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Main Document Index | ETOL Home Page | RH Vol.2 No.4 On the Nature of Revolution by Zheng Chaolin From Revolutionary History, Vol.2 No.4, Spring 1990. Used by permission. On the Nature of Revolution is an extract from an article published in the bulletin of the minority tendency of the Chinese Trotskyist movement, the Internationalist, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the October Revolution in Russia. The article was probably written by Zheng Chaolin who, together with Wang Fanxi, edited and wrote most of the articles for the bulletin. It began publication after the split from Peng Shuzi in the summer of 1941. The split in the organisation was over their characterisation of the war of resistance against Japan and the revolutionaries’ attitude to Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership in the struggle. There were arguments over Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution, the nature of the coming Third Chinese Revolution and its implications for the tasks of revolutionaries. However, as the Chinese Trotskyist organisations at that time were mainly propagandist because of their size (approximately 400 in total), the disagreements were never tested in practice. Zheng Chaolin (1901- ) joined the Chinese Communist Parts as early as 1922 while still in Paris, returning in 1924 to edit the party’s Hsiang-tao (Guide Weekly). During the Second Chinese Revolution he served on the Hubei Provincial Committee of the CCP. In 1929 he joined the Trotskyist movement, and represented the Proletarian Society at the unification of the Chinese Trotskyists in May 1931, where he was put in charge of propaganda, only to be arrested three weeks later by the Guomindang. He was not released until 1937. During the Sino-Japanese War he held the position that it was part of the coming world war, and that to support China against Japan would be tantamount to supporting American against Japanese imperialism. When the Chinese Trotskyists split in May 1941 he shared the publication work of the Internationalist group with Wang Fanxi. He was arrested by the Maoist secret police during the general round-up of the Trotskyists in 1952, and was kept in prison without trial until 1979. A gifted and brilliant translator, he was responsible for the appearance of many of the classic works of Marxism in the Chinese language. The Trotskyist movement campaigned for years to secure the release of its martyrs in Chinese prisons. In 1974 Frank Glass and Peng Shuzi issued a pamphlet, Revolutionaries in Mao’s Prisons, and appeals for their release became increasingly frequent as the 1970s wore on (cf. InterContinental Press, 8 May 1972, 28 April 1975, 4 October 1976; Workers Vanguard, 28 February 1975; Chartist, December 1977). Particularly was this the case with Zheng, who might have been expected to have been treated more leniently after the utter discredit of Mao’s faction following his death (cf Gregor Benton, What Became of Cheng Chao-Lin? in Inprecor, new series no.18, December 1977, pp31-2, and in InterContinental Press, 28 November 1977). The survivors were finally released in 1979 (cf. Amnesty International Newsletter, Vol.ix, no.9, September 1979; Socialist Challenge, 23 August 1979; and Workers Vanguard, 12 October 1979), and fortunately Zheng Chaolin was among them (Gregor Benton, Trotskyist Leader Zheng Chaolin Released in China, in InterContinental Press, 1 October 1979). A tendency in the Chinese section of the Fourth International which holds the defencist (defence of China against Japanese occupation) position argued that, even though the leadership of the anti-Japanese war of resistance is in the hands of the bourgeoisie, the struggle itself is a manifestation of the national liberation struggle, and, as the fight for national liberation is the main content of a bourgeois democratic revolution, it is a stage that cannot be skipped over on the road to a proletarian Socialist revolution. However, in order to distinguish themselves from the Stalinists’ position on the [forthcoming] Chinese revolution, they added that there is no Chinese wall between the bourgeois democratic revolution and the proletarian Socialist revolution. We have discussed on many previous occasions, in concrete and factual terms rather than in theoretical terms, whether the anti-Japanese war of resistance can be considered as a struggle for national liberation. So we will not dwell on this question here. However, we need to examine another question, that is, whether the waging of a revolution for national liberation in China is a stage in a bourgeois democratic revolution. In other words, we need a broad discussion on the nature of revolutions. Is a national revolution bourgeois democratic or proletarian Socialist? This question did not arise in the era of classic bourgeois democratic revolutions. The fact that this question is being posed points to the fact that we are talking about revolution in a backward country. Indeed, this question about the nature of national revolutions is being raised and discussed in many backward countries. Furthermore, we can observe a common feature in these revolutions – all reactionary policies are carried out with the excuse that ‘the national revolution is a bourgeois democratic revolution’. We can begin with the Russian Revolution. From the outset, the Mensheviks had maintained that the Russian Revolution would be a bourgeois democratic revolution. They therefore supported the seizure of power by the party of the liberal bourgeoisie, the Cadets, whilst limiting themselves to being an opposition party and waiting for the right conditions for a Socialist revolution to develop in Russia. After the February Revolution, the ‘Old Bolsheviks’ also used the same excuse that the democratic tasks had not been fulfilled, and therefore the revolution must still be bourgeois democratic in nature.

They opposed Lenin’s new line in the April Theses, and maintained their slogan of the ‘democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants’. Let us turn to China. The Guomindang is not against all revolutions. It opposes only a proletarian Socialist revolution in China. Indeed, it massacred the worker and peasant masses in the name of ‘national revolution’ (that is a bourgeois democratic revolution in English). It was the Stalinist party that in 1927 suppressed the so-called ‘excesses’ of the peasants and workers, that refused to break with the Guomindang, that opposed the building of soviets, all based on the theory that ‘the Chinese revolution will be a bourgeois democratic revolution’. Ten years on, this party is still using this as a reason for following [Sun Yat-sen’s] ‘Three People’s Principles’ and accepting the leadership of the bourgeoisie. At present, the defencists argue for support for the defence of the Chinese motherland [against the Japanese] on the basis that ‘the present stage of the Chinese revolution is bourgeois democratic’. The only thing that distinguishes them from the Stalinist party is that they believe that the coming third revolution will be a proletarian Socialist revolution, whereas the Stalinist party thinks that there must still be a bourgeois democratic stage that cannot be skipped over, and that we are at this stage now. The defencists and the Stalinist party both oppose any attempts to bring about a proletarian Socialist revolution in China at the moment. Almost all the ills of a backward country can be blamed on the ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’! Unfortunately, Lenin and Trotsky are quoted in defence of these positions. Just as the Old Bolsheviks quoted Lenin’s past writings to oppose the living Lenin, our defencists are now using dead and past writings of Lenin and Trotsky to oppose the living, present day revolution, to resist the path forced upon them by a living revolution. If Lenin had died earlier, or had stayed abroad unable to return to Russia to initiate the struggle, it would not be difficult to imagine the confusion there would have been in revolutionary Russia. We can see this by comparison with the confused state of revolutionary ideas in China at the moment. This confusion is rooted in political theory, and we must first clarify it. Our method of clarification is the same method used by Lenin in April 1917. Dry The Old Bolsheviks, as represented by Kamenev, opposed the April Theses. ‘We cannot accept Comrade Lenin’s theses, because the starting point of these theses is to accept that the bourgeois democratic revolution has been completed, and that we must immediately turn this revolution into a Socialist revolution.’ Lenin’s reply was cut and dry: ‘State power in Russia has passed into the hands of a new class, namely, the bourgeoisie and landowners who had become bourgeois. To this extent, the bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia has been completed.’ In these sentences, Lenin spelt out clearly that the bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia belonged to the past, that there would be no more such revolutions in the future. Was Lenin correct in saying this? Certainly. Did his few words change the minds of the Old Bolsheviks? No. The Old Bolsheviks pointed to the fact that land reform had not yet begun (even Lenin admitted this). Yet Lenin had always considered the land question in Russia as central to the bourgeois democratic revolution. Before February, Lenin believed that the bourgeois democratic revolution was the revolution that could resolve the land question. Even after the October Revolution, when writing in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky in 1918, he still maintained that the bourgeois democratic revolution was a revolution to resolve the land question. He wrote: Yes, our revolution is a bourgeois revolution as long as we march with the peasants as a whole ... Things have turned out just as we said they would. The course taken by the revolution has confirmed the correctness of our reasoning. First, with the whole of the peasants against the monarchy, against the landowners, against medievalism (and to that extent the revolution remains bourgeois, bourgeois-democratic). Then, with the poor peasants, with the semi-proletarians, with all the exploited, against capitalism, including the rural rich, the kulaks, the profiteers, and to that extent the revolution becomes a Socialist one. In other words, Lenin, both before and after 1917, characterised the revolution by the tasks to be fulfilled. However, during the revolution in 1917, he characterised the revolution according to which class had control of state power. The conclusions might be different, but that is because the criteria used to determine the character of the revolution were different, and there is no contradiction between the two positions. For the purpose of general theoretical analysis, Lenin had always characterised a revolution by its tasks. He did so before the eruption and after the success of the [1917] revolution. Yet, during revolutionary struggle, when there was contention about the way forward, particularly when those arguing for the wrong direction based their position entirely on the formula ‘the bourgeois revolution is not yet completed’, general criteria for analysis were insufficient. At that moment, we must look to the mechanics of the revolution as the criteria. (‘Mechanics’ refers to the action and interaction between classes, and includes the revolution’s motive force, but is more than the revolutionary motive force. There has never been a suitable translation. Some people translate it as ‘structure’, but this is not very fitting – author’s note). Why is a general definition not sufficient in this situation?

Why is a general definition not sufficient in this situation? Why is it not possible to determine the character of a revolution by its tasks? As Lenin had said, it was not certain at that time whether the peasants would follow the lead of the proletariat or the bourgeoisie. To solve the land question, the proletariat had to break with the petit-bourgeoisie and take the step towards the seizure of state power. It was only then that they could gain the trust of the peasants and resolve the land question once and for all. Because of this, they had to declare that ‘the slogan of the "democratic dictatorship of the peasants and workers’’ is obsolete, it is dead and cannot be resurrected’. For the same reason, they also had to proclaim that ‘the bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia is over’. This was Trotsky’s position as well as Lenin’s. The Old Bolshevik Preobrazhensky (though he later joined the Left Opposition) did not understand Lenin’s method. He wrote to Trotsky saying that ‘Your basic error lies in the fact that you determine the character of a revolution on the basis of who makes it, which class, i.e. by the effective subject, while you seem to assign secondary importance to the objective social content of the process’ (Leon Trotsky on China, p.278). Preobrazhensky represented the spirit of Kamenev in 1917, whilst Trotsky used Lenin’s method to counter his position. Sociological definitions of a bourgeois democratic revolution cannot foretell which class will bring about this revolution. This problem was at the root of the differences between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks advocated a proletarian revolution, yet in the midst of revolutionary struggle they could not solve this problem, and still characterised the revolution as bourgeois democratic on the basis of its historical tasks. We can learn from this that anyone who dogmatically holds the position of a bourgeois democratic revolution, or that of a bourgeois democratic stage that cannot be skipped over, can be misled into criminal policies. If we apply Lenin’s method to the Chinese revolution, the agrarian question in China has not been resolved, and the country has not been unified and gained independence. In sociological terms, that is, in terms of historical tasks, the Chinese revolution should be bourgeois democratic, and it could be said that at present we are in that bourgeois democratic stage. However, what are the implications of such a sociological definition? Does it clarify revolutionary theory and strategies? No, in fact it sows confusion, and is used by the Chinese Constitutional Democratic Party, the Chinese Mensheviks and the Chinese Old Bolsheviks to support their defencist position, and send the revolution to an early grave. We must therefore proclaim loudly, like Lenin, ‘State power in China is now in the hands of the bourgeoisie and the landlords who have become bourgeois, therefore the bourgeois democratic revolution in China has been completed’. Even if we do not use Lenin’s method and characterise the revolution by its tasks rather than by the control of state power, it can still be argued that the revolution is not bourgeois democratic. It is open to question, whether or not a task which had historically been completed by a bourgeois democratic revolution can be completed by another class in a future revolution, or whether it can still be completed within the confines of a democratic revolution. Unless these points are clarified, it would merely cause more confusion just mouthing the formulation of ‘bourgeois democratic tasks’. Liberation What are these ‘bourgeois democratic tasks’? They all boil down to national liberation and land reform. To view the question of national liberation in China as a bourgeois democratic task comparable to that of Holland, the United States, Italy, Norway and Belgium is to be concerned merely with form and not with content. The gaining of the national independence of these countries was undoubtedly a bourgeois democratic task, because they were seeking independence from what are generally capitalist or feudal ‘strong states’, but not from imperialist states, especially not from post World War imperialist states. It is possible to win independence from ‘strong states’ within the limits of a bourgeois democratic revolution. But to liberate China from the various imperialists is to strike a blow at the foundations of imperialism, and is characteristic of the proletarian revolution. This project cannot be carried out by the Chinese bourgeoisie. In historic terms, even the bourgeois democratic revolution (let alone a bourgeois democratic revolution led by the proletariat) cannot be completed. To complete this project, the revolution must rise above the limitations of bourgeois democracy. In doing so, it is necessary to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat. What of land reform in China? Trotsky told us: The peasants’ revolt in China, much more than it was in Russia, is a revolt against the bourgeoisie. A class of landlords as a separate class does not exist in China. The landowners and the bourgeoisie are one and the same. The gentry and the tuchens [large landlords], against whom the peasant movement is immediately directed, represent the lowest link to the bourgeoisie and to the imperialist exploiters as well. In Russia the October Revolution, in its first stage, counterposed all the peasants as a class against all the landlords as a class, and only after several months began to introduce the civil war within the peasantry. In China every peasant uprising is, from the start, a civil war of the poor against the rich peasants, that is, against the village bourgeoisie. (Leon Trotsky on China, p.482) In other words, the Chinese revolution is at a different level from the Russian Revolution, it has even less bourgeois democratic content. Even assuming that an agrarian revolution in China could be realised as it was in Russia, would we still consider land reform as a bourgeois democratic task?

Even assuming that an agrarian revolution in China could be realised as it was in Russia, would we still consider land reform as a bourgeois democratic task? Yes, if we use a sociological definition. Both Lenin and Trotsky had always maintained this. However, we should cast off sociological viewpoints and examine historical facts. In historical terms the French Revolution was a bourgeois democratic revolution that resolved the agrarian question most fundamentally. However, how did the French Revolution solve the land question? Did it distribute land equitably to all peasants? No, the land was sold to peasants, and not only to peasants but to anyone with money. Peasants with no money still did not have land. The French Revolution commercialised land, to be freely bought and sold. This was the historic limit that could be achieved by a bourgeois agrarian revolution. It would be correct to say, judging from theoretical analysis and sociological definitions rather than from looking at historical events, that confiscation and equitable redistribution of land by the state to the peasants was not beyond the limits of a bourgeois democratic revolution. Lenin, writing in 1912 (Democratism and Nationalism in China) criticised Sun Yat-sen’s land reform programme: Is this land reform [nationalisation of the land] possible within capitalism? Not only is this possible, it will be the most perfect and most thorough-going ideal capitalism. Marx made this point in the Poverty of Philosophy, and demonstrated it in Capital Volume 3, and clearly expanded it especially in the debate with Rodbertus on the theory of surplus value. Yet we have never seen this ‘most pure and most absolutely perfect ideal capitalism’ being realised in any capitalist country, and we will never see it. However, this [perfect] ‘capitalism’ was realised. Where? In Russia after the October Revolution, under the leadership of Lenin, when the revolution had gone beyond capitalism, and was no longer within the bounds of capitalism. To see agrarian revolution in China as a reliable bourgeois democratic task is to want to resolve the Chinese land question as in the French Revolution – to ask the peasants to buy the land, to make land a commodity to be bought and sold. We do not need a new revolution for this. This is already happening in China. The future agrarian revolution in China must take on the character of the October Revolution in Russia, an agrarian revolution that cannot in practice (and not in theory) be carried out by capitalism. To realise this revolution, we must go beyond the limits of bourgeois democracy and set up the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Chinese revolution cannot be bourgeois democratic, not only in terms of state power but also in terms of the two important tasks of national liberation and land reform. Strictly speaking, these two important tasks cannot be seen as bourgeois democratic tasks, yet they will play vital roles in the Chinese revolution. Also, it would be incorrect to say that this is a stage that cannot be skipped over. Revolutionary struggle in China will develop along the lines of these two tasks. The proletariat will seize state power at the height of the struggles for national liberation and land reform. Nevertheless, we cannot deny that there can be another future – when the balance of forces in the world and in China can create a situation where the proletariat, as ordinary people, understand the need for a Socialist revolution and seizes state power. What we will have then is not just Chinese national independence, but a world or Asian soviet federation; not just equitable distribution of land to poor peasants, but a Socialist land system. This is a slim possibility, but it would be entirely wrong to deny that it could ever happen. Revolutionary History,Vol.2 No.4, Spring 1990 Editor: Al Richardson Deputy Editors: Ted Crawford and Bob Archer Reviews Editor: Keith Hassell Business Manager: Barry Buitekant Production and Design Manager: Paul Flewers Editorial Board: John Archer, David Bruce, William Cazenave, George Leslie, Sam Levy, Jon Lewis, Charles Pottins, Jim Ring, Bruce Robinson, Ernest Rogers and Ken Tarbuck ISSN 0953-2382 Copyright © 1990 Socialist Platform, BCM 7646, London WC1N 3XX Typeset and printed by Upstream Ltd (TU), 1 Warwick Court, Choumert Road, London SE15 4SE Tel: 01-358 1344 Main Document Index | Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive Last updated on 23.8.2003

Main Document Index | ETOL Home Page Chen Duxiu and the Trotskyists by Zheng Chaolin Contents Part One: From the Moscow Group to the Chen Duxiu Group The Cadres Who Returned from Moscow in 1924 The Theory of National Revolution The Central Force in the Party The Moscow Group Splits Part Two From the Chen Duxiu Group to the Trotsky Group The Chen Duxiu Group after the August 7th Conference Under the Politiburo Elected by the August 7th Conference Under the Central Committee elected by the Sixth Congress The Chen Duxiu Supporters leap to Trotskyism Zheng Chaolin's memoirs written in 1945, were republished in China in 1979 as reference material for party historians, and then officially released for privileged categories of officials and researchers in 1986. The article was republished by Gregor Benton in 1996. Zheng spent a total of thirty four years in gaol seven under the Guomindang and for twenty seven under the CCP. His knowledge of the pre-revolutionary history of the CCP and in particular of the thought and life of its founder Chen Duxiu is second to none. We hope the Internet reproduction of his work will assist students of Chinese Communism better to understand Chen Duxiu, the course of the revolution, and the difference between Marxism and Maoism. Back to contents From the Moscow Group to Chen Duxiu Group The Cadres who returned from Moscow in 1924 1924 was an important year in the history of the CCP. It was the first year of formal cooperation between it and the Guomindang. Early on in 1924 the Guomindang, with the Communist Party’s help, convened the First Reorganization Congress; several Communist Party leaders were elected onto the Guommdang’s Central Executive Committee; the Huangpu (Whampoa) Military Academy was started up; Soviet political and military advisers started work; Guommdang branches in most places came under Communist control; the urban labour movement, which had become passive after the strike of February 7, 1923, livened up again; and Communist activity developed on an unprecedented scale. Even more cadres were needed to carry out Party tasks. To meet the need, the Moscow branch of the CCP dispatched back to China a number of Chinese comrades studying at Moscow’s KUTV They returned in batches; all in all they accounted for more than half the ongmal number of Chinese students at KUTV. Of those who stayed behind, some switched to the Military Academy and others were preparing to return to China after a further six months. The first batch returned before the 1924 summer holidays; the second set out from Moscow during the summer holidays; during and after the summer holidays, right through until the spring of the following year, people tackled back to China in smaller groups of two and three or four and five or even singly. All those who returned in 1924 or in the spring of 1925 took up high office in the Party. Peng Shuzhi sat in on the Central Committee as head of the Propaganda Department and attended all its meetings. Though he hadn’t been elected onto it by the Third Congress, he assumed the same powers as one of its normal members: he interviewed cadres and issued directives even Deng Zhongxia behaved respectfully in his presence, not to mention Zhuang Wengong, Secretary of the Shanghai District Committee. As for Chen Yannian, just a few days after arriving in Shanghai he was sent to Guangzhou to be Secretary of the Southern Regional Committee. Yin Kuan, who had returned before the summer holidays, had earlier gone to Shandong to be Provincial Secretary there. Zhao Shiyan, who had come to China on his own, took charge of the Northern Regional Committee in Beijing. This Committee was nominally under Li Dazhao, but Zhao Shiyan did the actual work. Wang Ruofei didn’t get back until early 1925, whereupon he was quickly appointed as Secretary to the Provincial Committee in Henan. Wang Zekai was sent to Anyuan to lead the Party there. Luo Yinong at first came to Shanghai but later went to Guangzhou and later still went to Beijing to run the Party school and to train cadres; finally, in late 1925 or early 1926, he came back to Shanghai to become Secretary to the Jiangsu-Zhejiang Regional Committee. Chen Qiaonian, who got back in early 1925, helped Zhao Shiyan on the Northern Regional Committee. Ren Bishi, like Peng Shuzhi in the adult Party, sat in on the Central Committee of the Youth League immediately after getting back to China, without having been elected to it. Xue Shilun at first worked as Treasurer and Secretary to the Central Committee in Shanghai, but he was not up to it, so he was sent to Hunan to help Li Weihan; Ren Zuomin took over his old jobs. Zheng Chaolin was appointed Secretary to the Central Committee’s Propaganda Department, where Zhang Bojian, who had gone back from Moscow before the summer holidays, was already working. Many of the other people who returned from Moscow were assigned to the labour movement; later Wang Yifei, Yan Changyi, and others returned to China after having studied military science in Moscow and some of them were assigned to the Party’s Military Committee. The students who returned to China from Moscow in 1924 (including the first half of 1925) were united as one and worked in close concert. They had received a common schooling, and just before returning they had received special training; their views on the theory of the Chinese Revolution and on methods of work were in close accord, as if printed from the same font. Party cadres and members from before 1924 looked askance on us and dubbed us the “Moscow people”. At first sight this was a neutral appellation, but secretly it reflected a mood of dissatisfaction among cadres and comrades from before 1924, who thought that these people had come to occupy a special position in the Party and formed a virtual clique. There had already been one such virtual clique in the Party-Zhang Guotao’s “National Trade Union group”.

Li Longzhi (who later changed his name to Li Lisan), Liu Shaoqi, and Xiang Delong (who later called himself Xiang Ying), all three of whom had worked in the labour movement in the South, didn’t belong to the “National Trade Union group” so they were more prepared to cooperate with the “Moscow people”. Li Weihan, the Provinclal Secretary in Hunan, had returned to China directly from France, without passing through Moscow, but he, too, counted as one of the Moscow people. Zhang Tailei and Qu Qiubai, on the other hand, were not members even though they had been in Moscow. Later, they gradually became hostile to the Moscow people. The “National Trade Union group” and cliques. The former had united around Zhang Guotao and Luo Zhanglong Zhang’s righthand man. It derived its solidarity from personal and work relationships; its solidarity could hardly be said to be grounded in theory or principle. Needless to say, the “workerist” views that Zhang Guotao developed in the early period of the CCP were not entirely without relevance to his group’s coherence. The Moscow group, however, was united mainly on the basis of theory and principle, though at the same time personal relationships also played a role in it. The theory of the Moscow group was called “the theory of national revolution”. Back to contents THE THEORY OF NATIONAL REVOLUTION In early 1924 – at the earliest in the fourth quarter of 1923 – comrades in the Comintern’s Far Eastern Bureau and leaders of the CCP’s Moscow branch met frequently to discuss the theory of national revolution. I knew about this, though I never attended any of the meetings, nor do I know who did. Naturally, Luo Yinong and Peng Shuzhi attended, but whether anyone else did I don’t know. The outcome of these meetings was the “theory of national revolution”. The content of the theory is set out in Peng Shuzhi’s programmatic essay in New Youth Quarterly no.4, which was specially devoted to “national revolution”, and in the political resolution passed by the Fourth Congress and drafted by the Comintern representative Voitinsky. The two documents are the same. That’s not surprising, for the “theory of national revolution” was worked out jointly by leaders of the Comintern’s Far Eastern Bureau and of the Moscow branch; or rather, it was worked out by the Comintern and embraced by the leaders of the Moscow branch. I haven’t seen those two documents in fifty-five years, and for the moment there’s no way in which I can borrow them to read, but I still recall their general drift. Basically, they promote two arguments: China cannot carry out proletarian-socialist revolution without first going through national revolution, i.e., bourgeois-democratic revolution; and the proletariat must strive for the leadership of the national revolution. 421 This was a new theory in the history of the CCP. We know that before the CCP’s First Congress everyone viewed the Chinese Revolution as similar in character to Russia’s October Revolution. I have to hand a copy of the Manifesto of the CCP, published in November 1920, 422 which says: “The first step toward realising our ideal society is to eradicate the present bourgeois system. That can only be done by forcefully overthrowing the capitalists’ state.” It also says: The Communist Party will lead the revolutionary proletariat to struggle against the capitalists and seize political power from the hands of the capitalists, for it is that power that maintains the capitalist state; and it will place that power in the hands of the workers and peasants, just as the Russian Communists did in 1917. I also have a copy of the programme approved by the First Congress, which describes its aim as “to overthrow the bourgeoisie with the revolutionary army of the proletariat and to re-establish the state on the basis of the toiling classes, until class differences are extinguished.” In sum, before and at the first Congress there was no theory – not even a glimmering of one – about first having to complete bourgeois-democratic revolution before starting proletarian-socialist revolution. After the First Congress the question of cooperating with the Guomindang was raised. It was discussed at the Second Congress and again at the West Lake Conference, and the Third Congress decided to join the Guomindang. But it was raised as a tactic, in terms of how can we even more quickly and effectively develop the revolutionary movement and Party forces. But after the decision to cooperate with the Guomindang had been taken and implemented and after the alliance between the Guomindang and Russia, when the Soviets sent advisers to China plus funds and weaponry to help the Guomindang, the old tactical formula was no longer enough and the question had to be reframed in strategic terms: the old line of “Guomindang-Communist cooperation” had to be replaced by one grounded in principle and basic Marxist theory. Thus was born the “theory of national revolution”, with its emphasis on the need to complete bourgeois-democratic revolution before going on to proletarian-socialist revolution. Were there grounds for such a theory? Yes, people cited the theoretical disputes in Russia before the Revolution as a basis for it. But they avoided talking about the actual course of events in 1917, for that showed that the Russians had already carried out the proletarian-socialist revolution even before completing the bourgeois-democratic one, that bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia was completed as a by-product of proletarian-socialist revolution. The second main argument connected with the “theory of national revolution”, i.e., that the proletariat must strive for leadership, is clearly subsidiary and, from a Marxist point of view, cosmetic. Before the revolution Lenin’s idea that the proletariat must lead Russia’s bourgeois revolution was premised in the belief that Russia’s bourgeoisie had already forfeited its revolutionary role. How could the view that China’s bourgeoisie still had a revolutionary role to play, that it should be richly aided with funds, weaponry, and advisers, and that the Communist Party should even be made to Join the Guomindang as a wing of it-how could this view be reconciled with striving for proletarian hegemony in the revolution?

Striving for proletarian hegemony was mere cosmetics, as the comments of senior members of the CCP clearly show. Peng Shuzhi, who imported the theory to China said that hegemony over the revolution “naturally” belonged to the proletariat so there was no need to strive for it; Qu Qiubai exposed this belief of Peng’s in his pamphlet Against Peng Shuzhi-ism. According to Peng there was no bourgeoisie in China, just the ghost of one. When Mao Zedong wrote his Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society in March 1926, more than a year after the proclamation at the Fourth Congress of the “theory of national revolution”, he didn’t say anything about the proletariat leading China’s other classes. The present version of that article in Mao’s Selected Works says that “the proletariat is the leading force in the revolutionary movement”, but the sentence was added later, when the Selected Works were edited for publication, and cannot be found in the 1926 text. In late 1924 or early 1925, the CCP officially proclaimed “national revolution” as the guiding theory for the entire revolutionary movement. The actual course of the Revolution of 1925 to 1927 showed this theory up as bankrupt. We who had been in Moscow studied this theory before returning home, and we all complied with it: it was the banner behind which we united. That it had been exposed as bankrupt Moscow group. Return to contents THE CENTRAL FORCE IN THE PARTY The Moscow group was not tangible but it undeniably existed. The Moscow branch was originally led by three people, Luo Yinong, Peng Shuzhi and Bu Shiqi. In early 1923, Bu Shiqi went back to China, leaving Luo and Peng in charge. After cooperation between the Guomindang and the CCP had been formally implemented, the “theory of national revolution” formally launched, and the order sending comrades back to China formally issued, the Moscow branch decided that Luo Yinong would stay on to continue to lead it and that Peng Shuzhi would go back to China to join the Central Committee of the CCP and at the same time rally and lead the returning cadres, i.e., the so-called Moscow people. Why didn’t Luo go instead of Peng? I don’t know. I was never told the reasons for that decision. In early 1925, not long after the Fourth Congress, Peng Shuzhi fell ill with typhoid fever after editing the Lenin number of the first issue of New Youth Monthly. Luo Yinong, who had just got back from Moscow, implied the dissolution of the came to the Propaganda Department to see us. He was sitting beside Peng’s bed. I happened to be standing there, and some of the things he said attracted my attention. I remember them to this day. The gist of his remarks was that we should form a central force in the Party so that we would be in a position to control the rest of it. The actual situation in the Party at that time was like this. The batch of cadres who had returned to China from the Soviet Union all supported Peng Shuzhi and Luo Yinong. (The exception was Jiang Guangchi, who had opposed Luo and Peng in Moscow; after getting back to China he supported not them but Qu Qiubai, but the rest of the Moscow people opposed Jiang) These cadres now occupied important positions in the Party. As long as they got on well with Chen Duxiu, they could control the feudal lords by using the emperor’s name and so take over the Party’s commanding heights. And that’s more or less what happened. Had Luo and Peng decided on such a plan before going back to China? Obviously not, or Luo would have had no need for his bedside talk with Peng. But the general tendency was there, even in Moscow. It’s worth noting that after Luo had spoken, Peng hummed and hawed and did not come out clearly in support of the proposal; but nor did he come out clearly against it. With the benefit of hindsight, I would judge Luo’s comments as follows. Peng Shuzhi was unlikely to oppose the idea of uniting the Moscow people around Chen Duxiu and using Chen’s name to control the “feudal lords”: of setting up a central force in the CCP to control the rest of it. The reason he didn’t actively support Luo’s proposal was certainly not because he was against it, and even less so because he supported the prohibition on factions passed at the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party. It was simply that he planned to keep the leadership of the Moscow group for himself rather than share it with Luo Yinong. In Moscow Luo played first fiddle and Peng second. On the surface they cooperated well together, but I’d already noticed that they had by no means completely merged. Luo invented for Peng the nickname Confucius, which caught on and still sticks. The nickname was meant to imply that Peng was a book-worm, that he’d read a lot, that he knew lots of theory, but that he was no good at doing things. Peng hated his nickname so we never used it to his face, but we did use it behind his back. Peng saw himself as China’s Lenin, but in Moscow he had to yield to Luo. Back in China, where he was elected onto the Central Committee at the Fourth Congress, he joined the Presidium (later called the Standing Committee) and simultaneously ran the Propaganda Department. By then Peng’s position was higher than Luo’s. Luo was simply a cadre awaiting assignment. How did Peng manage to force Luo to share the leadership of the Moscow people?

How did Peng manage to force Luo to share the leadership of the Moscow people? After their bedside talk, Peng decided to enter Baolong Hospital and arranged for Luo to move into the Propaganda Department building, where Luo slept on Peng’s bed. Before going to the hospital Peng told me to lock his desk-drawer and not to let Luo rummage in it. I was surprised, but I did as he said. Later, on account of Chen Bilan 423, Luo and Peng became enemies and stayed so. But that has nothing to do with what I’m now discussing, so let’s stop talking about it. As far as I remember Luo and Peng didn’t mention Chen Duxiu in their bedside talk. But they didn’t need to. In Moscow, if we were discussing the Central Committee of the CCP or the Party leadership, we had only Chen Duxiu in mind. Li Dazhao followed Chen in everything. We never mentioned the names Zhang Guotao, Qu Qiubai, Cai Hesen, or Tang Pingshan. In those days the leader cult had started up in the Soviet Union and the Soviet Central Committee was instilling it into the Party membership and the people. We worshipped Lenin as the supreme leader of the Soviet Republic – and in China we worshipped Chen Duxiu. But in Moscow the cult of Chen Duxiu meant something other to Peng and Luo than to the rest of us. Peng in Moscow saw himself as the Chinese Lenin, but he had to yield to Luo. Back in China in the autumn of 1924, he sneaked his way above Luo, but he still had to yield to Chen Duxiu. The only reason he clasped Chen’s leg was so that one day he could replace him. There were five members of the Standing Committee (or Presidium) after the Fourth Congress, namely Chen Duxiu, Cai Hesen, Zhang Guotao, Qu Qiubai, and Peng Shuzhi. At around the time of National Day 424 in 1925 after Cai had gone to Moscow to represent the CCP at the Comintern right up to the time when the Central Committee moved to Wuhan, it only had four members. I often sat in on its meetings. I used to hate Peng’s performance at them. Almost every time he would first wait for Chen Duxiu to say what he thought and then-at great length and with much pedantry-supply additional arguments to back Chen up. He used to speak at great length but no depth, so that the others in attendance became impatient at the loss of time, though Peng himself did not notice this. I must have betrayed my irritation and contempt, for Qu Qiubai – who was extremely sensitive – noticed it and told Jiang Guangchi. Jiang wrote it up in his novel Des sans-culottes 425 where I make a shadowy appearance. Needless to say, on several occasions at these meetings Peng expressed opinions that differed from those of Chen. He boasted to me once that at the meetings Qu Qiubai and Zhang Guotao used slavishly to follow the “Old Man’s” lead, and that only he Peng dared face up to Chen. “Qiubai is simply a higher technician,” he said. “Guotao is simply a higher administrator.” What he meant was that only he, Peng, was a “higher politician”, i.e., a politician of higher quality. We Moscow people, later to become followers of Chen Duxiu, were early on against Peng: we didn’t wait until after the Fifth Congress to chime in with Qu Qiubai against him. Wang Ruofei, Chen Qiaonian, Ren Xu, He Zishen, and others all despised Peng Shuzhi. Perhaps Chen Yannian’s opposition to Peng was a result of Borodin’s influence. Luo Yinong had personal reasons to be against Peng. Ren Bishi and Xiao Zizhang, who worked for the Youth League, were probably swayed by Qu Qiubai and the Youth International, but that’s another matter. We were opposed to Peng the man, not the “theory of national revolution” he brought back from Moscow; and even less did we oppose Peng as a cover for attacking Chen Duxiu. Naturally, a minority, like Wang Zekai and Liu Bozhuang, supported Peng all along. Return to contents THE MOSCOW GROUP SPLITS After the Fourth Congress, the development of the Chinese Revolution was accompanied by splits in the Moscow group. Luo and Peng’s plan was to use us as a central force with which to take over the entire Party, but as the Party grew the Moscow group – contrary to general expectations – split apart and was defeated and destroyed. The first people to split away were those in the group under Chen Yannian. Chen Yannian (Secretary of the Southern Regional Committee), Mu Qing (head of the Organisational Bureau), and Huang Guozuo (alias Huang Ping, head of the Propaganda Bureau) had all returned from Moscow, where they had studied and supported the “theory of national revolution”. But not long after Chen Yannian and others began working in Guangzhou, they became involved in the struggle between Borodin and Chen Duxiu, supporting the former against the latter. Borodin was a senior adviser to the National Government; perhaps he also represented the Comintern. Whatever the case, he meddled in the affairs of the CCP. He directly led the Party’s Southern Committee regardless of the opinion of the Central Committee of the CCP and did his best to control Party work – at least where the “national revolutionary movement” was concerned – across the whole of China. In so doing he encroached on the competencies of the official Comintern representative, Voitinsky. Before Chen Yannian took up his post in Guangzhou, in the summer of 1924, Borodin instigated Qu Qiubai (then staying in Guangzhou) to deal with the Guomindang in the name of the CCP, but many of Qu’s speeches and actions did not tally with the Central Committee’s position.

Before Chen Yannian took up his post in Guangzhou, in the summer of 1924, Borodin instigated Qu Qiubai (then staying in Guangzhou) to deal with the Guomindang in the name of the CCP, but many of Qu’s speeches and actions did not tally with the Central Committee’s position. Chen Duxiu and Cai Hesen in Shanghai were very angry about this, and in the name of the Central Committee ordered Qu to leave Guangzhou and return to Shanghai, which he did, leaving scars on his mind. Chen Yannian went to Guangzhou in the autumn, whereupon Borodin instigated Chen Yannian instead, regardless of whether the actions he encouraged Chen to undertake accorded with the wishes of the Central Committee. I know little about the struggle between Borodin and the Central Committee in Shanghai, for the issues in it were never publicly aired. All I know is that on one occasion when Chen Yannian came to Shanghai to deliver a report to the Central Committee, he stayed at my place and told me that Borodin had told him that the Central Committee in Shanghai only knew the slogan “Workers of the world, unite!” What Borodin meant was that the Central Committee in Shanghai only knew how to mouth principles, and was incapable of flexibly applying them. But Chen Yannian didn’t say exactly what principles were at stake. Borodin had arrived in China before the Comintern’s Far Eastern Bureau had settled on the “national revolution” formula, with which Voitinsky (who brought the idea to China) instructed the Fourth Congress I’m not saying that Borodin didn’t know about the theory, just chat “politicians” like Borodin put no price whatsoever on principle or theory and were only good at political conspiring. He behaved quite wilfully in Guangzhou, and paid not the slightest attention to the views of either the Shanghai Central Committee or Voitinsky, who was the official Comintern representative in China. Every time Borodin and Chen Duxiu clashed seriously, the Southern comrades led by Chen Yannian backed Borodin. In this way the Moscow people m Southern China set up their own banner under the leadership of Chen Yannian. The second group to split away from the Moscow group were leading members of the Youth League. The Youth League turned against Chen Duxiu much later than the Guangdong cadres. I can’t say for sure when the split began, but it was probably not until 1926. After the Fourth Congress of the CCP, the Youth League also held a Congress and changed its name from Socialist to Communist. At the same time Ren Bishi took over as its General Secretary from Zhang Tailei. The plan stemmed originally from Moscow: Peng Shuzhi, too, knew about and agreed with it. By 1926, the Youth League had gradually turned against Chen Duxiu, chiefly under the influence of the internal struggle in the Soviet Party. The Soviet Youth League (or Konsomol) did not agree with the Comintern’s China policy and was especially opposed to Voitinsky, the official Comintern representative m China. According to Konsomol leaders, Voitinsky was an “opportunist” and a “rightist”. I don’t know too clearly on what actual issues they opposed him. In 1923, the Trotsky opposition incited the Konsomol against the leading triumvirate in the Soviet Party, namely Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin. But Trotsky was overthrown and the Konsomol, too, was purged. By 1926, It was apparently no longer in a position to oppose from a Trotskyist point of view the China policy of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party and of the Comintern. But it’s a fact that the Konsomol leaders opposed Voitinsky and through him Chen Duxiu, who was supposedly under his influence. After the controversy in the Chinese leadership about the Northern Expedition, Qu Qiubai joined the Konsomol in opposing Chen. Qu Qiubai and Zhang Guotao both supported Chiang Kai-shek’s Northern Expedition. Zhang was a well-known schemer and intriguer, but even so his skills as such fell short of Qu’s. At the Central Committee meeting where the Northern Expedition was discussed, Zhang clashed frontally with Chen Duxiu but Qu – who supported the Northern Expedition no less than Zhang – pretended to comply with Chen. From then on, Qu plotted against Chen from behind the scenes. Whether Zhang did, too, I don’t know, but I do know that Qu Qiubai did. In the second half of 1926, he said he was ill and stopped attending Central Committee meetings or working for the Party. Wang Ruofei, head of the Central Committee’s Secretariat, early on became aware of what was happening. One morning in late autumn, while I was still asleep, he came to drag me from my lair and take me to Ximen Road where Qu lived. As we entered the upstairs room, Qu was sitting squarely at his desk working on an article. When he saw us he seemed a bit embarrassed. We exchanged a few words with him and then left. On the way back neither of us said anything about the incident, nor did we need to. It turned out that Qu wasn’t ill but was working hard on an article that he didn’t want anyone else to know about. It remained a mystery until the spring of 1927 in Wuhan, when it became clear that he had been writing up his pamphlet Against Peng Shuzhi-ism. Apart from that he had been inciting people against Chen Duxiu. These people included Ren Bishi and Xiao Zizhang, who had resumed from Moscow to work in the Youth League, and others like He Chang and Lu Dingyi who had never been in Moscow. All this happened behind the backs of Chen Duxiu and Peng Shuzhi. Qu never argued his positions openly at a meeting of the Central Committee. There must also have been a third group of Chen Duxiu supporters who fumed against Chen because of mistakes they detected in the way the leadership conducted actual struggles, but I can’t say exactly who they were.

Those of us who continued to support Chen learned early on to despise Peng Shuzhi as mean, dull-witted, vain, and unable to work together with other people. I wasn’t the only one who thought like this. So did Wang Ruofei, Chen Qiaonian, Zhao Shiyan, and above all Luo Yinong. Whenever Peng’s name came up, none of us liked to continue talking. But we all clearly distinguished between Peng and Chen Duxiu; we thought it was unseemly the way Peng always clung to Chen’s leg. The struggle against Chen broke out at the Fifth Congress. After Wuhan had fallen to the Northern Expedition, many senior officials of the CCP began to congregate there. People like Zhang Guotao, Tan Pingshan, Zhang Tailei, Li Lisan, Liu Shaoqi, Mao Zedong, Qu Qiubai, Luo Zhanglong, and Cai Hesen all went there. I can’t say exactly when each arrived, or from where. All I remember is that Qu Qiubai left Shanghai for Wuhan after the defeat of the second Shanghai insurrection in February 1927. Chen Duxiu and Peng Shuzhi, who were on the Standing Affairs Committee, stayed in Shanghai. Chen was still the Party’s General Secretary, but Qu Qiubai, Zhang Guotao, and Tan Pingshan re-established the Central Committee in Wuhan and started issuing directives. 427 For a while there were two Central Committees: the one in Wuhan lacked a General Secretary, but it dealt with the Central Committee of the Guomindang in the name of the Central Committee of the CCP; Chen Duxiu, acting on behalf of the Central Committee in Shanghai issued a joint declaration with Wang Jingwei, who had just got back from Moscow. It was not until just before April 12, 1927, at around the time of Peng and Chen’s departure for Wuhan, that the Shanghai Central Committee went out of existence. By the time that Chen and Peng arrived in Wuhan, Qu’s pamphlet attacking Peng had already appeared, and so had Mao’s Report on an Investigation of the Hunan Peasant Movement. The mood against right-opportunism had already been manufactured in Wuhan. I delayed leaving Shanghai for Wuhan until late April; when I arrived I went straight to the Central Committee offices to see them. The Central Committee was housed in a three-storey foreign-style building with the guard-room and the canteen on the ground floor, the conference room on the first floor, and the living quarters of Chen Duxiu, Cai Hesen, and Peng Shuzhi on the second floor. After chatting for a bit, we went downstairs to eat. Present were Chen, Peng, Cai, Huang Wenrong, and I. I can’t remember whether Chen Bilan and Li Yichun attended. While we were still eating, Peng mentioned Qu’s pamphlet. He addressed Chen Duxiu, probably with a request for support in a counterattack against Qu, I can’t remember exactly. Cai Hesen merely smiled. Chen said sternly, “You’re you, I’m me.” Chen had no intention of cooperating with Peng in an inner-Party struggle, so Peng had no choice but to fight alone. He stepped up work on his counterblast to Qu. By that time Qu Qiubai, Zhang Guotao, and Tang Pingshan controlled the Central Committee. They used to caucus before it met to harmonize their views. They distributed tasks and chimed in with one another at the meetings, so their views always ended up by winning out. Peng Shuzhi was like a pathetic daughter-in-law-whatever he did, he was in the wrong. 428 Chen Duxiu become a puppet of the Qu-Zhang-Tang troika and implemented its decisions. Needless to say, the members of the troika also harmonized their views in advance with Borodin. The Comintern wanted to replace Chen Duxiu as General Secretary, but soundings showed that his prestige was too high for that to happen easily. What’s more, it was hard to know who to replace him with. At one point the Comintern leaders settled on Tan Pingshan, but Qu and Zhang also considered themselves in contention for the post. Chen Yannian’s name came up too, but he refused. Some people said that he was not against replacing Chen Duxiu, but that he simply didn’t want to succeed him personally. So at the Fifth Congress the Comintern representative and the Qu-Zhang-Tan troika adopted the tactic of isolating Chen: they kept him on, but they got rid of all those who supported him. On the day the Congress opened, Luo Zhanglong, head of the Hubei delegation, proposed a slate of names for the Congress Presidium. Chen was on it, but none of his associates was. On the final day of the Congress, when the elections for the Central Committee were about to take place, this Presidium put forward another slate that like the first one had Chen Duxiu on it but none of his supporters. After the slate had been put forward, Roy stood up in the name of the Comintern and proposed adding the names of Peng Shuzhi and Luo Yinong to it. Congress agreed, but afterwards the new Central Committee immediately sent Peng to Beijing, Luo Yinong to Jiangxi, Wang Ruofei to Shanghai, Yin Kuan to Guangdong, and me to Hubei. In short, we were not allowed to remain on the Central Committee. The only exception was Chen Qiaonian, who became Secretary of the Central Committee’s Organisational Bureau.

