Just as feudal remnants and the colonial legacy continue to retard and barbarise the development of Indian society, the post47communist movement too appears to be weighed down by the backlog of its pre-47 blunders and unfulfilled tasks. Instead of representing and taking care of the future in the present, the CPI and even CPI(M) seem to have been obsessed with settling accounts with their own past.
India’s attainment of political independence in August 1947 could have had only one programmatic connotation — transformation of India from a colony to a semi-colony and a corresponding shift in the principal contradiction of Indian society. The contradiction between Indian nation and British imperialism was dislodged from its earlier position of centrality and replaced by the contradiction between feudal remnants and the Indian people. Yet recognition of this basic change remained conspicuous by its absence in the ’51 programme. The programmatic meaning of yeh azadi jhuthee hat was that the CPI continued to treat the contradiction with imperialism and that too with British imperialism for quite some time as the principal contradiction.
The 1951 programme and tactical line did repudiate all earlier understandings on the question of path of revolution as one-sided and defective. The tendency to dismiss the political significance of August 1947 was also rejected — but the thesis of primacy of anti-imperialism as the central keylink continued. There was also very little appreciation of the new mode of imperialist operation, of the shift from direct to indirect control and the role of the Indian ruling classes in perpetuating the continuing imperialist stranglehold.
This was reinforced by a peculiar Soviet-inspired understanding of the Chinese revolution which singled out the participation of the national bourgeoisie in the Chinese UF as the most decisive feature of the Chinese experience or at any rate as the most relevant lesson for India, the relevance of the experience of the protracted people’s war and building of the Communist Party and liberation army among the peasantry having already been minimised in the 1951 Tactical Line or the Statement of Policy. This understanding was first articulated by EMS in two New Age articles in end 1953 which only rationalised the compulsive urge of the communist leadership to work out an alliance with the national bourgeoisie, whether with the entire class or with sections of it and the thesis of primacy of the anti-imperialist task dovetailed perfectly into this scheme. It also matched well with the Soviet foreign policy requirements in the region which assigned a key role to the ‘anti-imperialist’ Indian bourgeoisie.
The 1951 programme had described India as “the last biggest dependent semi-colonial country in Asia still left for the enslavers to rob and Exploit”. Subsequently, it was felt that the description of the country as a whole as semi-colonial negates the fact that India has attained independence not only in a juridical sense but also in a “real, practical political sense” and the expression dependent, backward or semi-colonial should therefore be reserved for the economy.[1] The significance of 1947 finally came to be restated in the following words in the 1964 CPI(M) programme : “with this, the first stage of the Indian revolution, the stage of the general national united front, chiefly directed against foreign imperialist rule came to an end.”
There is obviously no room for any confusion regarding the class which led this first stage of revolution. And for the CPI and CPI(M), this was not leadership by default, both parties view the bourgeois leadership in freedom struggle as the working out of a historical destiny. In 1989, BTR made an appraisal of Nehru on the occasion of his birth centenary which opened with the statement “Nehru was the most enlightened leader of the class that was historically destined to lead the freedom struggle of India”.[2] Given this ‘anti-imperialist’ track record of the Indian bourgeoisie, and given that the CPI continued to regard the anti-imperialist task as its principal task, its strategic relationship with the bourgeoisie could only be one of unity first and struggle second. It is this perspective which led the CPI to the disastrous formulations of National Democracy (National Democratic Revolution, National democratic Front, State of National Democracy, Government of National Democracy etc.)
In the entire course of the inner-party debate of 1955-56, this perspective was criticised only tangentially by the so-called Left group represented by P. Sundarayya, M. Basavapunniah, HKS Surjeet, M. Hanumantha Rao and N. Prasad Rao. There were occasional references to the agrarian tasks and the agrarian revolution as the axis of India’s democratic revolution, but they were never logically followed up. Ajay Ghosh too made a couple of mentions of the predominantly agrarian nature of our democratic revolution but only to meet the arguments that the big bourgeoisie alone wielded control over the government and that the stage of revolution had now become socialist.
Notes :
- 1. In the inner-party debate of 1955-56, Ajoy Ghosh had in fact proposed to replace the 1951 formulation by the following: “the peoples of asia in their battle for freedom have already won great victories and are marching forward. The free and sovereign republic of India is playing a great role in the cause of world peace and Asian unity.”
- 2. Jiavaharlal Nehru: A Centenary Appraisal, The Marxist, Vol. 7, July-December 1989, p1.
