Leftism in India 1917-1947
By Satyabrata Rai Chowdhuri,
Palgrave, Price not mentioned

The Left’s support to a national government headed by the Congress is a measure of the dramatic changes in Indian politics in recent years. But the uneasy relationship between the Congress and the Left dates back to the early years of the communist movement in the country. Even before they came together to launch their party, Indian communists were unsure about how they should view the Congress, the party of the national bourgeoisie, its nationalistic movements and their own equations with such a party. Even today, the communists and other leftists continue to live and work with much the same confusions.

As its title suggests, this book does not deal with contemporary politics or with the Left’s role in it. But the period it covers provides a backdrop to much of the Left’s current dilemma. And it is necessary to know the early history of the Left in order to make sense of its politics today. Rai Chowdhuri traces the origins of communism in India to the third Communist International. At that session in Moscow in 1920, M.N. Roy famously disputed Lenin’s thesis that communists in colonies such as India should work together with bourgeois democratic parties in order to achieve national liberation. Roy, on the other hand, would have no such truck with the Congress and wanted communists to organize mass movements with workers and peasants.

It is a familiar story in the annals of Indian communism, but this book brings it alive with detailed and objective accounts of the debates. Rai Chowdhuri also takes the reader through the twists and turns in the Left’s subsequent infiltration into the Congress and its later responses to the Congress-led freedom movement. While orthodox communists remained suspicious and bitterly critical of Mahatma Gandhi, the socialists and other leftists within the Congress worked with him for strategic reasons. The book also records the communists’ eventual separation not only from the Congress but also from the socialists. If their isolation from the political mainstream was further accentuated by their volte face on World War II in the wake of the Soviet Union joining it, the allegations about their secret collaborations with the British government created a serious identity crisis for them.

It is widely known that long after those early years Indian communists continued to be indoctrinated, directed and financed by foreign sources that included the Moscow-controlled Communist International and the Communist Party of Great Britain. One has the impression, however, that the CPGB’s efforts to control Indian communists are somewhat underplayed by the author. Although the British party had very little of the resources and the influence of the Soviet party and government, its intellectual influence on Indian leftists was formidable. The author captures remarkably well the complex milieu in which the communists and other leftists struggled to find an identity for themselves. The contradictions led to endless splits in communist and other leftist groups.

A separate chapter examines the Left’s independent role in organizing workers’ and peasants’ movements. This seems to be the weakest part of the book’s account of the Left before independence. It may have been a rather small force compared to the Congress, but the Left really acquired a unique political profile in the Forties. And this happened not because of its role in the freedom movement, but because of a wave of peasants’ and workers’ movements it organized and led during the decade. These movements undoubtedly set the stage for the growth of communism soon after independence, especially in states such as Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Bihar and Orissa.

Nearly two decades after the fall of communism in the former Soviet Union and in eastern Europe, the Left, for all its contradictions, is alive and kicking in India. Its history can be a useful guide to its present.