The only exception was Chen Qiaonian, who became Secretary of the Central Committee’s Organisational Bureau. By the way, here’s an interesting anecdote. Although Li Weihan wasn’t among those people who had been in Moscow, like them he had in the past supported Chen Duxiu. During the Congress he at one point told Wang Ruofei that the other leaders were applying the trick known as “removing the emperor’s entourage”. It was not difficult for him to see what was really going on during the inner-Party struggle. I got this by hearsay, from Wang Ruofei. But after the Congress, Li resolutely opposed Chen. By then the “Moscow group” was no longer in existence. There were people who had returned from Moscow but there was no “Moscow group”. Those who stuck by Chen Duxiu, whether or not they’d been in Moscow, were known as the “Chen Duxiu group”. Return to contents PART TWO: FROM CHEN DUXIU GROUP TO TROTSKY GROUP THE CHEN DUXIU GROUP AFTER THE AUGUST 7 CONFERENCE Today everyone says with one voice that Chen Duxiu was removed as General Secretary at the August 7 Conference. But actually, he stepped down. I’ve always said so. Recently while re-reading Cai Hesen’s Dangde jihuizhuyi shi (History of opportunism in the Party), I came across a passage that said that sometime early in July Borodin had passed on a Comintern directive ordering Chen Duxiu and Tan Pingshan to go to Moscow and Qu Qiubai and Cai Hesen to go to Vladivostok, and that “the next day Duxiu stopped attending to his duties”. So Chen Duxiu himself relinquished the General Secretaryship a good month before the August 7 Conference. 429 Perhaps the August 7 Conference formally removed Chen from his post? No, it didn’t. I was at the August 7 Conference. I heard Qu Qiubai read out the Letter to Comrades and I heard other people deliver speeches. They all criticized past opportunist errors. Doubtless their criticisms were aimed at Chen Duxiu, but from start to finish no one at the Conference so much as mentioned his name, let alone resolved to sack him. The recently published collection of essays by Cai Hesen 430 includes a transcript of his speech to the Conference. In it he declares his support for the new line and criticizes the old opportunist line, but he, too, fails to mention the name Chen Duxiu. In the two months or more between the Fifth Congress and the August 7 Conference, the balance of power on the Central Committee changed greatly. The Qu-Zhang-Tan alliance had already come apart. Qu Qiubai now occupied the leading role, Zhang and Tan had marched South with the Ye-He army, Borodin had gone back to Russia, Roy and Voitinsky had resigned, and the “prodigy” Lominadze had arrived in China to replace them. Even more remarkably, the ex-Chen Duxiu-ite Luo Yinong, who had been transferred from his old post as Provincial Secretary in Jiangxi to do the same job in Hubei, rose on the eve of the August 7 Conference to become a member of the all-powerful Standing Committee 431 while simultaneously retaining his Hubei post. Luo was extremely capable, and in such critical times his support could hardly be dispensed with. But this is only an apparent explanation. I later heard that Luo had written to Zhang Guotao from Jiangxi saying that he would no longer back Chen Duxiu but would carry out the line of the Fifth Congress. This is hearsay and I have not yet been able to confirm it, let alone to see the letter. But I tend to think that it is the true reason for his sudden rise. Luo Yinong lacked followers and in Shanghai he relied on the Chen Duxiu people. While he was Secretary in Hubei both Liu Bojian (the head of his Organisational Bureau) and Zheng Chaolin (who continued to run his Propaganda Department) were Chen Duxiu supporters; Ren Xu, the head of his Peasant Department, who had worked in Mao Zedong’s Peasant Training Institute in Guangzhou, also became a Chen Duxiu-ite shortly after his transfer to Hubei. About one week after the August 7 Conference the Central Committee replaced Liu Bojian in Hubei with Chen Qiaonian and Zheng Chaolin with Hua Lin (also a Chen Duxiu supporter). Zheng Chaolin was switched back to the Central Committee, where he was assigned to revive the publication of Guide Weekly, which had been suspended for a long time. Just imagine: at around the time of the Fifth Congress the Central Committee did everything in its power to exclude followers of Chen Duxiu, but after the August 7 Conference they had to be allowed back onto the same body that had campaigned against them. But it’s not really so surprising. Chen Duxiu himself was no longer a member of the Central Committee, and Luo Yinong was no longer a Chen Duxiu-ite but a semi-Chen Duxiuite. Luo had no following, nor did Qu Qiubai; of the three members of the Standing Committee, only Li Weihan had a “following” that had escaped with him to Wuhan from Hunan, but the Central Committee could not be kept going exclusively by Hunanese. For example, they couldn’t revive Guide Weekly. In July Zhang Guotao had proposed getting Shen Yanbing to revive it, but Shen had a family to support. After the August 7 Conference it occurred to them that I could do it, for I was still a bachelor; what’s more, I had experience in publishing. So they brought me back to work in the Central Committee. In late September, when the Central Committee transferred back to Shanghai, I was formally appointed editor of the Party journal.

In late September, when the Central Committee transferred back to Shanghai, I was formally appointed editor of the Party journal. In Shanghai the Central Committee had originally appointed Deng Zhongxia as Secretary of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee, but the cadres of the Committee were Chen Duxiu supporters who ignored Deng and listened only to Wang Ruofei. “I’m only Deputy Secretary!” Deng complained to the Central Committee shortly after its transfer to Shanghai. What he meant was that real power in the Provincial Committee belonged to Wang Ruofei. Not long after that, he left the Jiangsu Provincial Committee. Yin Kuan in Guangdong was unable to cooperate with Zhang Tailei, so he returned to Shanghai; the Central Committee made him Provincial Secretary in Anhui. He Zishen ran the Hunan Provincial Committee’s Organisation Department and became its Secretary after Mao Zedong went up the mountains. The Hubei Committee was made up exclusively of Chen Duxiu supporters. In Beijing Peng Shuzhi took the post vacated by the death of Li Dazhao. And so on, and so forth. Wang Ruofei worked out a plan to get Chen Duxiu back onto the Central Committee, but nothing came of it. The first obstacle was the Comintern. It was precisely the Comintern, precisely Stalin, that forced Chen Duxiu to “throw away his official’s hat” in early July, 1927; Chen had no choice but to resign as General Secretary (or, as Cai Hesen put it, to “stop attending to his duties”). So the Comintern wouldn’t have let Chen Duxiu return as General Secretary. In the summer of 1927, the Chen Duxiu people could never have been defeated in the inner-Party struggle but for the intervention of the Comintern. The second obstacle was the Guomindang’s White terror, as a result of which Chen Qiaonian and Luo Yinong had been seized and martyred. Luo was a “semi-Chen Duxiu-ite” who at the time was sitting on the fence. If conditions had been right, he might have approved of Chen Duxiu’s return to power and backed him from his position on the Standing Committee as Director of the Organisation Bureau. The third obstacle was Chen Duxiu himself He was completely passive, and had no wish to take up work again after having just given it up. Lots of people went to talk with him, but as soon as politics came up he’d change the subject. For example, when Luo Qiyuan tried to discuss inner-Party matters with him, he took out his scheme for spelling Chinese characters and started asking Luo how you said this character or that character in Cantonese. He later said that at the time he had been pondering basic questions in the Chinese Revolution, including how much responsibility he himself should take for the defeat. He weighed the issues over a long period of time, but was unable to resolve them. On occasions he raised criticisms of various policies then being pursued by the Central Committee. He recorded them in letters, but needless to say the Central Committee was not prepared to accept them. 432 He knew that Wang Ruofei and Chen Qiaonian were working hard on his behalf, but he did nothing to encourage them, nor did he forbid them to do what they were doing. Some people thought that he was only pretending to be passive, and that he was secretly masterminding Wang and Chen’s campaign. I disagree, but 1, too, find it hard to explain why Chen had become so passive. Facts show that he could again become active once he had finished pondering the issues. In the second half of 1929, he was helped to do so by Trotsky’s articles. He then came out resolutely against Stalin, against the Communist International, and against the Central Committee of the CCP. In the face of these three obstacles, the Chen Duxiu-ites under the leadership of Wang Ruofei were doomed to failure. Return to contents UNDER THE POLITBURO ELECTED BY THE AUGUST 7 CONFERENCE The Central Committee elected by the August 7 Conference moved back very respectful toward Chen Duxiu. Two or three days after arriving in Shanghai, Qu went to visit him; his attitude toward him was the same as it had ever been. I don’t know what they talked about. At that time Huang Wenrong was still living in Chen’s house as his private secretary; he, too, didn’t tell me what they talked about. All I know is that Chen handed Huang back to the Central Committee, and Qu accepted him. A few days after that Luo Yinong also went to visit Chen; needless to say, he, too, behaved respectfully. Chen got Huang to make a record of his conversation with Luo, but I haven’t seen it. Not long after that, Huang was assigned to help me set up the editorial office of the Central Committee organ. In late December Luo Yinong came and asked me to invite Chen to stay in my house (i.e., in the editorial office) for three days so that he and Qu could have a discussion with the Old Man. On December 24, Huang hired a car to bring Chen over. Chen slept in Huang’s room.

Chen slept in Huang’s room. That evening I organized a dinner for to Shanghai in late September. Qu Qiubai and Luo Yinong were still Chen, Qu, Luo, Wang Ruofei, and some other guests. The next day Qu and Luo had their talk with Chen. I had some private business, so I did not attend. On the fourth day Huang took Chen back home. One day while we were chatting, Qu told me that the Old Man had said that if we had decided earlier to quit the Guomindang and carry out land revolution, he would have acted on the decision. Qu went on to express strong opposition to Chen’s statement. I seem to remember that he asked me what I thought, but I said nothing. The Standing Committee appointed Qu Qiubai, Luo Yinong, Deng Zhongxia, Wang Ruofei, and Zheng Chaolin to the editorial board of the Central Committee organ, with Qu Qiubai as chairman. I only recently saw the document, dated October 12, 1927, in which this decision was recorded. I’d always thought that I was editor and Qu was the bridge between us and the Standing Committee, that he represented the Standing Committee on the editorial board and told us what it thought and told it what we were doing. Clearly I remembered wrong. There’s no mistake about the document. I must have known about it, but I’d completely forgotten. The editorial board was a fiction, it never met even once. Qu and Luo represented the Central Committee, Deng and Wang represented the Jiangsu Provincial Committee, and I did the actual work. Shortly after his appointment Deng left the Jiangsu Provincial Committee. He never once came to my house. Luo and Wang often used to come, but not for the editorial board. The new organ no longer used the name Guide Weekly but called itself Bolshevik. I wrote an article for the founding issue titled What Next for the Chinese Revolution after the Betrayal of the Revolution by the Guomindang? The article concluded that the revolution had already been defeated, and that we would have to start again. After it came out, no one discussed it with me, but I myself discovered that my own viewpoint directly contradicted that of the Central Committee, i.e., of the Comintern. It turned out that the Central Committee, i.e., the Comintern, not only did not recognize that the Chinese Revolution had already been defeated but concluded that it was still in spate, and that the tide had risen even further. I delivered myself a private warning: in future write fewer articles on policy. No one pointed, out that my article ran counter to the Comintern line, and no one even noticed that it did. Wang Ruofei – not because he had noticed the article, but simply in the course of an idle conversation – once told me that he’d gone to see the Old Man with He Zishen and the Old Man said: Look, the British, US, and French troops stationed in Shanghai are withdrawing in batches, do you think that the imperialists would do that if the tide of the Chinese Revolution were still rising? Wang told me that it was as if Chen’s comment had suddenly jolted him awake. I thought to myself, so the Old Man thinks the same as me, that the Chinese Revolution has already been defeated. I invariably asked Qu Qiubai to write the Bolshevik editorials, for as a member of the Standing Committee he was familiar with Party policy. But for some reason he was too busy to attend the editorial conference that planned Bolshevik No.11, so the task devolved on me. The Guangzhou Insurrection had just ended, so I called my editorial Long Live Soviet Power. I said in it that China had only two possible futures: either a “Great Dragon Empire” under the dictatorship of the warlord Zhang Zuolin and a Guomindang Republic under the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, or a Soviet Republic under the dictatorship of the proletariat. There was no third way. The editorial got me into a lot of trouble. About a fortnight after it came out, at a meeting of the editorial board, Qu Qiubai reported that according to Li Weihan speaking at a meeting of the Standing Committee, Zheng Chaolin’s editorial was at odds with Comintern policy; our slogan was “workers and peasants’ democratic dictatorship”, not “dictatorship of the proletariat”. So Qu wrote an editorial for Bolshevik No.14 rectifying my mistake. He energetically explained that the Soviets set up during the Guangzhou Insurrection were a “workers and peasants’ democratic dictatorship”, not a “proletarian dictatorship”. After that I stopped writing editorials, and I generally did my best to write as little as possible. But my heresy as yet found no echo in the views of Chen Duxiu. Quite the contrary. Later, after we came into contact with Trotsky’s writings, I immediately agreed with Trotsky’s views on the nature of the future Chinese revolutionary state, but Chen Duxiu stood out against Trotsky on this point for quite some time. After Qu Qiubai had returned to Shanghai from Wuhan, the first time he visited Chen Duxiu he asked him to write some articles for the forthcoming Party journal. Far from refusing, Chen sent me numerous items for his Inch of Iron column, all of which I published, in issue after issue. They’re in the recent repeat, you can read them for yourselves. He wrote them under the name Sa Weng, meaning “Old Man Sa”.

He wrote them under the name Sa Weng, meaning “Old Man Sa”. 433 I guess he wanted to say by using that name that he’d never again play any role in the leadership of the CCP. Apart from Inch of Iron, he also wrote some ballads satirising the Guomindang. Each issue of Bolshevik contained one or more of these spacefillers. They were omitted from the reprint series, but I still remember a few lines from one of them: The Three People’s Principles are a muddle. The Five Rights 434 are a mess. Education that conforms to Party propaganda is tyranny. Under military rule, only warlords have a say. In the period of tutelage, the bureaucrats hold sway. The period of constitutional rule is far, far away. 435 Later, I can’t remember when, he stopped writing Inch of Iron, and the verses stopped even earlier. I never learned what he thought of the various issues of Bolshevik that came out. In the first six months after the move to Shanghai, three people were very friendly to me: Qu Qiubai, Luo Yinong, and Wang Ruofei. All of them wanted to win me over, but I kept a certain distance from them. I knew about Wang Ruofei and Chen Qiaonian’s campaign, but I took no part in it. Wang never tried to force me to join them. He knew I’d never gang up with anyone against Chen Duxiu. Not long after the Central Committee elected by the Sixth Congress had returned to Shanghai from the Soviet Union and started work, Wang Maoting, Secretary of the Yunnan Provincial Committee, came to see me on his way back from Moscow and handed me a letter written in invisible ink. Wang Ruofei had asked him in Moscow to give it to me and to tell me how to make the characters appear. I got the two necessary chemicals and mixed them according to Wang Maoting’s prescription. I made the characters appear and handed the letter to Chen Duxiu, for it was addressed to him. Wang Ruofei had asked the Central Committee to pass the letter on to Chen Duxiu through ordinary channels, but knowing that that would not happen, he had made an invisible copy of it and asked Wang Maoting to deliver it into my hands. All I remember about the letter is that it reported on the proceedings of the Sixth Congress and Wang Ruofei’s own reactions to it, and that it mentioned Qu Qiubai’s Zero International and Cai Hesen’s History of Opportunism, both of which it called “shameful documents”. Wang Ruofei told Wang Maoting to ask me to send him Chen’s reply written in the same invisible ink. I was prepared to do so, but after Chen had read the letter his face registered not the slightest reaction, and he did not reply. The reason I recount this incident IS because it shows that Wang Ruofei trusted me completely, and it also shows that at that time Chen Duxiu was still not prepared to take an active part in the struggle. Return to contents UNDER THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE ELECTED BY THE SIXTH CONGRESS In September 1928, the Central Committee elected by the Sixth Congress took up its official duties in Shanghai. The General Secretary Xiang Zhongfa was a puppet: real power was in the hands of Cai Hesen, who ran the Propaganda Department. According to reports, before returning to China Cai had asked Qu Qiubai who should edit Bolshevik. Qu recommended that I be kept on to do so. I worked under Cai just as I had previously worked under Qu, but I got on with him less well than I had with Qu, though we still managed to push our way forward. That didn’t last for long, however. Very soon Cai was toppled and replaced by Li Lisan. I was even less happy about working together with Li Lisan, for he was openly opposed to Chen Duxiu and knew I was a Chen supporter. We not only got on badly: we were downright hostile to one another. There were several instances of friction between us. At a meeting of the editorial board I asked Li to find someone more suited to the job. To my face he refused to let me go, but behind my back he sought the opinion of Qu Qiubai, then in Moscow. Qu decided to send Wu Jiyan back to replace me. As an interim measure Li appointed Pan Wenyu, who had already got back from Russia, to take over from me. So I quit work and lived idly. Chen Duxiu told Peng Shuzhi that if Qu Qiubai had been on the Central Committee in Shanghai, Zheng Chaolin would never have ended up in such a way. While Li Lisan held power, that was exactly how followers of Chen were dealt with. Sharing my idleness were Yin Kuan, who resigned as Provincial Secretary in Anhui; Peng Shuzhi, who resigned as Provincial Secretary in Zhili; 436 Wang Zekai, who’d been active together with Wang Ruofei at the Sixth Congress and had been kept out of a job by the Central Committee Liu Bojian, who had escaped from Hubei, where he had been Provincial Secretary, to Shanghai, but was kept idle by the Central Committee; and Ren Xu, who was in the same boat as Wang Zekai. I and Jing moved out of the Central Committee office and went to stay with Cai Zhende.

I and Jing moved out of the Central Committee office and went to stay with Cai Zhende. Zhang Yisen, the wife of He Zishen, was living in the small room with her baby daughter, not yet weaned. He Zishen himself had been sent to Shandong on Party business, though the Central Committee had at the same time warned the Provincial Committee in Shandong not to ask him to do any “political work.” Not long afterwards something went wrong in the Provincial Committee and He Zishen was arrested and thrown in prison. Cai Zhende was at that time a member of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee. Starting with the Jiangsu-Zhejiang Regional Committee, most cadre members of the committees at all the different levels in Shanghai were Chen Duxiu supporters. After the Sixth Congress, when Wang Ruofei was detained in Moscow, Li Fuchun took over from him as Secretary of the Provincial Committee in Jiangsu and his followers were gradually replaced by Li’s friends; the only two to survive were Cai Zhende and Ma Yufu. In early 1929, the Jiangsu Provincial Committee and the Central Committee clashed. There was a struggle, and the Jiangsu Committee even declared its “independence”. I forget what the conflict was about, but it was personal rather than political. Li Lisan and Xiang Ying on the Politburo had both worked in the labour movement. In 1924, when I had first got back to China, Li was in charge of the labour movement in West Shanghai and Xiang in East Shanghai. They vied with one another to see who could achieve most. Li Lisan won, and became leader of the Shanghai General Labour Union. At some point, ill will grew up between them. By this time after the Sixth Congress, Xiang was on the Politburo but his power and status were below Li’s. I seem to remember that after the Sixth Congress Xiang Ying at first took over as Provincial Secretary in Jiangsu and it was not until later that Li Fuchun got that job. Xiang Ying incited Li Fuchun and the Jiangsu Provincial Committee against Li Lisan. He Mengxiong, head of the Organisational Department of the Provincial Committee in Jiangsu, also joined in the campaign. They asked Cai Zhende and Ma Yufu to see if Chen Duxiu was willing to help them. They especially needed help on the propaganda side, for they lacked people who could write. He Mengxiong said: get Zheng Chaolin. Cai Zhende heard him say this, and told me. Li Fuchun came personally to visit me. At that time I was living in the house of Li Minzhi. Li Fuchun told me about the conflict and said he hoped that I would help the Jiangsu Committee. I said I would. But he added that later he wanted me to take over as head of the Propaganda Department on the Jiangsu Provincial Committee. I took unkindly to that, and did not respond. During those days we Chen Duxiu supporters (Peng Shuzhi, Liu Bozhuang, Wang Zekai, Zheng Chaolin, Cai Zhende, and Ma Yufu) gathered at Cai Zhende’s place to hear Cai’s report on the conflict and to draft some necessary documents. In the end, the Jiangsu Committee lost its struggle after Zhou Enlai took measures against it. He called together comrades from all over China then in Shanghai for a meeting that passed a resolution reproaching the Jiangsu Committee in the name of the entire Party throughout China; at the same time the Politburo met and a majority jointly attacked Xiang Ying. So Xiang and Li Fuchun had no choice but to abandon their positions. The Jiangsu Committee was reformed, whereupon Cai Zhende and Ma Yufu, the two Chen Duxiu supporters who were Wang Ruofei’s friends on the Committee, withdrew from it. During this conflict Chen Duxiu neither egged us on nor held us back. It is especially noteworthy that this time there was no choice but to allow Peng Shuzhi to join in the campaign. A year earlier, when Wang Ruofei and Chen Qiaonian were campaigning on behalf of Chen Duxiu, there was no question of letting Peng join them, and even less of letting him lead them. But now Chen Qiaonian was dead and Wang Ruofei was under detention in Moscow. Cai Zhende, Ma Yufu, and Zheng Chaolin despised Peng, but Wang Zekai and Liu Bojian supported him, so we had little choice but to let him join our campaign. After Cai Zhende and Ma Yufu had withdrawn from the Jiangsu Provincial Committee, the Committee continued to provide for their livelihood and let Cai live in one of the furnished houses at the disposal of the Committee. Cai invited me and Jing to go and live with him. We moved there in mid February. Return to contents THE CHEN DUXIU SUPPORTERS’ LEAP TO TROTSKYISM Cai Zhende and his wife lived on the first floor of a three-storey building and Jing and I lived on the top floor. He Zishen’s wife Zhang Yisen lived in the smallest room with her newborn daughter. Ma Yufu often used to drop in for a chat. After the defeat of the Jiangsu Committee, the Chen Duxiu supporters’ campaign against the Central Committee was exposed. Why were we against the Central Committee?

Why were we against the Central Committee? From my own point of view there were four main reasons. First, the reproaches made at and after the August 7 Conference against the Central Committee represented by Chen Duxiu were unfair. The defeat of the revolution wasn’t Chen’s fault. Chen was simply carrying out the line of the Fourth Congress. Second, after the defeat had happened the August 7 Conference denied it and claimed that the revolution was on the crest of an even higher wave, so the Central Committee called for insurrections and many lost their lives in vain in armed risings, without benefiting the revolution in the slightest. Third, there was no democracy in the Party, and senior cadres were split into numerous unprincipled warring cliques pursuing private ends. Fourth, the Party’s various leaders were not acting in an upright way: they were base in character and morals. And so on, and so forth. Perhaps the other Chen Duxiu supporters saw things differently. In short, the issues we raised in the course of this struggle were all quite narrow and rarely touched on points of high principle. It’s a fact that we failed to grasp those fundamental questions of the revolution; save for Chen Duxiu, we knew very little about the reality of China. If we’d carried on like that then even if the Central Committee had tolerated us instead of attacking us our little group would soon have vanished. On March 18, less than a month after my wife and I went to live with Cai Zhende, officers of the Guomindang’s Public Security Bureau came to arrest Zhang Yisen and in passing unearthed documents in the rooms of our two families, so we were all taken off to prison. Ma Yufu, who had just happened to drop in at that moment, was also seized. The Military Committee of the Central Committee under Zhou Enlai did everything in its power to rescue us, and some social contacts of mine and Cai Zhende’s helped too, so except for Zhang Yisen, who spent several months in gaol, the rest of us left the Garrison Headquarters’ detention centre at Longhua on April 29. After we’d moved and settled down, Yin Kuan dropped in on us one day. Yin was meant to have visited us on the day we were arrested, but for some reason he hadn’t come, so he’d escaped the misfortune that befell the rest of us. Now he started coming regularly again. Probably in mid or late May 1929, he brought some unusual mimeographed documents for us to see, documents of the Trotskyist Opposition in the Soviet Union. They were poorly translated and poorly mimeographed, but still they were intelligible. Yin Kuan had obviously been affected by them. He excitedly introduced them to us. I can’t remember which documents they were, and whether he brought them separately or in one go, but they immediately gripped me. I had known that there was a fierce struggle going on in the Soviet Party, and that at first the Trotskyist Opposition had opposed the faction in power, consisting of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and Stalin; and that later Zinoviev and Kamenev had somehow allied with the Trotskyist Opposition against Bukharin and Stalin, who in the meantime had taken over. But I didn’t know what the issues were, or even that they extended to the question of the Chinese Revolution. But now I had the documents in my hands. It turned out that Trotsky had publicly pointed out long before the defeat of the revolution that the Comintern’s basic line on the Chinese Revolution was wrong, and that after the defeat of the revolution he had publicly pointed out that Bukharin and Stalin should take the blame for it. It also turned out that Trotsky had pointed out even after the Wuhan debacle that the Chinese Revolution had already been defeated. This was exactly what Chen Duxiu and his followers thought. We immediately embraced Trotsky’s system of thought and steeped ourselves in his writings in order to discover on what grounds he had arrived at these two standpoints. They were not simply derived from his basic theory of “permanent revolution”. He had analysed and quoted a large number of documents, including a copy of the resolution of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee drafted by Wang Ruofei pointing out numerous errors committed by the Central Committee of the CCP. Wang Ruofei had published this document in Moscow and the Trotskyist students there had translated it into Russian for Trotsky. But it was very hard for us to achieve a thorough understanding of Trotsky’s basic theory. In Moscow we (for almost all of us who had now become Chen Duxiu supporters were Moscow people) had studied Marxism and Leninism, but not Trotskyism. We’d known for a long time that Trotsky had a “theory of permanent revolution”, but we had no idea what it said. In the past we’d also applied ourselves to questions like the nature of society, the nature of the revolution, the motive power of the revolution, the object of the revolution, the stages of the revolution, revolutionary strategy and tactics, the revolutionary state, and so on. But we’d studied them one by one, in isolation from one another: we were unable to assemble such a wide range of topics into a single whole, so the more we learned, the more muddled we became. Now, after studying the “theory of permanent revolution”, these topics suddenly sprang to life and became linked together in a coherent system, so they were no longer confusing. After that I dropped the question of who was to blame for the defeat of the revolution and whether the tide was high or low and went on to “indulge myself in abstract thinking”, i.e., to study basic principles and the theoretical aspect of how these various issues hung together. Another issue that attracted my attention while reading Trotsky was his consistent opposition to the CCP’s entry into the Guomindang. In 1922, in France, when the branches of the Communist Youth Party had discussed this question, I’d been against it and got into an argument with Yin Kuan who was for it. As for Peng Shuzhi, in Moscow in 1923, he enthusiastically supported entry. We all quickly embraced Trotskyism. After discussing and exchanging ideas for just a week or two, we basically became Trotskyists.

After discussing and exchanging ideas for just a week or two, we basically became Trotskyists. But Chen Duxiu held out for longer than the rest of us. At the same time as Yin Kuan gave Trotsky’s mimeographed articles to us (Cai Zhende and his wife Wang Tahoe Zheng Chaolin and his wife Wu Ginger, and Ma Yufu) to read, he also gave them to Peng Shuzhi and his wife Chen Bilan, to Wang Zekai and his wife Du Lin, and to Liu Bozhuang. The Peng and Wang families lived together in a house on Chunking Road opposite the high wall of Ward Road Gaol where Chen Duxiu often used to visit them. It was there that he read Trotsky’s documents. He discussed them with Peng Shuzhi, Yin Kuan, and Wang Zekai, and they convinced him. I personally did not take part in those discussions. We were not long out of gaol, and Chen Duxiu did not come to visit me in that period, nor did I go to visit him in his new house. Yin Kuan used to pass between my place and Peng’s, so it was mainly from Yin that I heard about the change in Chen’s thinking. After reading each of Trotsky’s documents, Chen would raise a disagreement, and then they would argue with him; but by the next time he came he would have abandoned his previous disagreement and would raise a new one on the shoulders of their old argument. In the course of his gradual conversion to their point of view, he had never once yielded to them in their presence, but next time he came face to face with them he would raise new differences on the basis of what they had previously told him. And so it went on. The person who put the most effort into winning him was Yin Kuan. But in the end, when it came to the question of the revolutionary power (should it be a dictatorship of the proletariat?), Chen was not persuaded, or at least not wholly persuaded. After Liu Rending came back to China, and even when we and the other three groups were holding talks, Chen still didn’t wholly accept Trotsky’s views on the nature of this power. In the course of this debate Chen not only spoke his views but also wrote them down in articles that he took along with him for Peng, Yin and Wang to read. There were probably seven or eight such articles, all of which I read. None was published or kept, which is a pity, nor was a record made of the discussions. Otherwise we could have used it and the articles to trace the entire process whereby one of China’s major modern thinkers came round to Trotskyism. All this probably happened between the second half of May and the first half of July 1929. The reason I’m paying so much attention to dates and times is in order to dispel some current myths. The most common myth is that Chen was unaware of Trotsky’s views until Liu Rending got back to China with a number of documents written by Trotsky, and that it was only then that Chen came under Trotsky’s influence and became his follower. Actually, by the time that Liu Rending met Chen Duxiu, Chen had already embraced Trotskyism (save for his above mentioned reservations on certain theoretical questions). We followers of Chen Duxiu were by then even more resolutely Trotskyist. Liu Rending reached Shanghai in September. He knew from the Chinese Trotskyist organization that had resumed to China from Moscow – he even knew it while he was still abroad, probably because Trotsky told him – that Chen Duxiu and his followers had already embraced Trotskyism. That’s why he got someone to bring a letter to Yin Kuan and me asking us to visit him in a hostel in the French Concession. We spoke a common Trotskyist language. Later, when I took Liu Rending to my home (on East Youheng Road) to meet Chen Duxiu, they, too, spoke a common Trotskyist language. Liu Rending brought three documents with him back to China: one was the Draft Programme of the Chinese Bolshevik-Leninists, which Trotsky had specially written while Liu was a guest in Trotsky’s house in Turkey; another, called Results and Prospects of the Chinese Revolution, was Trotsky’s criticism of the part relating to the Chinese Revolution in Bukharin’s draft programme for the Communist International; another was an article by Trotsky, titled The Chinese Question after the Sixth Congress, written after the Sixth Congress of the Communist International. The two articles were very long and in Russian, as, too, was the draft programme of the Chinese Opposition. Someone told me that Liu Rending recently told a visitor from the Party History Department of one of the Beijing universities chat the draft programme he brought back to China had already been translated into Chinese when it was handed over to Chen Duxiu, and that Zheng Chaolin later polished it for publication. That’s possible, I can’t remember. As for the two long articles, I remember clearly that we decided that Liu would translate Results and Prospects and I would translate After the Sixth Congress. The two translations formed the text of the second volume of On the Question of the Chinese Revolution. (The first volume consisted of the earlier articles by Trotsky that had come into our hands; it was published before Liu Rending returned to China.) Then there’s Pu Qingquan’s 457 theory. Pu says chat Chen Duxiu first learned about Trotsky’s views from his (Chen’s) nephew Wu Jiyan. According to Pu, Wu came to see Chen Duxiu and us at the end of 1929, after he’d been unmasked as a Trotskyist, sacked from his post, and expelled from the Party. That was even longer after Liu’s return to China. By then Chen Duxiu no longer needed a Wu Jiyan to show him Trotsky’s writings. Before his expulsion Wu had been Secretary of the Central Committee’s Propaganda Department and wouldn’t have dared have dealings with his uncle or with us Then there’s Peng Shuzhi’s theory.

Peng says that he got hold of Results and Prospects and After the Sixth Congress from some Trotskyist students who had returned from Moscow and showed them to Chen. What actually happened is that Yin Kuan got them from Wang Pingyi, 438 Yin gave them to Peng, and Peng gave them to Chen. Peng deliberately obscured Yin’s link in the chain; what Peng showed Chen was not the two long articles but a number of shorter articles, i.e., those collected in the first volume of the Chinese edition of On the Question of the Chinese Revolution. The two long articles weren’t translated into Chinese until after Liu got back from Europe. The story of how the two volumes were prepared and published is sufficient to refute Peng’s theory. Apart from this there are various other rumours, but what I’ve just said is the truth, and whatever does not accord with it should be rectified. All of us Chen Duxiu-ites became Trotskyists, but our motives, goals, and emphases were by no means identical. Roughly speaking, we were of two main sorts. One stressed the practical movement and recognized that given the defeat of the revolution, we should now conduct peaceful and legal campaigns, deeply enter into the masses, strike roots there, oppose the Central Committee’s ill-omened armed struggle, and wait until the mass movement revived before preparing to take up arms again. Absolutely no one proposed disbanding the underground Party. So the charge of “liquidationism” bandied about by the Comintern and the Central Committee was simply slander. The Liquidators in Russian revolutionary history proposed disbanding the underground Party, for in French liquider means to disband or dissolve. It’s a commercial term. If a company or an enterprise goes bankrupt and closes down, it “goes into liquidation.” The words “liquidate” and “liquidator” entered our language through Japanese. What is it that’s liquidated? The underground Party is liquidated, i.e., disbanded. So if no one proposes disbanding the Party, then it’s wrong to start calling people “liquidators”. Some Trotskyists of this variety opposed discussing theoretical questions concerning the nature of society, the revolution, and the state and wanted to confine discussion to questions concerning practical activity and the practical struggle. The second sort stressed theory; they wanted to discuss basic issues of the revolution. But like the first sort, they were not against practical activity. One of the biggest differences between the Chinese Revolution and the early Russian Revolution was that the Russians had only set up their Party after extensively debating and quarrelling about basic issues of the revolution, and continued to do so even afterwards. So the Russian revolutionaries had already clarified these issues in the course of their revolutionary activity, and they all had their own ways of looking at things. The Chinese Revolution was not like that. There was no clear and wide-ranging theoretical struggle before the founding of the Party, nor afterwards either, when we hurled ourselves into the raging fire. For theory we relied on foreign comrades and the Comintern: we trusted them to solve our problems for us. This may be why the CCP was repeatedly defeated. The emergence of Trotskyism in China might have provided an opportunity for steeling revolutionaries in polemic and increasing their knowledge of theory, but unfortunately by that time the Comintern and the CCP were in the rough grip of Stalinism, so the opportunity was missed and only a handful of revolutionaries got a thorough theoretical training. The intellectual preparation for China’s proletarian revolution was far inferior to that not only of Russia’s proletarian revolution but also of China’s own bourgeois revolution. The polemics waged between reformists and revolutionaries before the Revolution of 1911 shook the whole country, that goes without saying; before the Coup of 1898, there were even violent theoretical disputes between conservatives and reformists, between the Orthodox Confucianists and the Modern Text School. In the course of the polemic, both sides relied on their own resources to resolve the various theoretical issues in dispute, and certainly neither of them looked abroad for help, from organizations or individuals. The proletarian revolution is of course worldwide, unlike the bourgeois revolution, which is contained within national boundaries, so the theoretical struggle on a world scale can more or less be substituted for that in one country; but that by no means dispenses with the need for theoretical struggle within the state where the revolution is occurring. In this theoretical struggle Chen Duxiu was active, conscientious, and persistent, quite the opposite of his previous self. Many people had misunderstood his previous apathy. They had thought that he was just pretending, that he was deliberately letting Wang Ruofei campaign on his behalf while he hid behind the screen and pulled the strings. Others thought that he was genuinely apathetic about the revolution and about politics, that he had completely lost heart and given up. But now it can be shown that both suppositions were wrong. Between July 1927, when he “stopped attending to his duties”, and May 1929, when he first came across Trotsky’s writings, Chen was passive because he had not yet thought through to the end important questions of revolutionary theory; by himself he was not capable of resolving the weighty issues in the Chinese and world revolutions with which he was then wrestling. Those at his side, starting with Wang Ruofei, were unable to help him in this enterprise. Only Trotsky’s articles could do that. I don’t have his Letter to All Party Comrades to hand, nor do I have the statement Our Political Views signed by 81 people. But I do have his Reply to the Comintern dated 17 February 1930. In it he says: After the tragic and shameful defeat of the Chinese Revolution in 1927 for a while I was really at a loss as to what course of action to follow since I myself bore a heavy responsibility for the defeat. So I spent almost a whole year personally reflecting on those events.

So I spent almost a whole year personally reflecting on those events. Although I did not thoroughly grasp the lessons of the defeat in time, and failed to discover a new way forward, I am deeply aware on the basis of my own experience that this defeat was the inevitable outcome of the entire political line of the past period. He also says: Because of your deceiving ways and your blockade on the free passage of information, it was not until half a year ago that some documents by Comrade Trotsky on the Chinese question and some questions relating to the Soviet Union came into our hands. It was only then that we thoroughly and systematically understood the true source of the opportunism and adventurism perpetrated in the course of the Chinese Revolution. He also says: At present the main issues concerning the Chinese Revolution are: (1) Will the revolutionary power issuing from the future third revolution be a workers and peasants’ democratic dictatorship or a proletarian dictatorship? (2) Should we now directly prepare an armed insurrection, or should we raise political slogans appropriate to a transitional period in the revolution (e.g. the call for a National Assembly), and struggle for democracy? Trotsky’s writings had a big impact not only on Chen Duxiu but on Communists and revolutionaries the world over. When Trotsky’s Criticism of the Draft Programme of the Comintern was handed over to the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, it was initially kept from delegates; it was only when some delegates demanded to see it that the Comintern, under the control of the Soviet Party, allowed three delegates from each country to read it under the strict injunction to divulge its contents to no one. Many unprejudiced delegates-and even some prejudiced ones-were influenced by Trotsky’s critique and changed their view of the man. According to what someone told me, the Chinese delegation appointed Qu Qiubai, Guan Xiangying, and another person (whose name I forget) to read it. As a result Qu wavered but soon steadied; Guan was even more strongly moved, but he, too, later steadied. As for delegates of other countries, I read in James P. Cannon’s History of American Trotskyism that he and a number of other Americans at the Sixth Congress were swayed by what they read, stole a copy, smuggled it back to the US, and carried out Trotskyist activity inside the US Communist Party. When one of Cannon’s comrades, a militant, heard that Cannon had gone Trotskyist, he travelled from the West Coast all the way to New York to win him back. When Cannon realized what the visit was about, he asked the man to sit down and read the English translation of Trotsky’s Critique for himself. He did so, and stood up beaming. He, too, had become a Trotskyist. Let’s now go from theory to action. Main Document Index | Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive Last updated on 23.8.2003

Evelyn Roy The Metamorphosis of Mr C. Das Source: Labour Monthly, Vol. 4, June 1923, No. 6, pp. 363-376. Transcription: Ted Crawford HTML Markup: Brian Reid Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2009). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. On the eve of the Gaya Congress Mr. Das published his sensational programme calling for the destruction of the Reform Councils, the boycott of British goods, and the organisation of labour and peasant societies with the object of preparing the country for what was termed “the final blow”—a complete and protracted national strike, accompanied by the simultaneous and wholesale resignation of services under Government all over the country (especially in the ranks of the police and army), and a general declaration of civil disobedience in the form of non-payment of taxes. By this series of steps, as outlined in his short-lived organ, the Bangalar Katha, did Deshbandhu Das and his coterie of personal followers propose to restore life to the fast-ebbing nationalist movement and to attain the rapid consummation of Swaraj. This skeleton programme called further for the formation of an Asiatic Federation, the organisation of foreign centres of Congress propaganda to enlist “the support of all lovers of freedom in all free countries,” and for the drafting of a Swaraj constitution which would fully define the goal towards which Indian Nationalism was striving. The country had little time to discuss the project in full, launched as it was within a few weeks of the annual session of the National Congress, whose function it was to adopt a programme of action for the ensuing year. What comment there was time for concerned itself more with that other programme, published about the same time and precipitated upon the country in the third week of December—through the dubious connivance of Reuter—the programme of Social Democracy, drawn up for consideration at the Thirty-seventh Congress by the Communist Party of India. If the bureaucracy had hoped to kill two birds with one stone, to convict Mr. Das of being in collusion with Indian Bolshevism, and thereby damn his programme in advance, as it sought to damn that of the “Vanguard,” it was doomed to disappointment. The Deshbandhu was acquitted by the unanimous voice of his own countrymen of being in collusion with anybody but himself, but it was, nevertheless, considered by those who differed from him that his ideas bordered dangerously near to Socialism, if not dipped in the deeper dye of Bolshevism. His repeated protestations that he stood for the constructive programme, subject to the alterations mentioned above, and his declarations of faith in the revival of cottage industries, as exemplified by the sacred Charka, could not save him from the taint of dangerous heterodoxy. His frequent references to a need for change in tactics made him an object of suspicion to the high priests of orthodox Gandhism, while his apocryphal utterances about the “masses” alarmed the propertied classes and brought him into the limelight of official displeasure. Thus, on the eve of Gaya, Mr. Das stood practically alone with his own conscience; no party had yet rallied to his banner, though the air was thick with speculation. What he said and did may be regarded for all practical purposes as the utterances and acts of an individual mind, undeterred and uninfluenced by party responsibilities and allegiances. All factions awaited his presidential address at Gaya—here was the key which would unlock the mystery of his intentions and reveal the full purpose of the new leader. Negotiations behind the scenes there must have been and were, on the part of those discontented elements seeking a new standard to rally round, but as to which of those elements, exclusive of the rest, would relieve the isolation of the Deshbandhu and elect him their chief, Gaya alone could determine. The presidential speech at Gaya is a monumental record of Mr. Das’s legal mind at war with his poet’s soul. It is the Gotterdämmerung, where the gods of the earth and heavens wrestle in titanic conflict for supremacy. Beginning with an eloquent exposition of historical precedents, a host of facts is marshalled before his thousands of auditors (and for the benefit of the listening bureaucratic ear), to prove the legality of revolution. Then the Deshbandhu proceeds to prove, by another set of historical facts, the utter futility of exercising this indubitably legal right to rebel, and ends in a grandiose and self-contradictory climax, which seeks to demonstrate that India will succeed in doing that which history has failed to furnish any precedent for—the conquest of Swaraj by non-violence, such as will start a new chapter of human relationships and usher in a new historical era of peaceful revolutions. The inaugural address may be taken as the complete expression of the Deshbandhu’s individual philosophy and political ideology, worked over for many weeks with meticulous and loving care. It is likewise the last expression of pure Deshbandhuism, since events following rapidly on the conclusion of the Congress session swept Mr. Das and his personal devotees into the strong current of party politics, where his dominant personality no longer reigned supreme. A study of the Gaya presidential address is, therefore, a revelation of the full mind and heart of Chittaranjan Das, an authentic document of his own making at what may be regarded as the turning point in his career. There is little that is new. His speech at Dehra Dun, the statement to the Press at Amraoti, and the statement of policy in Calcutta appear to have been incorporated bodily in this wider and all-comprehensive document, wherein its author conscientiously attempts to indicate a new path for the national movement to follow.

