In the formative period the Party could take very little planned initiative to organise the following fronts, though from time to time it would issue calls to students and youth, cultural workers, working women etc. After 1936 there was some notable progress, but this could reach fruition only during and after the Second World War.
Students and youth
The first important document on this front is A Manifesto of the Young Communist International to the Bengal Revolutionary Organisation of Youth. Published in Masses of India of July 1925 (see Text IX A-1 for a short excerpt). In the era of WPPs, when there was an upsurge in mass youth movement (particularly around the anti-Simon agitation — see the first chapter in Part III), the Bhatpara conference of the WPP of Bengal (March-April, 1928) passed a “Resolution on Youth” (Text IX A-2). A notable feature here was that young communist cadres active on the working class front themselves took the initiative in forming a “Young Comrades’ League”. As Text IXA-3 would reveal, the League’s Programme was of a high political level.
A Draft Platform of Action of the Young Communist League of India was issued from abroad during the heyday of left sectarianism. Published in the Inprecor (10 March, 1932), it was a lengthy shadow document of the Draft Platform of Action of CPI (1930-31). It put forward the task of organising “the YCL — Vanguards of the Toiling Youth”, but contained very little that was particularly relevant for India. In Text IXA-4 we reproduce small sections dealing with the Naujawan Bharat Sabha and formulating specific student demands.
In mid-’30s the communists succeeded in setting up a few local and provincial-level student organisations such as the Bengal Provincial Students League (founded in December 1935). The student leaders who emerged from these organisations took an active role along with other democratic forces, in setting up the “All India Student Federation” (AISF) in August 1936. In some provinces it was under communist influence from the very start —’as in Bengal where vigorous political campaigns (for release of political prisoners, for expressing solidarity with the Spanish Republic and China etc.) were very successfully combined with struggles for elected students unions, adult literacy drives etc. Gradually the entire organisation came under increasing communist influence, but that is a story to be dealt with in the next volume of the present series.
Cultural front
It was no coincidence that the “All-India Progressive Writers’ Association” (AIPWA, or PWA for short) was formed in 1936, the same year when the AISF was founded. Both organisations reflected the all-pervasive advance of leftism in Indian society and polity during this period. As in the case of AISF, the initiative in founding the PWA also came not directly from the Party organisation, but from left-leaning intellectuals and writers like Prem Chand. The PWA mobilised a good number of progressive writers, poets etc, many of whom later joined the CPI and/or provided the base for the CPI-sponsored Indian Peoples’ Theatre Association (IPTA) founded in 1943.
