By the middle of 1951 Stalin in Moscow, Rajni Palme Dutt in London and a section of CPI led by Ajoy Ghosh and Dange had arrived at a common conclusion that the CPI must renounce the path of armed insurrection and must try the constitutional method to capture power. But that was possible unless the CPI was able to break its isolation and to change its image in the public mind. It was seen as an anti-national, violent, blood-thirsty insurrectionist party with extra-territorial loyalties.
It was rabidly anti-Gandhi and even anti-Nehru anti-national movement at that point of time. Every year it was observing August 15 as a Black Day with slogans like yeh azadi jhoothi hai. In fact, the whole CPI cadre had imbibed their perception from the early writings of M.N. Roy and Rajni Palme Dutt. P.C. Joshi once admitted, ?To my generation of Indian communists, and we come immediately after the founder members, RPD became our teacher and guide. His Modern India (1928) become our text, and his Labour Monthly notes of the month?the commentary that kept us going.? (P.C Joshi, Rajni Palme Dutt and Indian communists in New Thinking Communist, March 2001 Vol. 12, No. 2).
Similarly, Raj Thapar, the wife of Romesh Thapar, editor of CPI'smouthpiece Cross Roads and later of Seminar, in her autobiography, All these years: A Memoir (Penguin Books, 1992) writes, ?Rajni Palme Dutt was a legendary dependary figure in the communist firmament. Even though his book India Today (a rehashed version of Modern India published in 1940) remained the only text book for revolutionaries here, he himself had never set foot on Indian soil. So finally, in 1946, at the age of fifty, he decided to cross the ocean between the two cultures and came.? (p. 19)
Mohit Sen, the well known communist intellectual and leader ruefully remembers, ?For far too long had our national revolution been denied the status of a revolution. It had become fashionable to deride, especially by Marxist historians who followed the lead of M.N. Roy and RPD. Gandhi, in particular, was derided as a compromiser, conservative, superstitious leader who put brakes on the revolutionisation of the masses, thereby ultimately helping the British colonialists. He was assessed as being at best, the representative of the Indian capitalists. Nehru was assessed as his faithful lieutenant who deceived the masses, especially the youth, by his radical speeches and writings. (The Traveller and the Road; The journey of an Indian Communist, Rupa, New Delhi, 2003, p. 154)
Soviet leadership was very keen to cultivate Indian government led by Nehru. There was keen competition between Soviet Union and communist China to build state-level contacts with Nehru government. Communist China felt very much beholden to Nehru, who was the first to extend diplomatic recognition to the communist regime in China in October 1949. Soviet Russia had launched the peace movement in India as a cover to entice liberal intellectuals and Gandhians.
M.R. Masani writes, ?Closely linked with the Peace Front was the attempt to infiltrate into the ranks of Gandhi'sfollowers and to capture Gandhi, Public Enemy No. 1 throughout his life. An attempt was now to commence to claim that the communists were Gandhi'sreal heirs,? (Masani, The Communist Party of India (A Short History), Bharatiya Vidya Bhawan'sBook University Series, Bombay, March 1967, p. 151). In October 1951, the All India Peace Council requested the World Peace Council for permission to observe the death anniversary of Gandhi.
The politburo'sreview report presented to the Third Congress of the CPI held in December 1953, admitted the hold of Gandhi on public mind in these words, ?Far more serious than the direct organisational hold of the Congress or Nehru, however, is the hold of Gandhian ideology, who it is still powerful among the mass of the people… It should be particularly borne in mind that more than three decades of Gandhian leadership in the national democratic movement has created a tradition of particular forms of struggle which has affected large masses of workers, peasants and middle classes,? (cf Masani, op-cit., p. 151)
Overawed by the hold of Gandhi on Indian mind the communists used the peace movement to win over Gandhians like J.C. Kumarappa by sponsoring his repeated visits to Moscow and Peking and succeeded in creating a rift between top Gandhians with J.C. Kumarappa on one side and Acharya Vinoba Bhave, K.G. Mashruwala and Shriman Narayan Agrawal on the other.
In 1951, the CPI, for the first time, celebrated August 15 as Independence Day. But all these moves were dictated from the top rather from abroad and did not carry any conviction with the Party cadres. They did not have their hearts in them and therefore were just mechanically carried out. Mohit Sen records, ?Pravda published an editorial on Republic Day hailing the birth and progress of the Indian republic that had consolidated its independence, carried out significant socio-economic reforms and played a progressive role globally. This stunned the CPI leadership that could neither accept nor disown the article. I remember Sundarayya shouting at Ajoy Ghosh to denounce the editorial but he refused to do so. But he also did not accept P.C. Joshi'srequest to open an inner-party discussion on the editorial,? (op-cit. pp 148-149.)
Moderate communist leadership was faced with the problem ?how to change the mindset of communist cadres fed upon anti-Gandhi and anti-national movement rhetorics of early ideologues like M.N. Roy and R.P.D.? Their writings painted the whole freedom movement right from 1857 Revolt to the latter armed struggle as well as the Gandhian satyagraha as anti-revolutionary and reactionary. But the perception of these early communists ideologues was derived from the articles on India written by Marx himself and published in the New York Daily Tribune (NYDT) in the year 1853.
Unless this Marxian perception was changed, nothing would come out. Ajoy Ghosh who had been a colleague of Shaheed Bhagat Singh in the revolutionary movement and was a co-accused in the Lahore conspiracy case, after his acquittal and release wrote in 1945 his reminiscences of Bhagat Singh and his comrades. Therein he explicitly described the differences which the revolutionaries had with the communists, and he concluded that, ?It will be an exaggeration to say that Bhagat Singh had become a Marxist?. But after he became the general secretary of the CPI in 1951, he became anxious to appropriate the martyrdom of Bhagat Singh for the communist movement. But this he did it surreptitiously.
According to Mohit Sen, ?He (Ghosh) discussed Bhagat Singh at length with G.M. Telang and guided him in the writing of Bhagat Singh?The Man and His Ideas, published under the pseudonym of Gopal Thakur.? (op. cit. p. 138). The book was officially published by the People'sPublishing House in the year 1953.
(To be continued)