His speech at Dehra Dun, the statement to the Press at Amraoti, and the statement of policy in Calcutta appear to have been incorporated bodily in this wider and all-comprehensive document, wherein its author conscientiously attempts to indicate a new path for the national movement to follow. Of greater interest than its objective statements are the subjective forces of his own mind that struggle for supremacy, now the cool, reasoning brain of the lawyer, now the passionate warmth of the rebel, and again the imaginative idealism of the romantic poet. In the beginning the lawyer reigns supreme, and Deshbandhu the barrister treats his hearers to a masterly exposition of “Law and Order” as the basis of all tyranny, and the legal right of the subject, as furnished by good historical precedents, to rebel against the tyrannical dictates of this doctrine. His arguments are irrefutable, and one imagines they re intended less for his Khaddar-clad auditors, the majority whom, perhaps, could not understand the language he addressed them in, than for that august tribunal of bourgeois justice and morality—western civilisation and history—that he proceeded later to hold up to such scorn. Here spoke the product of bourgeois English education, quoting English historical precedent to substantiate his country’s claims to freedom, and hoisting the British rulers of India on their own petard, so to speak, by proving from the Revolutions of 1640 and 1688 the legal right of a people to rebel. He concludes this part of his thesis as follows:— This, then, is the history of the freedom movement in England. The conclusion is irresistible, that it is not by acquiescence in the doctrines of law and order that the English people have obtained the recognition of their fundamental rights. It follows, firstly, that no regulation is law unless it is based on the consent of the people; secondly, where such consent is wanting, the people are under no obligation to obey; thirdly, where such laws profess to attack their fundamental rights, the subjects are entitled to compel their withdrawal by force or insurrection; fourthly, that law and order is and always has been a plea for absolutism; and lastly, there can be neither law nor order before the real reign of law begins. To all of which arguments there is and can be no answer, and were British rule in India a mere question of legal quibbling, the representatives of that haughty Empire must withdraw in confusion, and leave India bag and baggage for sheer lack of any adequate defence. But, unfortunately, British rule in India is based, not upon the justification of law courts, but upon the strength of armies, and Mr. Das would have done better to have based his arguments upon the latter supposition, or to have saved his breath. However, having concluded this phase of his pleading, Mr. Das takes his stand on another ground to prove the right of the Indian people to freedom—this time, not by historical precedent, but by “sacred and inalienable right.” And once more, to the confusion of his Christian preceptors, he quotes the Bible, and the words of Christ. Here he warms to his task and plunges into a dissertation on the sacred and inalienable right, not alone of individuals, but of whole peoples, to resist unjust oppression and “to take their stand upon Truth.” For myself, I oppose the pretensions of “law and order,” not on historical precedent, but on the ground that it is the inalienable right of every individual and of every nation to stand on truth and to offer a stubborn resistance to ruthless laws . . . . The development of nationality is a sacred task—if, therefore, you interpose a doctrine to impede that task, why, the doctrine must go. By this narrow bridge, Mr. Das, the lawyer, passes over into the precincts of Deshbandhu Das, the patriot and friend of the country. The realms of dry historical facts are forsaken for that richer field of political speculation and philosophy, already enriched by the minds of Jean Jacques Rousseau and his successors. But the tools of the lawyer are not abandoned—the appearance of proving his point by logical deduction, the falling back upon authority and precedent, this time not mundane but divine. The next part of the address is devoted to an exposition of Mr. Das’s theory of nationality, wherein western ideas and education are forgotten, and the Vedanta school of Spiritual Imperialism is given full play. The patriot, the poet, and the mystic are happily combined, and Mr. Das becomes once more intelligible to his own people as he soars into the realms of metaphysics:— What is the ideal which we must set before us? The first and foremost is the ideal of nationalism. Now what is nationalism? It is, I conceive, a process through which a nation expresses itself and finds itself—not in isolation from other nations, not in opposition, but as part of a great scheme by which, in seeking its own expression and identity, it materially assists the self-expression and self-realisation of other nations as well. Diversity is as real as unity. And in order that the unity of the world may be established, it is essential that each nationality should proceed on its own line and find fulfilment in self-realisation. Mr. Das then goes on to declare that his ideal of nationality must not be confused with that conception which exists in Europe to-day:— Nationalism in Europe is an aggressive nationalism, a selfish nationalism, a commercial nationalism of gain and loss—that is European nationalism.

Das then goes on to declare that his ideal of nationality must not be confused with that conception which exists in Europe to-day:— Nationalism in Europe is an aggressive nationalism, a selfish nationalism, a commercial nationalism of gain and loss—that is European nationalism. And in contradistinction to this horrid spectre he conjures up a vision more pleasing and familiar to his auditors, fed with the same spoon from other hands, that of the new nationality of spiritual India which is to be realised through soul force, non violence and love, and which will save the world. Throughout the pages of Indian history I find a great purpose unfolding itself . . . . The great Indian nationality is in sight. It already stretches its hands across the Himalayas, not only to Asia, but to the whole world; not aggressively, but to demand its recognition and to offer its contribution . . . . True development of the Indian nation must necessarily lie in the path of Swaraj. A question has often been asked as to what is Swaraj. Swaraj is indefinable, and is not to be confused with any particular system of government. Swaraj is the natural expression of the national mind, and must necessarily cover the whole life history of a nation. Nationalism is the same question as that of Swaraj. Here is the transcendentalism of Mahatma Gandhi, highly flattering to a people accustomed to think of itself as a special creation of Providence, and charged with a spiritual mission to save mankind from the materialistic abyss towards which it is speeding. The Mahatma was wont to declare: “First realise yourself, then Swaraj will come of itself”; the Deshbandu affirms: “Let each nation realise itself, then Swaraj will come, the Swaraj of entire humanity.” The soul of the poet had not purged itself of the mysticism bred of solitary confinement nor of the tendency to make politics a metaphysical adjunct of speculative philosophy. Mr. Das belongs by nature to the school of Transcendentalists who have picturesquely adorned the pages of Indian history in her transition from mediaevalism to modernism, and are now rapidly becoming extinct in the march of events. We cannot leave the subject of the presidential address without reference to a few more pronouncements which provide a key to the ideology of India’s new leader. Mr. Das reaffirmed in strong words his faith in the doctrine and tactics of non-violent non-co-operation, and gave as his reasons therefore, “apart from any question of principle,” the “utter futility of revolutions brought about in the past by force and violence.” Taking the French, American, English, Italian, and Russian Revolutions as historical precedents (the ghost of the lawyer still lingers), he proceeds to demonstrate to his own satisfaction, and presumably to that of his auditors, that it is impossible to attain Swaraj by violent means (Swaraj here taken in its mystical sense as described above). Says Mr. Das:— I maintain that no people has yet succeeded in winning freedom by force and violence. The use of violence degenerates those who use it, and it is not easy for them, having seized power, to surrender it. Non-violence does not carry with it that degeneration which is inherent in the use of violence. He seeks to prove this assertion by a hasty and dogmatic analysis of those great historical convulsions described as “national” revolutions, which in the past have ushered in new political institutions to correspond with fundamental changes in the economic and social orders. The vast upheaval in France from 1789 to 1812 means nothing more to Mr. Das than a struggle “as to which of the various sections shall rule France.” He fails to glimpse beneath the apparent clash of individual hatreds and ambitions, the grim struggle between two opposing and mutually-exclusive classes, the corrupt monarchy and decayed feudal order on the one hand, and on the other, the rising bourgeoisie whose allies were drawn from the ranks of the exploited peasantry and city proletariat. Against this struggle the whole of Absolutist Europe ranged itself, for the challenge of the French bourgeoisie was a challenge against feudal absolutism and corruption wherever it existed; and so we find, civil war and terror within, accompanied by invasion, starvation and blockade from without. Napoleonism was the answer of the new social order, determined to maintain itself; and the overthrow of Napoleon, followed by the reaction that overswept Europe, could not delay forever the inevitable triumph of the French bourgeoisie, and of the bourgeoisie in every country. The great French Revolution, the English Revolutions of 1640 and 1688, the American and the Italian Revolutions were successful, in that a new class came to power, shaping its own political institutions in accordance with the dictates of its economic needs and interests.

The great French Revolution, the English Revolutions of 1640 and 1688, the American and the Italian Revolutions were successful, in that a new class came to power, shaping its own political institutions in accordance with the dictates of its economic needs and interests. Modern bourgeois democracy is not the Utopia dreamed of by Jean Jacques Rousseau, nor the abstract Reign of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Reason proclaimed by the Jacobins—but it remains, nevertheless, the logical heir and successor of the medieval feudal autocracy which reigned in Europe before its advent, and it represents one step forward on the road of progress that will lead mankind to its ultimate goal. The victory of the bourgeoisie over feudalism is but the prelude to another and fiercer class struggle, now being waged, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; which must end in the victory of the latter and the abolition of all classes with the institution of private property which gave them birth. The present-day politics of Europe bears this contention out. Such is history as viewed in the light of the Marxian dialectics, which reads success or failure, not in approximations to an abstract ideal, but in the development of new productive forces and the corresponding rise of new social classes, ideas and institutions. The faulty and shallow analysis which Mr. Das and all bourgeois libertarians bring to bear upon the great revolutions of the past is the result of their lack of understanding of the underlying social and economic forces involved. We can expect nothing better when we read, further on in the presidential address, that Mr. Das “looks upon history as the revelation of God to man.” With such an attitude towards history, where every event is a special dispensation of Providence and not the result of material economic laws, no wonder that Mr. Das fails to draw useful analogies from the great revolutionary movements of the past to apply to the Indian struggle, and no wonder that he declares that India will not repeat the history of other nations, but will offer the world something unique. And yet Deshbandhu Das and his associates are playing out their unconscious rôle as the leaders of India’s bourgeois revolution against the decayed feudal autocracy of the native princes, and the absolutism of the imperial overlord. The Congress and its leaders are but the tools and instruments of those powerful social forces that have been silently developing themselves within the past century—a native bourgeoisie, reinforced by a rebellious peasantry deprived of its land, and by an exploited industrial proletariat, the product of machine industry and a ruined system of handicrafts. The struggle of these social classes for supremacy is masked beneath vague phrases and idealistic abstractions about “Swaraj,” “Self-Realisation,” and “Truth,” even as the struggle of the French bourgeoisie, exploited peasantry and city proletariat was concealed beneath the eloquent perorations on “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das and his fellows, despite their sentimental Utopianism, are the Dantons, the Patrick Henrys, and the Garibaldis of the Indian Revolution, whose unexpressed and as yet half-conscious purpose it is to usher into power the Indian bourgeoisie. But is not Mr. Das something more, one is tempted to inquire, in the light of his eloquent pronouncements on the subject of “the masses,” whose cause he champions so valiantly against the “classes.” Is his role to be not that of eighteenth century Republicanism of America and France, but of a twentieth century Messiah of the masses? How nobly he champions their cause in his speech at Gaya, and on innumerable occasions before and after. Does he not say: — Many of us believe that the middle classes must win Swaraj for the masses. I do not believe in the possibility of any class movement being ever converted into a movement for Swaraj. If to-day the British Parliament grants provincial autonomy in the provinces with responsibility in the Central Government, I for one will protest against it, because that will inevitably lead to the concentration of power in the hands of the middle classes. I do not believe that the middle classes will then part with their power. How will it profit India if, in place of the white bureaucracy that now rules over her, there is substituted an Indian bureaucracy of the middle classes? � I desire to avoid the repetition of that chapter of European history. It is for India to show the light to the world—Swaraj by non-violence, and Swaraj by the people. And how does Mr. Das propose to realise this “Swaraj of, by, and for the people”? By the revival of the ancient Indian Panchayet, or village community, which he terms “real democracy.” According to his idea, “the most advanced thought of Europe is turning from the false individualism on which European culture and institutions are based to what I know to be the ideal of the ancient village organisation of India.” We do not know if Mr. Das confuses, in his ignorance of the facts, the idea of the Soviet system with that of the Panchayet. If he does, we would point out to him that the analogy lies, not between the Soviet and the Panchayet, but between the Panchayet and the ancient Russian village Mir, which like the old Teutonic Mark, constituted the basis of primitive village self-government. Such “ideal” democracies are to be found in the early history of every country, not alone in India, during the stage when agriculture was the prevailing mode of production and the small peasant proprietor was the dominant social class, in that remote past before feudalism, with its complicated social and political institutions, superseded this very primitive stage of decentralised government. It is useless to discuss the kind of democracy enjoyed by these village communities, except to observe that, being founded upon the system of private property, it contained the germ of modern bourgeois democracy into which, by slow and painful process of evolution, it has evolved, through the intervening stages of feudalism. Useless to discuss it we say, since even were it desirable, how were it possible to revive this archaic institution, which may have corresponded to the economic development of our remote ancestors, but which cannot possibly meet the manifold requirements of this twentieth century world in which we live, with its internationalised system of production, distribution and exchange?

If decentralisation is desired, why seek to revive the Panchayet? Its own natural extinction in the process of evolving society is the best proof of its own unfitness to survive. The very desire to hark back to an imagined Golden Age is but an indication of Utopianism on the part of Mr. Das and his fellow-worshippers of India’s mythical past, which savours strongly of reaction. Did not Jean Jacques Rousseau paint in glowing colours the “ideal democracy” of the primitive American Indians, whom those other seekers after democracy, the fathers of the American Revolution, were busily engaged in killing off to make room for themselves and their more advanced institutions? But Mr. Das goes further in his advocacy of the cause of the “masses.” In his presidential speech, as well as on other occasions, he specifically urged the organisation of labour and peasant societies “to further the cause of Swaraj,” and earned thereby the appellation of “Bolshevik.” We reproduce his words on this subject from the Gaya address, in order to discover if such an adjective is justified:— I am further of the opinion that the Congress should take up the work of Labour and peasant organisation�. Is the service of this special interest in any way antagonistic to the service of nationalism? To find bread for the poor, to secure justice to a class of people who are engaged in a particular class or avocation—how is that work any different from the work of attaining Swaraj? . . . We have delayed the matter already too long. If the Congress fails to do its duty, we may expect to find organisations set up in the country by labourers and peasants detached from you, disassociated from the cause of Swaraj, which will inevitably bring into the arena of the peaceful revolution class struggles and the war of special interests. If the object of the Congress be to avoid this disgraceful issue, let us take Labour and the peasantry in hand, and let us organise them from the point of view of their own interest and also from the point of view of the higher ideal which demands the satisfaction of their special interests and the devotion of such interests to the cause of Swaraj. We think Mr. Das should be absolved from all allegations of Bolshevism, and even of a pink shade of Socialism. What he advocates here is pure Hedonism—“pig-philosophy,”—let us help Labour in order to secure their help and to prevent their being used against us. No doubt this is put in such a utilitarian form in order to convince the more bourgeois among his audience—but it is the special pleading of what is at best, a bourgeois Utopian Liberal’s plea directed towards a bourgeoisie more hard-headed, less romantic and unsentimental than himself. That is the essential quandary of Mr. Das—to be a humanitarian bourgeois liberal intellectual, fallen among orthodox Gandhians and “Responsive Co-operators,”—each faction listening critically to all he had to say, ready to follow him if he voices their particular aspirations and unexpressed interests, but equally ready to pounce upon him and rend him to pieces should he violate any one of their cherished traditions or prove himself the standard bearer of a new economic class, which is not yet really represented in those chaste deliberations. We allude to the turbulent class of the industrial workers and landless agricultural proletariat, whose incipient spirit of revolt against unbearable economic conditions constitutes the only real menace to the established order of things in India, and upon whose dynamic power of mass action the Congress seeks to base its tactics of civil disobedience, without committing itself to a programme of economic reform which might antagonise the vested interests behind the bourgeois nationalist movement. The inaugural address at Gaya closed with Deshbandhu Das, the poet and sentimentalist, riding in the saddle of Pegasus, with the discomfited barrister lost amid the cloud pictures of an India reborn, waging “spiritual warfare” against the unnamed foe—a warfare waged by “spiritual soldiers” free from all anger, hatred, pettiness, meanness and falsehood. A quotation from the “Prometheus Unbound” of that other poet-mystic and knight-errant of Liberty, Percy Bysshe Shelley, constituted the climax and close of an undeniably eloquent oration, which equally undeniably is a masterpiece of contradictions and sentimental confusion. The die was cast. It remained for those who had heard to choose sides and elect their leader, either from among the doughty champions of No-Change or the Don Quixote of Pro-Change cum grano salis. The week of discussion and resolution-making came to an end, and Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das, “Friend of the Country” and champion of the masses, found himself the head of a new party called the “Congress-Khilafat-Sawaraj Party,” pledged to work within the Congress for the achievement of Swaraj by non-violent non-co-operation, but along the lines of its own programme. This programme, it was announced, would be drawn up and submitted to the public for approval in the early months of 1923. Mr. Das, finding himself and his party in the minority, honorably resigned his post of Congress President, and betook himself to a tour of the country to rally his forces. The principal clauses of his temporary programme, as announced before the Congress session, included the capture of the Reform Councils, to mend or end them, the boycott of British goods, and the organisation of peasant and Labour unions, with the object of declaring a national stake for the speedy attainment of Swaraj. The names of those who rallied to Mr. Das’s side and swelled the ranks of the new party included as a preponderating majority, that group of “Responsive Co-operators” who, in various provinces, had been long and vainly chafing against the leading strings of orthodox Gandhism, and who beheld in this eloquent exponent of “Pro-Change,” a captain who would lead them on to storm the citadel of the Reform Councils.

While the question of Council entry was a secondary consideration in Mr. Das’s programme, the whole issue of the Gaya Congress turned upon this disputed point, and to the new faction which unexpectedly swelled the ranks of the “Congress-Khilafat-Swaraj Party” this question was all-important and supreme. Wherefore we find that by sheer force of numbers they overwhelm Mr. Das, and make this point supreme for him as well. It begins to figure in every speech and declaration of policy as the decisive point at issue, on the part of the leaders of the new party. On the other point—that of the organisation of the Indian workers and peasants—the statement of Mr. N.C. Kelker, one of the Chiefs-of-Staff of the new party, and veteran leader of the Tilak School of “Responsive Co-operation,” is exceedingly interesting. In an article called “The New Party,” published in the Mahratta of January 14, 1923, the first comprehensive statement of the purpose and intentions of this organisation is given from the viewpoint of that rationalist faction which constitutes its chief strength. Mr. Kelker’s views about Labour, as compared with those of Mr. Das’s, are significant:-- The new party will, I think, whole-heartedly favour the formation of Labour unions and peasant unions. And while the formation of co-operative societies may represent its constructive activity, its destructive activity may, if occasion demands it, be represented by the advocacy of Labour strikes for a just cause and the non-payment of unjust taxes or dues by the peasants, not necessarily in the big name of Swarajya, but as a legitimate measure of resistance to unlawful acts of authority. This measured statement of the case comes like a cold douche after the warm-hearted advocacy of the Deshbandhu, and should have somewhat prepared the unwary for a further shock that came towards the end of January in the form of a statement by the first convention of the Congress-Khilafat-Swaraj Party on the “Rights of Private Property.” This statement takes the form of a special clause in the first draft of the party programme that “private and individual property will be recognised, maintained, and protected, and the growth of individual wealth, both moveable and immoveable, will be permitted and encouraged.” This clause, it is remarked by contemporary journals, “seems to have been particularly included in order to counteract the statements made in some quarters that the non-co-operation movement represented a form of Bolshevism.” But the fact that such a statement was published, far in advance of any other clause of the party’s programme is an important indication of the true nature of the men who lead it. It is a frank declaration of class-affiliation and class-consciousness on the part of the rising Indian bourgeoisie, whose special interests the Swaraj Party is dedicated to defend. Under the influence and pressure of this class the school of liberal intellectuals to which Mr. Das belongs, is being willy-nilly converted from the erstwhile champion of the exploited masses, into the protector of bourgeois property rights. This is, indeed, a metamorphosis little expected on the part of those who were carried away by the eloquent speeches of the Deshbandhu in the cause of Labour and the Indian masses, but not very surprising to those who have learned to draw a hard, clear line between sentimentality on one hand, and class-interest on the other. The presence of a class-conscious bourgeois party within the ranks of the National Congress is rapidly beginning to crystallise the political ideology of the non-co-operation movement as a whole. The leaders of the new party are determined to protect their class-interests from the very outset against the rising flood-tide of mass-energy that may some day find an outlet in revolution. The day is fast approaching when Mr. Das must either abandon his own party and the social class to which he belongs, to throw in his lot with a purely proletarian movement conducted on the lines of the class-struggle against capitalist exploitation, both foreign and native, or give up altogether his sentimental effusions about the masses and take his stand unequivocally by the side of the propertied classes. The new party has been captured by a very clear-headed set of individuals who have long been the standard bearers of political rationalism inside the Congress ranks, and who will do their best to guide the movement back into the folds of parliamentarism and constitutional agitation, where they will eventually become His Majesty’s most loyal Opposition. The difference between this “Responsive Co-operation” and the co-operating Moderates is slight indeed. Mr. Das now finds himself in the anomalous position of being the nominal head of a party which will end by negating the very principles of non-co-operation upon which it was originally founded. As he was isolated on the eve of Gaya, a solitary figure of dreams and illusions, so is he isolated now—pushed into a minority within the ranks of his own party whose guidance has passed into other hands. Deshbandhu Das may be no less the friend of the country, no less the champion of the oppressed masses than he was before his spiritual kidnapping by the Responsive Co-operators. But he is caught upon the horns of a dilemma which correspond to the poles of his own temperament—the lawyer in him struggled to escape from the metaphysical toils of orthodox Gandhism and so fell into the meshes of bourgeois rationalism, against which his poet’s soul rebels. He still talks about “the masses,” still dreams of the coming of an Indian millenium wherein peace and prosperity shall descend upon the people through the medium of the village Panchayet. Even in his most recent utterances before the third session of the All-India Trade Union Congress, celebrated in Lahore towards the end of March and over which he presided, he declared:— If the middle classes ever win Swaraj, and I live to see that day, it will be my lot to stand by the workers and peasants and to lead them on to wrest power from the hands of the selfish classes. But ere this day dawns the metamorphosis of Mr. Das from bourgeois liberal intellectual and Don Quixote of the masses into a true leader of the Indian working class must be complete. Evelyn Roy Archive The Labour Monthly Index

MIA > Archive > Evelyn Roy Evelyn Roy The Colonies The Struggle of the Akali Sikhs in the Punjab (13 October 1922) From International Press Correspondence, Vol. 2 No. 88, 13 October 1922, pp. 669–670. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2020). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. A struggle whose greatness and potentiality is little realized is being carried on in the Indian province of the Punjab, between the Government and property-holders on one side, and the insurgent peasants known as the Akali Sikhs on the other. This struggle is not a new one; it has been going on continuously, though less spectacularly, for many years. But of late it has broken out in such a form as to merit the august attention of the London Times and similar organs of Imperialism. The Sikhs are a rugged northern people inhabiting the province of the Punjab, of whose population they number about 11%. They are mainly agricultural by profession, the majority being small tenants or day laborers, the number of the latter having swelled enormously of late years, owing to the growing pauperization of the peasantry and the intensifying land-concentration in the hands of large capitalists holding directly from the Government. By religion, the Sikhs are a reformed sect of the Hindus, with a strong military tradition dating back to the days when the Moghul Empire was overthrown and the Sikhs under their tenth Guru or spiritual leader, Govind Singh, established an autonomous military state. The history of this militant sect resembles somewhat the semi-military, semi-religious Christian communities that flourished during the Middle Ages in Europe, and in the manner of living, customs and traditions, is not unlike the Russian Cossacks of the Don. Nine spiritual heads preceded the advent of Govind Singh, who died in 1708, after having reorganized the Sikhs into a strongly militarized political unit and laid down certain principles of religious and social reform which are scrupulously observed by his followers even today. According to his mandate, the Sikh population was divided into two main branches or professions, – 1. The Nirmalas, or Spotless Ones, who formed the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and 2. the Akalis or Immortal Ones, whose first duty was to be good soldiers and who constituted the military defenders of the Sikh State. Every member of this military brotherhood was enjoined to wear the “five K’s”, – the Kes or long hair, to protect head in battle; the Karra, or iron circlet; the Kangi, comb; the Kirpan, a knife or sword, and the Kadi, or short drawers. In addition, each Sikh wears a turban, folded upon his head in a particular fashion peculiar to his sect As time passed, the Nirmalas, whose functions were purely priestly, degenerated into a corrupt and licentious body, fattening on the rich proceeds of the worshippers, and handing on the guardianship of the numerous sacred shrines with their vast landed estates as an hereditary trust to their sons. The Akali, on the other hand, tilled the soil and were forced more and more into the ranks of the agricultural proletariat. Unemployment and their own strong military traditions, forced many of them to take service in the Indian army and police force to earn a livelihood. The Sikh regiments formed the flower of the British defense forces, and in this capacity, have acted not only as the jailors of their own people, but have been freely used to keep other races in bondage, beyond the confines of India. Sikh soldiery served in Europe and were sent to fight in Mesopotamia in the late war, and Imperialism thinks to have found in them an inexhaustible reservoir of mercenaries to carry out its plans of conquest. But Man proposes, and the Law of Economic Determinism disposes. The end of the war and the exigencies of the Indian budget, top-heavy with military expenditures, forced the demobilization of thousands of men who had learned more valuable lessons than manslaughter during their campaign abroad. Every Sikh soldier who returned to his village carried with him the seed of discontent and incipient revolt against the poverty and misery that he found there. This spirit added fuel to the flame that had already kindled the Punjab with sporadic agrarian revolts. The years from 1918–20 are filled with official reports about looting and burning, rioting and killing, on the part of the Punjab peasantry. In 1918, the Sikh League was formed to give political expression to this growing unrest, and in 1920, the Sikh community formally allied itself with the Indian National Congress to win Swaraj by means of Non-violent Non-cooperation, including non-payment of rent and taxes. The Akalis, who were the most aggressive members of the Sikh community, succeeded in forcing upon the acceptance of the Sikh League and the Congress leaders, the prosecution of their program of reform of the Sikh shrines, which they wished to remove from the guardianship of the Nirmalas and Udasis (an older Sikh sect closer to orthodox Hinduism than to reformed Sikhism), and administer in the interests of the Sikh peasants. There are upwards of three hundred of these shrines scattered throughout the province, dedicated to the memory of the ten Gurus, and used as places of worship by the people.

There are upwards of three hundred of these shrines scattered throughout the province, dedicated to the memory of the ten Gurus, and used as places of worship by the people. Up till now, these Gurdwaras, or shrines, have been in the keeping of rich and corrupt Mahants or guardians, some holding their office by hereditary succession, others by government appointment. Needless to say, the treasure and revenue from the vast estates attached to these Gurdwaras, whose annual income alone is estimated at over £700,000 sterling, are vested exclusively in the Mahant or custodian. The program forced upon the Sikh League and Congress Committee by the Akali Dal (peasant organization) was to take forcible possession of these shrines by direct action. The Congress agreed to back the Akalis provided their tactics were non-violent. Thereupon, between the latter part of 1920 to February 1921, several shrines were seized by orderly detachments of Akalis, who would descend suddenly and in a body upon the unprepared Mahant, demand the keys, evict him and take possession. The first to be captured in this manner was the famous “Golden Temple”, which the Akalis took by surprise and proceeded tranquilly to administer, despite the protests and wails for protection from the evicted Mahants. The Government held aloof in the beginning, not wishing to be accused of interfering in what was ostensibly a religious movement for reform. But the deeper conflict between the vested interests of the rich Sikhs and Manants and the direct action of the landless Akali peasantry was soon apparent, and forced the Government to take its stand by the side of the propertied classes, where it spiritually belongs. In February 1921, the whole of India was startled by the slaughter of 130 Akalis who had visited the shrine of Nankana Sahib to attend a Conference called there by the Sikhs, and who were attacked by armed Pathan soldiery hired by the Mahant. Thousands of Akalis rushed to the spot to vindicate the wrong perpetrated upon their brothers, and the forces of the government intervened. Hundreds of Akalis were arrested and sentenced to jail, while the Mahant who had caused the outrage, after being put on trial and condemned to death, had his sentence reduced to transportation for life. This incident united the Sikh community against the Government and made a political issue out of what had seemed a purely religious affair. A bill introduced by the Government in April 1921 for the reform of the Shrines had to be withdrawn because the Sikhs refused to cooperate in its discussion unless all Akalis held in jail were released, and the bill were drawn up according to the dictates of the Gurdwara. Prabandhak Committee (Committee for the Reform of the Shrines). Sikh members of the Legislative and Provincial Assemblies resigned, and one of them, Sirdar Mehtak Singh, former Government Advocate and Vice President of the Punjab Legislative Council, became Secretary of the Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee. The effect on the Sikh masses was instantaneous and alarming to the Government. Every Sikh, man, woman and child, armed himself with a kirpan, which grew overnight from a conventional religious symbol into a shining two-edged sword. Disaffection spread to the Sikh regiments, recruited directly from the peasantry, and soldiers appeared on parade in black turban and trousers, with their kirpans conspicuously displayed. Those sentenced for insubordination for refusing io remove these symbols went on hunger strike; whole companies followed their example. So serious did the situation appear that the Government was forced to make hurried concessions to save its face during the visit of the Prince of Wales. In January 1922 Sikh prisoners were released, the keys of the Golden Temple which had been taken by the Government were handed over unconditionally to the Gurdwara Reform Committee, and the Kirpan recognized as exempt from the Arms Act. The next few months witnessed a steady strengthening of the Akali movement, now organized into well-disciplined peasant societies known as the Akali Dal. Their program was access to land, free of rent and taxes, and their tactics that of passive resistance by the application of Civil Disobedience in the shape of non-payment of rent and taxes, to the landlords and Government. The repression that visited India on the departure of the Prince of Wales, fell heaviest of all on the Punjab. Over 3,000 Akalis were thrown into jail, martial law was declared throughout the province, and the press effectually muzzled to conceal the true state of affairs. Out of this state of darkness, the Punjab has once more leaped into the center of the world’s stage. The Akali Sikhs, after suffering temporary suppression, have recommenced their activities in a more determined and sensational manner than before. The forcible capture of shrines has been again resorted to, in the teeth of Government opposition, and Akali volunteers are marching in bands to the shrines, clad in black turban and kirpan, singing nationalist songs and refusing to obey the order of troops posted on the highroads to turn back whence they came. At Guru Ka Bagh, a shrine six miles from Amritsar, five Akalis were arrested by order of the Mahant for chopping down a tree on the estate of the shrine. They were sentenced on a charge of theft to six months imprisonment and a heavy fine. Next day five more Volunteers were called for and they came in hundreds, then in thousands. The railroads, by government order, refused to carry them, and so they walked, swinging along the high-roads in organized formation, singing their martial songs, and declaring themselves ready to die in the cause. Troops were rushed to the spot to defend the shrine, a cordon of armed soldiers and police was thrown around it for several miles, and pickets stationed on all the approaching roads to turn back the Akali volunteers. The latter refused to obey, and orders were given to fire. At Guru ka Bagh, six miles from the scene of the Amritsar massacre of 1919, more Indian blood has been shed in the defence of fundamental human rights.

The Government has openly declared its position. The efforts of the Akalis to take possession of the shrines will be resisted by all the resources of the state. The sacred rights of private property are declared to be in jeopardy, and a deputation of the mahants to the Government protesting against the action of the Akalis was received sympathetically. A second bill for the reform of the shrines, introduced in the last session of the Punjab Council, was rejected by the vested Sikh interests. It is proposed by the Government to introduce a third one, effectuating a compromise between the mahants and property-holders on one side, and the militant peasantry on the other. Meanwhile, the situation is described as “critical”. Battles are being fought, not alone at Guru ka Bagh, but in other parts of the Punjab, where the Akali bands have repeated their attempts to oust the mahants and put themselves in possession of the temple lends. Such lawless actions form stepping stones on the road to an open agrarian revolution, and the Government sees the danger ahead. The Akali revolt in the Punjab is but one manifestation of the widespread spirit of unrest that has seized every part of the Indian people, and which expresses itself in the case of the rich merchant and manufacturer in the demand for “home rule” and “fiscal autonomy”; on the part of the lower middle-class and intellectuals in the Non-cooperation agitation for “Swaraj”; on the part of industrial proletariat of all the great cities in numerous and prolonged strikes and on the part of the Indian peasantry, from Madras to the Punjab, from Bombay to Assam and Bengal, in riots and risings, in non-payment of rent and taxes, and in frequent bloody conflicts with the armed forces of the state. The ferment in India has many essences, but all are working together to produce, one fine morning, a monumental revolution which will not be a mere expression of resurgent nationalism, but a vast social and economic upheaval as well. In the final reckoning with British Imperialism, it is the Indian worker and peasant who must pay the price for freedom, and they will see to it that their blood has not been shed in vain. Top of the page Last updated on 3 December 2020

MIA > Archive > Evelyn Roy Evelyn Roy Politics Mr. Montagu, Martyr (22 March 1922) From International Press Correspondence, Vol. 2 No. 27, 15 April 1922, p. 203. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2020). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. The arrest of Gandhi and the abrupt resignation (or dismissal) of Mr. Montagu, Secretary of State for India, following upon his publication of the telegram from the Indian government urging revision of the Treaty of Sèvres, may have come to the uninitiated as two surprising, but quite distinct shocks. In reality, they were phenomena closely related to one another, and may be designated as twin efforts of a single cause – the present political crisis in England and throughout the British Empire. India, Ireland, Egypt, the hydra-headed monster that guards the golden apples of British Imperialism caught the fever of world unrest and, forgetting its mission, threatened to upset the nice adjustment of world power by predetermined and concerted revolt. Coming at a time when British Capitalism found itself hard put to maintain itself at home, these nationalist upheavals gained in strength from the weakness of the enemy, like a modern Hercules, Mr. Lloyd George devised a means of beheading the monster that threatened the golden treasure and charming the British public into retaining him as their leader. Seizing the Hydra in his brawny arms and holding it in mid-air, he soliloquized: “Ireland is an obstreperous beast too notorious abroad to be tampered with. It will pay to compromise without losing the essentials of power. Egypt can be placated with a modicum of concession; what do we care? After all, a Protectorate by any other name will smell as sweet, and Public Opinion will Be edified by such a demonstration of British justice and fair play. As for India, the other two disposed of, we shall have a free hand. There can be no trifling with the granaries of Empire. Tanks, machine-guns and bombing-plans will soon put an end to this prattle about Swaraj. Dead men tell no tales.” The astute Prime Minister did not deceive himself. In the midst of the general rejoicing over the Irish Free State and the Egyptian Treaty, the groans of unhappy India fell unheeded upon the ears of indifferent world. The decencies had been complied with; British ability to compromise stood vindicated. There must be something wrong with those brown devils in remote India who reach so clamorously for things beyond their grasp and ken. The arrest of prominent leaders and of thousands of obscure patriots, their sentences of long-term imprisonments, the daily calling out of troops to shoot down the striking workers who combined political demands for freedom with their please for economic redress, was almost smothered beneath the flowery tributes of the sycophants who followed the triumphal progress of the Prince of Wales from Bombay to Calcutta, from Madras to Lahore. The outer world did not know, and if it knew, cared not that these trailing sycophants were the puppets and victims of British Imperialism – dummy princes, Junker landlords, bondholders and capitalists, who danced to Nero’s fiddling while Rome burned. Beneath the superficial rejoicing reigned pandemonium; the vast mass of three hundred million toiling peasants and exploited workers who had lain passive for centuries beneath a foreign yoke, had awakened to the tune of quite another piper – the strange, half-mystic call to Religion, Country and People uttered by the gentle prophet of Non-Resistance, Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience, Mahatma Gandhi. It signalized the re-birth of many peoples into a single nation, whose poor and exploited masses drew together for the first time across the barriers of race, speech, religion and caste to fight together for a common Swaraj, a common millennium under the banner of a universally adored prophet. Mr. Lloyd George, who seeks to revive the legendary exploits of the heroes of Greek epic in his modern political career, resembles an impudent child juggling with the forces of natural law. Like a cheap political harlequin, he must dance to the tune of his strongest constituents. Ireland and Egypt were the glittering toys to dazzle the eyes of Liberals and Labor; India is the bone he throws to the growling dogs of conservatism. The noble lords must somehow be placated; they too, in the cynical eyes of a political juggler, have their price. A strong hand in India, with Lord Reading at the helm, and in England, a lord swapped for a liberal in the high office of Indian Secretary of State, is a good bargain and good politics at the same stroke. “Montagu and Gandhi must go together,” said the Morning Post. Lloyd George assented; Mr. Montagu had to go, just as Mr. Gandhi had to go, but neither must he be done to death prematurely. The House of Peers was howling for their blood, but then, in India and throughout the Empire more disturbing howls had rent the air for self-determination, independence, freedom. The quaking Empire must first be steadied ere the noble lords could taste their blood. The Irish Free State and “Independent” Egypt calmed the heaving Empire; the massing of troops, the enlistment of Civil Guards and recruiting of armed police solved the Indian situation. Only then was the little brown prophet of Non-Resistance, of home-spun Khaddar and the homely Charka, staunch denunciator of satanic governments, clapped into jail and sentenced to six years’ rigorous imprisonment before the astonished gaze of India’s adoring millions, who waited dumbly like the Florentines before their martyred Savonarola, and cried for “a miracle, a miracle!” And only then was Mr. Montagu deprived of his office, as candy is taken from a baby, because forsooth, the naive infant forbore to consult the Cabinet before the publication of that transcendent telegram from the Government of India demanding, on behalf of Indian Mohammedans, “the evacuation of Constantinople, the suzerainty of the Sultan over the Holy Places, and the restoration of Ottoman Thrace”. Quite as though Indian Mohammedans were inured, during the past few years, to see their lightest whims catered to; and as though Mr. Montagu, a seasonal diplomat if not a politician, on the very eve of the Allied Greco-Turkish Conference in Paris, would dare (without previous sanction) to come out of his corner like little Jack Horner after sticking his thumb in the political plum, and cry “What a good boy am I!” Amid such a display of political imbecility, intended to camouflage the most profound political sagacity, one can only enquire sotto voce, of that modern Hercules, Mr. Lloyd George: What fitting compensation has been offered Mr. Montagu for his voluntary (or involuntary) immolation upon the altar of political exigency? Do you really believe that placating the noble lords by the twin martyrdom of Messrs. Gandhi and Montagu will compensate for the redoubled impetus which these victimizations will give to the Indian movement? Even by throwing this bone to the dog, have you insured yourself sufficiently against the next General Election? Moscow, March 22, 1922 Top of the page Last updated on 2 January 2020

Evelyn Roy Letter to Henk Sneevliet Source: Transcribed from a photocopy contained in the Evelyn Trent Collection, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. Thursday 4-9-24. Dear Jack Horner[1] � Arrived and was safely met. It is very peaceful here and I like Com. Betsy very much. But I am not peaceful and am feeling not well. Have decided to return Saturday, so do not send me any letters nor should any come. I will come up Saturday morning to your office and we will dine together once more. Best wishes, E. ___________________ [1] Pseudonym for Henk Sneevliet used by Evelyn and M. N. Roy. Evelyn Roy Archive

Evelyn Roy An Indian Communist Manifesto Written: Drafted in Berlin, en route from Mexico to Moscow for the II Congress of the Comintern. First Published: Glasgow Socialist, 24 June 1920. Source: Transcription sent by British intelligence agents, contained in "Nai-HPD, August 1920, File No. 110, Weekly Report of the Director, Central Intelligence, Simla, 2 August 1920—'The Bolshevik Menace'", cited in Om Prakash Ralhan (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Political Parties, Vol. 14, Anmol Publications Pvt Ltd, New Delhi, 1997, pp. 61-65. Transcription/HTML Markup: Juan Fajardo, 2 January 2011. Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2011). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. THE time has come for the Indian revolutionists to make a statement of their principles in order to interest the European and American proletariat in the struggle of the Indian masses, which is rapidly becoming a fight for economic and social emancipation and the abolition of class rule. The appeal is made to the British proletariat because of their relation to revolutionary movements in countries dominated by British imperialism. The nationalist movement in India has failed to appeal to the masses, because it strives for a bourgeois democracy and cannot say how the masses will be benefited by independent national existence. The emancipation of the working class lies in the social revolution and the foundation of a communist state. Therefore, the growing spirit of rebellion in the masses must be organised on the basis of class struggle in close cooperation with the world proletarian movements. But, because British domination deprives Indians of the elementary rights indispensable for the organisation of such a struggle, the revolutionary movement must emphasise in its programme the political liberation of the country. This does not make its final goal a bourgeois democracy under which the native privileged class would rule and exploit the native workers in place of British bureaucrats and capitalists. All that the world is allowed to know of the Indian revolutionary movement is the agitation for political autonomy. This has naturally failed to enlist the sympathy of the working class in any country, which must always be indifferent to purely nationalist aspirations. The idea of class-conscious rebellion against capitalistic exploitation has been gaining ground in India, immensely stimulated by the war. The quickened industrial life, the rise in the cost of living, the employment of Indian troops overseas and the echoes of the Russian revolution have fanned the discontent always existing in the masses. The nationalist revolutionary movement, recruited from educated youths of the middle classes, tried to turn the discontent to an armed uprising against foreign rule. Since the beginning of the present century, terrorism, local insurrections, conspiracies and attempts to revolt have become more and more frequent until at last practically the whole country came under martial law. These activities did not inspire the masses with lasting enthusiasm: the leaders failed to prescribe remedies for the social and economic evils from which the workers suffer. But dynamic economic forces, which are destined to cause a proletarian revolt in every country, have grown acute in India and hence the spirit of rebellion has grown more and more manifest among the people who were not moved by the nationalist doctrines preached by the revolutionaries. Today there are two tendencies in the Indian movement, distinct in principles and aims. The nationalists advocate an autonomous India and incite the masses to overthrow the foreign exploiter upon a vague democratic programme or no programme at all. The real revolutionary movement stands for the economic emancipation of the workers and rests on the growing strength of a class conscious industrial proletariat and landless peasantry. This latter movement is too big for the bourgeois leaders and can only be satisfied with the social revolution. This manifesto is issued for those who fill the ranks of the second movement. We want the world to know that nationalism is confined to the bourgeois, but the masses are awakening to the call of the social revolution. The growth of class-consciousness in the Indian proletariat was unknown to the outer world until last year, when one of the most powerful and best organised strikes in history was declared by the Indian revolutionaries. Though the nationalists used it as a weapon against political oppression, it was really the spontaneous rebellion of the proletariat against unbearable economic exploitation. As the workers of the cotton mills owned by native capitalists were the first to walk out it cannot be maintained that the strike was nothing more than a nationalist demonstration. It is known in England how this revolt of the famished workers was crushed by British imperialism. But the British working class were misled into believing that it was merely a nationalist demonstration and therefore abstained from taking definite action according to the principles of class solidarity. A simultaneous general strik would have dealt a vital blow to imperialistic capitalism at home and abroad, but the British proletariat failed to rise to the occasion. The only step taken was very weak and of a petty nature—the protest against the manner of crushing the revolt signed by Smillie, Williams, Lansbury and Thomas. This was not the voice of the revolutionary proletariat raised to defend class interest. The bourgeois nationalist movement cannot be significant to the world proletarian struggle or to the British working class, which is learning the worthlessness of mere political independence and sham representative government under capitalism. But the Indian proletarian movement is of vital interest. The tremendous strength which imperialistic capitalism derives from extensive colonial possessions rich in natural resources and cheap human labour must no longer be ignored.

