The editorial in the For a Lasting Peace, For a People'sDemocracy, (DHCPI, Vol VII, pp. 609-613) reflected a change in the USSR policy towards India. Now USSR wanted to use India's non-aligned foreign policy to keep it out of Anglo-Amercian Bloc and bring indirectly into the Russian orbit. The editorial was, in fact, drafted by Rajni Palme Dutt of the CPGB in reaction to Ranadive group'slengthy document ?Strategy and Tactics?, which denied India'sIndependence, declared Nehru an imperialist stooge and pleaded for a Telangana type violent revolution. This document at the same time, perhaps to win Moscow'sfavour, carried an extraordinarily slanderous attack on Mao-tse Tung, which Moscow at that stage could not approve openly. The editorial in a way rejected the Ranadive line and his leadership. Ranadive was soon replaced with C. Rajeshwar Rao as a caretaker General Secretary. Ajoy Ghosh, after his release from jail was emerging as the new theoritician of the party and was ?allegedly the apple of Stalin'seye?. (Raj Thapar, All These Years: A Memoir, Penguin Books 1991 p. 91). Raj Thapar presents a first hand account of the pathetic subservience of Indian Communist leadership to Moscow. She writes, ?He (Ajoy Ghosh) was then obsessed with the latest Cominform editorial on India, which had appeared in, A Lasting Peace for a People'sDemocracy (dated January 27, 1950)… There was a tangential departure from the earlier line. You had, of course, to be a communist to see it, or to realise what havoc was concealed in the seemingly innocuous line, ?the party must align with all the peasantry?… before it appeared, the party was only allowed to align with the poor peasantry. In fact, rich peasantry was a term of choice abuse, the equivalent of ?Kulak?. In any case, the peasants in communist thought were backward and reactionary. So this rather sleepy sentence had sent shock waves among the theorisers, for after all the Soviets were omniscient and this editorial must surely have been written by RPD, as it was. So, who knew better? Certainly not the comrades working at the grassroots. Ajoy Ghosh was in the process of formulating a more acceptable line than Ranadive?s, and was so shaken by those few words that his thinking had come to a grinding halt. Day after day, he (Ajoy Ghosh) would ring our door bell at ten in the morning, and settle down with Romesh in the study and start, Romesh what do you think they mean by ?all the peasantry?? It well near drove me mad with rage. This leader of the revolution, looking like an emaciated owl with his high receding forehead and his funny ears, intoning those words in his modulated voice as a kind of regular punctuation mark, for me it was the mantra of dillusion in a way… I was now beginning to react unfavourably to what I considered was the abysmal incapacity of communist ?leaders?. I kept questioning this business of receiving orders from abroad, formulations from abroad, all related to the very remote Indian village, while those who were supposedly in the ?vanguard of the working class? had no say in the matter.? (ibid p. 91-93)
Dilating on the funniest part of the story, Raj says, ?Ajoy kept shaking his head from side to side and saying, ?But how can I be sure??… None of this, it was said, could be verified through the postal and telephone services because they were all tempered with… so while cogitating upon the whole situation, he struck on what he considered a bright idea. He turned to me and said, ?Why don'tyou go to London and get us a confirmation from RPD?? I was caught off guard and bewildered and protested. …I felt sick to my stomach at the impotency of the man… I had no choice though. Between Romesh and Ajoy, they worked it all out in a most ingenuous way.? (ibid p. 93) And lo! Raj had to travel all the way to London to seek clarification of only one sentence.
Indian communist leaders used to analyse Indian situation in the most peculiar manner. According to M.B. Rao, editor of the official publication, Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India, volume VII 1948-50, PPH, Delhi 1975), the communist leaders thought. ?Not on the basis of a concrete study of the concrete situation but on the basis of quotations from Lenin and Stalin and later from Mao and Chinese leaders … Our leaders did not understand Lenin'smethod but desperately hung on to his words.? (Introduction p. IX) Rao elucidates, ?Problems were solved with historic parallels. In the first period Nehru was Kerensky, August 15th was February revolution, insurrection maturing, hey presto! We march to socialism. After the Lasting peace editorial Nehru was Chiang Kai-shek, August 15 was China's1927, the peasant army was marching with steady steps to liberate the cities and establish a new democracy. (ibid p. X) Mohit Sen, in his memoirs, A Traveller and the Road: The Journey of an Indian Communist (Delhi, 2003), had the same experience. He writes, ?Discussion were not only animated but heated. Much of it was not on what was the reality but on how Marxist-Leninist texts were to be understood and interpreted. For example, the question whether India was independent or not, was not examined so much by an analysis of how the Indian state functioned, as by quotations from Lenin and Comintern documents to prove that India could not be independent since its freedom struggle had not been led by the working class. This was a classical Stalinist method of confronting your opponent not with your arguments but your superiority in the knowledge of the texts of the masters. In that way your opponent could be shown to be combating not you but Lenin or the Comintern? (p. 150) As an example of this blind love for quotations, Mohit Sen, pointing to Ajoy Ghosh, writes, ?Strange it may seem, though he (Ajoy) opposed Ranadive politically, he was at ease in his company and admired the latter'scapacity to quote Lenin, on any subject under the sun.? (ibid p. 170)
It was because of this unrealistic bookish approach and blind faith in borrowed wisdom that, the Indian Communists, to quote M.B. Rao, went on discussing, ?What happened on August 15? Was it independence? This was a vexed question until 1955 when we agreed that it was independence. Meanwhile, different interpretations were given not only by our party but also by international communist circles.? (op. cit. Introduction p. viii).
(To be continued)
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