Acknowledgments
Almost all the documents of the period 1917-28 are taken from volumes I, II and III of Dr. G Adhikari’s exhaustive treatise : Documents of the History of the CPI
To trace the history of a movement that is European in historical origin and proletarian in character, in an Asian ‘peasant country’ like India, one has to start with an
Karl Marx, whose interest in India was evident from such writings as the incomplete Notes on Indian History, referred to the British plunder of this resourceful country on many occasions
India was certainly not alone in awakening to a protracted anti-imperialist struggle. Other peoples in the colonies and semi-colonies — popularly described at the time as “the East”, much in
The run-up to the initiation of the communist movement in India covered the first seventeen or eighteen years of the twentieth century. Let us, therefore, take a quick glance at
Communism in India arose on the high road of Indian people’s movements briefly discussed above. But to understand the historical conditions of its genesis, it will be necessary now to
The first world war, arising out of inter-imperialist conflict for redivision of world resources and territories, sharply exacerbated all the contradictions of Indian society. The principal contradiction — that between
Already on the eve of the first world war, Lenin in his “Right of Nations to Self-Determination” had laid down the essence of proletarian approach to the national question very
From the late nineteenth century onwards, Indian national struggle had been quite receptive and responsive to international political currents. There are many evidences to show that enlightened Indians were aware,
The chronology of events relating to the emergence of an Indian communist group in the Soviet Union is as follows.
1. Mahendra Pratap[1], arrived in Tashkent in February 1918, followed by
Almost simultaneously with but quite independently of the formation of a communist centre in Soviet Russia, the first communist elements and groups sprang up in India during 1921-22. These were:
(1)
From the Second Congress onwards, the Comintern was repeatedly advising communists in colonial countries to support and influence the national liberation movements. The communists in India, particularly those with a
Treason, treachery and conspiracy have always been the catchwords of the British imperialist rulers and their successors — the modern Indian ruling classes, against the Indian communists. Thus the conspiracy
One of the many curious events hi the history of communism in India was that the credit for organising the historic conference which united the scattered communist groups into one
Despite all these major weaknesses, it was this conference that adopted the first Party Constitution and elected the nucleus of an all-India leadership where all the erstwhile communist circles were
The Third Congress
The Third Congress met from June 22 to July 12, 1921 – only three month after the famine-stricken Soviet Land had concluded a peace treaty with Poland and
We have already surveyed the Indian scene upto February 1922, i.e., upto the withdrawal of the non-cooperation movement on the pretext of Chauri-Chaura. To the enthused fighters this came as
Any account of communist literary work in India has to start with SA Dange’s Gandhi Vs. Lenin, written in April 1921 and published openly from Bombay in the middle of
This was the period when the post-non-cooperation lull reached its lowest and then began a turn-around to culminate in the Civil Disobedience Movement starting in 1930. And this was the
After Chauri Chaura the two streams of Congress activities — one of swarajists in legislatures and the other of constructive workers and satyagrahis mainly in villages — dragged monotonously on