The tremendous strength which imperialistic capitalism derives from extensive colonial possessions rich in natural resources and cheap human labour must no longer be ignored. So long as India and other subject countries remain helpless victims of capitalist exploitation and the British capitalist is sure of his absolute mastery over millions and millions of human beasts of burden, he will be able to concede the demands of British trade unionists and delay the proletarian revolution which will overthrow him. In order to destroy it completely world capitalism must be attacked simultaneously on every front. The British proletariat cannot march towards final victory unless he takes his comrades in the colonies along to fight the common enemy. The loss of the colonies might alarm orthodoz trade union psychology with the threat of unemployment, but a class-conscious revolutionary proletariat, aiming at the total destruction of capitalist ownership and the establishment of a communist state, cannot but welcome such a collapse of the present system since it would lead to the economic bankruptcy of capitalism – a condition necessary for its final overthrow. To all possible misgivings of British comrades we declare that our aim is to prevent the establishment of a bourgeois nationalist government which would be another bulwark of capitalism. We wish to organise the growing rebelliousness of the Indian masses on the principles of the class struggle, so that when the revolution comes it will be social revolution. The idea of the proletarian revolution distinct from nationalism has come to India and is showing itself in unprecedented strikes. It is primitive and not clearly class-conscious so that it sometimes is the victim of nationalist ideas. But those in the van see the goal and the struggle and reject the idea of uniting the whole country under nationalism for the sole purpose of expelling the foreigners, because they realise that the native princes, landholders, factory owners, moneylenders, who would control the government, would not be less oppressive than the foreigner. "Land to the toiler" will be our most powerful slogan, because India is an agricultural country and the majority of the population belongs to the landless peasantry. Our programme also calls for the organisation of the Indian proletariat on the basis of the class struggle for the foundation of a communist state, based during the transition period on the dictatorship of the proletariat. We call upon the workers of all countries especially Great Britain to help us to realise our programme. The proletarian struggle in India as well as in other dependencies of Great Britain should be considered as vital factors in the international proletarian movement. Self-determination for India merely encourages the idea of bourgeois nationalism. Denounce the masked imperialists who claim it and who disgrace your name (of British workers). The fact that India is ruled by the mightiest imperialism known to history makes any kind of revolutionary organisation among the working class almost impossible. The first step towards the social revolution must be to create a situation favourable for organising the masses for the final struggle. Such a situation can be created only by the overthrow or at least the weakening of the foreign imperialism which maintains itself by military power. Cease to fall victims to the imperialist cry that the masses of the East are backward races and must go through the hell fires of capitalistic exploitation from which you are struggling to escape. We appeal to you to recognise the Indian revolutionary movement as a vital part of the world proletarian struggle against capitalism. Help us to raise the banner of the social revolution in India and to free ourselves from capitalistic imperialism that we may help you in the final struggle for the realisation of the universal communist state. Manabendra Nath Roy Abani Mukhetji Santi Devi Evelyn Roy Archive

Evelyn Roy Letter to Henk Sneevliet Source: Transcribed from a photocopy contained in the Evelyn Trent Collection, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. Paris Dec. 9 [1924] Dear Jack Horner,[1] Got your letter through the comrade. The Com. who came from Hamburg did not bring any news from you. He said that you went away for a few days. Your wavering between �two loves� is quite understandable. As a matter of fact, I am inclined to think that it is better for you to remain with your home movement, provided you do not go too far away from another C. I., as, I am afraid, you tend to do. I am still of the opinion that a serious talk will be useful, although I am still not quite certain how we stand here. We are going ahead with the work. At any rate, I will be glad to see you here in Christmas. The necessary arrangement will be made in time for your trip. I will not write anything in detail, since we will meet soon. I am afraid not much can be done about the comrade you sent. There is no chance in the French party. Then at present there is a great chase after foreigners. Our work cannot absorb any more collaborators just at this moment. Anyhow, I will try if something can be found. He can, of course, go to China any time; but he won�t get much help from the party in this respect also. Greetings, Evelyn ___________________ [1] Pseudonym for Henk Sneevliet used by Evelyn and M. N. Roy. Evelyn Roy Archive

MIA > Archive > Evelyn Roy Evelyn Roy The Colonies Mota Singh, Leader of the Indian Peasants (1 September 1922) From International Press Correspondence, Vol. 2 No. 75, 1 September 1922, pp. 563–564. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2020). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. The arrest and conviction to five years penal servitude of Master Mota Singh by the Indian Government, on the charge of promoting disaffection, has received brief mention in the Indian press and still less in the outer world. Yet the Indian Government viewed his activities with greater concern and apprehension than those of Mahatma Gandhi, and enjoy a grimmer sense of triumph now that, after more than a year and a half of effort to arrest him, he lies at their mercy, under lock and key. But there is a section of the Indian people which is acutely aware of the loss of a friend and leader, and this is the starving, many-millioned peasantry of northern India, whose struggles and half-articulate demands for land and freedom from rent and taxes found expression through such leaders, and whose outbreaks of mass action during the past two years, in the shape of riots, insurrections, arson and looting, have struck unnamed terror into the hearts of native landlords and foreign bureaucracy alike. Mota Singh was the acknowledged leader of the Akali Sikhs, that militant section of the Punjab peasants which, under intelligent direction, has been conducting a successful campaign against their own corrupt religious leaders and British coadjutors, for the reclaiming of rich temple lands and their redistribution among the peasant masses, as well as for the lowering of rent and taxes payable to the Government overlord. Organized into a movement of their own class, the peasants of the Punjab were able to formulate a dear-cut program for the redress of their most crying grievances, and to unite together to demand its fulfillment. The Punjab Sikhs being the Government’s main reserve for army recruits, and this section of the population being known for its militant temper, a growing uneasiness was felt in bureaucratic circles over this peasant’s movement, which spread to neighboring provinces with lightning lapidify. Taking their cue from the Akali Sikhs, the landless peasants of the United Provinces inaugurated the Aika or Unity movement, which found similar expression in the formation of village societies united upon a common program of non-payment of rent and taxes, and access to land. Simultaneously the Bhils, an agricultural tribe of central India and Rajhutana, rebelled against their century-old oppression and exploitation, and commenced a series of uprisings which the Government, for all its armed strength, found difficult to suppress. In the south, the Moplahs of Malabar rose in a prolonged and bloody revolt. Throughout the country, since the Amritsar massacre of 1919, a growing peasant movement made itself felt, which responded with enthusiasm to the non-cooperation program of Mr. Gandhi and the Congress leaders, for the sake of the clause about civil disobedience and non-payment of rent and taxes. Joined with the strike movement of the city-proletariat, the popular awakening proved a truly formidable backing to the nationalistic campaign of the Congress extremists, and forced the Government to pay heed to the latter, for the first time in its hitherto innocuous career of resolution-mongering and humble petitioning Some substantial concessions might have been wrung from the foreign rulers, had not Mr. Gandhi’s timidity and religious horror of bloodshed stood in the way. While the latter was beseeching the workers and peasants to abstain from violence to life and property and to purify themselves spiritually for the attainment of Swaraj, at the same time denouncing every manifestation of mass energy as “criminal hooliganism”, the Government, wiser in its estimate of the situation, applied the two-edged sword of amelioration and repression. Amelioration came first, in the shape of land-legislation, hurriedly introduced and rushed through the various provincial legislatures where the peasant unrest was most acute. The opposition of the feudal landlords, the Zemindars and Talucdars, was brushed aside where it could not be conciliated. Some of the most glaring forms of forced labor were remedied, and slight concessions made to the peasants. Repression was visited upon the heads of the middle-class intellectuals who headed the nationalist movement, as well as upon those leaders of the masses, both in the cities and in the country, who had distinguished themselves as constituting a menace to the British Government “by law established”. Among these latter, Mota Singh stood head and shoulders above the rest. A son of the people, a water-carrier by trade, and born in a remote village of the Punjab, he received a fairly good education by dint of great sacrifices on the part of his humble parents. A man of strong build, like all the sons of Northern India, with a quick temper and a warm heart, he could find no settled employment for any length of time despite a knowledge of native languages and a gift for writing, none too common among Indian villagers even of the well-to-do class. In his heart burned the history of his conquered race, the Sikhs, and in his veins coursed the martial blood of a proud and soldierly people. All about him, in his everyday life, he witnessed the slow degeneration and decay of a once stalwart peasantry, evicted from its land by the money-lender and landlord, usually the Government at one and the same time, and forced either into the ranks of the Indian army, where for a miserable monthly pittance they assisted in the subjugation of their own kith and kin, or into the ranks of that greater army, daily increasing, of the landless agricultural worker, drifting about the countryside in search of seasonal employment, unable to buy for himself and his family a full meal a day, from one year’s end to the other.

The daily misery of his people ate into his thoughts, but these found no outward expression until the dramatic march of the northern peasantry on that April day in 1910, to Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, to protest against the passing of the Rowlett Bill which placed all India under martial law. The peaceful demonstration ended in the massacre of hundreds and the wounding of thousands of innocent people at the hands of a terror-stricken and cowardly government. Thenceforth, Mota Singh became a rebel, who went about the countryside preaching open resistance to the foreign rulers, and organizing the peasantry for a revolution which would end their sufferings and bring about new conditions. He was no follower of passive resistance; if he adopted the slogan of non-cooperation, it was because he saw the need for united effort on the part of the entire people, and like a disciplined soldier, he closed ranks under the banner of Mahatma Gandhi and the National Congress which promised Swaraj for India with land free of rent and taxes to all. It was thus that he and his simple followers interpreted the words of the Congress leaders who bid them join the national struggle. In November 1920, the order for the arrest of Mota Singh was issued, but there was none in the regions of his native province who dared to execute the mandate. His Akali banas numbering more than one hundred thousand men, rallied to their leader. A strong body guard was provided for him, and for a year and a half, Mota Singh moved about Northern India, now appearing suddenly on some public platform, where he would make a dramatic speech, now disappearing into the wilderness of the frontier territories, or merging into the vast, unfathomable sea of Indian villagers, who welcomed their chief amongst them and protected him to a man, against the evil intentions of the police. Mota Singh spoke to the Indian peasant about non-payment of rent and taxes, and the overthrow of British rule. But after 1921, while still evading arrest, a new development appeared in his speeches and writings. In November 1921 he made a dramatic appearance at the great annual fair held in Nankana Sahib, a holy shrine of the Sikhs, and delivered a stirring speech of more than three hours duration, which held his simple village auditors spellbound. He spoke not only of the overburdened life of the peasant, of the necessity of organization to resist the payment of rent and taxes, and the evils of British rule, but dwelt at length on the system which underlay it all, the system of private property, which he stigmatized as the true cause of all the wretchedness of the Indian workers and peasants. It was necessary, he said, to make war al one and the same time, against both the foreign government and the native landlords and capitalists who upheld it. His words were listened to with rapt attention. Police officers who were called to the spot by news of Mota Singh’s presence, tried to arrest him, but the people surrounded their leader, defended him from the police with their kirpans, the short daggers worn by the Sikhs as a religious symbol, and bore him off to a place of safety. The zealous defenders of law and order were powerless to touch this popular hero. Mota Singh continued in liberty until June of this year. He roamed throughout the northern provinces of India, preaching doctrines of simple Communism, learned practically from the hard life of his people, and made clear to him by the distant echoes of the great Russian Revolution, which woke the East from its age-long slumbers. Hiding in distant villages, moving from place to place, he still managed to conduct the Akali movement from his hiding places, speaking, writing and organizing with great zeal. Up to the moment of his arrest, he was editing a newspaper and contributing articles to many others, besides doing much translation work and active propaganda. News was brought to the police that he was revisiting his native village, and a whole posse was sent down to surround the place. The police found every house deserted. None knew of the whereabouts of Mota Singh. All denied his presence there. A house to house search commenced, and the village was surrounded by a police-cordon to prevent the escape of anyone. At length a man was observed on the outskirts of the place, clad in a loin-cloth, a black turban and a kirpan, claiming to belong to another village. He was detained, and identified by the Chief Inspector as Mota Singh. The latter, upon recognition, admitted his identity and was led off to jail by the authorities. As a non-cooperator, Mota Singh declined to defend himself in the law-courts of the British Government, and was sentenced to five years imprisonment on the evidence presented in court from his own speeches and writings. The whole world knew of Gandhi’s arrest and conviction, but very few know of Mota Singh; yet Gandhi belongs already to a stage of Indian history that is past, while Mota Singh belongs to the future. He is the type of new leader that is springing up throughout the length and breadth of India, straight from the lives and pressing needs of the people, knowing their sufferings and filled with an unbending determination to end them by any means within their power. Mota Singh lies in prison, but his spirit walks abroad among the Indian workers and peasants, who will rear up new leaders in his likeness to break their chains of slavery.

Mota Singh lies in prison, but his spirit walks abroad among the Indian workers and peasants, who will rear up new leaders in his likeness to break their chains of slavery. The international fellowship of workers throughout the world greet Mota Singh as one of them. Top of the page Last updated on 31 August 2020

Evelyn Roy Indian Political Exiles in France Source: Labour Monthly, Vol. VII, April 1925, No. 4. Transcription/HTML Markup: Brian Reid Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. THE increasing severity with which Indian political exiles are treated in French territory leads one to believe that it is due to the policy of close co-operation entered into between the French and British Governments since the advent of the Conservatives to power in Great Britain. Three such cases have been brought to our attention in the past few weeks, and a fourth one has just been added. The first and most shocking is the expulsion front France of Manabendra Nath Roy, political exile and well-known revolutionary from British India, whose writings and organising activities have done so much to bring India into close touch with the outside world, and whose ideology has deeply impressed itself upon the Indian liberation movement, especially during the past four years. Manabendra Nath Roy has been actively associated with the nationalist and revolutionary movement in India since the age of fourteen years, that is to say, twenty years of his life have been dedicated to the cause of the suffering millions there. Severely persecuted on account of his activities by the British Indian Government, he was several times imprisoned and finally forced to escape in 1915 to avoid a heavy punishment. Since that time he has continued his activities on behalf of his country by means of writing, organising and arousing public opinion in various countries on behalf of his country’s cause. He is the author of several books—India in Transition, One Year of Non-Co-operation, India’s Problem, What Do We Want? and Political Letters—all severely prohibited in India. He came to Europe in 1920, and has travelled extensively in nearly every European country, his life tormented by the ceaseless activities of the British Secret Service, which has dogged his footsteps from the Orient to America, from America to Europe. The German Government, acting under British pressure, issued an order for his arrest in 1923, but he left Germany before it was executed and took up his residence in Switzerland. Here, also, pressure was brought to bear to bring about his expulsion, which was refused by the Swiss Government. He came to France in July of 1924, after the Herriot Government came to power,; hoping to find here a wider field of activity and a safe refuge on the soil of France. His expulsion, executed on January 30, can only be attributed to British pressure brought to bear upon the French Government, which has refused him the right to remain on French soil. A very ugly feature of his expulsion lies in the fact that reports were telegraphed out to India by Reuter, from an obviously inspired source, on February 6, “That M. N. Roy was on his way from France to India, under arrest on a warrant issued in India against him as a result of the Cawnpore Conspiracy Trial.” It appears that only a slight miscalculation of time prevented the British authorities from seizing him and putting him aboard a steamer bound for India, before any public protest could be made, or any preventive action taken on the part of his friends. The manner of his arrest and expulsion bears this supposition out. M. N. Roy was taken in the street, on photographs and information supplied by Scotland Yard; he was hustled to the nearest local police station by a detective and three policeman, without any warrant of arrest being shown to him, nor any proof of identity being provided. From there he would have been taken to the frontier without further formality had not the impatience of the detective to get rid of him obliged him to send his victim to the Prefecture of Police, where the writ of expulsion was executed with the same brutal haste. His demand for a delay of twenty-four hours, in order to arrange his affairs and to consult a lawyer, was roughly denied; he was not allowed to communicate with anyone before his departure, and was sent under escort to the frontier by the first train His wife, who was arrested with him, was kept in detention until his departure, without being allowed to see or speak with anyone. He was told by the detective who arrested him that he was going to be sent to England. The fact that he was sent to Luxembourg only shows that a country was selected where his abduction by British Secret Police would be an easy matter, His escape may be regarded as a miracle of good luck. The other cases which have been brought to our attention of the persecution of Indian political exiles at the hands of the French authorities include two refugees in the French colonies of Pondicherry and Chandernagore. Mr. R. C. L. Sharma, political refugee from British India since before the war, has been constantly harassed by the French and British Secret Police, acting in common. In September-October, 1924, he received a verbal order to leave French territory without delay, no reason being given. Through his lawyer, he was able to secure a delay by demanding a written order from the Governor, who gave him the choice of leaving French territory or going to live in a small village o� the interior, Canouvapeth. Here he has lived for the past six months, closely watched by the French and British Police, unable to leave without authorisation. No offence against French law has been alleged against him; he has done nothing to justify these arbitrary measures. At British instigation, the introduction, distribution and circulation of literature printed in English and freely circulated in Great Britain is severely prohibited in French India, because in these publications the truth about British rule in India is told. A third case, now occupying the attention of the Indian public, is that of Mr.

A third case, now occupying the attention of the Indian public, is that of Mr. Moti Lal Roy, political exile in Chandernagore from British India, the founder of an Ashram or religious school, and editor of a newspaper Prabartak. Mr. Mod Lal Roy is a highly religious man, whose pupils revere him as a “guru” or spiritual teacher. Besides religious instruction, his school aimed to teach the students to become self-supporting in after-life. He is the author of several religious books, and of Hundred Years of Bengal, proscribed in British India. At the instigation of the British-Indian government, the French authorities of Chandernagore suddenly began prosecuting Mr. Roy. He was called before the local Administrator and severely interrogated about his activities, in rude and insulting language. His school was searched, its pupils subjected to cross examination by the police, and his paper suspended. We will quote his own appeal to French public opinion at this unmerited treatment:— The great determination that for the last fifteen years has led me to dedicate myself to the service of God and country; the fire of sacrifice which has consumed my all, while ceaselessly labouring and waiting for its fruition; if all this is deemed to mean nothing else but a disturbance of law and order in the land, then must I not declare from the housetops that even the path of true self-discovery for this nation is closed, and its sadhana (realisation) of manhood in danger, Should I not then, even at the cost of my very life, demonstrate that a pure, blameless seat of religious culture is being made the target for destruction by the power of Europe priding itself upon its twentieth-century civilisation; that the sword of oppression hangs not only over British India, challenging the national manhood there, but the same menace shadows the face of French India was well? I appeal to the French nation, who preached the gospel of Equality, Freedom and Fraternity—to the national leaders and to my countrymen, and hereby draw their attention to see that the holy seat of national culture and spiritual sadhana is not endangered or baffled in its object under the ban of unjust oppression. We believe that the French people, once aware of these wrongs inflicted upon the sons of India who are struggling to free their country from one of the blackest tyrannies in history, will demand the protection of those exiles who have sought refuge from British persecution on the soil of France or her colonies. The position of Indian political refugees is seriously menaced; it lies with the French people who still believe in the rights of man to demand their protection at the hands of the French Government. Paris, March 10, 1925 The following letter has been addressed by M. N. Roy to the French “Ligue des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen,” in protest against his expulsion from France (described in the article above). SIRS, Permit me to submit the following facts for your consideration, thinking that they demand an intervention on your part. On January 30 I was arrested in Paris in fulfilment of an order of expulsion signed by the French Ministry of the Interior on January 3, and was immediately conducted to the frontier, without having been informed of the reasons for my expulsion, and without being given the means to consult a lawyer for my defence. Thus, by one stroke of the pen, the right of asylum for Indian political refugees has been destroyed, and with this right, the idea which Indian revolutionaries hold, that France is the home of Liberty and Democracy for all the oppressed peoples of the world. I appeal to the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme to obtain redress, and to this end I shall briefly recount the facts. For twenty years, that is to say since the age of fourteen, I have fought in the ranks of Indian revolutionaries to free ourselves from foreign rule. My activity, dedicated to the cause of the 320,000,000 oppressed people of my country, has brought upon me, as upon all Indian revolutionaries, the brutal persecution of the English police. I have been imprisoned several times. In 1915, I was forced to fly from India to escape the extreme penalty of the so-called “law” which holds the Indian people in their present state of slavery. The British police have not left me in peace, even in my exile. They have pursued me step by step, from one country to another, from Java to Japan, from China to the Philippines, to America, to Mexico and through most of the countries of Europe. Having taken refuge in Mexico in 1917, President Carranza, then at the head of the Government, gave me protection, and twice refused a demand for my expulsion presented by the British authorities. The exigencies of a revolutionary life have forced me on several occasions to adopt different names. The sympathy of the Mexican people and Government enabled me to live and travel with a Mexican name, which protected me to a certain extent since 1919, when I left for Europe with my wife. Since that time, we have lived and travelled in most of the European countries, writing, studying, organising and making propaganda for the liberation of India. We left Switzerland for France in 1924, and have lived here six months, working for our cause, without ever mixing ourselves in the internal politics of this country. My expulsion can only be attributed to foreign pressure brought to bear upon the French Government, as it was brought to bear upon the American, Mexican, German and Swiss Governments. The French authorities know whence this pressure comes, but it is difficult to believe that France has voluntarily agreed to become an instrument of British Imperialism. My case is not the only one. Acting under British pressure, the Government of M. Poincaré expelled and interned Indian political exiles who had sought asylum in Pondichery and Chandernagore. Two such cases were brought before the attention of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme during the summer of 1924. Can the revolutionary traditions of the great French people accept such acts of oppression against Indian political refugees, seeking shelter from British persecution on French soil? In the name of all Indian revolutionaries, I call your attention to this violation of the right of asylum, and demand the annulation of the order of expulsion against me, and the right to enter and to live in France. With assurances of the highest esteem, I remain, Very truly yours, (Signed) MANABENDRA NATH ROY. Luxembourg, February 1, 1925. Evelyn Roy Archive

Evelyn Roy The Revolution in Central Asia—The Struggle for Power in Holy Bokhara, pt. II Source: Labour Monthly, Vol. 6, September 1924, No. 9, pp. 557-565. Transcription: Ted Crawford HTML Markup: Brian Reid Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2009). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. [The opening section of this article appeared in the July number of THE LABOUR MONTHLY] The first reaction to the Russian Revolution of March, 1917, in Central Asia was the publication in April of a Manifesto by the Mlada Bukharsi,1 in which a programme of reforms was laid down, including, among other things, the limitation of the authority of the Amir and a decrease in the power of his officials, as well as the granting of civil rights to the population. These demands amounted to something less than the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, but they proved too much for the Amir. When the masses turned out to celebrate this proclamation by a peaceful demonstration, the soldiers and hired hooligans of the state provoked some violence, whereupon hundreds of the demonstrators were arrested and thrown into jail, there to be beaten and tortured to death, and one of the leaders was shot. This was the beginning of a reign of terror in Bokhara. All those suspected of sympathising with the Mlada Bukharsi were arrested and executed; thousands were forced to languish in prison without trial. In one demonstration alone, six hundred revolutionaries were shot or hanged, and three thousand sympathisers arrested. The entire population turned against the Amir, even those who had formerly been Moderates. The revolutionary party gained in strength, though forced to go underground. Part of Mlada Bukharsi emigrated to Turkesthan, which, being directly under the Kerensky regime, offered them some protection. The property of all those belonging to revolutionary organisations was confiscated and their lives declared forfeit. Such was the effect of the first revolution of 1917 upon Bokhara el Sharif, whose ruler trembled for his hitherto undisputed power over the destinies of his unfortunate vassals. How much greater was his alarm and indignation when the Kerensky regime was overthrown, and there was proclaimed a Soviet Republic of Workers and Peasants, not only in European Russia, but in the very heart of Central Asia as well—in the neighbouring district of Turkesthan. The years 1918-1919, marked by a desperate struggle on the part of the new-born Russian state against invasion from abroad and counter-revolution at home, saw the rise of an equally deadly and determined struggle for power in Central Asia, between the forces of revolution—represented by the various nationalist movements of Young Sards, Young Kirghiz, Young Turcomans and Young Bokharans aided by the Red Army on one side—and the forces of counter-revolution on the other, including Russian White Guards, native aristocracy and clergy, openly aided and encouraged by foreign gold, munitions and troops, in which the most conspicuous to figure were the British. These years saw the recrudescence on a wide scale of peasant riots and rebellions in Bokhara, provoked by the increasing economic misery due to the high taxes and currency inflation of the Amir’s government. Metal coins had all been confiscated by the latter after the events of 1917; worthless paper money was issued in its stead, which the people were commanded to accept in return for their grain and goods. The export of foodstuffs was forbidden, and trade with Russia, which had formerly been the mainstay of the population, was destroyed since the revolution—white guards and British troops having cut off all connection between the two. Trade depression and civil war ruined the Bokhara peasantry no less surely than it did those of the neighbouring Khanates, while governmental exactions and oppression drove then ever onward to the brink of open rebellion. But for an impoverished and disarmed people to make a successful rebellion arms and money are required, no less surely than it is required by their oppressors who seek to prevent them from rising in revolt. Mlada Bukharsi, with its headquarters in revolutionary Turkesthan, entered into relations with the Soviet Government there, which was itself engaged in a life and death struggle for existence. On one side were the forces of Koltchak and Dutoffat Orenburg, who, by seizing the only line of communication, had cut off all connections with Moscow; on the other side was Denikin, and the British in Trans-Caspia, whose headquarters were in Ashkabad. In addition to these main fighting fronts, there were hostile bands in all the surrounding districts, financed and fed by the same source which fed the main stream of counter-revolution. The very centre of intrigue and conspiracy against the Soviet power was none other than Holy Bokhara, whose nominal independence and neutrality rendered it a most convenient hotbed of counter-revolution. Already in March of 1918, one attempt to ensure constitutional rights to the Bokharan people had been drowned in blood, when Kolesov, Chief of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Government of Turkesthan, presented an ultimatum to the Amir to grant the demands of the Young Bokharans on twenty-four hours’ notice. The reply of the Amir was a secret order to his army for a general massacre of the Bolshevik emissaries and Young Bokharans. Kolesav barely escaped with his life and a part of his following. Subsequent events prevented the Soviet Republic from immediately avenging this dastardly act on the part of the Bokharan Amir. Amir-al-Khan, Amir of Bokhara, Commander of the Faithful and Shadow of God on Earth, had been approached by the British General Mallison, representative of His Most Gracious Majesty King George V, with an offer to increase the influence of the Amir in Bokhara, Samarcand and Tashkent, and with that end in view, to take British (Indian) troops into the territories of Turkesthan.

His Majesty at first refused this valuable offer of assistance because the Mussulmans of his own state were against accepting any British help so long as the Treaty of S�vres remained unaltered. This was a bit of Islamic solidarity which the Commander of the Faithful very soon regretted, and by 1918 he found a way to reconcile his Mussulman conscience to the acceptance of British munitions and weapons of war from this same General Mallison, who became his joint ally, together with the Russian White Guards, Generals Koltchak and Dutoff, and the so-called “Trans-Caspian Government.” The captured records of certain Russian counter-revolutionaries show that at this period a British major (name unknown) came to Tashkent from Meshed and offered the Russian White Guards:— 1. Money, munitions and British troops. 2. To make Turkesthan an autonomous (White) Republic. 3. In return for which Great Britain was to receive concessions in railways and mines for ninety-nine years. Money, munitions and troops were freely given, but the rest of the agreement remained unfulfilled, despite the most indefatigable efforts. The repeated defeats of the Russian white generals (at Ossipov and Khokand in1918-1919) caused the removal of the centre of counter-revolution to Kashgar, in Chinese Turkesthan. Relations had previously been opened with the British Consul there, by name Mr. Esterton. A treaty was actually made between the counter-revolutionaries and the English to clear the Osh corridor, that through this passage munitions might be sent from India to Ferghana (headquarters of the counter-revolution in Eastern Turkesthan). The corridor was cleared, but the munitions failed to arrive in time to save the Whites from ignominious defeat. The failure of the White Guard movement led to the organisation of the Basmatchis (bandits) of Turkesthan in an effort to crush the Soviet power. False letters, telegrams and brochures were printed and distributed among the ignorant population, repeating the lies about the nationalisation and violation of women by the Bolsheviks and their alleged persecution of religion. No means was too low to stoop to for the defeat of the great revolution which threatened to sweep onward in its triumphant course to the very gates of India. But by the end of 1919 communications between Moscow and Turkesthan were re-established, and the “Centroviki,” or troops and responsible workers from the Centre, began to arrive, who quickly organised the campaign against the Basmatchis and remaining bands of Whites. Efforts were made on the part of the British Consul in Kashgar to bring about a rising of the Kirghiz, the nomadic peoples of the Asiatic steppes, but these proved unsuccessful. The real check to British intrigue in Central Asia came from the victory of the Red Army over the Whites; the removal of the Trans-Caspian front and the capture of Resht; the evacuation of Northern Persia by the British, and the successful revolution in Bokhara, resulting in the banishment of the Amir and the establishment of a People’s Soviet Republic. Renewed efforts of the struggle for power in Central Asia came about a year later, in the revolt of Enver Pasha, who sought British help in his realisation of a dream to establish a Pan-Islamic kingdom there, with he himself as ruler. But let us return to the revolution in Bokhara. With the beginning of the year 1920 a new situation arose. The Soviet Republic had beaten back most of its foes. Foreign intervention had ceased to manifest itself openly in the form of invading armies from abroad, and confined itself to secret subventions of the Whites and other counter-revolutionaries, who for the moment had been driven back on all fronts. It was the first breathing-space for the young Republic, giving it a chance to survey the situation in all the far-flung regions of the former Russian Empire. The first to claim attention was the party of Young Bokharans, who for two years had been preparing the moment, already long overdue, for revolution in their own country. The necessity for some kind of action was made all the more pressing by the fact that Bokhara had become the stronghold for all the defeated forces of counter-revolution and intrigue, which took shelter there under cover of the Amir’s hospitality. Trouble began in August, when, taking advantage of one of the innumerable mass-revolts which had become a commonplace since 1917, a group of young Bokharans put themselves at the head of the movement in Charjui, arrested the ruling Begs and declared the establishment of a People’s Government. Within two days, the revolutionary movement had spread throughout the country. The rising in Charjui was reinforced by open rebellion in Emirabbad and other vital points. Encouraged by this popular support, the Revolutionary Committee of Young Bokharans in Charjui declared the abolition of the Emirate, and passed the first decrees on land, taxation and the establishment of a Republic. They followed by appealing to the Soviet Republics of Turkesthan and Russia for help in putting down the counter-revolution. Help was not slow in coming, for a revolutionary army of Young Bokharans had been organising themselves in Tashkent in anticipation of this moment. They marched at once, helped by the Soviet Government of Turkesthan and the Red Army. The Amir stood not upon the order of his going, but fled in all haste, incognito, to Eastern Bokhara, lest he fall into the hands of the irate populace whom he had so abused throughout his reign. In Eastern Bokhara he paused, hoping to organise a counter-revolutionary army with the help of the Whites and their British supporters, among the Basmatchis of that region. There he lingered, sending agents to India and to Meshed to ask for help in putting down the infidels who had deposed him. The son of the former Prime Minister of Bokhara was sent to Meshed, and there drew up a treaty in the name of the Amir with the War Attaché of the British Consulate.

The terms of this Treaty2 include the following provisions: That the British will restore the Amir to his throne, and unite Samarcand with Bokhara; in return for this service, His Majesty’s Government would receive mining and other concessions in Bokhara, and British officers would control the government institutions of that country, including finances and the re-organisation of the Bokharan army. But the British, not for the first time in history, had espoused a lost cause. The popular movement against the Amir and his corrupt government was so strong that, by the close of 1920, that dignitary was forced to flee from Eastern Bokhara and seek refuge in the court of his brother-monarch, Amanulla Khan, the Emir of Afghanisthan. In the course of his flight, the ex-Amir and his bands performed their last act of wanton destruction against the unfortunate population over which they had so long ruled. In revenge for the successful revolution they burned millions of poods of grain, killing the cattle and devastating the land in a final effort to ruin the peasantry and reduce them to utter starvation. Having performed this last act of patriotism, the Commander of the Faithful and his suite took up their residence and continued their intrigues from the neighbouring court of Afghanisthan. But as Amanulla Khan concluded, early in 1921, a Treaty of Friendship and Recognition with the Russian Soviet Government, little material help was given from this quarter to the deposed Shadow of God upon Earth, who found no worthy collaborator in his plans for revenge and restitution until there appeared on the scene as an ally the figure of Enver Pasha, who took up his stand in Eastern Bokhara against the Soviet Power and endeavoured, with British help, to establish himself as the head of a Pan-Islamic kingdom in Central Asia. This was the last adventure of Enver Pasha—an adventure which ended with his own death on the field of battle in Hoveling, in the summer of 1922. It was also the end of the Armir’s hopes of regaining his lost throne by force of arms. He has now taken refuge in Appeals to Public Opinion, to rescue himself from obscurity and oblivion into which the world has permitted him to sink. But, oddly enough, Public Opinion, though a variable quantity, seems loath to bestir itself in his behalf (though he is alleged to have good friends among the British), and the Bokharan People’s Republic continues to exist and to prosper, firm in its friendship and alliance with the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. The old taxation-system of the former Amir, which claimed one-half the peasants’ income, has been abolished; the land formerly monopolised by the Commander of the Faithful and his Begs has been confiscated and distributed among the peasants. Wide reforms have been introduced, granting full civil rights to the entire population without exception, making education free and compulsory, and for the first time in the history of Bokhara stabilising and balancing the budget. A national Bokharan army has been organised, to defend the People’s Government against counter-revolution, banditry and intrigue. The government is Soviet in form, the representatives elected by the people. In the last All-Bokharan Congress of Soviets, out of eighty-five delegates, sixty-three were peasants and ten handicraft-workers, the rest being drawn from the revolutionary intellectuals and middle class who support the nationalist cause. The President of the Republic is a young Bokharan by the name of Faizulla Khajaieff, son of a rich Bokharan merchant. The Nazirate of Foreign Affairs is filled by a peasant, that of Finance by a former shoemaker. Thus it may be seen that democracy has made great strides in a country which but yesterday was a synonym for mediaeval oppression, corruption and greed. For the first time in its history, the peasantry receives help from the government in the shape of credit, seed and cattle to cultivate their land. Economic rehabilitation would have been faster but for the depredations of the Basmatchis under the leadership of Enver Pasha and his band of Turkish officers, who laid waste the land and terrorised the people till the close of 1922. But means have been found to lay down new railway lines, map out new routes across the sandy deserts, erect caravanserais and re-open economic trade centres for commerce with Russia and the outer world. The workers of Bokhara are mainly peasants and handicraftsmen; the bulk of these have been organised into strong co-operative unions for the improvement of their economic condition. Twenty-five per cent. of the Budget of 1923 was devoted to the Nazirate of Education. For the first time, schools are accessible for the education of the rich and the poor. In addition to regular elementary and high schools, there are eleven professional schools for training teachers, doctors, engineers, &c., and special categories of schools for the education of women, for music, art and drama, &c, There are Bokharan students in Russia, Germany and Turkey being trained for expert service to their country—among them are twenty-five young Bokharan women, emancipated from their life of semi-slavery by the experiences of the revolution. There are social centres, libraries, clubs and theatres, created for the cultural uplift and improvement of the population. A campaign for the abolition of illiteracy is being waged. Translation on a wide scale has been undertaken of foreign literature and scientific works in cheap editions published by the State. At the same time, native Bokharan art is protected and fostered, and the people’s own culture preserved. There are, for the first time in the history of Holy Bokhara, medical clinics, hospitals, rest-houses, cr�ches and veterinary centres; a struggle has been inaugurated against the spread of malaria and of venereal disease. In short, new life and a new future has dawned over Bokhara el Sharif with the dawn of the Social Revolution. Religion has been separated from politics and the life of the state, but is permitted free and unrestricted expression, so long as it keeps clear of all subversive political action against the State.

The relations between the Bokharan People’s Soviet Republic and the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, to which it is federated, are of the closest co-operation, friendship and confidence. It is fully realised by the leaders of Young Bokhara, as well as by the masses, that had it not been for the great Russian Revolution of November, 1917, their own revolution would have remained a distant and impossible dream; while had it not been for the help and sympathy extended to them in the trying days of 1920-22, when the counter-revolutionary forces were at their height, the young Republic must have succumbed to its foes, and the People’s Government overthrown to make way for the Amir, propped up by the soldiers and machine-guns of Imperial Britain, the successor to the defunct imperialism of the Tsar. The struggle for power in Central Asia is destined to continue, for the interests at stake are too vast to surrender with ease. But in that struggle, the forces of autocracy and imperialism are on one side, pitted against the ever-increasing army of freedom and emancipation on the other. Who can doubt which will conquer in the end? APPENDIX II The following are extracts translated from a letter from the Emir of Bokhara to Ishan-Sultan and Daulat Min Bey:— TO THE GREAT OF THE GREAT, SULTAN OF THE WORLD AND OF ISLAM THE SOVEREIGN After greetings and our prayers, Glory to Allah, here is everything well under the protection of the Just Amir of Gaza (High) Afghanisthan . . . . It appears from the letter of Khizinachi that Khodji-Mira Khur-Bashi and Mirza Mushgaph have come to complete agreement with the British Government and have arranged for armies, aeroplanes and batteries, which are to arrive through Shugney, Chitran and Darvaz by spring. His Highness himself, with armies and batteries, will operate from Kabul and through Mazari-i-Sharif they want to come to Sharabad. As it was done before, appoint men and send letters to the elders of the tribes of Manghit, Kangara, Altiruch and Kukhisthan. Let them collect as much as they can of cereals and products. You yourself also act in every respect. Allah grant that the Government be well. We shall never yield our crown and throne to the Djadids. If some of the Tribes did not hear, let them know of the High and Supreme Order. Take measures to that end . . . . As many five-cartridge rifles and Berdanka rifles as will be necessary shall be delivered to you thence, rest assured. In the name of God and the Prophet, pray never forget the hospitality of His Highness, and as long as you are alive, do not sit inactive. When His Majesty will come to power, Khisar and all this government will be yours. Dear Friend, fight as much as is in you. Allah grant that the Almighty give you strength. Alaa Maleikum, (Signature) AMIR ALI KHAN. (Signatures of translators, &c.) Notes 1. Central organisation uniting all the revolutionary parties and factions in Bokhara, which was formed after the Russian Revolution of 1905. 2. For the full text see Appendix I, published at the conclusion of July’s instalment. Evelyn Roy Archive The Labour Monthly Index

MIA > Archive > Evelyn Roy Evelyn Roy The Awakening of India (5 May 1922) From International Press Correspondence, Vol. 2 No. 32/33, 5 May 1922, pp. 247–248. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2020). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. India, which during the past decade has been stirring uneasily from its slumbers, has awakened to full consciousness in the last two years. One has but to glance through any daily paper to witness the unusual prominence given to news of events in India in order to realize that this awakening extends to every phase of national existence – intellectual, social, economic and political. The age-long apathy of patient resignation and endurance has been broken, partly by the opening up of India to currents of world thought, due to such transcendent events as the imperialist war and the Russian Revolution, and partly by the desperate economic condition of the overwhelming mass of the people, whom centuries of exploitation have reduced to the last stages of wretchedness. The third and most significant factor in the awakening of India lies in the rapid industrialization of the country, which has been going on throughout the last two decades and which has resulted in the creation, along with a native and foreign capitalist class, of an industrial proletariat numbering about nine millions. It is the growing class-consciousness of the latter, brought about by the increased exploitation during the years of reckless war-profiteering, that is responsible not only for the unparalleled record of strikes, lockouts, various manifestations of mass action and the growth of trade-unionism within recent years, but also for the increasing intensity of the nationalist campaign for political independence. The intimate relationship that exists between the nationalist struggle for Swaraj or Home Rule, and the labor movement for bettering the economic condition of the workers, is realized by few outside of India and even fewer inside. Mr. Gandhi, the saintly leader of the nationalist forces and apostle of non- resistance, could never have commanded the nationwide response of the masses, nor have terrified the British Raj into its present frenzied rage, had there not been behind his incoherent and badly-led movement the steady driving force and fighting spirit the Indian working-class. The power of organized labor has long made itself felt in England and the countries of Europe and America, and no sooner did the spectre begin to raise its head in India than the British rulers foresaw wherein lay the real danger to capitalistic imperialism. In the growth of trade-unionism, in the demands of the workers tor higher wages, fewer hours, better living conditions and a share in the profits of industry, backed up by the united action of the proletariat in prolonged strikes and bloody encounters with the police, the Viceroy of India and his coadjutors rightly read the real threat to British, rule. They hastily began to attempt the divorce of the economic from the political movement by the creation of Labor Arbitration Boards, by the introduction of Factory Acts, by nomination of Labor Members to the new Legislative Council and the appointment of Government Commissions to study the causes of labor unrest in India. But at the same time, they dissplayed their implacable hatred of the working-class by ordering out armed police and soldiery to quell every strike and to force the workers to capitulate to their employers. The labor movement, agitated by nationalist leaders, inevitably drifted into political channels; it became the willing instrument of politicians who called Hartals, national strikes and local ones, declared an economic boycott of British goods, organized their Non-Cooperation campaign against the Government and advanced extremist demands for Swaraj, because they were always sure of being supported in their action by at least one section of the population that stood ready to risk life and limb to obtain its demands, namely, the Indian working-class, with nothing to lose but its chains. The huge, unwieldy mass of disaffected, discontented people in India which swells the ranks of the Nationalists, consisting of the rising bourgeoisie, Government servants, petty traders, ruined artisans, peasants and field and city proletariat, are held together by the slenderest thread of unity – the Nationalist Program, which calls for Swaraj or Home Rule; the righting of the Punjab wrongs of 1919, when several thousand people were massacred by machine-guns under the infamous Rowlatt Act, and the revision of the Treaty of Sèvres by the Allies so as to grant complete independence to and the restoration of Turkey. Upon this exceedingly vague program of conflicting and impossible demands, all classes were asked to unite and to fight the British Indian Government by the non-violent means of boycott, civil disobedience and non-cooperation. So chaotic a movement must long ago have fallen apart into its various component elements, had it not been for the saving grace of Mr. Gandhi’s personality, which contained a powerful appeal lor the Indian masses; for the policy of government persecutions, which took definite shape and reached its climax during the recent visit of the Prince of Wales, and for the awakened mass-energy of the workers and peasants determined to better their lot. The national Hartals or general strikes, which paralyzed the life of all the great cities visited by the Prince, together with the bloody conflicts which broke out between the striking workers and students organized into Volunteer Corps, and the police, forced the hands of the Government. All the prominent leaders of the Nationalist movement were arrested and convicted to from six month to two years’ imprisonment, with the exception of Mr. Gandhi. In addition, about ten thousand Indian Volunteers lie rotting in jails, the majority of whom are culled from the ranks of the workers. The month of December witnessed two significant Congresses in the history of India, one the Second All-Indian Trade Union Congress at Jharria, in which about 20,000 worker-delegates participated, and the other at Ahmedabad, was the 16th Session of the Indian National Congress, the political organ of the Nationalists, attended by 6,000 accredited delegates.

