Early Communism and India

• Vidyadhara Buddhiraju

A reader’s summary to Denying National Roots – Early Communism and India

The field of social studies is vast and basically open ended. It is an important field of study, because it is upon this basis that societies imagine themselves. It is upon this basis that they enact constitutions and laws and develop the basic notions of “self evident” individual and social morality. It is through this discipline that notions of good manners and propriety are either developed or imposed. It is through this broad discipline  that a national imagination is made, manipulated and even periodically recast into radically changed forms.

There was a period in human history perhaps a couple of thousand years ago, when it was possible to imagine societies that developed in substantial autonomy from one another. Their strengths and frailties being their own affairs. And ideas would cross boundaries strictly upon their own merits. The notion of cross cultural exchange based strictly on inherent merit may have had a substantial relevance.

However the world is no longer divided into isolated islands of culture and politics. The abstractions based upon such an experience must be expanded to accommodate newer realities that have developed over the recent centuries.

The dawn of a vigorous imperial age across the world created new realities that societies across the world have not yet fully comprehended. India too has been scorched by these flames for more than two thousand years. Even so, with the appropriate caveats, it maybe asserted that India has fared better than many other societies over these millennia in preserving a native and autonomous even if deeply wounded, social imagination.

But the other side of this coin is that India’s social imagination has not kept up with changes world wide. India as a society remains innocent of great menaces that now assemble and act more rapidly than ever before. India remains gullible and vulnerable to such developments. The rest of the world may more quickly recognize and counteract such developments, effectively or otherwise.

India’s independence movement, a powerful social movement based in the ancient national identity and purpose, attained its goal of expelling the British Raj from its ramparts of power. But today a more subtle and more pervasive global force exerts its influence upon India’s social imagination.

With substantial risk of wrongly imagining it as a monolith, one must still recognize a powerful dynamic that identifies it and deeply integrates it into a global political movement. As a global movement with a common political purpose, it has gained far more influence and force than any before it. It brings a far greater sophistication and organizational ability than so far witnessed.

Other societies have faced this force. They have either succumbed, adapted to or collaborated with this force. In the west, the motivations, the processes and methods of the left are not quite new. They are as old as the Roman empire. Naturally the Indian experience regarding this force is much more recent.

Western societies naturally have studied and documented Marxist Communism and Socialism quite extensively. However each commentator must focus upon the social imperatives that he faces in his own society and field of attention. The left in India makes extensive and glowing accounts of the beneficence showered upon India by the Communist movement. Naturally these accounts will not in themselves yield a sufficient picture about the development of the movement and its motives.

There are very few works about the career of the Communist movement in India from an outsider’s perspective; scholarly works of such a nature, practically none.

The creation of the USSR empowered global communism with generous funding. But more importantly it became a force for imposing a rigid and unyielding control upon global Communism.

Societies across Europe and Americas were able to comprehend this development if not respond to it effectively. In this India has been more gullible than many others. India has not, until recent years, found it polite to question the objectives, assertions or methods of the Communist movement. This is a remarkable achievement of the Communist movement in India.

The current work catalogues the career of the Communist movement in India, from very native national roots to its complete occupation by the Comintern, which was essentially the overseas  department of the Bolshevik ruled USSR.

It is easy to miss the point of this work. It is not intended as a catalogue of crimes of the Communist party. It is not a rhetorical work intended for moving the masses. Rather, it is a study of the masterly art of political manipulation, both at the microcosm and the macrocosm, as practised by the Communist party in India.

Naturally it is not a congratulatory work. Nor does it issue condemnations. It presents detail and perspective not earlier collated into such a concise and ready text. It reveals the deep and extensive influence that the Communist movement exerted at every level of politics in pre independence India.

None of these events sordid or otherwise would in themselves be out of the ordinary in a history of world politics. Scholarly works about politics in Europe have been, for many centuries, very honest about the workings of political events.

However, in India, even those with considerable and legitimate claims to great experience and scholarship of world history, remained innocent of the greater scheme and purpose underlying the events. The layman ofcourse was ofcourse ill equipped to follow the events and comprehend the purpose.

Today it is important that such issues are examined and documented from perspectives outside the bland and self congratulatory content issued by the Communist movement’s own publishing departments. The rhetorical Communist discipline of “Critical Analysis” is routinely applied to the political targets of the Communist movement. This principle must be turned around and applied, honestly rather than for rhetorical purpose, to examine the working of the several political movements in India.

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