Marxist historian Irfan Habib, who addressed the inaugural Sitaram Yechury Memorial Lecture on Monday, called upon India’s communist movement to reevaluate its historic position of equating the Congress and the All-India Muslim League.
He stressed the need to discuss such problematic positions of the undivided CPI as these could have a bearing on the workings of its legatee parties even today.
Habib addressed a packed auditorium of H.K.S. Surjeet Bhavan to mark the passing of a year since former CPM general secretary Yechury breathed his last. Yechury and Surjeet, another former general secretary of the party, were associated with a tendency within the CPM to build broad coalitions with the Congress.
The CPM’s draft political resolution earlier this year had ruled out a political alliance with the Congress.
Habib, 93, said: “I think the time has come when even that particular period roughly from the 1930s to 1947-48 should be freely discussed within the communist
movement.”
He explained: “...It is important to realise that after 1942 our position with regard to the war was very different from that of the Indian National Congress and that was one reason for the division (with the CPI supporting the war effort). The decisions that we took under that division, in which we equated the Congress with the Muslim League, is, I think one, which all theorists should now really discuss. They were not the same.
“The Muslim League was a communal organisation. The Congress was not. The Muslim League cooperated with the British. The Congress opposed the British. On what ground could we then say that they were the same? That Muslim communists should go to the Muslim League and the others to the Congress. I believe that this was a wrong decision, that this indeed divided the communist movement on communal grounds.”
Habib narrated an anecdote on a leader of the League. The person was actually a communist who was ordered by the CPI to join the AIML, and later to emigrate to Pakistan to build the communist movement there. The leader, who went on to become a Supreme Court judge, Habib said, “blamed all this for his departure from Marxism. He blamed all this on (former CPI general secretary) P.C. Joshi and his policy of appeasement of the Muslim League.
“...We should recognise that to put the Congress and the Muslim League at one level was not only a mistake but a grievous one. There was a communal party and there is a national party,” Habib said.
CPM general secretary M.A. Baby announced that a group headed by economist Prabhat Patnaik would be set up to carry forward the legacy of Yechury.