Both were closely watched by the Government. Both passed almost identical demands. The Trade Union Congress, besides advancing an economic program lfor the redress of workers’ grievances and the betterment of their miserable condition, declared that the only true cure for the workers’ ills lay in the attainment of Swaraj, and that this would be won through the action of the Indian working-class within ten years. The National Congress, forgetting or ignoring the economic grievances of its principal mainstay, the Indian workers and peasants promulgated the same vague political program as before; announced the adoption of non-violent civil disobedience to Government laws and orders as the immediate tactics to attain their demands, and elected Mr. Gandhi supreme arbiter of the national destinies, with power to name his successor in case of his arrest. The recently-announced arrest of Mr. Gandhi comes as no surprise to those watching the current of events in India. The campaign of Civil Disobedience led quickly to violence, as was to be expected. The impoverished peasantry refused to pay rent and taxes; police and militia were promptly called out by the Government to enforce collections, and passive resistance quickly transformed itself into sanguinary struggles between the police and the people. Gandhi, whose vacillating tactics have more than once led the Congress Party to ridicule and disaster, renounced the policy of Civil Disobedience as premature, and called upon the rioters to repent and offer themselves to justice. His change of front came just in time to stop the warrant for his arrest issued by the Government – another unfortunate blunder in tactics, since he laid himself open to the charge advanced against the Ali Brothers, of trying to save himself. Again, as with the Ali Brothers, to clear himself of this imputation, Gandhi swung again to the left and sanctioned individual civil disobedience, which brought down the wrath of the authorities upon his head and resulted in his incarceration. The moment was opportune and had long been waited for by the Government, which had given the Mahatma a very long rope in the hope that he would end by hanging himself. To have arrested him two months earlier would have been to risk an open revolution; coming when it did, the country chafed and there were minor uprisings in every part, but these were easily put down. The Government felt firm ground beneath its feet before it gathered into jail the last Indian leader of national repute, who ranks undoubtedly first in actual influence and popularity among the masses. In spite of his “Himalayan mistakes”, Gandhi can never be accused of cowardice. His worst faults are bad judgment and lack of political acumen. He failed to comprehend the social forces with which he was playing, and until these are understood, the Indian movement will continue, as in the past, to be a series of false advances and precipitate retreats before an enemy too strong and astute for Indian political babes-in-the-woods to cope with. Nevertheless, the arrest of Gandhi marks a temporary setback to the progress of the revolution in India. However badly, he has steered the unwieldy mass of Indian energy and opinion into one broad channel of ceaseless agitation against the existing system during the last two years. If his leadership was confused, it was because the movement itself was a chaos which bred confusion, though he has made blunders of first magnitude, he at the same time groped a way for the people out of the blind alley of political stagnation and government repression into the roaring tide of a national upheaval. The Indian movement is ready for a new leader because it is becoming every day more clarified, its inherent contradictions are becoming palpable even to its component parts, but this very clarification spells disintegration, unless some new leaders are hurled into the breach. The more conservative right wing of moderate Indian opinion is growing tired of the political handsprings of Gandhi and his followers. The extreme left wing, whose body consists of Indian labor, has seen its forces uselessly spent in a hopeless political contest with the bureaucracy for a Swaraj constantly postponed. In every affray with the armed forces of the Government, it has come off worsted, its best elements lie in jail. It too, grows tired of political rope-dancing, and will break away, unless some tangible economic program is advanced by the Congress leaders to rally labor in earnest to their cause. Like the Chartist Movement in England, which its Indian prototype in many ways resembles, what began as a great mass-movement towards political, social and economic revolution may end as a mediocre struggle of the disheartened workers to win, within the bonds of legalized trade-unionism, the right to a full meal a day and an old-age pension when Capitalism shall throw them on the scrapheap. May there soon arise from the ranks of Indian labor, or from the intellectual proletariat at war with foreign rule, a class-conscious Gandhi who will crystallize the political confusion that reigns in the Indian movement by formulating a clear and definite program based upon the needs and aspirations of the overwhelming majority of the Indian people; by boldly raising the standard of the working-class, and by declaring that only through the energy and lives of the Indian proletariat and peasantry, can Swaraj ever be attained. Top of the page Last updated on 2 January 2020

Evelyn Roy The Truth about the Sikh Rebellion Source: The Communist, November 18, 1922, pp. 4–6. Publisher: Communist Party Great Britain. Transcription: Ted Crawford. HTML Markup: Brian Reid. Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. A struggle whose greatness and potentiality is little realised is being carried on in the Indian province of the Punjab, between the Government and the property-holders on one side, and the insurgent peasants known as the Akali Sikhs on the other. This struggle is not a new one; it has been going on continuously, though less spectacularly, for many years. But of late it has broken out in such a form as to merit the august attention of the London Times and similar organs of Imperialism. The Sikhs The Sikhs are a rugged northern people inhabiting the province of the Punjab, of whose population they number about 11 per cent. They are mainly agricultural in profession, the majority being small tenants or day labourers, the number of the latter having swelled enormously of late years, owing to the growing pauperization of the peasantry and the intensifying land concentration in the hands of large capitalists holding directly from the Government. By religion, the Sikhs are a reformed sect of the Hindus, with a strong military tradition dating back to the days when the Moghul Empire was overthrown and the Sikhs under their tenth Guru or spiritual leader, Govind Singh, established an autonomous military state. The history of this militant sect resembles somewhat the semi-military, semi-religious Christian communities that flourished during the Middle Ages in Europe, and in the manner of living, customs and traditions, is not unlike the Russian Cossacks of the Don. Nine spiritual heads preceded the advent of Govind Singh, who died in 1708, after having re-organised the Sikhs into a strongly militarized political unit and laid down certain principles of religious and social reform which are scrupulously observed by his followers even to-day. Nirmalas and Akalis According to his mandate, the Sikh population was divided into two main branches or professions. – (1) The Nirmalas, or Spotless Ones, who formed the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and (2) the Akalis, or Immortal Ones, whose first duty was to be good soldiers and who constituted the military defenders of the Sikh State. Every member of this military brotherhood was enjoined to wear the “five K’s” – the Kes or long hair, to protect head in battle; the Karra, or iron circlet; the Kangi, comb; the Kirpan, a knife or sword, and the Kach, or short drawers. In addition, each Sikh wears a turban, folded upon his head in a particular fashion peculiar to his sect. As time passed, the Nirmalas, whose functions were purely priestly, degenerated into a corrupt and licentious body, fattening on the rich proceeds of the. worshippers, and handing on the guardianship of the numerous sacred shrines with their vast landed estates as an hereditary trust to their sons. The Akali, on the other hand, tilled the soil and were forced more and more into the ranks of the agricultural proletariat. Unemployment and their own strong military traditions forced many of them to take service in the Indian army and police force to earn a livelihood. Sikh Regiments The Sikh regiments formed the flower of the British defence forces, and in this capacity, have acted not only as the jailors of their own people, but have been freely used to keep other races in bondage, beyond the confines of India. Sikh soldiery served in Europe and were sent to fight in Mesopotamia in the late war, and Imperialism thinks to have found in them an inexhaustible reservoir of mercenaries to carry out its plans of conquest. But man proposes, and the Law of Economic Determinism disposes. The end of the war and the exigencies of Indian budget, top-heavy with military expenditures, forced the demobilization thousands of men who had learned more valuable lessons than manslaughter during their campaign abroad. Every Sikh soldier who returned to his village carried with him the seed of discontent and incipient revolt against the poverty and misery that he found there. This spirit added fuel to the flame that had already kindled the Punjab with sporadic agrarian revolts. The Sikh League The years from 1938-20 are filled with official reports about looting and burning, rioting and killing, on the part of the Punjab Peasantry. In 1918, the Sikh League wars formed to give political expression to this growing unrest, and in 1920 the Sikh community formally allied itself with the Indian National Congress, to win Swaraj by means of Non-violent Non-co-operation, including non-payment of rent and taxes.

In 1918, the Sikh League wars formed to give political expression to this growing unrest, and in 1920 the Sikh community formally allied itself with the Indian National Congress, to win Swaraj by means of Non-violent Non-co-operation, including non-payment of rent and taxes. The Akalis, who were the most aggressive members of the Sikh community, succeeded in forcing upon the acceptance of the Sikh League and the Congress leaders, the prosecution of their programme of reform of the Sikh shrines, which they wished to remove from the guardianship of the Nirmalas and Udasis (an older Sikh sect closer to orthodox Hinduism than to reformed Sikhism), and administer in the interests of the Sikh peasants. There are upwards of three hundred of these shrines scattered throughout the province, dedicated to the memory of the ten Gurus, and used as places of worship by the people. Up till now, these Gurdwaras, or shrines, have been in the keeping of rich and corrupt Mahants or guardians, some holding their office by hereditary succession, others by government appointment. Needless to say, the treasure and revenues from the vast estates attached to these Gurdwaras, whose annual income alone is estimated at over £700,000 sterling, are vested exclusively in the Mahant or custodian. The programme forced upon the Sikh League and Congress Committee by the Akali Dal (peasant organization) was to take forcible possession of these shrines by direct action. The Congress agreed to back the Akalis provided their tactics were non-violent. Direct Action Thereupon, between the latter part of 1920 to February, 1921, several shrines were seized by orderly detachments of Akalis, who would descend suddenly and in a body upon the Maliant, demand the keys, evict him and take possession. The first to be captured in this manner was the famous “Golden Temple,” which the Akalis took by surprise and proceeded tranquilly to administer, despite the protests and wails for protection from the evicted Mahants. The Government held aloof in the beginning, not wishing to be accused of interfering in what was osten ibyl a religious movement for reform but the deeper conflict between the vested interests of the rich Sikhs and Mahants and the direct action of the landless Akali peasantry was soon apparent, and forced the Government to take its stand by the side of the propertied classes, where it spiritually belongs. In February, 1921, the whole of India was startled by the slaughter of 130 Akalis who had visited the shrine of Nankana Sahib to attend a Conference called there by the Sikhs, and who were attacked by armed Pathan soldiery hired by the Mahant. Thousands of Akalis rushed to the spot, to vindicate the wrong perpetrated upon their brothers, and the forces of the Government intervened. Hundreds of Akalis were arrested and sentenced to jail, while the Mahant who had caused the outrage, after being put, on trial and condemned to death, had his sentence reduced to transportation for life. The Sikhs United This incident united the Sikh community against the Government and made a political issue out of what had seemed a purely religious affair. A Bill introduced by the Government in April 1921 for the reform of the shrines had to be withdrawn because the Sikhs refused to co-operate in its discussion unless all Akalis held in jail were released and the Bill were drawn up according to the dictates of the Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (Committee for the Reform of the Shrines). Sikh members of the Legislative and Provincial Assemblies resigned, and one of them, Sirdar Mehjak and Singh, former Government Advocate and Vice President of the Punjab Legislative Council, became Secretary of the Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, The effect on the Sikh masses was instantaneous and alarming to the Government. Every Sikh, man, woman and child, armed himself with a Kirpan, which grew overnight front a conventional religious symbol into a shining two-edged sword. Disaffection spread to the Sikh regiments, recruited directly from the peasantry, and soldiers appeared on parade in black turban and trousers with their kirpans conspicuously displayed. Those sentenced for insubordination for refusing to remove these symbols went on hunger strike: whole companies followed their example. So serious did tile situation appear that the Government was forced to make hurried concessions to save its face during the visit of the Prince of Wales. In January, 1922 Sikh prisoners were released, the keys of the Golden Temple which had been taken by the Government were handed over unconditionally to the Gurdwara Reform Committee, and the Kirpan recognised as exempt from the Arms Act. Akali Movement Grows The next few months witnessed a steady strengthening of the Akali movement, now organised into well-disciplined peasant societies known as the Akali Dal. Their programme was access to land, free of rent, and taxes, and their tactics that of passive resistance by the application of Civil Disobedience in the shape of non-payment of rent and taxes to the landlords and Government. The repression that visited India on the departure of the Prince of Wales, fell heaviest of all on the Punjab. Over 3,000 Akalis were thrown into jail, martial law was declared throughout the province, and the press effectually muzzled to conceal the true state of affairs. Out of this state of darkness, the Punjab has once more leaped into the centre of the world’s stage. The Akali Sikhs, after stiffening temporary suppression, have recommenced their activities in it more determined and sensational manner than before. The Akali Volunteers The forcible capture of shrines has been again resorted to in the teeth of Government opposition, and Akali volunteers are marching in bands to the shrines, clad in black turban and kirpan, singing nationalist songs and refusing to obey the order of troops posted on the high-roads to turn back whence they came. At Guru Ka Bagh, a shrine six miles from Amritsar, five Akalis were arrested by order of the Mahant for chopping down a tree on the estate of the shrine.

They were sentenced on a charge of theft to six months’ imprisonment and a heavy fine. Next day five more volunteers were called for and they came in hundreds, then in thousands. The railroads, by Government order, refused to carry them, and so they walked, swinging along the high-roads in organized formation, singing their martial songs, and declaring themselves ready to die in the cause. Troops were, rushed to the spot to defend the shrine, a cordon of armed soldiers and police were thrown around it for several miles, and pickets stationed on all the approaching roads to turn back the Akali volunteers. The latter refused to obey, and orders were given to fire. At Guru ka Bagh, six miles from the scene of the Amritsar massacre of 1919, more Indian blood has been shed in the defense of fundamental human rights. Government sides with Property The Government has openly declared its position. The efforts of the Akalis to take possession of the shrines will be resisted by all the resource of the state. The sacred rights of private property are declared to be in jeopardy, and a deputation of the Mahants to the Government protesting against the actions of the Akalis was received sympathetically. A second bill for the reform of the shrines, introduced in the last session of the Punjab Council, was rejected by the vested Sikh interests. It is proposed by the Government to introduce a third one, effectuating a compromise, between the Mahants and property holders on one side, and the militant peasantry on the other. Meanwhile, the situation is described as “critical.” Battles are being fought, not alone at Guru ka Bagh, but in other parts of the Punjab, where the Akali bands have repeated their attempts to oust the Mahants and put themselves in possession of the temple lands. Such lawless actions form stepping stones on the road to an open agrarian revolution, and the Government sees the danger ahead. Evelyn Roy Archive | The Communist IndexMarxism & Anti-Imperialism in India Last updated on 3 December 2020

Evelyn Roy The Funeral Ceremony at Gaya Source: Labour Monthly, Vol. 4, April 1923, No. 4, pp. 218-228. Transcription: Ted Crawford HTML Markup: Brian Reid Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2009). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. The thirty-seventh annual session of the Indian National Congress met in the last week of December, 1922, at the picturesque pilgrimage place of Gaya, in the province of Behar. No more appropriate place could have been selected, for Gaya is the traditionally sacred spot in which to offer up Pinda (sacrifices) to the lingering ghosts of the departed dead, and so release them from the last earthly bond, that they may journey towards Nirvana or seek rebirth. The fifteen thousand or more political pilgrims that wended their way on foot, bullock-cart, or steam car to the holy spot to attend the Congress session were, perhaps, unconscious of the fact that their eager pilgrimage to Gaya was to offer involuntary Pinda to the dear departed but lingering ghost of Gandhism, famous to the world as Non-Violent Non-Co-operation based upon Soul-Force—but such was, nevertheless, the fact. According to Hindu custom, after a definite period of mourning for the dear departed is over, the Sradh ceremony is performed, consisting of a feast given to all the friends and relatives of the deceased. The Sradh at Gaya marks the close of a definite period in the Indian Nationalist movement—the preparatory period inevitably characterised by confusion of ideas and mistakes in tactics, but valuable for the political lessons to be deduced therefrom. The new period that lies ahead was inaugurated upon the funeral ashes of the old. The social and economic background of the thirty-seventh National Congress was wide as the poles asunder from that which marked its predecessor at Ahmedabad the year before. A full year had rolled away without the slightest approach of the promised Swaraj. Mahatma Gandhi and twenty-five thousand faithful followers fill the Government “hotels” as a reward for having followed the injunctions of Non-Violent Non-Co-operation based upon Soul-Force. The middle classes, once the vanguard of the National movement, are divided among themselves and weak in their counsels as to the future course to follow. Boycott of schools and law courts, depending on them for fulfilment, have been an acknowledged failure; boycott of foreign cloth and liquor shops, and the propagation of Khaddar and Charka (homespun and hand-weaving), which depended on the masses for fulfilment, have equally failed, not for lack of goodwill or loyalty to the imprisoned Mahatma but from sheer economic disability of the starving workers and peasants to pay higher prices and work longer hours in the sacred but abstract name of Patriotism. The chief clauses of the “Constructive Programme,” adopted at Bardoli in February, 1922, just after the riot of Chauri Chaura, which urged the prosecution of the triple boycott while suspending indefinitely the declaration of civil disobedience and non-payment of taxes as well as the use of all aggressive tactics, have had the ultimate effect of damping the enthusiasm of the masses for the national cause and of withdrawing from it the backbone of mass-energy, while at the same time giving free play to the forces of Government repression, let loose in all their vigour since the departure of the Prince of Wales from Indian soil. Meanwhile, what of the masses of whom everyone in India, politically-minded or otherwise, has learned to speak? “Back to the villages” has become the slogan of every shade of political opinion. It would seem that this new and potent force in Indian national life, the hitherto dumb and inarticulate workers and peasants, has become a pawn in the political game, waged heretofore between the Government and the middle classes. How otherwise to explain this eagerness to reach the “masses”; the sudden zeal for organisation and propaganda on the part of Congress-wallahs; the equally sudden desire to rush remedial legislation through unwilling Legislatures, on the part of the Government, to somewhat better the condition of rack-rented peasantry and sweated factory hands? The thirty-seventh annual session of the Indian National Congress met this year upon a background of comparative industrial calm, broken by sporadic strikes of a purely isolated and economic nature, in no way comparable with the fever of industrial unrest which displayed itself in political strikes and national hartals during the corresponding period of last year. But it met at the same time in a period of intense organising activity on the part of the working masses, of the slow but persistent growth of trade unionism and co-operative effort, of industrial and economic conferences and efforts at federating the loosely-scattered labour organisations whose number and influence have immensely multiplied within the preceding twelvemonth. Three events bade fair to disturb the harmony of the prospective solemnities of the Congress, and a fourth actually obtruded itself upon the Congress meditations, forcing some recognition from the mourners there assembled of present-day actualities in the land of the living. We refer first to the publication in November of the report of the Civil Disobedience Committee, which declared the country to be unfit for the inauguration of mass Civil Disobedience, including non-payment of taxes, but recommended by an evenly-split vote the reconsideration of the boycott of the Reform Councils, with the object of contesting the elections to be held in the spring of 1924. The second discordant note was struck by no less a person than the President-elect of the Congress, Mr.

The second discordant note was struck by no less a person than the President-elect of the Congress, Mr. C.R. Das, newly-released from six months’ confinement in gaol, who after the report of the Civil Disobedience Committee, saw fit to deliver himself of two speeches which set the whole country by the ears. In addition to echoing the heresy of Council-entry, qualified with the object of “ending or mending them,” the Deshbandhu (Friend of the Country) startled his compatriots and the bureaucracy alike by enunciating such heresies as the following:— “I do not want that sort of Swaraj which will be for the middle classes alone. I want Swaraj for the masses, not for the classes. I do not care for the bourgeoisie. How many are they? Swaraj must be for the masses, and must be won by the masses.” (Speech at Dehra Dun, November 1, 1922.) A few weeks later he published a “Mass” programme in his daily vernacular organ the Bangalar Katha, which declared for the constructive programme and election to the Reform Councils, and stressed the necessity for organising labour and peasant societies as a means to declare a national strike and enforce nonpayment of taxes for the final winning of Swaraj, which vague term he recommended should be defined by a National Committee. Excitement and speculation were still bubbling over the Deshbandhu’s heresies to orthodox Gandhism when a third event on the very eve of the Congress plunged the entire nation into a fever of fright and bewilderment. This was the cabling out to India by Reuter, evidently under Government orders, of the complete programme of Social Democracy drawn up for the consideration of the National Congress by the exiled “Vanguard” Party in Europe. The cabled document was published in almost the entire Indian press, Official, Moderate, and Nationalist, on December 21, 22, and 23, the comments thereon extending over the entire week that preceded the opening of the National Congress at Gaya. The object of the Government in this spectacular move was to alienate the Moderates by the spectre of Bolshevism, and to frighten the Congress, and especially Mr. Das’s party, out of any discussion that might remotely resemble the “Vanguard” programme. Both these designs were successful. The landlords and Moderates rallied most satisfactorily to the side of “law and order,” and the Nationalists busily tried to whitewash themselves of any suspicion that they might faintly approve of such rash republican ideas. Needless to say the “Vanguard” programme, though it might have been in the hearts of some, found no one to sponsor it in the national conclave, but thanks to the crude advertisement given by the Government its text was known to the entire country. That its clauses of social and economic reform, such as the eight-hour day, the confiscation of large estates for redistribution among the landless peasantry, and the nationalisation of public utilities, remained undiscussed proves the crime of the Congress to be one of deliberate commission rather than omission. Certain outstanding figures in the Congress may be taken as symbolic of the tendencies that direct the current of national life in India to-day. The voice of Mr. C.R. Das, expressing the ideals and aspirations of the liberal Indian intelligentzia, struggling to free itself from the social and economic interests of the bourgeoisie; opposed to him, the colourless figure of Mr. C. Rajagopalacharia, the “deputy-Mahatma,” expounding the principles and dogmas of “pure Gandhism,” and personifying the reactionary spirit of lower-middle-class extremism, sounding the death-knell to progress and scurrying to cover at the slightest hint of revolution. The voice of bourgeois radicalism, speaking in the person of N.C. Kelker, the leader of the Maharashtra school of political rationalism, opposed to the metaphysical reactionaries of orthodox Nationalism and temporarily allied with the liberal intellectuals of the Left Wing in their common fight against the stand-patters of the Centre, who still commanded an overwhelming majority. These were the voices of definite organised groups, representing the needs and more or less conscious aspirations of an entire class. There were other voices, less distinct and not so clearly heard, but nevertheless symbolic of rising social forces destined to dominate the sittings of future congresses—the voice of P.K. Mazumdar, echoing that of Hazrat Mohani at Ahmedabad, demanding that Swaraj be defined as “complete independence without foreign connection by the people of India by all legitimate and proper means.” Here spoke the new school of radical Republicanism, new as yet to India, but corresponding to the unexpressed desires and needs of a vast section of the people. Fainter still, and heard for the first time within the Indian National Congress, spoke the voice of the workers and landless peasants, through the lips of the venerable Mr. Singaravelu Chettiar, of Madras, who introduced himself, amid the cheers and laughter of the assembled delegates, as “an Indian Communist,” and who urged upon the Congress the necessity of making common cause with labour to bring about a national strike so as to get rid of the domination both of the Government and of the bourgeoisie. Communists throughout the world, he assured his brother delegates, were with India in her battle for freedom.

Communists throughout the world, he assured his brother delegates, were with India in her battle for freedom. In a manifesto issued just before the Congress, Mr. Singaravelu stressed the necessity of adopting an economic programme which would include the immediate grievances of the Indian workers and peasants within its scope. The great struggle between the two contending parties within the Congress, the Right and Left Wings combined against the Centre, apparently hung upon the burning issue of Council-entry—whether or not the Congress Party should change its tactics and contest the coming elections to the Government Reform Councils. But the real issue lay deeper, and was tersely expressed in the popular names given to the respective factions, viz., the parties of “Pro-Change “ and of “No-Change.” Whether or not the Congress should exercise the right of private judgment upon the mistakes and failures of the past year, and reverse the programme and tactics sanctified by the benediction of Mahatma Gandhi, proven wrong by time and trial—or whether it should follow blindly the dictates of the Mahatmaji throughout the time of his incarceration, regardless of opinions to the contrary—this was the real issue of the struggle at Gaya. Every resolution brought before the house was represented in this spirit by loyal followers of orthodox Gandhism, and was voted upon in this form. “Change or No-Change,” “Love and Loyalty to the martyred Mahatma or Treason to his sacred Memory”—thus was every question formulated and thus was it decided where every vote cast was a Pinda offered to the beloved memory of the revered Mahatmaji. Orthodox Gandhism scored a complete and overwhelming victory, but for all that orthodox Gandhism is dead, and what transpired at Gaya was merely the respectful offering of friends and relatives to the lingering ghost of the deceased. A study of the resolutions accepted and rejected during the five days’ Congress deliberations reveals the nature of the struggle that has raged within the ranks of the Non-Co-operators throughout the past eight months. It is the struggle between the past and the present, between the dead and the living, between reaction and progress, which resulted in the temporary and illusive triumph of the former over the latter. The orthodox No-Changers rejected all the recommendations which their own Civil Disobedience Committee had recommended—the withdrawal of the boycott of law courts and schools—and reaffirmed their faith in these confessedly moribund tactics. The recommendation of the same Committee to boycott British, as opposed to merely “foreign” cloth, brought forward as a resolution before the Congress, was likewise rejected on the grounds that the specific boycott of British goods implied a hatred foreign to the doctrine of Non-Violence and Love. The main bone of contention, that of Council-entry, was debated exclusively from the point of view, on the part of the orthodox No-Changers, as to whether Mahatma Gandhi would sanction such a departure from the policy laid down by him at Ahmedabad and confirmed at Calcutta. In the words of Mr Rajagopalacharia:— “The Congress should remember that no great change from the present programme could be recommended by any but the wisest and greatest of leaders. It is not possible for small men to ask the Congress to take a line different from what this house, sitting at Calcutta decided after careful consideration.” There were other resolutions lost, of equal if not more importance to that of Council-entry, which was stressed far beyond its due. The resolution presented last year by Hazrat Mohani, now in gaol, demanding a change in the Congress programme by declaring the goal of the Indian people to be the attainment of independence outside the British Empire, “by all possible and proper means,” was presented again this year at Gaya by the spokesmen of his party, which appears to have grown considerably in the past twelve months. Needless to say, the resolution was lost by an overwhelming majority, but the number of votes cast for it was larger than last year, and the speeches made in favour were more outspoken. The annual appearance of such a resolution denotes the growth of that hitherto rara avis in the constitutional Congress movement—a party of radical republicanism. Manifestly in order to show that the No-Change party still asserted its right to give a lead to the people, and as a counter-irritant to the contagious cry of Council-entry, the Congress majority adopted two last-minute resolutions which would be laughable were they not so pathetic in their inadequacy. One was on Civil Disobedience—ambiguously worded and vague in portent, but launched as a possible objective so soon as the faithful followers should complete the preliminary requirements, viz., the collection of twenty-five lakhs of rupees (about �170,000) for the Tilak Swaraj Fund, and the enrolment of 50,000 volunteers, pledged to Non-violent Non-Co-operation and the fulfilment of the constructive programme. The resolution on Civil Disobedience, passed against the unanimous recommendation of the Civil Disobedience Committee appointed by the Congress, is one of those anomalies which can only be explained by a study of the psychology of the No-Changers. The very men who had most loudly cried down the use of this weapon as “dangerous,” now proposed its adoption and. carried the resolution successfully through the hypnotised Congress. It was meant less as a threat to the Government than as a bribe to the sensation seeker. But the Congress has cried, Wolf! Wolf!” too often for either the Government or people to pay heed. The resolutions affirming the boycott of schools and law courts, and providing for a conditional declaration of Civil Disobedience (which is to be individual and not mass), were best described by the Pro-change Press as “whipping a dead horse.” The other last-minute resolution thrown as a sop to the sensation-monger bordered less on the Bolshevik, as described by the Anglo-Indian Press, than on the lunatic, taking into consideration the nature of the element which proposed it. It declared:— The Congress hereby repudiates the authority of the legislatures in future to raise any loan or incur any liabilities on behalf of the nation, and notifies to the world that, on the attainment of Swarajya, the people of India, though holding themselves liable for all debts and liabilities rightly or wrongly incurred hitherto by the Government, will not hold themselves bound to repay any loans or discharge any liabilities incurred on and after this date on the authority of the so-called legislatures brought into existence in spite of the national boycott.

This heroic gesture of defiance before the Government, the Councils, and the world was presented on the last day of the Congress without having been fully discussed in the Subjects Committee, where it was proposed for the first time late on the previous night, and in the absence of some of the leaders. Mr. Rajagopalacharia himself, who proposed the resolution, seemed a little amazed at his own temerity in departing so far from the footsteps of the Mahatmaji, and made little effort to support his point in the face of opposing speeches, which stigmatised the resolution as “non-moral, to say the least.” But his faithful followers, trained to obedience, voted blindly in favour, and to the great surprise of everybody present the resolution was overwhelmingly adopted. By this dictum the petty bourgeoisie, represented by the Congress patriots, have driven another nail into their own coffin, since who among the financiers, whether foreign or native, now investing their capital in India will be interested in having come to power a class which has beforehand repudiated the principal and interest on those investments? The only other noteworthy resolution adopted by the Congress was that approving the organisation of Indian labour “with a view to improve and promote their well-being and secure them their just rights, and also to prevent the exploitation of Indian labour and Indian resources.” This resolution was passed unanimously, it being the fashion in Congress as well as other circles to talk about the “masses,” and a Committee on Labour Organisation was appointed “to assist the Executive Council of the All-India Trade Union Congress for the organisation of Indian labour, both agricultural and industrial.” A similar resolution was passed by the Congress two years ago at Nagpur, but nothing came of it. It remains to be seen whether the present resolution will be taken more literally. The Congress ended, as was to be expected, in a split between the forces of the living from those which clung to the dead past. Mr. C.R. Das and his followers, on the termination of the Congress session, issued a manifesto announcing the formation within the Congress ranks of the “Congress Khilafat Swaraj Party,” based upon “the attainment of Swaraj by all peaceful and legitimate means, working on the principle of Non-violent Non Co-operation.” Mr. Das resigned his presidency of the Congress on the ground that his views did not coincide with those of the majority, but declared his party would continue to work within the Congress until the majority were converted to their viewpoint, meanwhile reserving the right to follow those tactics which seemed best to them. The Executive of the new party numbers among it such men as Mr. C.R. Das, President, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Motilal Nehru, V.J. Patel, N.C. Kelker, M.R. Jayakar, C.S. Ranga Iyer, V. Abhayankar, &c., &c., names which speak volumes to those even slightly acquainted with the Indian nationalist movement. It means that the Left, represented by C.R. Das and the liberal intellectuals, has temporarily joined forces with the Right—that school of rationalist politicians who have long since headed a revolt away from Congress leading-strings back into the ranks of the co-operating Moderates, and whose philosophy of nationalism is summed up in the phrase “Responsive Co-operation.” The new party, which met at the end of January to draw up a programme and line of action, has not yet published the result of its deliberations, which covered such questions as the formation of a Pan-Asiatic Federation (to supplant Pan-Islamism), boycott of British goods, and participation in elections to the Reform Councils. A committee is at work drawing up a tentative scheme of Swaraj, which the new party has set itself the task of defining, and will place before the country for discussion and approval through the press and platform. The scheme includes the main points set forth in Das’s presidential address before the thirty-seventh National Congress, viz.: (1) The formation of local autonomous centres on the lines of the ancient Indian village system, integrated into a loosely-federated national unit; (2) the residuary power of control to remain in the hands of the Central Government, so exercised as to interfere least with the local autonomy of the integrated village units. In view of Mr. Das’s reiterated insistence on the importance of attaining “Swaraj for the masses and not for the classes,” which raised such a clamour in the British and Indian Press, and led to his being stigmatised as “Bolshevik,” the specific declaration of the first convention of the new party on the rights of private property, has a double interest and significance. The members declare that “private and individual property will be recognised and maintained, and the growth of individual wealth, both movable and immovable, will be permitted.” This frank declaration of class-affiliation and class-consciousness betokens more than the mere winning over of Mr. Das and the school of liberal intellectuals to the protection of bourgeois property rights. It shows the rapid crystallisation of ideology in the Indian national struggle, and the presence of a predominating bourgeois element, determined to protect its class-interests from the very outset against the rising flood-tide of mass-energy that may some day find an outlet in revolution. Evelyn Roy Archive The Labour Monthly Index

Evelyn Roy Some Facts About the Bombay Strike Source: Labour Monthly Vol. VI, May 1924, No. 5. Transcription/HTML: Brian Reid Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. ONE hundred and fifty thousand mill operatives, including thirty thousand women and children, have been on strike and locked-out of the textile mills of Bombay for nearly three months. All the mills of the district, eighty-three in number, are closed down. The question at issue is the payment of the annual bonus to the operatives, in addition to their usual wage. In July of last year, the owners put up a notice that the usual bonus, received by the operatives during the last five years and regarded by them as a form of supplementary wages, would not be paid. The men did not heed the notice, most of them being illiterate, and it was not until the end of the year when the bonus became payable that they realised the issue at stake. A strike was declared in the middle of January, followed immediately by a lockout on the part of the owners, in an attempt to force the men back to work unconditionally. The monthly wage of a Bombay mill operative is 35 rupees for men; 17 rupees for women—for a ten-hour day. This sum is insufficient to maintain their bodily health and strength, or to provide them with the most elementary necessities. For this reason, during the height of the post-war boom period when mill profits soared to several hundred per cent., the annual bonus was granted as a form of supplementary wages. The cost of living has risen (according to official figures) 58 per cent. since 1914; profits have risen from 674 lakhs of rupees in 1917 to 1,559 lakhs in 1921, with a slight falling-off in 1922-23. The cotton mill workers are proverbially underpaid and overworked, with the result that they are always heavily in debt to the money-lender. Their right to organise into trade unions is not legally recognised; they have no regular labour organisations and no union fund. Their leaders, up to the time of the present strike, were drawn from the ranks of the bourgeoisie—lawyers, politicians, philanthropists and professional labour leaders, who were closer, in interests and sympathies to the employing class than to the workers. They sabotaged every attempt to strike on the part of the latter; they took the part of the employers in every decisive issue; they used their influence to keep the men at work and satisfied with the old conditions instead of attempting to better themselves. The Government, which affects to maintain its neutrality in labour disputes, has never hesitated to call out armed police and military to aid the employers in guarding their property and crushing a strike. Thus every institution and condition was against the success of the present strike, as it has been of previous ones. Yet the textile workers of Bombay have maintained their struggle far three months in face of all odds; they have remained peaceful and nonviolent in the teeth of the most open provocation; they have repudiated their old leaders and elected new ones from their own ranks to present their demands before the Government and the employers; they have endured with marvellous fortitude the sufferings of hunger and privation throughout the whole of the strike period. They have never wavered in their demand for the payment of bonus as a pre-requisite for returning to work; they have maintained their solidarity of front against the efforts of the employers to seduce a part of them back to work, and against the sabotage of the Government and the public, which has refrained from giving them any concrete help during the long and bitter dispute. The textile workers of Bombay are dying in the streets from starvation. Their January wages, already earned before the declaration of the strike and lockout, have been illegally withheld by the owners. The grain dealers and provision shops have long ago refused them credit. They are unable to pay their rent for the miserable rooms in which they huddle by tens and dozens in the infamous Bombay Chawls (tenements).

They are unable to pay their rent for the miserable rooms in which they huddle by tens and dozens in the infamous Bombay Chawls (tenements). The workers have never possessed any material resources to carry them from one day to the next, nor any central fund to maintain them in time of strike. They are sticking to their demands in the face of slow starvation. Appeals to the public for material help and to the Government have met with no response. The charitable associations of Bombay are all controlled by the Mill Owners’ Association, and have refused to give aid to the strikers. The Legislative Councils, both national and provincial, have made no move to come to the assistance of the sufferers. The Indian National Congress, which in each of its annual sessions since 1916 has pledged its support to the cause of Indian labour, refused to sanction the granting of a sum for supplying grain or credits to the starving strikers. The All-India Trade Union Congress, which presumes to lead the struggle of the Indian workers against the employing class, has never so much as mentioned the Bombay strike, nor sent one of its office-holders to the scene of the struggle to investigate and guide it, nor issued a single appeal on behalf of the starving strikers. The Fourth Annual Session of the All-India Trade Union Congress, which was scheduled to be held on March 7, the very day on which the workers of Bombay were being shot down by the guns of the police and military, deferred its session indefinitely because of internal quarrels and factional disputes among its office-bearers. When it finally met on March 14, it broke up in a rain of abuse and a free-for-all fist fight, without so much as giving one thought to the cause of the 150,000 striking mill hands of Bombay, or of identifying the All-India Trade Union Congress with the greatest industrial struggle that has ever been waged in India. The British Labour Government and Labour Party, which rule the destinies of the Indian people to-day, has limited its interest in the fate of the starving Bombay workers on strike for a living wage to a statement in the House of Commons that the matter “has been left to the Government of India.” While in Britain the Dockers’ strike, the tram and bus strike, and other threatened strikes have been subjected to the immediate and closest scrutiny of the Government, which spares no efforts to bring them to a speedy and satisfactory solution, in India an industrial dispute affecting the welfare and very lives of 150,000 workers, to which must be added the count of their families and dependents, and reaching out in its consequences to the very shores of England in its effect on the Lancashire textile industry, has been allowed to proceed for three months without a motion to interfere on the part of the Labour Government or a gesture of sympathy or solidarity on the part of the Labour Party. The British Labour Government and the British Labour Party have permitted the striking and locked-out mill hands of Bombay to die in the streets from starvation, to be shot down by the rifles of armed police and military, without using their supreme power as head of the British Empire to bring this strike to an end and to secure victory to the just demands of the Bombay workers. What are the facts of this strike? In what way is it proceeding, and what will be the result of a defeat of the workers, both in India and in Great Britain? The present struggle is more than a mere demand for payment of bonus on the part of the workers. It is an offensive on the part of Indian capitalism (which includes both Europeans and natives) against the Indian working class to reduce still further its already pitiably low standard of living. It was intended to follow up the refusal of the bonus with a cut in wages. The comparative lull in the textile industry was seized upon by the owners as a favourable moment to cut into the wage-bill, which had been slightly raised during the boom period in response to the rise in the cost of living and the consequent strike wave that visited Bombay in 1919. Such an, offensive had already taken place in Ahmedabad, where the workers were forced to accede. The Bombay mill owners were prepared to close down for a short time to force the men to submit to the new conditions. The strike of the operatives in January was promptly replied to by the declaration of a two-weeks’ lockout; It was held that this period would suffice to bring the men to their knees. In spite of the opposition of their so-called leaders, who tried by every means to persuade them to resume work unconditionally, having failed in all their efforts to prevent the strike, the workers instinctively realised that more than the bonus was at stake—if they yielded, the next attack would be directed against their wages. Therefore they held firm, and the lockout had to be extended for two further successive periods of two weeks. At the close of each one, unsuccessful attempts were made by the owners to reopen the mills with blackleg labour. Signs were posted, saying that if the men would resume work the owners guaranteed not to reduce wages, but nothing was said about the bonus. The men held out, and at the end of six weeks the owners began to feel the effects of the complete stoppage, and division arose in their own ranks. At a meeting of the Bombay Mill Owners’ Association, a strong Indian minority were for granting the demand for bonus, but a slight majority against it carried the day. In the battle between Lancashire and Bombay, in which Lancashire textile products are protected at the expense of native industry, it is the Indian workers who must pay the difference in a lower wage bill to permit the Indian textile industry to thrive. At the end of six weeks, in response to the urgent demands of the workers and the pressure of public opinion, the Governor of Bombay, Sir Leslie Wilson, who had refrained from taking any action calculated to bring the dispute to a close, appointed an Inquiry Committee with power to investigate “the customary, legal or equitable claim of the men to payment of bonus.” This Committee had neither power to recommend nor to arbitrate; despite the request of the workers, no representative of labour was included among its members, appointed from the prominent capitalists and Government henchmen of Bombay. It was a move to gain time, by appearing to do something, and to drag out the negotiations until the workers would be forced to surrender.

This Committee held three sittings, extended over a period of two weeks. Appointed on February 29, it published its findings on March 12, five days after the events of March 7, when protest meetings of the strikers were fired upon by the police, resulting in five killed, four wounded and thirteen arrests. The decision of the Committee caused no surprise, given its nature and composition; it declared that: “The mill workers have not established any enforceable claim, customary, legal or equitable, to the payment annually of a bonus,” . . . and that “the results of the working of the mill industry as a whole for the year 1923 are such as to justify the contention of the mill owners that the profits do not admit of the payment of a bonus.” Would that the mill workers of Bombay could say to their Christian rulers: “I asked for bread, and ye gave me a stone.” On March 7, just before these findings became public, a notice was posted on all the mill premises to the effect that: “To all workers willing to resume work unconditionally, the mills will by opened for resumption of work on March 8, and two days later the January wages will be paid.” The notice was signed by S. D. Saklatvala, Chairman of the Bombay Mill Owners ’ Association. The result was the tragic and, till present writing, unexplained events of March 7, when in reply to some stone-throwing on the part of assembled groups of strikers gathered together to discuss the notice, police fire was opened without warning on the unarmed crowd, killing five and wounding four. Thirteen workers who attempted to loot a grain shop were arrested. This brutal massacre, which would have been unthinkable in Britain, and which roused a storm of indignation in the Indian public mind, was brushed aside by the Bombay Government with the single statement in the Bombay Legislative Council on March 8 that “the Government desire to offer their sympathy to the victims, particularly in view of the very creditable behaviour of the men hitherto. . . . Military patrols have been called out, but it is hoped that it will not be necessary to use them unless absolutely essential to preserve law and order.” Asked by a member if there was any loss to property as a result of the acts of the strikers, the Home Member replied: “I understand there has been some window breaking and some looting in the mills. But so far I have no information of any serious injury to any of the mills. ” Human life may be held cheap in a country inhabited by 320,000,000 souls, but in the interests of what assumes itself to be “civilised government” it might have been expected that an official inquiry would be undertaken into the reasons for an order to shoot, on the sole authority of a deputy police inspector (European), in the absence of a magistrate, and before the crowd had been warned to disperse or blank shots had been previously fired into the air. Can mere stone-throwing on the part of justly-aggrieved men in the face of the most intense provocation be held to justify the calling out of armed police and soldiery and the shooting into an unarmed and defenceless mob? Are industrial Amritsars to be repeated all over India with impunity under the aegis of a Labour Government? The events of March 7 precipitated long-delayed action on the part of the Bombay Government, and the Mill Owners’ Association was informed by His Excellency that: “January wages should be paid at once without affecting the question of bonus and irrespective of resumption of work by the men, and that the mill owners should meet the representatives of the men to discuss the questions at issue.” It should be remembered that this tardy step to effect negotiations was made two months after the beginning of the dispute which had plunged 150,000 workers, together with their wives and families, into the direst distress and the whole industrial life of Bombay into an abnormal state. Would a similar strike of such dimensions have been allowed to drag out its course in Lancashire without some action being taken by the Labour Government? Yet still another month has been allowed to pass without any decisive action being taken to bring the dispute to a close. The latest reports bring news that the striking operatives, exhausted and starving, have appealed to the Government for help to assist 50,000 of them, with their wives and children, to be repatriated to their villages, where they hope to find some kind of work. Fifty thousand have already found their own way back to the country districts—the remaining ones, three times fifty thousand at the least if we count those dependent upon them, remain in Bombay to fight it out to the end, performing causal labour, subsisting on precarious charity, or dying outright in the streets of Bombay. The Government has been asked to provide them with some form of work to enable them to survive the struggle. A few of the smaller mills are reported to have opened, to which a few thousand men had straggled back to work. But the overwhelming majority remain firm to their voluntary pledge to abstain from rejoining the mills until their original demands have been met. Nor theirs is the cry of the British proletariat, “Work or maintenance.” To claim such a boon as their right is beyond their humble dreams. They know only how to do that which is within reach of their own human endurance—to resist the capitalist offensive dumbly, peaceably, uncomplainingly, but with what worlds of determined fortitude, until either their cause is won or they themselves are no more. There is something truly Indian in this infinite capacity for suffering; in this strength of the meek to resist injustice even unto death. What scorn of human life it expresses—or of human existence reduced to a status lower than the beasts! The British Labour Party, in power to-day as the British Labour Government, has it within its means to save the Bombay workers from death by starvation and from the lingering existence which exploitation renders worse than death. It can send material help to support the starving strikers, and it can demand arbitration of the dispute in a manner fair and just to the cause of the Indian working class. Upon the outcome of this strike hangs the fate, for the next few years, of the Indian textile workers in their heroic struggle for a living wage. And upon the payment of a living wage to the Indian textile workers depends the future well-being of the textile workers of Great Britain, whom the Indian workers are being forced, against their will, to undercut. The Bombay strike is but another instance o� the fact that the international proletariat must hang together or they will hang separately. Evelyn Roy Archive

MIA > Archive > M.N. Roy M.N. & E. Roy The Colonies A Review of the Indian Situation (10 November 1922) From International Press Correspondence, Vol. 2 No. 97, 10 November 1922, pp. 757–760. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2021). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. The six months following the arrest of Mr. Gandhi and the assumption of a determined policy of repression on the part of the Government towards every phase of the Indian movement have been a period of confusion, rout and a gradual reassembling of forces whose economic and social demands are being put forward for the first time in the shape of distinct political programs. The old motley political organization known as the Indian National Congress, which for the last five years arrogated to itself the right to speak for all the dissatisfied elements in the country, with the exception of the Constitutional Moderates who accepted the Montagu-Chelmsford Reform Scheme of 1918, was a heterogeneous, loosely-knit body which in reality stood for the interests of the petty bourgeoisie. Of these interests, Mr. Gandhi was the transcendentalized, but none the less conscious spokesman, together with the other leaders thrown up from the movement in its heyday, – notably, the Ali Brothers, Lala Lajpat Rai, C.R. Das, Pundit Malaviya, Mr. Rajagopalacharia, Hanim Ajmal Khan and the rest. Not one of these men voiced the aspirations of the truly revolutionary elements of Indian society, the city proletariat, the landless peasantry and the rapidly-growing class of pauperized intelligentzia. which had been working for the overthrow of British rule through a network of secret terroristic societies since the beginning of this century. The spirit of revolt, which stringent economic conditions fostered by the war, augmented and caused to burst forth in violent manifestations on the part of the agricultural and industrial proletariat, was seized upon by the National Congress and exploited for its own political purposes. The personality of Mr. Gandhi greatly assisted in prolonging this artificial hold of the Congress over these rebellious social elements. It was not until repeated betrayals of the interests of the Indian workers and peasants by the Congress leaders, culminating in the Bardoli Resolutions of the Congress Working Committee, which renounced all revolutionary mass-action on the part of the people and clearly repudiated their most urgent economic demands, that the true social affiliation and class-aims of the National Congress became clear. The arrest of Mr. Gandhi shortly after the confirmation of the Bardoli Resolutions by the Congress Committee at Delhi severed the last tie which held the great masses of the Indian people within the folds of the National Congress. The heavy hand of repression exercised by the Government at this juncture prevented the immediate realization of the actual situation. Twenty-five thousand people cast into jail, and the quartering of armed soldiery and police upon all those districts in which martial Law was not openly declared, as in the Punjab, prevented the rapid readjustment to new conditions and the crystallization of new forces under different leadership. This period of intense confusion and groping in the dark lasted throughout the summer months; the National Congress, devoid of adequate leadership, awaited the release of Mr. C.R. Das in August, while the striking city workers and riotous peasantry were too bewildered by the Congress injunctions to refrain from all manifestations of discontent, and too oppressed by the watchful forces of the Government, to take up their economic struggle independently of Congress leading strings.

