link with
Jawaharlal Nehru during the late 30s and 40s.
The ultra-left line imposed by the Comintern following the adoption of the
programme in 1928, and its consequences for India, is also examined. The
orientation for the colonies set out in his time by Lenin, and elaborated at
the 4th Congress into the anti-imperialist united front, was junked and all
nationalist forces were denounced as henchmen of imperialism,
particularly those on the left. Not only Gandhi but Nehru and Subhas
Chandra Bose were labelled “agents of British imperialism”. Crazy
instructions were sent to the CPI which, at that time, barely existed as a
party.
Comintern directives, SDG discovered, were not as hitherto believed,
accepted uncritically by the CPI, and if the ultra-left line created problems,
the shift following the 7th Congress of Comintern in 1935, proved difficult
to gain acceptance, as the previous line, it was insisted, was not an error.
With the Nazi-German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, WW2
underwent a change of character, the CPI had to be convinced to stop
opposing British imperialism, which had ceased to be the most malign
force on the planet, but to support this ally of the Soviet Union. This would
have enormous repercussions for the CPI. These bizarre zig-zags of the
Comintern seem to be all the more grotesque when imposed on the CP of
a colony struggling for independence.
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol9/no4/jones.html
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