A Tribute

Bringing home the Dead

Sankar Ray

Sudipta Kaviraj, then a young academic at the new-born Jawaharlal Nehru University had modestly suggested to Puran Chand Joshi that the CPI at long last accepted his tactical line of a ‘National Front’ with the ‘national bourgeoisie’ against the rightist forces backed by the US imperialism, in 1972. This was When the West Bengal state council of the Communist Party of India set up a the Progressive Democratic Alliance with the Congress. They had even supported the Congress government from outside after the most controversial state legislative assembly election in 1972.

Pat came a benign rebuttal from PCJ. “No, I never meant unity of the CPI and the progressive section of the Congress to be concluded over telephone. By unity, I meant Unity through mass actions.” Kaviraj narrated the anecdote to this writer and a few other friends. The National Front between communists and Congress PCJ perceived, during his 12 years (1935-47) as CPI general secretary was not to be dominated by parliamentarism. The compulsion of struggle in the NF, he used to tell cadres in his inimitable style at the general body meetings, would be an acid test for freedom fighters

Born on 14 April, 1907, PCJ fully immunized himself all through his life from ‘parliamentary cretinism’ – first coined by Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte - and had abiding faith in democratic mode of struggle against the Right reaction outside the parliamentary arena. He moved into the shoes of Dr Gangadhar Adhikari as the third CPI general secretary in 1935.(The first GS: Sachchidanand Vishnu Ghate). He was a member of the first central committee (1933) of CPI. As the CPI chief, he brought in a sea change in the communist movement transforming the nascent CPI into an organized entity through half-partisan struggle , a mix of open mass action in the freedom struggle within restricted constitutional rights and underground organization among toilers in the long term against the oppressive British regime and conveying to them what the communists meant for freedom, distinctly different from bourgeois nationalist aims. There is no denying that the CPI grew differently in contrast to the Congress,led by Mahatma Gandhi even in mainstream politics.

He was the youngest among the 32 accused in the historic Meerut Conspiracy Case (1929-33) allegedly to ‘overthrow the British rule’. His seniors included Ghate,Shripad Amrit Dange, Muzaffar Ahmed, Sohan Singh Josh, Adhikari, R S Nimbkar,Radharaman Mitra, Gopen Chakravarty, Ben Bradley, Philip Spratt and S. S. Mirajkar who turned the court room into a platform for spreading the message of socialism as the legitimate alternative to the Raj. The colonial bureaucracy was incensed to crush the communists who stood unflinchingly behind the exploited people. This exposure of the Raj in a way foiled the colonial plot to silence the communists when CPI was yet to become a centralized national party.

PCJ’s deposition before the colonial judiciary was a semi-theoretical expose of finance capital under the cover of `crown'. The native people were subjected to unprecedented oppression by the British rulers who unleashed economic exploitation in fulfilment of commercial and industrial objectives .The symptomatic manifestation was abject poverty, starvation and unprecedented famines including artificial one like the Bengal Famine of 1943. PCJ quoted Albion scholars such as W W Hunter and William Digby. The trial was a shot in the arm for the toddler CPI that rapidly matured into a reckonable political formation.

PCJ’s organizational talent and political clarity was legendary and that was a catalyst CPI’s penetration among the masses with its uncompromising politics and ideology. There the party differed conspicuously with the Congress whose commitment to campaign for the end of the rule Britannica was never scanned cynically by PCJ, while driving home CPI’s independent class role that attracted the toilers and intellectuals. He brought out CPI’s first ideological journal The Communist (cyclostyled) in 1935.

Braving the ban on CPI until 1942, PCJ was instrumental in building mighty mass fronts like All India Kisan Sabha,Progressive Writers’ Association and All India Student Federation in 1936. In 1938, National Front, CPI’s central organ, was brought out and in 1943, the Indian Peoples Theatre Association came into being, courtesy PCJ. And all these fronts were mass fronts as long as PCJ had been at the helm of CPI. Let me give an example of how he was committed to separation between party and mass organizations. The late Hemango Biswas, a unique mass singer who infused folk song-tradition in the IPTA, recalled an incident. At the Andheri Commune, where Ravi Shankar and Timir Baran – the two outstanding Sarod players of the 20^th Century – also stayed as performing artistes. “ Benoy Roy (a top IPTA functionary of the commune-SR) one day said, Ravi Shankar, Timir Baran and Santi Bardhan lack political understanding and I will write to Comrade PCJ on this. I couldn’t share with this view but remained mum. He wrote to Comrade Joshi who sent a cryptic reply the very same day – ‘ They are your polit bureau. Learn at their feet.”

How difficult it was to work among the economically weaker sections with the communist scheme for top leaders like PCJ was described by Michael Carritt, the British ICS officer, who discreetly kept liaison with the CPI, in his memoirs of the 1930s, A Mole in the Crown. Carritt, conscientiously gravitated towards Marxism, seeing the severity of colonial torture against armed freedom fighters in the mid-1930s, joined the CP of Great Britain while heading the home (political) cell in Calcutta. Along with Michael Scott, outwardly a clergyman but another mole , Carritt met incognito with PCJ in the late 1930s in Calcutta. He wrote about the first meeting with PCJ. “Unlike his usual cheerful self, he now seemed in poor form. The reason for this was soon apparent; he had not eaten anything for twenty four hours; he was penniless and without any place to lodge since his undercover arrangements in Calcutta had, for some reasons, broken down. This kind of crisis was by no means unusual in the life of an underground political fugitive…. The immediate food and money problem was easily solved my Michael and myself; we rather shamefacedly turned out our pockets and found enough loose change to keep him going for more than a week.”

PCJ, defying the overwhelming influence of Stalin era and Stalinism, thought independently of the revolutionary situation in colonial India. “He thought that the Indian communists under-rated the revolutionary role of the small peasantry and over-emphasized that of the comparatively small number of textile mill-workers in Bombay and Ahmedabad. I myself agreed with him but Michael, more loyal to the orthodoxy of that time, was doubtful”, Carritt noted.

The decision by the CPI(M) central leaders to pay tribute by remembering PCJ in his birth centenary year is assertion of their right to own the revolutionary heritage no less than the CPI whose card-carrying member PCJ was until he breathed his last in 1980. The CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat who had numerous meetings with PCJ when Karat was a student at the JNU and PCJ was engaged in building an archive of freedom struggle, cogently wrote that apart from an able organizer, PCJ was “indefatigable in his work to bring new people and sections to the Party. The core of the cadre who served the Party at the all India level and in the provinces owed a lot to his personal guidance and nurturing”.

Karat is an admirer PCJ’s powerful pen that was a USP for CPI-managed journals like National Front and People’s War. After meeting the four Kayyur comrades in Malabar Jail, on the eve of their execution, he wrote an unforgettable reportage in People’s War (13 April 1943) : Flowers of Humanity that can never perish. “The party is not losing you but gaining four martyrs. Let them send you to the gallows that we can’t help today. But inspired by you four, we will win 400, 4,000… new party members”, PCJ wrote in an emotion-choked but politicized piece.

Indian communists didn’t have a GRamsci unlike their Italian counterparts or Recabarren like the Chilean comrades. But they had sterling leaders like PCJ, Ajoy Ghosh and EMS. Remembering PCJ is natural for both the CPI and CPI(M) but it is time to revive the debate on the PCJ line and to free him from slanders during the BTR-Adhikari-Bhowani Sen period of sectarian adventurism.