Das in August, while the striking city workers and riotous peasantry were too bewildered by the Congress injunctions to refrain from all manifestations of discontent, and too oppressed by the watchful forces of the Government, to take up their economic struggle independently of Congress leading strings. This period of confusion and marking time was punctuated by the futile invocations of the Congress leaders to spin, weave and wear Khadder or homespun as the Alpha and Omega of the struggle for Swaraj, – and by the solemn tour of the Khilafat and Congress Civil Disobedience Committees who went in procession throughout the length and breadth of India, to investigate and report if the state of mind of the people in each province would warrent the declaration of Civil Disobedience and Non-payment of taxes. This tour was a hollow farce, the Committees having made up their mind beforehand that the people were unfit and that mass Civil Disobedience would not be declared, but for obvious political reasons, they have deferred publishing their findings, which were held strictly in camera, until the annual session of the National Congress takes place in the third week of December at Qaya. The Growth of a new Opposition within the Provincial Congress Committees While the All-India Congress Committee and the Working Committee represented the quintessence of orthodoxy to the Gandhi ideals and tactics, castigating the slightest deviation from the Bardoli Program as treason to the lost and martyred leader, the Congress Committees of several provinces which had always chafed under the “dictatorship” of the central body, began to evolve new and contrary ideas as to the policy and tactics to be pursued. This opposition found a chance for expression in the various provincial conferences which were held immediately after the arrest of Mr. Gandhi and others, during the months of April, May and June. While, with the exception of Maharashtra, a section of Bombay, the resolutions finally passed in these provincial conferences endorsed the Bardoli Constructive Program of the triple boycott of foreign cloth, government schools and law courts, and the founding of national schools, arbitration courts and the use of homespun khaddar, there was a noticeable spirit of opposition displayed by a minority in nearly all the discussions. Maharasthra was the only region to break definitely with the Bardoli decisions and to put forward a new opposition program whose principal feature was the entrance of Noncooperators in the Reform Councils, there to constitute themselves as an opposition to the Government by practising “responsive cooperation”. It also pronounced the boycott of law-courts and schools to have failed, advocated the resumption of practice by lawyers and reentry into schools by non-cooperating students, and instead of the use of khaddar, advocated Swadeshi, or mill-made cloth produced in the country. It also pronounced itself in favor of systematic propaganda abroad to put the case of India before the world, a measure resolutely opposed by Mr. Gandhi and his followers. Thus, the Maharashtra opposition, whose members felt so strongly on the points of difference enumerated above as to resign from the All India Congress and Working Committees as well as from the provincial Congress committee offices, constitutes a very definite political tendency at variance with the orthodox Congress creed. It is modern, rationalistic, aggressive, as opposed to the outworn, religious and reactionary ideology of the Congress leaders still in power, but its opposition tends more towards the right than towards the left, – its ultimate destination is reunion with the Constitutional Moderates. It is the opposition of the nationalist lawyers, merchants and manufacturers, not fully satisfied with the amount of reforms granted by the Government, but too practical and realistic to follow the Congress leading-strings any longer through the morass of Charka, Khaddar and a boycott which never succeeded and is already a dead letter so far as observance is concerned. The opposition in other provincial conferences was less clear and expressed, but along similar lines. Bengal pronounced for the Bardoli Progrom, but the President, Mrs. C.R. Das, advocated entry in the councils and spoke at length on the necessity of organizing peasant and labour unions for the redress of the economic grievances of the working-classes. Dictatorship exercised by one man, repudiated in principle, and the right and duty of picketing was emphasized as a means to enforce the boycott. A cry for revision of the Congress Program as laid down at Bardoli and Delhi was heard from many districts, notably in Berar and United Provinces, Berar advocating Civil Disobedience and the formation of voters’, taxpayers’, agriculturists’ and labour unions, and the United Provinces pronouncing in favor of participation in elections to Municipal and District Boards by Non-cooperators. The Punjab Conference confirmed the Bardoli Program as a temporary measure, but called for Civil Disobedience and Non-Payment of Taxes at the earliest possible moment. Gujerat, the homeland of Mr. Gandhi, upheld the Bardoli Program in all its details. Southern India, especially Madras, terrorized by the Moplah Rebellion, emphasized the need for peaceful, constructive measures and the propagation of khaddar. The Provincial Conference of the Central Provinces, held in Nagpur in April, stressed the necessity of practical measures to force the Government’s hand and advocated participation, through obstructionist tactics, in the Reform Councils, the establishment of technical schools for training efficient workers, the giving up of the boycott of law-courts as impractical and the basing of the Congress program and tactics on considerations of expediency and practicality rather than morality or spirituality. It declared: “The aims of the Congress are thoroughly worldly and for worldly happiness and have to be attained by worldly means which should be easily understandable and practicable.” Civil Disobedience was advocated. Thus, the opposition to the Congress Program, though in the first months vague, confused and groping in the dark, reduced itself to a right and a left wing, – the right wing advocating realistic measures such as entry into the Reform Councils; the left wing urging resumption of militant tactics based on mass civil disobedience, conditional upon non-violence, but advocating the use of self-defense in the face of provocation.

The right wing opposition signalized its earnestness by resuming practice in the law-courts, preaching the participation in elections through the columns of its press, and resigning from congress committees where the views of its members constituted a minority. Maharashtra is the seat of this opposition. The Elements of the Left Opposition It was the Left Opposition working through the provincial congress committees and expressing its voice in the minority reports of some of the provincial conferences, that made itself felt in the June session of the All-India Congress and Working Committees held in Lucknow, United Province. The All India Congress Committee, reinforced by the Central Khilafat Committee, sat in camera and discussed the measures to be taken to meet this growing spirit of opposition from right and left. To the right it dealt short shrift, – entry into the councils, the removal the Triple Boycott, were declared disloyal to the memory of Mr. Gandhi and those who had gone to jail to defend non-violent Non-cooperation. The Maharashtra delegates did not attend this session. To deal with the left was more difficult, because its voice was more powerful. Demands came strongest from the Punjab, Bengal and the United Provinces, where government repression was the most severe, for the use of retaliatory measures of self-defense and the declaration of mass civil disobedience. The Congress Committee discussed behind closed doors the justification of self-defense, and to postpone making a final decision, appointed the Civil Disobedience Committee whose members would tour the country for two and a half months and, after a detailed investigation of the wishes and fitness of the inhabitants, issue its report on September 15th, for the Congress Committee to act upon. A long questionnaire was drawn up, containing minute questions as to the Congress program in the past and the desirability of altering it in the immediate future, and the Committee of seven members started on tour, receiving tremendous ovations at every stopping place, On September 15th, it announced its labours not yet completed, and promised a report of its findings in time for the Gaya Annual Congress, in December. Most of its sittings and interviews with prominent non-cooperators in each province were held in secret, and little publicity has been given except by a few of those interviewed, who published their replies to questions. The Committee consists of orthodox Gandhites, and will undoubtedly pronounce against the inauguration of mass civil disobedience. It has tided over the most critical period of repression and popular resentment, and will trust to the annual session of the Congress to enforce its findings over the heads of the right and left extremists. Some kind of a split in the Congress ranks in December seems inevitable. The right wing is heading towards reunion with the Moderates, aided by a slight reciprocal movement towards the left on the part of the latter, as a result of Lloyd George’s speech in Parliament on the Civil Service, of which more later. The left wing, representing the revolutionary nationalists behind the scene who advocate the use of violence for the overthrow of foreign rule, sees the failure of the present tactics to achieve results and watches the growing alienation of the masses, whose willingness to resist the government constituted the real strength pf the Congress movement, with alarm. The left-wing extremists have a limited political outlook and are full of petty-bourgeois ideas; they are frankly against the class struggle and hesitate to put forward a revolutionary program to capture the allegiance of the masses. But they advocate the use of mass-action to win their own demands, and the organization of the Indian workers and peasants to make this mass action more effective. If the orthodox Congress center sticks to its present program and tactics, this left-wing extremist element will probably break away and a part of them will try for the organization of a new political party of the masses. The Revival of the Moderates The Constitutional Moderates who participated in the elections to the new Reform Councils, represented the extreme right of the Nationalist movement, which broke away from the Congress in 1910 when the latter declared for rejection of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms and the adoption of Non-violent Non-cooperation for the attainment of Swaraj. At first socially frowned down upon by the country, which was overwhelmingly extremist, for their cooperation with the Government, they exercised little hold upon the public mind and were entirely lost sight of during the wave of extremist enthusiasm that swept India between 1919–1922. But representing as they did the most class-conscious and politically minded section of the Indian bourgeoisie, the great landholders, big financial magnates and powerful industrialists, they pursued their course of cooperation with the Government to the extent that reforms were conceded, and soon became a factor to be reckoned with in the political field. The first decisive act of opposition to the Government on the part of the Moderates in the Reform Councils was the reduction of the annual budget by an all-round five per cent on the majority of items listed for taxation, in order to force reduction on military expenditure and a refusal to accept the proposed enhancement of the cotton excise duties. This act of independence created an enormous sensation both in India and England, where Lancashire interests and Morning Post imperialists united their voices in crying out against this working of the Reforms. In India the huge budget deficit of £6,106,000 (now increased to £10,666,000) which the new scheme of taxation was aimed to relieve, stared the Government in the face and called, either for a reversal of the Legislative Assembly’s action by the Viceroy’s veto, or a drastic reduction in military expenditure, which consumes nearly half of the annual budget. In view of the excited condition of the country, then in the throes of the Non-cooperation campaign, the Government deemed it expedient to accept the action of the Assembly and appointed a Committee on Retrenchment under Lord Inchcape, to investigate possible avenues of economy. It was the first triumph of the Moderates under the Reform Scheme, and they made much of their victory. The second act of defiance of a really sensational character (we leave aside the non-official participation of the certain moderate elements in the “Round Table Conference” called during the Non-cooperation campaign to find a way out of the existing deadlock between Government and people, and the half-hearted resolutions of censure on Government repression and for the release of the political prisoners, voted down in the Reform Councils early this year) was the spirited debate in the Legislative Assembly and Council of State on Lloyd George’s now famous speech in Parliament on the Indian Civil Service, during the latter part of July.

The gradual Indianization of the Civil Service, now manned in the higher posts almost exclusively by Englishmen, has been one of the oldest planks in the Moderate platform, and was incorporated as a part of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reform Scheme. But the slightest attempt at the execution of this clause met with loud howls from the Die-Hards and a determined opposition from the European members of the Indian Civil Service, both active and retired. Bitterness of feeling on this score assumed a racial character, so much so that openly defiant speeches were exchanged between various prominent individuals and groups of the two communities in India, accompanied by dire predictions in the Anglo-Indian and British press as to the future of the Civil Service and British rule in India when control would pass out of the hands of the white race into the keeping of the Indians. Matters were brought to a head by a circular letter from the Indian Government issued to the Governors of all the Indian provinces, on May 30th, (as the result of a promise made in the Legislative Assembly in February during the debate on the Indianization of the Services) asking the opinion of the local governments on the necessity and speed with which increase of the number of Indians in the Civil Service should be carried out. The news of this circular letter added fuel to the flame of controversy, and Mr. Lloyd George felt it incumbent upon himself to allay the fears of the British members of the Indian Civil Service by a very rhetorical speech in their defense delivered in Parliament in July. His references to the new reforms as an “experiment”, and to the I.C.S. as the “steel frame” of British rule in India which could never be eliminated, brought down upon his head the wrath of the entire body of constitutional moderates, and enabled the Non-cooperators to point the moral of governmental insincerity and dishonesty in its promise of self-government. So serious was the crisis, that the Viceroy received a representative deputation of moderates on the day following the telegraphic reports of the Prime Minister’s speech; and tried to explain away in soothing language the rash eloquence of Lloyd George. This explanation, repeated in the Viceregal address to the Legislative Councils on Sept. 5th, did not prevent the moving of two resolutions of censure, one in the Assembly, the other in the Council of State, upon the Prime Minister’s speech in Parliament The original strongly worded resolutions were passed in a slightly modified form, over the heads of the government ministers, who in vain warned the members of the deleterious effect of such resolutions upon the minds of British members of Parliament. This storm in a tea-cup over, a still more decisive and significant act of the moderate members of the Legislative Assembly demonstrated their awakened sense of political power. This was the repeal of the Press Act and the voting down of the Viceroy’s injunction to except the native states and ruling princes from the scope of this repeal. The Assembly negatived the Government measure for the protection of the ruling princes against attacks in the press by a vote of 45 to 41. Amid the prevailing excitement that followed this bold assumption of power, the Viceroy used his prerogative of veto and presented the measure for approval to the Council of State, where it was perforce approved. All these straws show which way the wind blows. The Constitutional Moderates have blossomed into full political consciousness overnight and, encouraged by the chaotic debacle of the Non-cooperators, have arrogated to themselves the political leadership of the constitutional nationalists. Their minor triumphs during the last year and a half of experience in the new Councils has given them the taste of future power, and being composed of the most class-conscious and powerful of the native bourgeoisie, they will carry on the fight until their full program, Home Rule or full dominion status within the British Empire, is attained. At this juncture, when the Moderates, flushed with their first successes, incline towards pressing for the early fulfillment of the Reform Scheme, and the right-wing Non-cooperators look with yearning eyes towards entry into the Councils, a scheme for the reunion of Moderates and Non-cooperators within a common political party has been launched under the auspices of Mrs. Annie Besant and a few of her followers of the Liberal League. A Manifesto was issued in the name of the “1921 Club”, appealing for unity of all shades of opinion to carry on the fight within constitutional limits for the attainment of Home Rule. It is too early to judge yet of the extent of the response to this latest political manoeuvre. If there is a split at Gaya in the Congress camp, the prospects of a union of all right elements seem favorable. In such a case, the Congress will be left impotent and insignificant as a factor in national politics, unless, as seems extremely improbable, it adopts a economic program in conformity with the immediate desires and necessities of the masses. Resurgent Mass Action; the City-Proletariat Meanwhile, following the temporary lull that visited the country after the arrest of Mr. Gandhi and enforced by the Government reign of terror during the ensuing months, a new and more vigorous movement is discernible among the city proletariat and the rebellious peasantry. Strikes have ceased to wear a political complexion, and have become purely economic struggles for better wages, improved living conditions and shorter working hours. They are prolonged and obstinate in nature, the men holding out to the last, until their demands are partially won or starvation drives them back to work. The East India Railway strike of three months duration early in this year, the Calcutta Seamen’s strike involving 30,000 men and the strike of ten thousand stevedore coolies in May and June, and the strike in six of the largest Calcutta Jute Mills at the same time, – all being fights for wage increase, – are a few typical examples of the new energy and determination that inspires the Indian workers in their economic struggle. In Bombay, the Tramway strike and the great strike in the Tata Iron and Steel Works now going on, testily to the same fact. The cases cited are but a few of the more conspicuous of the industrial unrest once more sweeping the country, – of lesser strikes involving a few thousand men and lasting from a few days to several weeks, there are more than can be enumerated.

The cases cited are but a few of the more conspicuous of the industrial unrest once more sweeping the country, – of lesser strikes involving a few thousand men and lasting from a few days to several weeks, there are more than can be enumerated. Most of the fights end in compromise, – bad organization, traitorous leadership and lack of funds being the main causes. The spirit of the men is high and they would hold out to the end, were their leaders more revolutionary, and did they have a little financial backing. Most of the strikes which end in struggles for wage-increase, begin because of the unjustified dismissal or ill-treatment of some fellow-workmen, and demands for the reinstatement and compensation of those so ill-used always constitute a part of the stipulations. With such good spirit and instinctive solidarity, much can be expected. The growing talk of calling a general strike for the release of Mr. Miller, the Irish railway guard and organizer of the North Western Railway Union who was imprisoned for his activities, led to his early release, and 30,000 workers marched in procession to meet him. In addition to the strike movement, a general growth and consolidation in the ranks of labour is noticeable. The unions are becoming more definitely class instead of amorphous sociopolitical bodies. Federation of unions belonging to the same industry, but in different provinces, is taking place, notably, among the miners, the textile workers and the railwaymen. A conference for the federation of the latter industry will be held in November, at about the same time that the All-India Trade Union Congress is scheduled to meet. One of the largest labour organizations is the Bengal Trade Union Federation, which claims to have fourteen unions affiliated, with a membership of 250,000 men. Together with this growth in organization has come a development of the idea of using labour as a parliamentary political force, much as the British Labour Party is used, by semi-liberal reformists and ambitious place-seekers. Labour leaders are already in the field, of the type of Joseph Baptista, N.M. Joshi, who is labour member in the Bombay Legislative Council, W.C. Andrews, a Britisher and Christian missionary, and others, who declare the necessity of “guiding” the Indian labour movement into safe channels and giving it an outlet in some form of parliamentary action. These men are exercising a great control on the young labour bureaucracy, and are called in to mediate with the employers and government in times of prolonged strikes, their decisions being almost invariably obeyed by the Indian workers. Andrews has been elected president of the forthcoming conference of railway workers. By their dominant position and reformist ideology, they do much harm, sabotaging strikes, preventing their declaration, and dampening the enthusiasm of the men. In addition to these well-meaning meddlers, there is a great number of spies and provocators, so much so that the unsatisfactory termination of the East India Ry. strike was attributed to the distrust aroused in the men by discovering that some of their leaders were government agents, and they thereupon repudiated all leadership. A new feature of Indian legislation is the number of bills introduced for the amelioration of the workers’ conditions. A factory Act was passed in the last session of the Legislative Assembly, and several social reform measures including a bill on Workmen’s Compensation are scheduled for introduction in the present session. Add to this the appointments of Committees on Industrial Unrest in every province, whose reports are just coming in, and the creation of Government Arbitration Boards for the settlement of industrial disputes, and one has a fair idea of the growing importance which Indian labour is playing in the national life. The attention paid to the allaying of industrial unrest by the Government at the present time is far more earnest than that dedicated to suppressing the activities of the Non-cooperators, who are no longer regarded seriously. In both the speech of Lloyd George in Parliament and that of the Viceroy on opening the Legislative Councils, the crisis in the nationalist movement created by the Non-cooperators, is announced to have been safely passed, but the Viceroy elaborated at length on the labour legislation which it was projected to lay before the house, and the prospects of industrial peace for the coming year. The Peasantry The temporary confusion induced in the ranks of the riotous peasantry by the withdrawal at Bardoli of the item of Civil Disobedience and Non-Payment of taxes from the Congress Program, and the injunction to respect the rights of the landlords and of private property, produced a noticeable lull in what had become a country-wide movement against both government and landlords by the peasants’ refusal to pay taxes and rents. In the Government Communique on the Non-Cooperation Movement, issued at the time of Mr. Gandhi’s arrest, stress was laid upon the menace to life and property involved in the ever-growing responsiveness of the peasants to the slogans of Non-payment of rent and taxes. The reports of the Commissioners of the various provinces account for the deficit in revenue occasioned by the refusal of the rural population to give the tax-collectors their due. Repression was swiftest and most severe in the Punjab, United Provinces, Bengal and Madras, where the peasant movement was strongest and had broken out into violent manifestations. The land of peasants refusing to pay taxes was seized and auctioned off by the Government to the highest bidder. Punitive police were stationed in those districts where unrest prevailed.

Punitive police were stationed in those districts where unrest prevailed. Conflicts with the armed forces of the state, ending in many casualties, and wholesale arrests for the slightest breach of peace, with a declaration of martial law in the disturbed areas, brought temporary quiet. But late in the summer, towards the end of July and the beginning of August, agrarian unrest again manifested itself in Madras, Bengal, Central India and the Punjab. Brief telegraphic despatches announced the hurrying of armed forces to the disturbed areas. The most determined efforts at revolt were made by the Bhils, an agricultural tribe of Central India, which fought for several weeks before succumbing to superior forces. In Bombay, the passive resistance movement of the Malvas of Mulshi Petha, the Mahratta peasants who were being forced off their land by the great industrial concern of Tata & Co., reached a climax, most of the leaders being sent to jail, and the Government was forced to intervene and effect a compromise. But the most violent agitation broke out in the Punjab, where the struggle of the Akali Sikhs for control of the Gurdwaras or temples and adjacent lands broke out with fresh vigor after a temporary lull of some months. The struggle of the Akalis dates back several years, and while heralded as a religious movement for reform of the temples, it is in reality, as the Government later recognized in its Communique issued in September, an attack on the property rights of the corrupt mahants or guardians of the shrines. While the Akalis practiced passive resistance, they used direct action in seizing the temples and turning out the manants, until the latter implored government protection, and got it. An open rupture between the Government and the Akalis took place in August at Guru ka Bagh, a shrine near Amritsar, where the attempt of the Akalis to assert their rights to the land by cutting down trees was met by their arrest, imprisonment and fine on the charge of trespassing and theft. Thousands of Akalis rushed to the spot on the call of their leaders, to continue the fight. Police and soldiers were sent to guard the properties of the temple and turn back the Akali bands, who marched in orderly bands from adjoining villages, the railroads having refused them transportation. At first open force was used, – the Akalis were beaten back by blows and fired upon if obstinate. So tremendous became the excitement, and so great was the response of the Akalis to replace those fallen, that the Government changed its tactics, ordered the arrest of those leading the movement, and threw barbed wire defenses around the property, to keep out the Sikhs, who were arrested if they approached. The affair at Guru ka Bagh is being repeated all over the Punjab, 100,000 Akalis having declared their willingness to die in the cause. Official secrecy veils the progress of the movement, which at first received much publicity. The Indian press is full of accounts of the struggle between the Sikhs and the Government, and a national issue has been made out of it, up to date, ever 4,000 akalis have been arrested and sent to jail. The undoubted awakening among the peasantry has affected both the Nationalist movement and the policy of the Government. Signs are not wanting that an agrarian party will spring up ere long, just as the growing activity of the peasants has given rise to a strong and class-conscious organization of the landlords. In several provinces such an agrarian party already exists, the existing peasant organizations forming the nuclei. A great movement is noticeable among the nationalists to go “back to the village”, the popular cry of the hour, to found schools hospitals, organize the peasants and head their struggle for a better life. In Bengal, a strong section of the middle class intellectuals are voicing a cry for the repeal of the permanent settlement, a land act passed in the early years of British rule, which confers great privileges on the landlords and brings much harm to the peasantry. The Sikh League is the acknowledged political party of the agrarian Sikh community, and though allied with the Congress movement, has an independent program of economic reform. The Government has tried to meet the situation in its own way, partly by repression and partly by compromise and concession. Land legislation is pending in several provinces, and has been passed m others, to meet immediate crying grievances of the peasants, while Commissions of investigation nave been set up where unrest is most acute, to investigate the causes and suggest ways and means of meeting the demands of the peasants without outraging the sensibilities of the landlords. Martial law preserves peace in the interim. Such is the general situation which confronts those seeking to preserve the status quo and those looking for means to upset it. In the peasant and industrial proletariat lie the seed of revolution, if their economic struggle be properly guided and they can be welded into a party with a clear-cut program backed up by direct action. A vague feeling urges the nationalists to keep contact with these elements, and “organize the masses” has become the nationwide slogan, but nobody knows how or to what end they should be organized, and those who know shrink from the consequences involved to life and property. A new revolutionary leadership must be evolved which can seize upon the existing unrest and direct it in proper channels. Top of the page Last updated on 4 January 2021

MIA > Archive > Evelyn Roy E. Roy The Colonies The Debacle of Gandhism (8 September 1922) From International Press Correspondence, Vol. 2 No. 77, 8 September 1922, pp. 578–580. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2020). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. Gandhism as a political force reached its climax in the Ahmedabad session of the Indian National Congress, held in the last week of December 1921. The six thousand delegates, representatives of India’s outraged nationalism – outraged by the policy of deliberate repression launched upon the Government of India, – conferred upon the Working Committee and upon Mr. Gandhi as its head, supreme dictatorial powers to guide the national, destinies during the ensuing year. Non-violence, non-cooperation and mass civil disobedience, including non-payment of taxes, were adopted as the means to attain the goal of a still-undefined Swaraj. Few leaders can ask far more than this – the sense of power that emanates from a nation’s mandate, backed up by the popular will. The field was clear for Mr. Gandhi to exercise qualities of leadership and to match steel with his powerful opponent – British Imperialism. If at first blush, the contest looked unequal between the slender David and the giant Goliath, it must be remembered that the odds were not all in favor of the latter. Three hundred and twenty million people, united under the single command of an adored and trusted leader, who has cleverly put his bristling opponent at a disadvantage from the outset, by proclaiming non-violence as his chief weapon, such a force if properly manoeuvred, could be made to wring more thau one concession from the irritated and non-plussed adversary, whose moral position in the eyes of the world is a bad one, and whose cowardly hypocrisy smarts under the knowledge of this fact. And concessions were all that Mr. Gandhi asked for. He is not, and has never been an avowed revolutionary, who puts the issue squarely to the enemy – “either you or I must go”. His unsubstantial Swaraj, when pieced together from reluctant definitions, means only “Home Rule within the British Empire”, as the defeat of Hazrat Mohani’s resolution for “complete independence outside the British Empire” proved at the Ahmedabad Congress. If, instead of winning concessions for at least a section of the Indian people, Mr. Gandhi won for himself a six-year jail sentence and a martyr’s crown at the hands of the British Government, he has only himself to blame. Great positions carry with them great responsibilities, and Gandhi the Dictator, who played a lone hand against his powerful adversary, must acknowledge that his tactics brought him to a catastrophic defeat. The situation at the close of the Ahmedabad Congress was a delicate one, and success for either side hung in the balance. It is in such moments that leadership turns the scale, and judging by the denouement, the palm must go to Lord Reading and not to Mr. Gandhi. A moment’s retrospect will make clear the position as it stood. The visit of the Prince of Wales to India served its purpose, by showing the Government that there was real force behind the Non-cooperators – the force of the striking masses. Stung by this demonstration of power, the bureaucracy adopted a policy of such wide repression, that today, in addition to all the prominent traders, twenty-five thousand Indian patriots lie in jail upon very vague and unproven charges of “sedition”, disaffection” and of “waging war against the King”. But in its eagerness to stamp the movement out, the Government overshot the mark. The Moderates, that tiny section of upper class Indians whose “loyalty” gave a show of legality to the wholesale arrests and prosecutions of their fellow countrymen, these same Moderates rebelled against their leading-strings, and demanded a change of policy. Members of the new Councils resigned, others protested; lawyers and landowners and capitalists banded themselves together in a sort of unity to tell the Government it must cease its rampant repression. The suggestion of Pundit Malaviya to hold a Round Table Conference of all shades of opinion, for the solution of the crisis, was responded to by all the political parties. This was the crucial moment, and the wary tactics of the Viceroy in this crisis prove that he was fumbling in the dark. In a speech made in Calcutta on Dec. 21, 1921, just before the Ahmedabad Congress opened, the Viceroy himself stated that he was in favor of a genuine attempt to solve the problems of unrest by means of discussion and consideration at a conference, and that meanwhile, there should be a cessation of activities on both sides, both Non-cooperators and Government. He further declared that such a truce would involve no advantage or triumph to be claimed on either side. The reason for this offer to mediate was clear. It was desired to save the face of British prestige during the Prince’s visit, and for this reason, Lord Reading was ready to negotiate. No definite response was given immediately to his offer, and his real object – that of making the Prince’s visit a success, was thereby lost. But his words had not fallen on deaf ears, and we find the idea of a conference being toyed with by Mr. Gandhi in the Ahmedabad Congress, who “left the door to negotiations open”, and again in the Conference held in Bombay on Jan.

Gandhi in the Ahmedabad Congress, who “left the door to negotiations open”, and again in the Conference held in Bombay on Jan. 15th, in which definite terms were laid down for the calling of a Round Table Conference, in conformity with the Viceroy’s speech; that the Government cease its arrests and release all prisoners and that the Non-cooperators cease all activities pending the negotiations. Mr. Gandhi, meanwhile, as Congress Dictator, had suspended Civil Disobedience until the end of January, in order to assist the arbitration. In this desire of Mr. Gandhi to arbitrate, lay the secret of his defeat. Lord Reading discovered that Mr Gandhi was no less unwilling than himself, to call into action the sanguinary forces of the Indian masses. This was amply demonstrated by his ever-growing insistence upon the creed of Non-violence at the expense of its concomitant non-cooperation. By his sharp rebuke to every manifestation of force on the part of the masses, such as his Manifesto to the Hooligans of Bombay after the events of November 17th – 20th and Madras, in which he declared “it is better to have no hartal and no hooliganism”: above all, by his shrinking from embarking upon the final step that he himself declared must lead to Swaraj, namely, Mass Civil Disobedience, including non-payment of taxes. This latter step was thrice postponed alter its formal adoption in the Ahmadabad Congress, postponed for no reason whatever, except Mr. Gandhi’s own timid horror of the inevitable conflicts between police and people that must follow its inauguration. It did not need much acumen for Lord Reading to discover this weakness of Mr. Gandhi, who proclaimed it from the housetops, for the benefit alike of Government and Non-cooperators. On Jan. 25th, he wrote in Young India, at the very moment when the Round Table negotiations were under way, and he was supposed to declare Mass Civil Disobedience m operation within five days if the overtures for peace fell through: “I don’t know what is the best course. At this moment I am positively shaking with fear. If a settlement were to be made, then where are we to go? After coming to know the strength of India, I am afraid of a settlement. If a settlement is to be made before we have been thoroughly tested, our condition will be like that of a child prematurely born, which will perish in a short time.’’ in the face of this naive avowal of indecision, helplessness, and terror, is it any wonder that the Viceroy, afflicted by no such qualms and very conscious of his end in view, should bring the negotiations for a Round Table Conference to an abrupt end and pursue his serene course of lawless repression, undeterred by the voice of his own or Mr. Gandhi’s conscience. Lord Reading’s decision was communicated to Pundit Malaviya and the 200 delegates from all political parties, in a telegram sent by his secretary, towards the end of January, which stated that His Excellency was unable to discover in the proposals put forward by the Conference the basis for a profitable discussion on a Round Table Conference, and no useful purpose would therefore be served by entering into any detailed examination of their terms. The Viceroy had begun to advance from the very first step of retreat taken by Mr. Gandhi in postponing the application of Mass Civil Disobedience until the outcome of the Round Table Arbitrations. If instead of this amiable postponement, Mr. Gandhi had issued an edict to the waiting peasantry to cease payment of taxes immediately at the close of the Congress, the whole outcome might have been different. The response of the peasants cannot be doubted. Wherever tried, its effect was instantaneous and overwhelming. Lord Reading, confronted by a show of force and firmness, backed by mass-action on a large scale, might have wavered and accepted negotiations with the Non-cooperators. But Mr. Gandhi merely threatened and then postponed for two weeks that which constituted his only weapon. On Feb. 4th, when the Viceroy had already declared the road to negotiations closed, Mr. Gandhi addressed a letter to him, once more offering to delay the inauguration of mass civil disobedience pending the Conference, if the Viceroy would revise his policy of lawless repression. The reply, of Feb. 6th, was a Government Communique which declared that “mass civil disobedience is fraught with such danger to the State that it must be met with sternness and severity”, while Mr. Gandhi’s overtures for peace were completely ignored. Matters had now come to a showdown the Government had called Mr. Gandhi’s bluff, and all cards were laid on the table. Mass Civil Disobedience, already declared at Bardoli on Jan. 29th, but suspended pending the Gandhi-Reading negotiations, was formally launched through the medium of a mass-meeting held at Bardoli, and a Manifesto issued Feb. 7th by Mr. Gandhi, in which he declared: “The choice before the people then, is Mass Civil Disobedience with all its undoubted dangers, and lawless repression of the lawful activities of the people.” Although Mass Civil Disobedience was not formally sanctioned by Mr. Gandhi until all hope of a compromise with the Government had been given up, that is, until the first week in February, in reality it had begun spontaneously in various districts since January, in the form of non-payment of taxes, and was approved by the various local Congress Committees. The rumor spread from village to village that the Gandhi-Raj had come, and it was no longer necessary to pay taxes. That the movement was spreading rapidly is proven by the fact that loyal officials began to resign in large numbers because of their inability to collect the revenue, as well as by the official reports, which show large sums outstanding which the officials were unable to collect from the peasantry.

That the movement was spreading rapidly is proven by the fact that loyal officials began to resign in large numbers because of their inability to collect the revenue, as well as by the official reports, which show large sums outstanding which the officials were unable to collect from the peasantry. District magistrates complained of incitement among the people not to pay taxes, of popular resistance to rent-warrants, of insults heaped by prisoners under trial upon their judges, and a general subversion of jail discipline. The prompt and energetic measures taken by the Government to arrest the non-payment of taxes movement, prove how seriously it was regarded. Already on January 10th, a Communique from the Punjab, warned the people against the consequences of Civil Disobedience, which the Government threatened would be dealt with by more rigorous and systematic measures than any yet adopted. On January 20th, the Madras Government issued a similar notice, stating that the resignation of village officials would not be accepted, and that officers refusing to carry out their duties would be dismissed and deprived of their hereditary rights, and that the land of persons refusing to pay faxes would be seized and put up for sale. Extra police were recruited at the expense of the population, but those paying taxes before the prescribed date would be exempt from this liability. Military police were called out in Assam to assist collections, but were met with resistance by the people. Conflicts between the police and the people became a daily occurrence, but a strict censorship was maintained to conceal the extent of the unrest. Only the reports of the revenue officers form a gauge of the strength of the movement. In Guntur District, Madras, collections amounted to 1/100th part of the money due. (Conclusion follows) Top of the page Last updated on 31 August 2020

Evelyn Roy The Debacle of Gandhism Source: The Communist Review, November 1922, Vol. 3, No. 7. Publisher: Communist Party of Great Britain Transcription/Markup: Brian Reid Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2006). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. GANDHISM as a political force reached its climax in the Ahmedabad session of the Indian National Congress, held in the last week of December, 1921. The six thousand delegates, representatives of India’s outraged nationalism—outraged by the policy of deliberate repression launched upon the Government of India—conferred upon the Working Committee and upon Mr. Gandhi, as its head, supreme dictatorial powers to guide the national destinies during the ensuing year. Non-violence, non-co-operation and mass civil disobedience, including non-payment of taxes, were adopted as the means to attain the goal of a still-undefined Swaraj. Few leaders can ask for more than this—the sense of power that emanates from a nation’s mandate, backed up by the popular will. The field was clear for Mr. Gandhi to exercise his qualities of leadership and to match steel with his powerful opponent—British Imperialism. If, at first blush, the contest looked unequal between the slender David and the giant Goliath, it must be remembered that the odds were not all in favour of the latter. Three hundred and twenty million people, united under the single command of an adored and trusted leader, who has cleverly put his bristling. opponent at a disadvantage from the outset, by proclaiming non-violence as his chief weapon—such a force, if properly manœuvred, could be made to wring more than one concession from the irritated and nonplussed adversary, whose moral position in the eyes of the world is a bad one, and whose cowardly hypocrisy smarts under the knowledge of this fact. And concessions were all that Mr. Gandhi asked for. He is not, and has never been, an avowed revolutionary who puts the issue squarely to the enemy—“either you or I must go.” His unsubstantial Swaraj, when pieced together from reluctant definitions, means only “Home Rule within the British Empire,” as the defeat of Hazrat Mohani’s resolution for “complete independence outside the British Empire” proved at the Ahmedabad Congress. If, instead of winning concessions for at least a section of the Indian people, Mr. Gandhi won for himself a six-year jail sentence and a martyr’s crown at the hands of the British Government, he has only himself to blame. Great positions carry with them great responsibilities, and Gandhi the Dictator, who played a lone hand against his powerful adversary, must acknowledge that his tactics brought him to a catastrophic defeat. The situation at the close of the Ahmedabad Congress was a delicate one, and success for either side hung in the balance. It is in such moments that leadership turns he scale, and judging by the denouement, the palm must go to Lord Reading and not to Mr. Gandhi. A moment’s retrospect will make clear the position as it stood. The visit of the Prince of Wales to India served its purpose, by showing the Government that there was real force behind the Non-co-operators,—the force of the striking masses. Stung by this demonstration of power, the bureaucracy adopted a policy of such wide repression, that to-day, in addition to all the prominent leaders, twenty-five thousand Indian patriots lie in jail upon very vague and unproven charges of “sedition,” “disaffection” and of “waging war against the King.” But in its eagerness to stamp the movement out, the Government overshot the mark. The Moderates, that tiny section of upper class Indians whose “loyalty” gave a show of legality to the wholesale arrests and prosecutions of their fellow countrymen, these same Moderates rebelled against their leading-strings, and demanded a change of policy. Members of the new Councils resigned, others protested; lawyers and landowners and capitalists banded themselves together in a sort of unity to tell the Government it must cease its rampant repression. The suggestion of Pundit Malaviya to hold a Round Table Conference of all shades of opinion, for the solution of the crisis, was responded to by all the political parties. This was the crucial moment, and the wary tactics of the Viceroy in this crisis prove that he was fumbling in the dark. In a speech made in Calcutta on December 21, 1921, just before the Ahmedabad Congress opened, the Viceroy himself stated that he was in favour of a genuine attempt to solve the problems of unrest by means of discussion and consideration at a conference, and that meanwhile, there should be a cessation of activities on both sides, both Non-co-operators and Government. He further declared that such a truce would involve no advantage or triumph to be claimed on either side. The reason for this offer to mediate was clear. It was desired to save the face of British prestige during the Prince’s visit, and for this reason, Lord Reading was ready to negotiate. No definite response was given immediately to his offer, and his real object,—that of making the Prince’s visit a success, was thereby lost. But his words had not fallen on deaf ears, and we find the idea of a conference, being toyed with by Mr. Gandhi in the Ahmedabad Congress, who “left the door to negotiations open,” and again in the Conference held in Bombay on January 15th, in which definite terms were laid down for the calling of a Round Table Conference, in conformity with the Viceroy’s speech; that the Government cease its arrests and release all prisoners and that the Non-co-operator cease all activities pending the negotiations. Mr. Gandhi, meanwhile, as Congress Dictator, had suspended Civil Disobedience until the end of January; in order to assist the arbitration.

In this desire of Mr. Gandhi to arbitrate lay the secret of his defeat. Lord Reading discovered that Mr. Gandhi was, no less unwilling than himself to call into action the sanguinary, forces of the Indian masses. This was amply demonstrated by his overgrowing insistence upon the creed of Non-violence at the expense of its concomitant Non-Co-operation. By his sharp rebuke to every, manifestation of force on the part of the masses, such as his “Manifesto to the Hooligans of Bombay” after the events of November 17th—20th and Madras, in which he declared, “it is better to have no hartal and no hooliganism”; above all, by his shrinking from embarking upon the final step that ine himself declared must lead to Swaraj, namely, Mass Civil Disobedience, including non-payment of taxes. This latter step was thrice postponed after its formal adoption in the Ahmadabad Congress; postponed for no reason whatever, except Mr. Gandhi’s own timid horror of the inevitable conflicts between police and people that must follow its inauguration. It did not need much acumen for Lord Reading to discover this weakness of Mr. Gandhi, who proclaimed it from the housetops, for the benefit alike of Government and Non-co-operators. On January 25th, he wrote in Young India, at the very moment when the Round Table negotiations were under way, and he was supposed to declare Mass Civil Disobedience in operation within five days if the overtures for peace fell through: “I don’t know what is the best course. At this moment I am positively shaking with fear. If a settlement were to be made, then where are we to go? After coming to know, the strength of India, I am afraid of a settlement. If a settlement is to be made before we have been thoroughly tested, our condition will be like that of a child prematurely born, which will perish in a short time.” In the face of this naive avowal of indecision, helplessness, and terror, is it any wonder that the Viceroy, afflicted by no such qualms and very conscious of his end in view, should bring the negotiations for a Round Table Conference to an abrupt end and pursue his serene course of lawless repression, undeterred by the voice of his own or Mr. Gandhi’s conscience? Lord Reading’s decision was communicated to Pundit Malaviya and the 200 delegates from all political parties, in a telegram sent by his secretary, towards the end of January, which stated that His Excellency was unable to discover in the proposals put forward by the Conference the basis for a profitable discussion on a Round Table Conference, and no useful purpose would therefore be served by entering into any detailed-examination of their terms. The Viceroy had begun to advance from the very first: step of retreat taken by Mr. Gandhi in postponing the application of Mass Civil Disobedience until the outcome of the Round Table Arbitrations. If instead of this amiable postponement, Mr. Gandhi had issued an edict to the waiting peasantry to cease payment of taxes immediately at the close of the Congress, the whole outcome might have been different. The response of the peasants cannot be, doubted. Wherever tried, its effect was instantaneous and overwhelming. Lord Reading, confronted by a show of force and firmness, backed by mass-action on a large scale, might have wavered and accepted negotiations with the Non-co-operators. But Mr. Gandhi merely threatened and then postponed for two weeks that which constituted his only weapon. On February 4th, when the Viceroy had already declared the road to negotiations closed, Mr. Gandhi addressed a letter to him, once more offering to delay the inauguration of Mass Civil Disobedience pending the Conference, if the Viceroy would revise his policy of lawless repression. The reply, of February 6th, was a Government Communique which declared that “Mass Civil Disobedience is frought with such danger to the State that it must be met with sternness and severity,” while Mr. Gandhi’s overtures for peace were completely ignored. Matters had now come to a showdown. The Government had called Mr. Gandhi’s bluff; and all cards were laid on the table. Mass Civil Disobedience, already declared at Bardoli on January 29th, but suspended pending the Gandhi-Reading negotiations, was formally launched through the medium of a mass-meeting held at Bardoli, and a Manifesto issued February 7th by Mr. Gandhi, in which he declared: “The choice before the people, then, is Mass Civil Disobedience with all its undoubted dangers and lawless repression of the lawful activities of the people.” Although Mass Civil Disobedience was not formally sanctioned by Mr. Gandhi until all hope of a compromise with the Government had been given up—that is, until the first week in February—in reality it had begun spontaneously in various districts since January, in the form of non-payment of taxes, and was approved by the various local Congress Committees. The rumour spread from village to village that the Gandhi-Raj had come, and it was no longer necessary to pay taxes. That the movement was spreading rapidly is proven by the fact that local officials began to resign in large numbers because of their inability to collect the revenue, as well as by the official reports, which show large sums outstanding which the officials were unable to collect from the peasantry. District magistrates complained of incitement among the people not to pay taxes, of popular resistance to rent-warrants, of insults heaped by prisoners under trial upon their judges, and a general subversion of jail discipline. The prompt and energetic measures taken by the Government to arrest the non-payment of taxes movement prove how seriously it was regarded. Already on January 10th, a Communique from the Punjab, warned the people against the consequences of Civil Disobedience, which the Government threatened would be dealt with by more rigorous and systematic measures than any yet adopted. On January 20th, the Madras Government issued a similar notice, stating that the resignation of village officials would not be accepted, and that officers refusing to carry out their duties would be dismissed and deprived of their hereditary rights, and that the land of persons refusing to pay taxes would be seized and put up for sale.

Extra police were recruited at the expense of the population, but those paying taxes before the prescribed date would be exempt from this liability. Military police were called out in Assam to assist collections, but were met with resistance by the people. Conflicts between the police and the people became a daily occurrence, but a strict censorship was maintained to conceal the extent of the unrest. Only the reports of the revenue-officers form a gauge of the strength of the movement. In Guntur District, Madras, collections amounted to tooth part of the money due. Non-payment of taxes was not the only disturbing feature of Indian unrest during the months of January and February. Widespread disturbances throughout India, from the Punjab to Madras, from Bombay to Burma, arose from the attempts to enforce the various measures of the Non-co-operation programme, such as boycott of cloth and liquor-shops, resulting in encounters between police and people, and mob-risings, with loss of life and many arrests which tended to increase the general disquiet. The correspondent of the Morning Post, writing from India at the end of January, says: “In large areas, particularly Upper Assam, conditions border on anarchy. Rent and revenue payments are refused, and where resort is had to loyalist volunteers and Gurkhas, the Gandhites have openly ridiculed such military procedure. In a police affray arising from picketing in Serajgunge (Bengal), the police fired, killing five and wounding 200. The present tension, unless eased by stronger Government action, will have a most serious outcome.” In Bombay, the movement was more peaceful, consisting mainly of boycott of schools and enlistment of volunteers, so that in a mass-meeting held in Bardoli in January, under the auspices of the Non-co-operators, Mr. Gandhi was able to declare the district self-disciplined and fit enough for the adoption of Civil Disobedience. But even this model atmosphere was ruffled when the Bombay Government announced on February 9th, that the Municipalities of Ahmediabad and Burat would be superseded for two and three years respectively, for having resolved to conduct their schools independently of Government control and for refusing the Government education grant. At this critical moment, an unexpected pin-prick exploded Mr. Gandhi’s faltering resolution, and sent him scurrying back to the protection of law and order. On February 4th, a riot occurred in Chauri Chaura, a village of the United Provinces, in which a procession of volunteers was fired on by the police and the infuriated mob charged the police station, captured the building, killed 23 policemen, and then set fire to the police station, cut the telegraph wires and tore up the railway. The news of this untoward but by no means unusual event, whose counterparts were being enacted all over India in every province, leaked through the official censorship on February 6th, just at the moment when Mr. Gandhi and the Viceroy were exchanging their famous notes, and full details reached the Mahatma on the very day on which he announced the formal inauguration of Mass Civil Disobedience. The gruesome details of burned policemen and dismantled telegraph wires were more than Mr. Gandhi’s sensitive conscience could bear. By some extraordinary mental process, he held himself and his declaration of Civil Disobedience to be responsible for the whole occurrence, and with a loud wail of dismay and despair, announced a five-days’ fast (reduced to two days on the supplications of his followers) as penance and punishment for the tragedy of Chauri Chaura. In an article published on February ioth in Young India, Mr. Gandhi declares: “I regard the Chauri Chaura tragedy as a third warning from God against the hasty embarkation on Mass Civil Disobedience, and it is my bitterest cup of humiliation, but I deem such humiliation, ostracism, or even death preferable to any countenancing of untruth or violence.” Without loss of time, on February 11th, a Conference was hastily convened at Bardoli, wherein the Working Committee of the Congress revoked not only Mass Civil Disobedience, but all picketing, processions and public meetings as well. The peasants were ordered to pay land-revenue and all other taxes due to the Government, and to suspend ever activity of an offensive nature. Mr. Gandhi’s harkening to his conscience did him the good service of delaying the order for his own arrest, a fact of which he was unaware at the time. The Government at Simla, a little amazed at this temperamental outburst and sudden change of heart, stayed its and temporarily to permit Mr. Gandhi to lead the movement into confusion worse confounded. The national uprising which they had feared and prepared against during the last three months, was checked and thrown into rout by the good offices of Mr. Gandhi himself, whose incorrigible pacificism and dread of the popular energy could be counted upon to prevent the explosion. What Governmental repression in all its varied forms had failed to accomplish, the agonized appeal of the Mahatma was able to effectuate. Truly, as a Pacifist Reformer, Mr. Gandhi may well congratulate himself on his success in soothing the just anger of the populace, even though he may have to admit his utter failure to melt the heart of the Government. That which arrests, tortures, floggings, imprisonments, massacres, fines, and police-zoolams could not quell—the blind struggles of a starving nation to save itself from utter annihilation—Mr. Gandhi, by the simple magic of love and non-violence, reduced to impotence and inactivity, which insured its temporary defeat. The Bardoli Resolutions were received throughout the country with mingled feelings of triumph, relief, and alarm—triumph on the part of the Government and its supporters, relief to the feelings of those moderates and secret sympathisers with the victims of Government repression, and alarm on the part of those Non-co-operators whose ideas of strategy and tactics differed widely from those of Mr.

Gandhi. While the Nationalist Press on the whole supported Mr. Gandhi in his volte-face, and local Congress Committees immediately began to put the Bardoli Resolutions into practice, a section of Extremist opinion found itself outraged by the sudden retreat from the Ahmedabad decisions. Some Mahratta newspapers criticised Mr. Gandhi for stressing isolated incidents like Chauri Chaura and Bombay to the detriment of the movement as a whole. Mr. S. R. Bomanji, in a lecture delivered in Bombay on “The Lessons of Bardoli,” declared that the people were asked to sacrifice everything and were prepared to do it, because they thought Mr. Gandhi was leading a fight for freedom, Mr. Gandhi was the most greatly admired man in India, but that did not preclude them from the right of thinking, and in the hero-worship of Mr. Gandhi they were losing their individuality. The regular session of the All-India Congress Committee was held in Delhi on February 24th, and the Bardoli Resolutions were presented for endorsement. Pundit Malaviya, Mr. Gandhi’s alter ego of Pacificism and Moderation, urged the ratification of Bardoli, and the complete abandonment of Non-co-operation in all its forms. Mr. Gandhi, still horror-stricken at the bloodshed of Chauri Chaura that presaged Revolution, hugged the Bardoli decisions without going to the length of Pundit Malaviya’s surrender. But an angry section of earnest Extremists, realising the disastrous effect upon the movement of the abandonment of all aggressive tactics, and smarting under the Government’s ill-concealed triumph, urged the repudiation of Bardoli and the renewal of Non-co-operation, including Civil Disobedience. Mr. Gandhi himself, caught in the unpleasant predicament of being “let off” by the Government for good behaviour, felt himself stung to self-defence by a return to his abandoned position. Accordingly, a compromise was struck, and the Delhi session of the Congress Committee sanctioned all forms of Non-co-operation, including individual Civil Disobedience, both defensive and aggressive, and picketing. The Resolution affirmed that “Civil Disobedience is the right and duty of a people, whenever a state opposes the declared will of the people.” The Delhi decision was a complete reversal of Bardoli, and as such, constituted a direct challenge to the Government. The arrest of Mr. Gandhi, already once postponed, could be henceforth merely a matter of time an place. The wider issues of imperial policy as well as the Government of India, demanded it. In England, the Die-hards were clamouring for his blood, together with that of Mr. Montagu, Secretary of State for India, whom they identified with the liberal policy of the Montford Reforms. Lloyd George, threatened with a General Election by the dissolution of his Coalition, ran hither and thither, hatching devices for saving his job. Having achieved the Irish Free State and “Independent” Egypt as sops to Liberal opinion, it became necessary to placate the Conservatives by some blood-offering, and this he proceeded to do by the sacrifice of Indian hopes and aspirations. India’s victimisation to Lloyd Georgian and Imperial exigencies took three outward and visible manifestations. The first was the attempted splitting off of the Mussulmans from the Nationalist Movement by granting certain concessions to the claims of the Caliphate; the second was the dismissal of Mr. Montagu and the appointment of a Conservative to his post; the third was the arrest of Mr. Gandhi, with the purpose of dealing the coup de grace to the Non-co-operation Movement. Mr. Lloyd George is a clever politician, but events have not justified the wisdom of any one of these three steps. The revision of the Treaty of Sévres had formed one of the demands of the Non-co-operators from the very beginning, as a means of bringing about the Hindu-Muslim unity so essential to the success of Indian nationalism. But Mr. Gandhi was not the only angler for Muslim goodwill. The historic “divide and rule” policy of the British Government, which had met with so much success in India by the separation of Mussulmans and Hindus could not be checkmated by so simple a manœuvre as taking up the cudgels for the Caliphate. It was clear that if Muslim support could be bought by concessions to religious fanaticism, the British Government would be the first to buy it over, if it considered it worth while. The time came when this policy seemed expedient. At the end of January, Lord Northcliffe, in the course of his Indian tour, published a significant and sensational letter advising concession to Muslim opinion, and the conservative Press in England echoed his advice. The Viceroy of India took advantage of the approaching Paris Conference to telegraph the Home Government his oft-reiterated plea on behalf of some revision in favour of the Caliphate. It was evident that the Die-hards, influenced by traditional belief in the militant fierceness of the Mussulman, were inclined to placate this element at the expense of the Hindu community. In a word, the Imperialists stole Mr.

In a word, the Imperialists stole Mr. Gandhi’s thunder, and hoped thereby to split the strength of the Indian Extremists. The Paris Conference, duly presided over by Lord Curzon, who had his instructions, granted most of the things that Indian Muslims had clamoured for. But the result has been somewhat disappointing. Seith Chotani, President of the Indian Central Caliphate Committee, issued a statement on behalf of his organisation regarding the Near East proposals, which he stigmatizes as “pro-Greek” and entirely unacceptable to Indian Muslims. “Indian Muslims and their fellow-countrymen demand that England keep her promises to the letter and spirit.” In view of international complications, England cannot very well concede more, so the ruse of buying up Muslim goodwill can be said, on the whole, to have failed. As for the dismissal of Mr. Montagu, this served its purpose with the Die-hards, but at what a cost to Indian public opinion only Lord Reading, as the man on the spot, best knows. Mr. Montagu enjoyed a wide popularity among Indian Moderates, based on a fictitious idea of his friendliness to Indian constitutional reform, and this popularity has attained a frenzy of adulation since his spectacular martyrdom on the altar of British Liberalism in India. This frenzy is enhanced by a growing fear that his successor, Lord Peel, symbolizes a reversal of the Reform policy adopted in 1919. The slightest act of reversion on the part of the India Office will be heralded in India as the beginning of reaction and oppression. What Mr. Lloyd George has gained at home, he has more than sacrificed in India by this peculiarly inopportune victimisation of psuedo-liberalism, which in reality, was never anything but a sugar-coated imperialistic pill. As for the arrest of India’s Mahatma! Mr. Lloyd George should beware of the Ides of March. Scarce twelve days after the Delhi decisions, and simultaneously with the dismissal of Mr. Montagu, Mr. Gandhi was arrested on the charge of “tending to promote disaffection against the existing system of Government” by certain speeches and articles, and a few days later was brought to trial. True to his gospel of Non-co-operation, Mr. Gandhi pleaded guilty and offered no defence, urged the judge to find him guilty and to give him the maximum sentence, and in the course of a long written statement which he read out before the court, he reaffirmed his doctrine of non-violent Non-co-operation with the existing system of government in straightforward, eloquent words. The judge who sat personifying British justice and honesty must have felt some inward qualms of conscience in the face of this ringing indictment, which fell upon the court-room like the voice of suffering India itself. In a few words, half-explanatory and almost apologetic, he pronounced sentence—six years’ simple imprisonment—and the farce was over. Mohandas Karamehand Gandhi, apostle of Non-resistance, leader of Non-co-operation and beloved Mahatma of India’s struggling millions, was led off to jail. Let neither Lloyd George, nor Lord Reading, nor the thinking public be deceived by the calm that fell upon. India’s millions at news of Mr. Gandhi’s incarceration. The Non-co-operators, those who intoxicate themselves with the opiate of non-violence, may attribute it to Soul-Force; the Government may deem it the justification of its policy of repression; but for those who know India of to-day, this unearthly calm presages a storm more violent than any which has yet shaken the political horizon. That which is lacking is leadership in the Indian movement to-day. But without disrespect let us say frankly, that no leadership for a time is preferable to Mr. Gandhi’s misleadership. He performed gallant service in the last three years in leading the Indian people out of their age-long hopelessness and stagnation into the path of agitation and organisation which attained a nation-wide response and scope. His own mental confusion was but a reflection of the confused and chaotic state of the movement itself, just staggering upon is weak legs and learning to walk. All honour to Mr. Gandhi, who found a way for his people out of the entanglements of Government censorship and repression; who, by his slogans of non-violent Non-co-operation, boycott and Civil Disobedience, was able to draw the wide masses into the folds of the Congress Party and make the Indian movement for the first time truly national. But the movement had outgrown its leader; the time had come when the masses were ready to surge ahead in the struggle, and Mr. Gandhi vainly sought to hold them back; they strained and struggled in the leading-strings of Soul-Force, Transcendental Love and Non-violence, torn between their crying earthly needs and their real love for this saintly man whose purity gripped their imagination and claimed their loyalty. Mr. Gandhi had become an unconscious agent of reaction in the face of a growing revolutionary situation. The few leaders of the Congress Party who realised this and sought a way out, were rendered desperate, almost despairing at the dilemma. Mr.

Mr. Gandhi had become a problem to his own movement, and lo! the British Government, in its infinite wisdom, relieved them of the problem. Mr. Gandhi out of jail was an acknowledged force of peace, a sure enemy of violence in all its forms. Mr. Gandhi in jail is a powerful factor for unrest, a symbol of national martyrdom, a constant stimulation to the national cause to fight its way to freedom. Since his arrest, two wings of the Congress Party have developed into clear-cut prominence. One veering towards the right, headed by Malaviya, seeks reunion with the Moderates, the abandonment of Non-co-operation and a bourgeois programme of constitutional reform within the Empire. The other struggles vainly after the vanishing slogans of Gandhism—atyagraha, Non-violence, boycott of foreign goods, and the reconquest of India by the Charka (Spinning-wheel). In this camp, which is all that remains of Extremism, reigns consternation and confusion, but a few voices are rising clear and strong above the din. The voice of Mr. C. R. Das, President of the last Bengal Provincial Conference, recommending the capture of the Reform Council and the formation of peasant and workers’ unions; the voice of Dr. Munji in the Maharashtra Conference, which proclaimed that “the aim of the Congress is thoroughly worldly and for worldly happiness and has to be attained by worldly means which should be easily understandable and practicable”; the voice of nationalist journals which cry that the nation must be organised for the struggle, and that the real work lies among the masses. New leaders are surging to the front, ready to learn by past mistakes and to build a new programme far the future. Upon their understanding of the present Indian situation depends their present success or failure. The mass movement among the workers and peasants is still strong and powerful; the Aika peasant movement in the United Provinces, the outbreak of unrest among the Bhils in Central India, the three months’ strike of the workers on the East India Railroad, prove where the real strength of the Indian movement lies. Reformist trade-union and co-operative workers are already in the field to capture the allegiance of the Indian masses. It remains for the Congress leaders to anticipate them by formulating such a programme as will bring the workers and peasants of India to their side. In the dynamic struggle of mass-action under wise political leadership lies the true and only solution of the Indian struggle for freedom. Communist Review

Evelyn Roy The Famine in Russia How the Capitalist States Helped Source: Communist Review Vol. III, August 1922, No. 4. Publisher: Communist Party Great Britain. Transcription/HTML: Brian Reid. Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. IN agonised Russian mother writes to the Moscow newspaper, Pravda, as follows: “I am a widow with four children, and no one in the world to help me. My oldest child is fourteen, the youngest seven. We have had nothing to eat for days, and I see my children growing weaker and weaker. There is no food to be had. The youngest lay sick in bed, dying. In the night my eldest child came to me and said that we must kill the little one for the sake of the rest, and give them something to eat. I told her it could not be, but then I saw the pinched faces of the three starving little ones, and I thought that in any case, the youngest must die soon, for we had no means to save her. I consented, and in the night my oldest girl and I went quietly while the others slept, and with a knife we killed and cut up the body of my youngest. Now there is food for the other children, but I cannot eat, knowing what it is. I write to you to ask if I have done wrong, and to offer myself for punishment.” This is but one of a hundred similar instances occurring daily in the famine region of Russia, where for nine months hunger has raged, supplemented by bitter cold and virulent epidemics. Nineteen million people have been affected by this great catastrophe, which will rank among the worst in history. And, to add to the horror of hunger, cold, disease, pestilence and suffering of every description – cannibalism! A civilized people, once the gentlest, most laughter-loving and happiest in the family of nations, has reverted to barbarism. Mothers are secretly killing their children; families are feeding on the flesh of those who have died; human ghouls are digging up the frozen corpses that have been interred, to save themselves from death. Who is responsible for these horrors? The thousand-throated enemies of Russia will cry “the Bolsheviks.” But those who know the truth will reply, “Capitalism.” Let us not speak here of the causes of the famine. Careful historians will record the fact that seven years of warfare had depleted the labour, livestock and seed-grains of the richest grain-producing region of Russia to such a point that since 1918 crop-scarcities had produced a condition that threatened famine even before the withering drought of 1921 completed the havoc wrought by war and revolution. Let us rather speak of the reason why, in this twentieth century, with all the facilities of science and civilization at the beck and call of mankind; with telegraphs and wireless and railroads and swift ocean greyhounds ready to act as willing servants for transporting help from one world’s end to the other, why is it that nineteen million people anywhere, be they on the banks of the Volga or of the Ganjes, should be reduced to starvation and to cannibalism? How is it that in the year of grace 1921, with the corn-bins of the most Christian countries full to bursting and with farmers going bankrupt for lack of a market to sell their grain; with the factories of the world lying idle to relieve the glut of overproduction during the war, and as a result of this hundreds of thousands of unemployed men and women walking the streets of all the great metropoli in search of work; with great ships congesting every port and empty trains running across each continent; with Christian preachers thundering the Ten Commandments and proselytizing the heathen to worship their God of Love and Human Kindness – with all this, and more, how is it that starving Russia is not fed and supplied with the essential materials that will enable her next year to help herself? Truly, it is an enigma, since by so doing the paralysis of overproduction and unemployment that cripple the Christian world would find immediate relief. “But who is to pay?” asks the twentieth century business man, who prays every Sunday in church for forgiveness for the week’s transgressions. “The Bolsheviks are bankrupt; they have abolished private property, and the famine is their punishment. Let them suffer until they change their ideas or their government.” The capitalist governments consulted together when the call for help went forth a year ago – when there was still enough food to keep the terror-stricken population until relief should arrive; when the hot sun still shone on the blighted fields, and water and railways were open to transport all the help that could be sent. The Supreme Economic Council of the League of Nations deliberated; the Premiers and Presidents of the world’s great powers held weighty conclaves, and the sum total of their decisions was that neither help nor credit could be extended to a Government which repudiated its foreign debts. Meanwhile, from Samara, the Urals, and the regions of the Volga, a migration of peoples set out blindly, as in ages past, towards north, east, south and west, searching for food.

Meanwhile, from Samara, the Urals, and the regions of the Volga, a migration of peoples set out blindly, as in ages past, towards north, east, south and west, searching for food. Those who remained were those whose little store of food still held out, or who believed that the promised help would arrive in time to save them before the winter snows. July, August, September dragged out their burning course, and the belated rains began to fall. The pitiful crops that had been garnered were already exhausted. October ushered in an early winter. Yet more people abandoned their homes and set forth in a desperate, instinctive search for regions of plenty. Already one-third of the population of the famine districts had been carried off, either by migrations or deaths from hunger and disease. People had begun to dig in the earth for roots. Those to whom a horse, a cow, dogs, cats or any domestic animal remained, killed them and ate, thankful for this ration. Those who had not hunted mice, rats, pounded the bark of trees, and gnawed at grasses. The weakest – old men and women, little children – sickened and died. Then came the killing frost; thirty degrees below zero, with no wood to warm the skinny bones that each day protruded further beneath the cracked skin of the starving. Help came – first Russian help, given miraculously by those who themselves had nothing. Towns and villages contributed flour and potatoes; workers gave their labour; soldiers and civilians formed volunteer corps to work in relief stations; the whole population was mobilised by an energetic State to fight the famine, just as it had been previously mobilised to fight foreign invasion, counterrevolution, and the new economic crisis. Fifteen million poods of seed grain were sent immediately to the famine districts for the fall planting to ensure the next year’s harvest. Soup kitchens, hospitals, service trains, children’s homes, receiving stations, were established in the stricken areas, and transportation provided for a part of the homeless and starving to the big cities, where they were cared for in State institutions. All government departments, the army, factories, workshops, and every organised group contributed their quota by maintaining homes for children or adults, by working extra hours in each week, by special contributions of food and clothing. All salaries and rations were taxed to pay a monthly contribution to the famine sufferers. Special days were set aside in industrial centres, in which the whole production went to the famine fund. All the tremendous propaganda and organising apparatus of the Soviet Government was brought to bear on the problem of relief to the stricken provinces, and long before the first train-load of food was sent from abroad the Russian Communist Party had measured the terrible need and had organised all the resources of the country to meet it as best they could. Then came the Quakers, the Nansen Commission, and the American Relief Administration. The Quakers, who have maintained feeding centres for children ever since the Revolution, were the first in the field after the Russians. Their organisation has grown to such an extent that they are now feeding 83,000 persons, and they have raised a fund of £300,000. Then came the American Relief Administration, and everyone in Russia will remember the thrill of hope that went through the land when the news was published that the agreement had been signed at Riga, and the first American food train had crossed the Russian border twenty-four hours later. With a $15,000,000 fund behind them, and their organisation perfected during war service, they show a record of 1,800,000 children fed up to January 31st, with a promise of 2,000,000 children and 5,000,000 adults by February 1st. The Nansen Commission for international relief work in Russia has raised up to the end of January £1,000,000, with 250,000 adults and children fed. The Committee for Famine Relief of the Far Eastern Republic had delivered, up to February 15th, 600,000 gold roubles and 100,000 poods of foodstuff, this amount including contributions from other Far Eastern countries such as China and Mongolia. The International Federation of Trade Unions (The Amsterdam International) and the Second International together have collected 794,000 gulden (414,000 roubles gold) out of this 75,000 poods foodstuff and 1,000,000 German marks worth of medicaments delivered. The Relief Organisation of the Third International outside Russia has collected and delivered to date 150,000,000 German marks, 200,000 poods foodstuff, besides automobiles, trucks, locomobiles, field kitchens, etc., and 52,100 persons fed up to November 1st. The Friends of Soviet Russia, working in the United States, collected, up to February 1st, $330,000 and $250,000 worth of wearing apparel. The American Mennonites have agreed to send $50,000 and the Dutch Mennonites $75,000, but, so far, nothing has been received. Various private individuals and organisations of different character have contributed a total of 758,920 gold roubles, up to February 15th, of which the most generous was a fund of £20,000 raised by the Manchester Guardian. [1] The grand total of contributions to date from the various bourgeois governments, as distinct from individual or organisational donations, consists of 72,444,900 gold roubles and 300,000 poods foodstuff. The itemised list of contributions per government, which may prove of interest, is as follows: – France Italy Czecho-Slovakia Norway Belgium Sweden Denmark Angora Persia Afghanistan Switzerland Esthonia Uruguay Far Eastern Republic U.S.A. American Relief Bokhara Luxemburg Total: 6,000,000 fr.

(5,000,000 fr. in army stores) 6,000,000 lire 30,000,000 kr. 1,500,000 kr. 750,000 fr. 500,000 kr. 1,000,000 kr. 140,000 poods flour and rice 50,000 poods flour 100,000 poods flour 100,000 fr. 10,000,000 Es. mks. 5,000 pesetas 10,000 roubles gold 20,000,000 dollars 15,000,000 dollars 6,000 roubles gold 100,000 fr. 72,444,900 roubles gold 300,000 poods foodstuff The total contributions from foreign individuals, organisations and governments to January 31st were: – 120,000,000 gold roubles. 4,500,000 poods foodstuff. The bulk of this has come from the United States. At first glance the whole amount may seem generous, but when we consider the immense need, coupled with the fact that nine weary months have passed in the collecting of it, and that most of the money is still on paper with the food and essential materials it could buy still undelivered, it is clear why the famine conditions have become worse instead of better. Nineteen million people cannot be fed daily on even their present pitiable ration of ½lb. of foodstuff, with the amount subscribed. Russia has, of course, provided the lion’s share, and it is due chiefly to the herculean efforts of the Russian government and its people that Dr. Nansen was able to report that ten million people have been arranged for in the next three months, leaving nine millions unprovided for unless immediate help is forthcoming. Food is but one item, although a big one, on the long list of necessities, first among which rank seed grains for the fall planting and agricultural- machinery to replace the horses and cattle carried off by the war and scarcity. Medicaments are a first essential in a region where famine has been supplemented by typhus, dysentery, scarletina, diphtheria, cholera, and tuberculosis. The sanitary trains, doctors, nurses, pharmacists, medicines, etc., which have been provided are too few to cope with the tremendous mortality resulting from the weakness and exhaustion of the inhabitants. There is an urgent need for beds, bedding, disinfectants, clothing, instruments, medicainents, medical literature, and cleansing soap. In one district alone on the Volga, out of a population of 350,000 souls, 40,000 died of hunger from June to November. Who, in the long run, is responsible for the set-back to civilisation that famine and death and cannibalism have brought to the Russian people? Is it the Bolsheviks, who have manfully set their shoulders to the wheel, undaunted by this staggering catastrophe, or is it capitalism, which, upon hearing nine months ago that nineteen million people must die of famine unless immediate help was sent, responded: – “A Government which repudiates its foreign debts cannot expect to receive credit.” Notes * Up to date the Manchester Guardian has collected £60,000. – (Editor) Evelyn Roy Archive | Communist Review

MIA > Archive > Evelyn Roy Evelyn Roy Political Prisoners in India (19 April 1923) From International Press Correspondence, Vol. 3 No. 33 [15], 19 April 1923, pp. 284–285. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2021). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. At the moment of writing there are between 20,000 Is 25,000 political prisoners in Indian jails, undergoing sentences of from three months to three years for their activities in the Nationalist movement of Non-Violent Non-Cooperation against the British-Indian Government. Exaggerated estimates by the nationalists themselves place this estimate as high as forty thousand, and it is possible that during the high water mark of repression, in the past eight months, this figure was not incorrect, but the consensus of opinion is that 25,000 prisoners still lie incarcerated on various charges arising out of the campaign of passive resistance initiated in 1920 by Mr. M.K. Gandhi. In addition to this number, there are various outstanding personalities, leaders of the movement such as Mr. Gandhi himself, who have been sentenced to longer and more severe prison terms. Six years is the average sentence for those singled out for such exemplary punishment. Class War Prisoners In addition to the political prisoners there are thousands of workers and peasants lying in jail under ordinary criminal charges, for taking part in various forms of direct action, such as strikes, riots etc., either in connection with the nationalist movement, or in their own campaign for the improvement of their miserable working and living conditions. The number of these cannot be estimated even roughly, but they run well into the thousands, even by taking only a few of the most prominent judgments of the past few years. For example, the agrarian revolt of the Moplahs of Malabar, Southern India, which lasted eight months, ended in the hanging of five leaders and the sentencing of 6,689 participants to various long terms of imprisonment. Seventy Moplahs died of suffocation while being transported in a railway van from one prison to another. Another of the recent prominent cases of agrarian unrest in the United Provinces, which led to the riot of Chauri Chaura by a mob of 5,000 villagers against a local police station, resulted in the arrest of 227 peasants, 172 of whom have in the month of January been condemned to death. Six died in jail of alleged ill-treatment. The sensational passive resistance campaign of the Akali Sikhs, an agrarian people of the province of the Punjab in Northern India, led to the arrest of 5,603 on technical charges of trespass and theft, all of whom have been given various sentences of from six months to two years. Both agrarian and industrial workers lying under prison sentence are subjected to the ordinary jail-rules applied to criminal convicts, and only in the case of the arrested nationalists, coming mostly from the middle-class, is some exceptional treatment beginning to be nude and their status as political prisoners recognized, owing to the pressure of educated Indian opinion, which has forced the Government to make some concession in this respect. Apart from being forced to perform prison labor, political and class war prisoners are subjected to special forms of corporal punishment and torture for infringement of prison rules, or offending the sensibilities of the warders. Flogging is permitted under jail rules and frequently indulged in as one of the ordinary forms of punishment, inflicted at the will of the warder, for such trivial offences as refusing to stand up when ordered, or refusing to stand at attention when ordered. Cases of illness and death due to illness brought on by conditions and treatment meted out in jail are common. What is needed to remedy conditions In addition to other means for the relief of prisoners, the following measures should be adopted: Organization of an All-India Political and Class War Prisoners’ Bureau with sub-bureau in each province and important city, divided into three main branches or functions: Legal Publicity Welfare and Relief Financial The legal department should provide the assistance of expert lawyers for all political and class-war prisoners, to defend cases and protect the rights of prisoners before and after conviction. It should also agitate for the recognition of the full legal status of such prisoners and their right to exceptional treatment from the ordinary criminal prison rules. The Publicity Department should keep the public informed of prison conditions, treatment of prisoners, the conduct of cases, judgments passed and every detail of prison life. This department should function, not only nationally, but internationally, in order that the peculiar brutalities of Indian prison life should become as notorious as was that of the Russian Czarist regime. It should also agitate for funds to conduct the general work of the Bureau. The Welfare and Relief Department would supplement the labors of the two foregoing, by providing food, clothing, medical aid, books and other prison-necessities and comforts where such are allowed, as well as to arrange for visits, letters, help to stricken families and to bring to the notice of the other departments of the Bureau the general condition of prisoners and cases of ill-treatment and abuse. The Financial Department would collect funds for the carrying on of the above work, to be amplified from time to lime as conditions demand. Conclusion Since the Indian struggle at the present time and for some lime to come, is predominantly national in character, the organization of a joint Bureau for Political and Class-War prisoners becomes imperative, and the nationalist movement must at the same time be made to shoulder the responsibility of the agrarian and proletarian movement which it constantly calls upon to militate in the nationalist cause. The reason is doubly imperative, since the Indian proletariat is too poor, oppressed and illiterate to take the initiative in any steps for self-defense that require a nationwide scope and organizing power. The trade-unions can be relied upon to a certain extent, but only to the extent that these are sympathetic towards and working with the nationalist cause. All other labor organizations bear too much of the official government stamp to be relied upon for any sincere and effective work in the organization of a class-war prisoners’ relief. 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Evelyn Roy Mahatma GandhiRevolutionary or Counter-Revolutionary? A Reply to Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse Source: Labour Monthly Vol. V, September 1923, No. 3. Publisher: 162 Buckingham Palace Road, London., S.W.1 Transcription/HTML: Brian Reid Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2006). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. THE learned articles from the pen of M. Romain Rolland, which recently appeared in the monthly review Europe, and the reply thereto in Clarté by Henri Barbusse, on the subject of Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the Non-violent Non-Co-operation Movement of India during the years 1920-1922, have opened a new field of discussion between the two opposing camps of European radical intellectualism. M. Rolland, the protagonist of Non-violence, has offered to the world a new argument and, as he conceives it, a new proof of the efficacy of this doctrine as applied to political struggles. He discovers Mr. Gandhi a year after the latter has been consigned to the oblivion of a six years’ gaol sentence, and in eloquent and poetic language describes and interprets his career as leader of the Non-Co-operation Movement, in order to prove his own theory that Non-violence, based upon suffering, self-sacrifice, and brotherly love, is the only philosophy that can save European civilisation from ultimate annihilation. M. Barbusse, belonging to the opposite camp of those who believe in opposing force to force, dictatorship to dictatorship, and the ultimate survival of the fittest, replies to the articles of M. Rolland by attempting to upset the whole basis of the latter’s thesis as to Gandhi’s true rôle in the Indian movement. Mr. Gandhi, he asseverates, is not what M. Rolland imagines him to be—an apostle of love, sacrifice, and suffering, come to redeem the world with a new gospel and a new vicarious atonement. On the contrary, Mr. Gandhi is a revolutionary to whom Non-violence is but a masterly tactic in the face of a difficult situation. Had Lenin been in Gandhi’s place he would have spoken and acted as did the latter, declares M. Barbusse; both are for compulsion; both are realists. Gandhi took care to base himself upon the working and peasant masses. He always defended the poor and the oppressed. The revolutionary movement of India is more a social struggle than a nationalist one, and the fight against the British bureaucracy is a characteristic form of the class-struggle. So writes Henri Barbusse in a valiant effort to disprove the arguments of Romain Rolland and to defeat his object of using Gandhi as a new stick wherewith to beat the programme and tactics of Bolshevism. It may not come amiss for those who have spoken and written critically on the Non-violent Non-Co-operation Movement in India, during the past two years, to add a few words to this controversy in an effort to shed new light on what is, after all, a dark subject for the majority of European intellectuals. It is not our present purpose to analyse the Non-Co-operation Movement here; this has been done exhaustively in two books by Manabendra Nath Roy, published in 1922 and 1923 (India in Transition and One Tear of Non-Co-operation; from Ahmedabad to Gaya[1]). Therein the social forces underlying the Gandhi movement, as well as the significance and rôle of the latter upon Indian life as a whole, have been dealt with from the standpoint of historic materialism. Our immediate object is to take the articles of M. Rolland and to point out in them certain outstanding misstatements of fact and consequent wrong conclusions which are in themselves sufficient to negate the whole force of his argument without going to the opposite extreme of declaring Gandhi to be that which he is not and never will be—a “true revolutionary,” whether of the violent or non-violent variety. M. Rolland is to be felicitated upon his praiseworthy study of the Gandhian polemics, and of his more or less accurate knowledge of the main course of events in Indian political life up to the time of Mr. Gandhi’s incarceration. Such knowledge is rare in a European, and betrays a real interest in the subject on the part of this distinguished savant and litterateur. It is not his knowledge of the main events of Mr. Gandhi’s spectacular career that we call in question, but his interpretation of those events to suit his own purposes. We regret that the first two articles on Mahatma Gandhi which he wrote have not come to our hands. We have only the final two, but they contain enough to prove that M. Rolland, in his enthusiasm for the new prophet that is to save the world, has taken too much for granted as to the rôle of Mr.

Rolland, in his enthusiasm for the new prophet that is to save the world, has taken too much for granted as to the rôle of Mr. Gandhi in the Indian Nationalist Movement, and has been too hasty in his conclusion, vital to prove his own thesis, that that movement has already attained its goal, or is indisputably about to do so, as a result of Mr. Gandhi’s leadership, based upon the doctrine of suffering, sacrifice, and soul-force. Let us touch briefly upon some of the threads of M. Rolland’s arguments that all tend towards the main conclusion. In the first place he vastly over-estimates the success of the programme of Non-Co-operation in that which concerned the boycott of schools, law courts, and government posts and titles. The number of those resigning their places and titles under government was infinitesimal; the giving up of practice by lawyers was confined to a limited number of Congress politicians and patriots, for a very limited time. The majority returned to their practice before the year was ended. Only in the schools was there a notable response on the part of the young, enthusiastic, and idealistic students, and this was later acknowledged as one of the greatest mistakes of the whole campaign to bring these thousands of young men away from their studies without supplying them with any alternative means of study or of gaining a livelihood. This whole part of the Non-Co-operation programme has been such a recognised failure that it is no longer spoken of nor regarded as part of the national activities, although theoretically it has never been abandoned. The boycott of foreign cloth and of liquor shops attained greater success, because here Mr. Gandhi and the Congress hit upon a means of directly attacking the government exchequer at its source. The boycott of liquor is not, as M. Rolland mistakenly observes, intended as a measure of “healthful discipline” and “necessary hygiene.” On the contrary, it was an attempt to cut off one of the great sources of revenue of the Indian Government, which retains control of the liquor traffic and reaps huge profits therefrom. The boycott and picketing of liquor shops was so largely successful in cutting off this source of Government revenue that huge deficits were admitted in that Department, and the Government energetically opposed itself to this side of the campaign from the very outset. As M. Rolland rightly observes, Mr. Gandhi deserves to be remembered as a social reformer long after his political triumphs and failures are forgotten. His plea for the removal of untouchability was a righteous one, but we cannot say with truth that it has attained any measure of practical fulfilment among those Hindu orthodox who constituted the chief followers of the Mahatmaji. Social revolutions are not made from above, but from below by the inexorable working of economic laws. Untouchability and caste will disappear from Indian society, and are disappearing, not as a result of the impassioned pleadings of a Mahatma, but because of the advent of industrialism and the break-up of patriarchal traditions. The boycott of foreign cloth constituted the most important clause of the Non-Co-operation programme, not only because it coincided with Mr. Gandhi’s reactionary social philosophy that decried the advent of modern civilisation and preached the cult of the spinning-wheel and homespun, but because the backbone of the Non-Co-operation Movement founded upon sacrifice, suffering, and soul-force was the native mill-owners, whose competition to Lancashire products was immensely stimulated by the preaching of the doctrine of boycott of foreign cloth and the wearing of Swadeshi (home-manufactured goods). It was the mill-owners of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras who financed the Non-Co-operation Movement, who, together with the landlords of India, represent the rising bourgeoisie which insistently claims for itself a place in the sun. The Congress fund of one crore of rupees raised in 1921-22 was largely donated by the rising capitalist class of India, to whom the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms did not grant the economic expansion which it craved. This fund, largely on paper, constituted the string which controlled the activities and dictated the tactics of the Mahatmaji in critical moments; it lay behind his “address to the hooligans of Bombay and Madras”; it lay beneath his exhortation “not to make political use of the factory workers; it constituted the real reason for his failure to declare mass civil disobedience and non-payment of taxes, and for his insistence on the tactics of non-violence and respect for law, order, and private property. We do not make these statements for the sake of disillusioning M. Rolland as to the spiritual rôle of his new Messiah, but in the interests of truth and the correct interpretation of historical events. The proof for these statements can be found by referring to the list of contributors to the Tilak-Swaraj Fund, and to certain very interesting disclosures made by members of the Congress opposition on the manipulation of the Tilak-Swaraj Fund in the interests of Indian capitalism. It will be replied that Mr. Gandhi was not responsible for the sins of his followers, but Mr. Gandhi made himself responsible for them on innumerable occasions; does not M. Rolland himself exclaim: “He had become in truth the conscience of India.” This was on the occasion of the riot of Chauri Chaura, when Mr. Gandhi for the last time repudiated mass-action and ordered the retreat from Bardoli, which every honest Indian now recognises to have been the greatest betrayal of the movement that could have been made. The riot of Chauri Chaura and the right-about-face of Mr. Gandhi from the road that led to revolution back to the blind alley of reformism constitute the turning-point of his career and the acid test by which his whole philosophy will be judged by generations to come. Mr. Gandhi, after having for the third time declared the inauguration of mass civil disobedience, for which the Indian masses expectantly waited, for the third time retracted his order and disowned those simple followers who had taken him at his word. Not only did he urge the rioting peasants to deliver themselves up for judgment and make confession, but he stands personally responsible for the passing of the Bardoli resolutions in the face of his countrymen’s opposition, which denounced, once and for all, all forms of aggressive action and limited the national activities to weaving, spinning, and praying.

Here stands the revolutionary exposed in his true colours as a timid social reformer, terrified at the greatness of the movement he was called upon to lead, and endeavouring vainly to crush it within the limits of his own reactionary philosophy. The result of Chauri Chaura and the shameful retreat of Bardoli, which M. Rolland describes as “an act of exceptional moral value,” was the condemnation of 228 peasants to death by hanging for the crime of having attempted to better their miserable condition (a sentence whose barbarity put even the British Government in India to shame and was later reduced to nineteen death sentences); and the temporary dislocation of the whole Non-Co-operation Movement, followed by the arrest of its leader, and wholesale Government repression and police terrorism throughout the length and breadth of India. But Mr. Gandhi never flinched from his resolution and the Bardoli “Constructive Programme,” which enjoins upon the Indian peasants to pay rent to the Zemindars (landlords), and assures the latter that the Non-Co-operation Movement in no way attacks their property rights, remains the measuring stick by which to judge Mr. Gandhi’s status as revolutionary or reformer. “Why did the Government arrest Gandhi?” inquires M. Rolland, naïvely. And he replies, “Because his non-violence was more revolutionary than all violence.” M. Rolland is once more mistaken. The British Government in India arrested Mr. Gandhi because it realised that his hold upon the country, and by country we mean the rebellious masses, was so weakened that it could safely put him away without awakening any great popular resentment. And such in fact is the case. The silence that fell upon India at the arrest of the Mahatmaji was not the triumphant vindication of the philosophy of soul-force, nor the disciplined obedience of the masses to the injunctions of their leader, but the acquiescence of the multitudes in the arrest of a leader who had ceased to lead them; whose repeated acts of betrayal of the true interests of the rebellious workers had cut him and the Nationalist Movement as a whole completely off from the dynamics of massaction. Never did M. Rolland speak more truly than when he refers to the vast upheavals of the Indian proletariat and peasantry as “having only the slightest connection with the Non-Co-operation Movement.” The great mass-awakening that shook the Indian continent at the close of the war, and which came as a result of many world-factors as well as internal economic forces, coincided with the rise of the aggressive campaign of Non-violent Non-Cooperation, but was not synonymous with it, nor even identified with it until Mr. Gandhi, by dint of his compelling personality and instinctive political sagacity, succeeded in welding the two together into a temporary and artificial unity, much as he succeeded in binding together the Hindu-Mussulman communities. Not by means of an honest, straightforward programme of social and economic emancipation for the Indian masses, even at the expense of the propertied classes, but by means of playing upon the religious superstitions and susceptibilities of the ignorant and illiterate workers and peasants, to whom “Gandhi Raj” was promised within one year and to whom “Gandhi Raj” meant non-payment of rent and taxes and access to land with better living and working conditions for the exploited city proletariat—thus did the Mahatma win his ascendancy over the rebellious mass-movement and seek to combine it with that of the bourgeois intellectuals and propertied classes for an increased share in the exploitation of these same Indian masses. But such tactics, depending upon the compelling personality of one man and the religious frenzy of the multitudes, were built upon sand. After repeated and innumerable betrayals at the hands of their bourgeois leaders, the Indian workers and peasants have fallen away from the Nationalist struggle and have resumed their interrupted fight for better wages, fewer hours of work, better living conditions, and the amelioration of their desperate economic condition. The divorce of mass-energy from the Non-Co-operation Movement, signed and sealed by the Bardoli decisions repudiating all aggressive tactics and forbidding the declaration of civil disobedience, resulted in the collapse of the latter, and delivered it over as an easy prey into the hands of the waiting Government. The only strength of the movement had lain in its backing by the rebellious masses; it was the threat of direct action on a nationwide scale, of which the demonstrations and hartals during the visit of the Prince of Wales were but a foretaste, that made the Government stay its hand so long. It was only when the movement rendered itself impotent by repudiating all mass-action that the Government lifted its hand and struck with deadly ferocity. As a result of the Bardoli retreat the Indian movement was thrown back into hopeless confusion, from which it is only just recovering, slowly and painfully. The arrest of Mr. Gandhi assisted this recovery by removing what had proved to be a force making for reaction and leaving the field clear for new leaders to take his place. M. Rolland is mistaken in observing that “the Movement has victoriously resisted the redoubtable test of the first year without a guide.” There have been guides—able and competent ones, who sprang to take the place of those removed from the scene of action. Mr. C. R. Das, late President of the All-Indian National Congress, and founder of the Swaraj Party, is the acknowledged successor of Mr. Gandhi as an All-India leader. He has snatched the fallen standard and is carrying it forward in the struggle between Indian bourgeois nationalism and British Imperialism—a struggle which is destined to be a long one, and which M. Rolland is far too sanguine in declaring: “It appears certain that Indian Home Rule is no longer in question; in one shape or another it is inevitable. India has conquered—morally!” In that final word lies the whole crux of the dispute at issue. To M. Rolland the gigantic struggle that is convulsing the Indian continent to-day is a moral battle between the forces of good and evil, between the Adversary and the Hosts of Heaven.

Mr. Gandhi is the new Messiah who has appeared to lead this spiritual warfare, waged not only on behalf of India, but of the entire world. India’s triumph will be a world triumph of the forces of light over darkness, of spirit over matter, of God over Satan. With such a conception of the Indian struggle for freedom we have nothing to do; it embodies the exaggerated subjectivism of the disillusioned post-war intellectual, flying to the realm of metaphysics to escape from the cruel logic of facts and realities. For the scientific Marxist, who conceives the world to be built upon economic forces, subject to material laws, such a conception has all the grotesque mediævalism of the gargoyle, and we conceive of the minds of these sentimental idealists as full of such gargoyles—unreal, grinning, and out of tune with the age in which we live. They cease to be romantic curiosities and become dangerous when they seek to put their conceptions to political use—and the exploitation of Mr. Gandhi in the interests of counter-revolutionary pacifism is such a political application of these ideas. M. Rolland and the whole school of Spiritual Imperialists, who hold that the world is to be redeemed by soul-force, self-sacrifice, and suffering, are endeavouring to use Mr. Gandhi as a proof of their own thesis that Europe has brought about its own annihilation by the use of violence, of which Bolshevism is the final and concentrated form making for ultimate destruction of all that remains of European culture and civilisation. India, they declare, has been saved by the use of spiritual weapons—let Europe emulate India’s example and save herself. The argument sounds convincing till we examine its premises and find them false. India is not yet saved; she is still struggling to pull herself out of the slough of economic backwardness; social degeneration, and political subjection—all more or less contingent one upon the other. Her present struggle is a very material one for land and bread. It is for this that the peasants of the Punjab, the United Provinces, Bengal, Madras, and the whole of India have shed their blood; it is for this that the rising proletariat has organised great strikes of months’ duration, often at the cost of freedom and even life. It was for this that the Indian workers and peasants followed the Mahatmaji, and when he repudiated this goal it was for this that they left him, to resume the struggle on the economic field, eschewing political action. The political struggle, which will enthrone the Indian bourgeoisie in a living partnership with the Imperial overlord, is far from finished; but the lines of class-cleavage in Indian society grow every day more marked, and the development of the class-struggle side by side with the Nationalist one, and often antagonistic to it, is ever more distinguishable. In this struggle Mr. Gandhi definitely aligned himself on the side of the bourgeoisie; and however much of a religious prophet he may be, however largely he may figure as a social reformer, and despite his really great contribution to the progress of Indian nationalism in the field of agitation and organisation in the future development of the Indian revolutionary movement, Mr. Gandhi must be counted among the counter-revolutionaries and not, as M. Barbusse mistakenly supposes, among true revolutionaries. He it was who conceived of the brilliant tactics of aggressive Non-Co-operation, based upon non-payment of rent and taxes; he it was who found an outlet for the movement by the slogan of Non-violence; he it was who for the first time carried the idea of Swaraj among the Indian masses. But it was equally he who, frightened by the shadow of revolution that hung over the land; alarmed at the threat to the established order which such a revolution implied; terrified at the thought of bloodshed and his own inability to control the forces of mass-energy once aroused—it was equally he who sought to beat back this rising tide of revolution by repudiating those very forces which he was called upon to lead. The tired intellectuals of Europe may look to the East in search of a new Messiah, destined to appear miraculously to save them from the clutches of reality. But to all honest revolutionaries who understand the real forces that underlie such great movements as the Russian and Indian revolutions, all talk about “spiritual warfare,” and the triumph of non-violence over violence, is dismissed as the babble of children or the fevered eloquence of intellectual degeneration in search of new illusions. Mr. Gandhi sought to pit his individual philosophy and moral scruples against the armed might of the greatest power in existence—the British Empire—and he inevitably failed. But he would not have failed so miserably had he been gifted with the revolutionary understanding which places economic forces and material laws above the weakness of the individual, and had relied upon the resistless power of the Indian masses to fight their way to freedom. Mr. Gandhi sought to interpose his own will between the Indian masses and this inevitable struggle, and was swept aside to make way for others better able to interpret the imperative needs of the movement. Well for him that he is canonised by the disillusioned, post-war intellectualism of the West. Notes 1. The Vanguard Bookshop, Post Box 4336, Zurich, Switzerland. Evelyn Roy Archive

Evelyn Roy Letter to Henk Sneevliet Source: Transcribed from a copy contained in the Evelyn Trent Collection, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. Mar. 13th [1927] My dear Jack Horner.[1] Your letter was more than welcome, as I had given up all idea of receiving any word from you, and especially, because I have heard nothing at all from Europe for over three months. I have heard very little from R.[2] � only in response to letters I have written him about various personal questions, and our correspondence has come to a complete standstill, as I have received no reply to the letter I wrote in December, which you say was forwarded to him. I am feeling immensely better than I did last year, or in fact better than I have for several years. This is mainly because I have nothing to worry over, and because I am once more in a state where I can be, to some extent, master of my own destiny. I had fallen into such a lamentable situation in Europe, largely because I was away from my own environment and was absolutely dependent upon someone else for my whole existence. You will be glad to hear that I am working and earning my living by writing for one of the newspapers here. I received a divorce six months ago, as it appeared to me absolutely necessary to do so, before I could take up my life again in any direction. I hesitated a long time before taking this step - waited over six months and wrote many letters to R. offering to return and resume our former relationship. It was only after receiving his categorical reply to remain in this country or go to China, but not to return there, that I decided upon what course to follow. Life appeared to me very difficult � almost impossible to resume in the old channels I had left nine years before. My mother & father were glad to see me, but did not welcome my ideas, and part of my family refused to have anything at all to do with me. Most of my old friends from school and college also turned away from me. I found myself almost alone, except for a very few who remained loyal to the past, without in any way understanding or sympathizing with my viewpoint. My activities abroad had been such as to render it very difficult for me to obtain work for which I was adapted by education and training. I had lost my citizenship and this fact closed a good many avenues of employment as well as made my position extremely uncertain. There were other factors, known to yourself, that rendered my situation precarious. The only bright spot was the fact that I was back in a country where I could speak the language, felt more or less at home and where I could eventually readjust myself to conditions if permitted to do so. I had some trouble with the authorities and would have much more did I show any disposition to be active in any way. This was impossible during the first 18 months after my return. I was in a state of complete mental and physical collapse. The very thought of politics sickened me. I could not concentrate my mind long enough to read a newspaper or book. I was restless, unhappy and frightfully disorientated. I belonged neither to my old life or the new one I had left it for. Then there was the personal heartache. Besides all this, I had to meet the slanderous gossip and malicious tongues of various nationalist factions in this country, who very effectually poisoned the minds of all those liberal and semi-radical people I have turned to for help and friendship. They heard such frightful things against me that one and all turned away from me. I was accused of being a spy, a renegade, a defalcator of funds, of having abandoned my husband and the movement after having bled them dry, etc. etc. Quite naturally, I found myself alone. I had not the heart, even if I had possessed the strength, energy and enthusiasm, to begin all over again in the movement here. I attended the Convention in Chicago[3] on my way west, and have never in my life witnessed such sorry and disgusting quarrels, intrigues and useless discussions. They are hopelessly divided and split up into a thousand little factions. Spies are plentiful and the whole impression was one of disgust. Of course my own mental condition was at its worst then and it probably appeared even worse to me than it was in reality, but I saw enough to convince me that my place was not there, at least in my present state of mind. I wanted only to keep clear of useless discussion and endless intrigue and find a little peace somewhere. In the American movement I am a stranger. All my work had been for India. Many stories were circulated about me - from external and internal sources. Had I attempted to be active I would have been deported at once. There was no possible way to prevent it for I had no rights here at all. The result is, I have held aloof from everything, seen no one and done nothing but attempt to regain my mental and physical strength and to solve the first problem of all � to earn my living somehow or other. This was rather difficult for reasons explained above but I finally secured work on a paper and earn enough to live on independently. I have become, what R. predicted when I left Europe, �lost to the movement� � for the time being at any rate. My convictions remain the same, but circumstances and my own inclination have brought this about. Of course I might have gone east, as originally planned, but what was there for me there? I was as much a stranger there as here - more so in fact � and once I left here I would be condemned to wander about in strange lands for the rest of my life, without even the reason I had before to justify such an existence of having been married and compelled to follow my husband. I knew only one person there on whom I must depend again for every favor and rather than place my life once more in this unbearable situation, I decided to remain here and to tie together the broken threads as best I could. Here I was in a measure, at home. These are my people. I understand them, and it is in this environment I can grow and develop normally, as a human being. Above all, I was so weary of being hunted from place to place, from country to country, of having to hide and always to be surrounded by a terrible fog of suspicion and fear, and to have others suspect and fear me. All this had become intolerable.

I want you to understand that I have recanted nothing. Made no confessions or concessions. No one has molested me openly. I have been left alone, but of course watched to a certain extent. As long as I remain strictly aloof from all political activity, I think I will not be bothered. At first I thought it would be impossible for me to abandon my former life and work and just to live like this � it is still difficult � but it has been forced on me by a good many circumstances. I could not remain in the Indian work, that was sure even before my divorce. My position had become very difficult. You remember my unhappiness for the two years preceding my departure for America. Once divorced, it became even more impossible to on with it. This was the reason I hesitated so long. If it had been merely a personal matter I would have gone straight enough with it because I realized that the personal tie was broken forever. But I had given nine years to the work and it was not easy to leave it nor did I do it lightly. If I had ever been in India, or could ever go there, it might have been different, but always it had been pure theoretical abstraction to me. The only living link was my husband. When this link was broken, only the abstraction remained, and I was so tired of abstract theories. I had to come face to face with realities and to learn something about everyday, practical living. I don�t know what the future holds in store for me. Sometimes I looks black and hopeless. Sometimes I find comfort in being just alive and free to live as an ordinary human being once more. To love and be loved by my family and what few friends remain, and to work and eat and sleep untroubled by the ghost of fear, suspicion, intrigue and hatred. After all, I was born to this life and had to adapt myself to the other kind of existence. Surely I can learn to adapt myself once more to this purely normal, healthy living, in which the element of struggle is not lacking. The time may come when I may be of more use to the world than if I had tried to struggle on in the position I found myself in over there. Even now, when I review all that happened, I do not see how I could have acted so differently in any way or how I could have changed the outcome. Each step I took was forced upon me by circumstances, and I walked very slowly, so as to be sure I made no great mistakes. I blame my husband for nothing. He could not help what happened, any more than I could. I only wish he might have been more frank and open so that together we could have discussed everything and decided on a course to follow, instead of sending me off in ignorance of his real feelings and desires. That is why I turned to you for help � to know what he really wanted most to do, and for me to do. Had he wanted me to come back, I would have come, if only to be true to him and the work. It was very hard for me to believe or to realize that he did not want me or need me. That he wanted me to stay away. I only fully knew this seven months after I left him, and it was then that I went to get my divorce. Had I known for the beginning, it would have saved me seven months� uncertainty and groping for the right course to follow. But perhaps he also was not sure. All I know now is that for a few years we were happy together and that he was the first to feel the desire to be free again. I do not even know at what stage he felt this desire, but it must have been at least as early as 1921. Had he told me this frankly, I would have come back to America then, and saved us both four years of useless worry and uncertainty. This I wrote to him in my last letter. I have told you so much because you know us both better than anyone does except Borodin. Had there been any hope or prospect of our reunion, I would have gone to China, but he gave no slightest indication of any such desire on his part. If I went to China, it would be to follow out our destiny, and to go in that way meant I would be condemned to be a wanderer for the rest of my life. Here at least my mother, who is nearly seventy, is glad and happy because I have come home once more, and should I go away and leave her again, it would be a terrible blow to her. This much good at least I have accomplished by remaining in America. So now you see why I cannot write you articles for your paper or the American movement. I am sorry. I wish I could, but I am very far away indeed from the movement here. I still follow world politics in general, now that my mind is becoming stronger and more active again, and I have to thank my former life for teaching me to understand the trend of world affairs and the forces that are pushing us. I try to reflect this knowledge as much as possible in my writing, but you know what the bourgeois press is. There is much to study and learn in this country. In many ways it is very remarkable and am glad to be here and be a part of it. I was such a stray cat in Europe, belonging nowhere, of use to nobody. California is beautiful. In truth it is one of God�s chosen spots. I bask in the sunshine and am glad to be back home again, but I have forgotten nothing of the past, and the few friends I made in Europe I still love and treasure highly. That is why I was so glad to hear from you and will always be glad. I am so sorry that all is not well with your affairs. I am so sorry to hear about Betsy�s difficulties, and I would write her, but I don�t think she likes me very much. Remember me to her most sincerely when you see her, also to Pim and Pam. Think you were rather impractical to marry again under the circumstances, but I suppose you could not avoid it very well as there was the child to consider. I am beginning to be very averse to foreign missionaries. One should work in the country to which one naturally belongs by birth and associations and understanding.

One should work in the country to which one naturally belongs by birth and associations and understanding. Best wishes to Sima, Simushka and the Langkempers. Also to all old friends at 101 Nassaukade. Much love to yourself and write me from time to time. I love to hear from you. It is the only link I have with the past. Surely I deserve to have one link. Evelyn You may use the same address to reach me. ___________________ [1] Pseudonym for Henk Sneevliet used by Evelyn and M. N. Roy. [2] She is referring to her ex-husband, Manabendra Nath Roy. [3] Likely a reference to the Fourth National Convention of the Workers (Communist) Party of America, held in Chicago, in the American state of Illinois, from August 21st to the 30th, 1925. Evelyn Roy Archive

Evelyn Roy The Fourth Anniversary of the Red Army in Moscow Source: The Communist Review, June 1922, Vol. 3, No. 2. Publisher: Communist Party of Great Britain Transcription/Markup: Brian Reid Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2006). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. ACCORDING to documents, the Red Army is only four months younger than the Russian Revolution, but in reality, it was born on the same day, said Trotsky in an article commemorating the fourth anniversary of the formation of the Red Army, on February 24th, 1922. A marvellous review of the Moscow battalions was held in the Red Square, and in the evening a meeting of the Moscow Soviet in the Great Theatre to honour the day. On both occasions, Leon Trotsky, Commissar of War and Commander-in-Chief of the Red Army of the Russian Soviet Republic, was the principal orator. It was such a day as comes rarely to snow-stricken Russia—brilliant sunshine in a pale, clear sky, which the dazzling snow seemed to rob of all its blueness. Since five o’clock in the morning the regiments had been forming for the great review that was to take place at eleven; over long country roads in the dim, morning light, with the hoar-frost clinging to their heavy, skirted coats an strange peaked caps, the soldiers had marched from outlying villages throughout the district of Moscow, to assemble around the walls of the ancient Kremlin, and to pour their ranks inside the great rectangular space known since the Revolution as the Reel Square. Upon one side rises the Chinese Wall that encircles the medieval fortress-town of the Kremlin, whose gilded domes and multi-coloured spires and minarets rise flashing like a fairy vision above the serrated top of the old wall, where sentries stand on guard. Upon the other side lies the outer wall of the Kremlin, now concealed and half destroyed by the buildings of the modern city; one end of the square is closed by the old, fortified gateway and the other end by the fantastic church of St. Basil, built in the time of Ivan the Terrible, who caused the eyes of the unhappy architect to be put out in order that he might not be tempted to build for any other monarch such an architectural oddity as this grotesque agglomeration of variegated pinnacles, half Chinese pagoda, half Indian temple, like a disordered nightmare brought to being. Into this picturesque enclosure, from an early hour, the regiments began to march, bands playing, banners waving, the whole square alive with uniformed men whose lines stretched away on either side to the outer limits of the square, and overflowed into the streets beyond. Under the Kremlin Wall, where the graves of the Red Guards slain in the first storming of the old fortress lie, the crowd of spectators began to file in. A large delegation was present from the Communist International, which happened to be celebrating a conference in Moscow conjointly with the anniversary of the Red Army’s foundation. Familiar faces greeted one at every turn—men and women prominent in the International Working-class Movement, men at the head of affairs here in Russia—all mingling in little groups and gathered to pay homage to the soldiers whose four years of strenuous fighting saved the Republic and given impetus to the cause of the International Proletarian Revolution. At eleven o’clock, the slim, well-knit figure of Trotsky appeared on the Tribune, and a slow wave of cheering rose and swelled on the frosty air, dying away to the farthest corners of the Square, only to be flung back again as an echo and renewed by the enthusiastic soldiers—“Trotsky’s darlings.” The Commander-in-Chief of the victorious Red Army held up his hand for silence, and an instant hush fell over that vast assemblage. There was nothing of theatrics in that simple gesture, but the firm, steady will of the man ripened by responsibilities and sure of his followers. The Red Army idolises its Chief, who mingles in his treatment of them the discipline of a stern revolutionary with the tender love and consideration of a father for an immense family of trusting, simple-hearted courageous children. Then he spoke, each word falling distinctly, separately, like the salute of a cannon, his full, resonant voice flinging out the sound to the farthest soldier in the Square and waiting until the echo gave it back again with equal and startling distinctness, so that it seemed as though there were two speakers, not one, addressing the motionless and attentive auditors. He spoke of the first beginnings of the Red Army, that tattered group of determined workers who banded themselves together at the outbreak of the Revolution and constituted the Red Guard; of the first year’s struggle to organise a new army out of the disintegrating masses of the old Czarist fighting machine; of the trouble and confusion and inexperience of those early clays when, for lack of adequate knowledge of military science, many lives were uselessly sacrificed, and not quality but quantity was made to count in the fierce battles against counter-revolution and the invading armies from abroad. “Many of us,” he said “lacked the advantage of previous training,” and those who heard knew that he spoke of himself among them. Then turning from the past to the future, he declared that the fifth year of the Red Army’s life must be a year of strenuous study. “We must abolish illiteracy from our army by the coming first of May,” said Trotsky earnestly. “Let us see to it that every soldier knows how to read and write; each soldier must be able to read the Oath of Allegiance and to understand fully the meaning of that glorious promise to our Republic. The reduction of the army will be in proportion to the qualitative improvement of its elements. The army must be well-fed, warm and clean first of all; a soldier with a ‘vosh’ (louse) is only half a soldier.

a soldier with a ‘vosh’ (louse) is only half a soldier. Ignorance and prejudice is the inner vosh that weakens the human being much more than the outer one; we must therefore raise the moral standard and enlightenment of the army; it must understand the Soviet Constitution and its internal problems as well as foreign politics and the contingencies that may give rise to future wars; more, our soldiers must understand the material laws that determine the history of mankind and the universe. We must so improve our military training that every Red soldier will in case of need, be capable of taking the command. All this cannot be done by the waving of a magic wand, but by the hard, patient mosaic of daily work. The fifth year of life of the Red Army will be a year of strenuous study.” To see this erect, soldierly figure in his severely simple uniform, without a hint of decoration or a sign of rank beyond the general’s stars on his sleeve, and to remember that at the outbreak of the October Revolution, in 1917, he knew nothing of military science, even to the handling of a rifle; then to recall his war record of the past four years in building up the most tremendous fighting machine of the modern world, in the teeth of insuperable difficulties; to enumerate the list of battles won, of enemies captured and invading armies driven back defeated, is to see embodied in the flesh one of the many great achievements of the Russian Revolution, whose child he is and which has made of him a man. The anti-militarist orator and agitator Trotsky has been moulded in the fiery crucible of war and revolution into a ripened leader and beloved commander with a sure grasp of himself and of the forces that stand obedient to his behest. Trotsky has risen splendidly equal to the undreamed of exigencies and responsibilities so suddenly thrust upon him. He stands to-day not merely as a national, but as an international symbol of revolutionary achievements accomplished under the most difficult conditions; small wonder that the proletariat look to him as the leader of future victorious hosts against the minions of the world reaction and counter-revolution. As he finished his brief but eloquent address, the sky was suddenly filled with a distant humming, and a squadron of aeroplanes appeared in the transparent blue, circling, diving and climbing joyously above the multitude, and as the thunderous applause began to die away, a flutter of leaflets, like white doves, began to flutter gently down in zig-zag spirals upon the expectant, upturned faces of the happy throng. Trotsky descended from the Tribune and made his way to the front line of spectators where the soldiers would pass in review to give and take the salute. Eager comrades pressed to greet him as a fellow-soldier, and were met with simple cordiality; one old veteran, crippled in the service, approached him hat in hand, and Trotsky asked him to cover himself, shaking his hand with comradely good-fellowship. It was very cold standing there; the men had been on the march and had stood already for hours with true Russian patience. Before the review commenced, a group of speakers from the Communist International ascended the Tribune to greet them in the name of their own proletariat. The Russian leaders, who have never for a moment forgotten the international character of the struggle they are conducting, invariably include the representatives of the fighting proletariat of other lands in every celebration of the Red Republic. The broader issues of the contest now being waged on Russian soil, are constantly held before the people; the Red Army, on its fourth anniversary, must not forget that it is serving first and foremost as the vanguard of the world proletariat in its advancing march towards freedom; while the members of the Communist International know that on hailing the triumphant forces of Russia, they can rejoice at the closer approach of the world revolution. Delegates from the Communist Parties of Czekoslovakia, Japan, France, Germany, and America paid brief and heartfelt tribute to the tremendous organisation that had grown from such small beginnings, and that, during four years, had valiantly defended the first government of workers, soldiers and peasants from the enemies that had hemmed it in on every side. They conveyed to the Red Army of Russia and to the Soviet Republic which it defended, the greetings of their home proletariat. As they spoke, the distant aeroplanes circled above their heads like giant swallows, gracefully dipping and curving in the clear, frosty sunshine, or riding low over the Chinese Wall of the Kremlin, whose painted towers seemed to blink in astonishment at this intrusion upon their hoary antiquity, and at the conclusion of every speech, a low roll of response, spreading and swelling to a shout, then dying away into echoes, came from the listening soldiers. At last the quick, staccato music of the band stirred the waiting ranks to motion. In marching array, regiment after regiment filed past the reviewers, who stood on one side of the square, Trotsky in their midst. Each company carried its own scarlet banner, with the campaigns it had fought in lettered in gold upon it. The soldiers marched with the easy spring of lissome youth, for they were all young. In steady ranks they poured, infantry, machine gun corps, engineers, sappers and miners, artillery, cavalry, aeroplanes and tanks, ambulance and communication units—a modern army completely equipped, in the face of the most tremendous handicaps of revolution, civil war, invasion, and blockade ever recorded. It was a magnificent spectacle, rendered more impressive by the clear beauty of the day and the symbolic significance of this mighty war machine, created by an anti-militarist out of the chaos of ruin and defeat, and dedicated to the cause of world-revolution. The triumphant playing of the Internationale; the gleam and flutter of the red banners;

the gleam and flutter of the red banners; the plain uniforms of officers and men, adorned only by the Soviet insignia, a crossed gun and hammer; the white aeroplanes painted with a red star, and the formidable tanks each bearing a name allegorical and meaningful, such as “The Paris Commune,” “The Fighter for Freedom,” “Comrade Lenin,” “Rage,” and “Proletariat.” Russia the indomitable has become Russia the invincible, thanks to the limitless courage and toil which created the Red Army for the defence and preservation of the first Proletarian Republic. Communist Review

MIA > Archive > Evelyn Roy Evelyn Roy Polemics and Discussions Looking for New Illusions (6 September 1923) From International Press Correspondence, Vol. 3 No. 59 [37], 6 September 1923, pp. 657–658. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2023). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. It is matter fur some surprise that Indian nationalists of the spiritual school have not discovered the great contribution made to the literature of their creed by the celebrated French writer, Romain Rolland. In a series of articles, published early in the present year in the French magazine Europe, under the title of Mahatma Gandhi, M. Rolland describes the progress of the Non-Cooperation Movement throughout the time of Mr. Gandhi’s leadership up to the moment of his arrest, and upon this movement as a background, he constructs an image of the Mahatmaji as a new Messiah, come to save not India alone, but the entire world, and particularly warring Europe, by his doctrine of Suffering, Self-Sacrifice and Soul-Force. Such an unexpected reinforcement from so distinguished an individual will doubtless add strength to the conviction of those who are already convinced that India’s peculiar mission is to spiritualise the world. To those who have begun to doubt and waver in this food belief, M. Rolland’s articles will bring renewed faith. How can so famous a man be mistaken, they will ask. Having probed the knowledge and experience of the West to its depths, only to arrive at despair and disillusionment, M. Rolland and his school have turned their faces to the East in search of inspiration, and lo! they have discovered a new Evangel. Listen to the tired intellectualism of post-war European decadence: “In this crumbling world, there is no refuge, no hope. There is no great light. The Church drugs us with soothing and virtuous counsel, but guards carefully against embroiling herself with the powerful; moreover, she gives advice, but sets no example. Vapid pacifists bleat languishingly, and one feels that they hesitate; they speak of a faith which they are not sure oi having. Who will prove this faith for them? And how, in the midst of a world that denies it? ln the only way that faith may prove itself – by action! “There is the Message to the World, as Gandhi calls it, the message of India: ‘Sacrifice ourselves! The highway to peace is the sacrifice of self.’ This is the message of Gandhi!” One can imagine how gratified must be Tagore, Arabinda Chose and the whole school of Spiritual Imperialists to read this confirmation of their creed, written in such lyrical words by the master-hand of a French romanticist. Perhaps they would be better pleased had Romain Rolland seen in them, instead of Gandhi, the new Saviour of Humanity, but even in this he leaves ground for hope. Concluding his panegyric on India’s spiritualizing mission, he declares: “The great religious manifestations in the Orient have a rhythm. One of two things must be; either the Gandhi Avatar will conquer, or will repeat itself – just as, centuries before, came the Messiah and the Buddha – unto the complete incarnation in a mortal demi-god of the Life-Principle that will lead us towards the new stage of the new Humanity.” So, if India and the world are to be saved by the rhythmical advent of mortal demi-gods, it is high time that one of these spiritual leaders takes up the rule of Avatar, left vacant since the arrest of the Mahatma, and finishes his job. which is, according to M. Rolland, to bring Swaraj to the Indian people by Suffering, Sacrifice and Soul-Force, thus proving to the rest of the world that it can be done. Naturally, when the armed nations of the West behold that great moral victory, they will cast away their weapons and accept the new Gospel, even as they accepted (with ample reservations), the similar gospel of Christ two thousand years ago. M. Rolland speaks pessimistically of the Christian Church as it exists today, but does not despair if a new Church may be founded, to begin anew the work of proselytism. Truly, hope springs eternal in the pacifist breast. In the eyes of M. Rolland, Gandhi has already scored a moral victory, which will very soon be followed (on this point he is vague but positive) by the granting of Home Rule for India, on the part of the British Government.

Rolland, Gandhi has already scored a moral victory, which will very soon be followed (on this point he is vague but positive) by the granting of Home Rule for India, on the part of the British Government. “I am of the opinion, moreover”, he declares, “that this political ideal (Swaraj) will be attained promptly.” Of course, such a consummation is devoutly to be wished for, and, besides, it is essential to prove his whole thesis, – namely, that Non-violence is superior to Violence, and is the only path to salvation. If M. Rolland can prove that the Mahatma won Swaraj for India by non-violent means, then he hopes also to prove that Europe must abandon her wars and revolutions, in favour of spiritual weapons. “The world is swept by the winds of violence”, he declares, “each people devours the other, in the name of the same principles, which conceal the same interests and the same instincts of Cain: Nationalists, Fascists, Bolshevists, oppressed classes and peoples, oppressing peoples and classes, all claim for themselves, while refusing it to others, the right to be violent, which appears to them the Law. Half a century ago, Force preceded Law. Today it is far worse; Force is Law. One has devoured the other.” All this is true, and M. Rolland is to be congratulated on having pierced the tissue of lies that, in the name of Bourgeois Democracy, conceals the Dictatorship of the Capitalist class. He does not like it, any more than he likes the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which exists in Russia. Hence, in order to escape from these cruel realities, he flies to the Orient, whose softening perspectives offer him room for hope that fhere may be found another world, built upon other laws. He suddenly finds in Gandhi a new Messiah, preaching a gospel of Love and Non-Resistance, which sweeps everything before it, evokes a vast popular following, compels a powerful Empire to listen and concede. Here is fresh hope fur the tired intellectuals of war-stricken Europe. They behold in Gandhi a brother-pacifist, a Super-Pacifist, who has translated theory into action, words into deeds, and who has conducted a mighty movement that was heading towards violent Revolution, into the channels of non-violent Non-cooperation, based upon Suffering, Sacrifice and Soul-Force. Well may the pacifists rejoice, whether of East or West. For the first time in modern history, it has been given to one of their creed Io guide a movement according to the principles of Non-violence, well may the Reverend John Haynes Holmes of New York acclaim Gandhi as the greatest man in the world: well may Romain Rolland hail him as the new Messiah. As pacifists, they could not do otherwise; Mahatma Gandhi is their proof, their single illustration, of the efficacy of pacifist theories applied to real conditions. Yet in the midst of their adulation and mystic joy, they forget one single, small, but all-important fact, namely, that the non-violent Non-Cooperation Movement of India, headed by Mr. Gandhi and conducted upon the principles of Suffering, Self-Sacrifice and Soul-Force, has not as yet succeeded in its objective, plainly stated to be the attainment of Swaraj; that its leaders, including Mr. Gandhi and some twenty-five thousand more, were arrested and sent to jail for various terms of imprisonment, many of which have not yet expired; that the movement, seriously crippled by government repression and its own mistaken tactics, has suffered a serious setback in the last fourteen months, and is only just beginning to go forward once more, under the very mundane guidance of Mr. C.R. Das and the Swaraj Party, who have given up all talk about Soul-Force, and are sticking to Non-violence, not as a religion, but as a tactic forced upon them by the exigencies of the situation. Far from being won, “Swaraj” is further away today than it appeared in the critical days of 1921–22, when the gigantic mass-movement of the Indian workers and peasants threatened to break away from spiritual leading-strings and become aggressively revolutionary. It was in that crisis that “Round Table Conferences” were spoken of, between the Government and the leaders; that Mahatma Gandhi toured the length and breadth of the country, a free man, challenging the existence of the “Satanic Government” openly, yet the latter feared to lay hands upon him, lest the rebellious masses rise in his defense. Romain Rolland speaks more truly than he knows when he declares: “Three years earlier, India would have been soaked in blood by the arrest of Gandhi. But the sentence of Ahmedabad was received by the religious silence of India.” Petty-bourgeois pacifism is full of illusions, and hugs ihein ever more tightly to its breast as the cold blasts of Reality whistle more and more chill. The “religious” silence of India at the arrest of its Mahatma was the silence of inaction, despair and disillusionment; it was the last proof, if proof were still needed, that the non-violent Non-Cooperation Movement, based upon Suffering, Sacrifice and Soul-Force, had divorced itself utterly from the dynamics of mass-energy by adopting the Bardoli Programme, which repudiated all direct action of the masses. Swaraj, which had hovered almost within call, fled away once more like a mocking shadow, and the Mahatma was led off to jail for six years, amid the “religious" silence of India. Let Rolland rejoice, if it please him, in the “moral victory” of Gandhism; that does not bring Swaraj any closer to the Irunger-ing workers and peasants who had followed the Mahatma so blindly .believing when he told them that Swaraj would come within a year – the Swaraj of Non-payment of Rent and Taxes, and a better life for all.

Was it not this same Mahatma who denounced the riotous villagers of Chauri Chaura, and ordered them to give themselves up for judgment, which they did, and two hundred and twenty-eight of them were condemned to death! Was it not the Mahatma who called a halt to Civil Disobedience, and who forced through the Bardoli Resolutions, which order the peasants to pay rent to the Zemindars, and which tell the Zemindars that their property-rights will lie respected? Yet M. Rolland, hugging his illusions more tightly to him, exclaims: “I can scarcely believe that Mahatma Gandhi and the Non-Cooperators would accept association in the same Assembly with European and Indian capitalists. But it appears certain that Indian Home Rule is no longer in question. In one shape or another, it is inevitable. India has conquered morally.” There are more things in this world of realities than are dreamed of in the philosophy of Pacifism. It appears certain that the Non-cooperators will very shortly sit in the same Assembly with European and Indian capitalists, if the programme of the Swaraj Party is fulfilled. But Home Rule is still far-distant, and Swaraj has become a meaningless term. The advent of a second Incarnation is still necessary to save India, and thereafter the world. The tired intellectuals of Europe are roaming the Orient in search of new illusions to replace the rags of those torn from them by the holocaust of War and Revolution, but they refuse to see there the same inexorable laws that operate throughout the natural world, whether it be East or West. They speak of “moral” victories and “spiritual” battles and the advent of a new Messiah, without knowing whereof they speak, nor caring to know that beneath the talk about Suffering, Sacrifice and Soul-Force, a people of 320,000,000 souls is struggling to free itself from political, social and economic bondage, by any weapons that come to hand. The laws of economic determinism are at work there as here, and the time will come when this mighty people, tired at last of being slaves, will rise and throw oft its shackles, striking great blows for freedom that will shake the world, even as did the great revolutions of the past. When this time comes, heaven help the tired intellectuals of Europe, and the petty-bourgeois pacifists, both East and West, for another, perhaps the last, cherished illusion will be gone! Top of the page Last updated on 2 May 2023

MIA > Archive > Evelyn Roy Evelyn Roy The Colonies The Forces Beneath the Present Lull in India (15 September 1922) From International Press Correspondence, Vol. 2 No. 79, 15 September 1922, pp. 595–596. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2020). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. The sudden disappearance of India from the world press since the arrest and conviction of Mr. Gandhi to six years imprisonment, would seem to indicate that the revolutionary movement there has come to an abrupt end, after a spectacular and sensational career under the banner of non-violent non-cooperation. Events in India during the past five months seem to confirm this theory. Since the Bardoli Resolutions of the National Congress Committee, passed in April as the result of an outbreak of mob-violence on the part of some non-cooperating peasants of the United Provinces, the slogans of Mass Civil Disobedience and Non-payment of Rent and Taxes, have been dropped from the Congress Program, and instead, the so-called Constructive Program has been put forth, whose main clauses were the spinning, weaving and wearing of Rhaddar or homespun cloth by the Indian people, the peaceful boycott of law courts, reform councils, government service and schools, and the removal of untouchability of the lower castes, and of the drink evil. This purely reformist and non-revolutionary program, urged upon the Congress Committee by Mr. Gandhi just before his arrest, constituted a decided retreat in the face of Government repression and the rising tide of mass-energy, expressed in the form of bloody riots, strikes and peasant risings throughout the country. The Congress leaders were no less terrified than the Government by the threat to life and property which the growing revolutionary consciousness of the peasants and workers implied, and two clauses of the Bardoli Constructive Program urge, first upon the peasants and then upon the landlords, the necessity of preserving law and order and of safeguarding the rights of private property. This strategic retreat and complete disavowal of the masses by the nationalist leaders completed the break between the popular unrest based on economic causes, and the purely political agitation of the Congress Party. The arrest and conviction of Mr. Gandhi severed the last thread which held the masses and the nationalists together. For the past three months, this complete divorce of the mass-energy from the Congress, has become more and more noticeable, while at the same time, the Congress itself has been thrown into confusion by the growth and development of internal factions, of right and left tendencies, which only the dominant personality of Mr. Gandhi had held in check for so long. The incarceration of the latter gave free play to these splitting tendencies, whose leaders have been conducting guerilla warfare behind the closed doors of the Congress Committees. At first chaotic, the opposition has at last resolved itself into several distinguishable elements. The right wing leaders, who represent the left-wing of the cooperating Moderates, are preparing to rejoin the latter within the new Reform Councils, and abandon the National Congress altogether, unless it revises its program in keeping with their own ideas. There are two left-wing tendencies. One, centered in Maharashtra, constitutes a strong and compact group which agitates for repeal of the Boycott of Councils clause, and participation in the coming government elections on the slogan of “Responsive Cooperation”. This means abandonment of the Non-cooperation idea of the Extremists and the consent to work hand-in-hand with the Government to the extent that the latter concedes reforms, and the refusal to cooperate when the Government denies concessions. In principle, this “left-wing” opposition differs very little from the platform of the Moderates, who accepted the Montagu-Chelmsford Reform Scheme of 1919 with the idea of attaining to home rule within the British Empire by gradual stages. Another, and smaller left-wing element, composed of the younger and more revolutionary spirits in every province, is crying for the repeal of the Bardoli Program of Construction and a return to the aggressive tactics of non-violent non-cooperation, including civil disobedience, non payment of rent and taxes, picketing of foreign cloth-shops etc. This group also puts forward the demand to organize Indian labor, both in the factories and on the fields, to support the Congress program, and to include within the latter the redress of some of the most crying economic grievances of the city and peasant workers. The Congress Centre represents the orthodox adherents of Mr. Gandhi. They stand for fulfillment of the Constructive Program until the Indian people have proved, by self-discipline, that they are fit to inaugurate further steps of the non-cooperation campaign, in a strictly peaceful manner. Any revision of the Constructive Program of Bardoli is, they argue, an act of treason to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi, and of disloyalty to the Congress.

Any revision of the Constructive Program of Bardoli is, they argue, an act of treason to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi, and of disloyalty to the Congress. The center is the party of stagnation, which is being buffeted between right and left. The increasing resumption by former non-cooperating lawyers of their law-practice, the continued existence of Government services and schools, and the undeniable importation of foreign cloth by Indian merchants as shown by the trade-returns of the past half-year, demonstrate more clearly than words the abject failure of the so-called “Constructive Program” to achieve results, and would point to the dire necessity, to leaders less obstinate and more realistic, of adopting some change of tactics which would at one and the same time, hold the majority of the Congress together, and bring back the masses within the folds of the Nationalist Party. But the Constructive Program is still flourished over the heads of the Indian people as the Word of God, and threatens to remain, what it has been since its adoption, the rock upon which the Extremist movement will split to its own destruction. Meantime, the powerful current of mass-energy which was halted and puzzled for a time by the right-about-face of Bardoli and the arrest of Mr. Gandhi, is gathering a momentum which will break down all obstruction when the tide rises highest. Both peasants and city-proletariat, after a temporary lull in their activities, have commenced a new campaign of strikes, riots and incendiarism which necessitates the strictest Government supervision to control. But, there is a difference between these renewed activities and the former countrywide movement of the masses under the banner of non-cooperation. Then, while the underlying motive force was economic, the avowed goal was political, namely, the attainment of Swaraj or self-government, which Mr. Gandhi promised within one year. Now, the political motive has been dropped, and the struggle has become purely economic, – a struggle for the reduction of hours, the increase of wages, the right to organize on the part of labor, and the incorporation of workmen’s benefits and social reform legislation in the immediate economic program of the class struggle. With the peasants, the impelling motive force is now as formerly, access to land free of rent and taxes, and release from the grip of the usurer. The accentuation of the class conflict in Indian society, as distinguished from the nationalist campaign, is marked by prolonged strikes on the part of the city-proletariat, and by sporadic revolts of the landless peasantry. Since the beginning of this year, aside from innumerable lesser strikes, there have been several conducted on a nationwide scale, such as the Assam-Bengal Railway and Steam Navigation strikes, declared in conjunction with the exodus of coolies from the Assam Tea-Gardens on account of starvation wages and slave labor conditions; the East India Railway strike, which lasted three months, the Calcutta Seamen’s strike involving 55,000 men and the Jute Mill Workers strike, just ended. Among the peasantry, leaving aside the Moplah Rebellion, which required nine months for the Government to suppress, intermittent revolts are going on among the Akali Sikhs of the Punjab for the possession of temple lands usurped by the corrupt priestcraft and protected by the Government; the Aika or Unity movement among the peasants of the United Provinces and Central India for resistance to rent and tax collectors; the revolt of the Bhils, an agricultural tribe of Central India, and continuous unrest, which at the present writing calls for the presence of special soldiery, among the peasants of Bengal and Madras. The Government is meeting this widespread economic unrest in two ways – by merciless repression where the movement seems weak and likely to be crushed by armed strength, and by remedial legislation where the economic grievances are so manifest and deep-rooted as to drive the people on to resistance in the face of all opposition. The Factory Act of 1921 and the Oudh Rent Act are two examples of remedial legislation, the one applied to industrial workers, the other to agricultural. At the same time, bands of special police and soldiery patrol the countryside, and a determined onslaught is being made against the right of city-labor to organize itself into unions. Kept labor leaders, employed by the Government, are doing their best to steer the movement into safe channels of reformism. Powerful political parties, representing the industrial magnates and the rich landlords, are crystallizing under the pressure of events, which are rapidly uprooting the old divisions of Indian society based upon religion and caste. Such political parties, formed on manifest class-lines, can but hasten the day of the formation of a political party of the workers and peasants of India, whose truly revolutionary spirit and urgent economic needs are driving them relentlessly onward towards class consciousness. Despite their ignorance and helplessness born of centuries of exploitation, the strength of the nation lies in these millions of workers, who are growing wise in the process of struggle, and who will gradually put forth new leaders to replace those who betrayed them in the past, and who still seek to betray them. Top of the page Last updated on 31 August 2020

Evelyn Roy Politics in Gaya Source: The Communist International, 1923, No. 24, pp. 69-81 (6,703 words) Transcription: Ted Crawford HTML Markup: Brian Reid Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2007). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. The Thirty-Seventh Annual Session of the Indian National Congress met in the last week of December, 1922, in the picturesque pilgrimage-place, of Gaya, in the Province of Behar. No more appropriate place could have been selected, for Gaya is the traditionally sacred spot in which to offer up Pinda (sacrifices) to the lingering ghosts of the departed dead, and so release them from the last earthly bond, that they may journey towards Nirvana or seek re-birth: The fifteen thousand or more political pilgrims that wended their way on foot, in bullock-cart or steam-car to the holy spot to attend the Congress session were perhaps unconscious of the fact that their eager pilgrimage to Gaya was to offer involuntary Pinda to the dear departed but lingering ghost of Gandhism famous to the world as Non-Violent Non-Co-operation based upon Soul-Force—but such was nevertheless the fact. The much exploited cult of Sayagraha, which aimed to translate politics into religion and the rising flood-tide of revolution into a pacific love-feast, inaugurated by Mr. Gandhi in1920, confirmed at Ahmedabad in 1921, and consecrated at Bardoli a few months later, gradually wasted itself away in the sharp struggle between Government and people during the last year and was peacefully buried about the time that the Civil Disobedience Committee, after touring the country for nine months, published its report. According to Hindu custom, after a definite period of mourning for the dear departed is over, the Sradh ceremony is performed, consisting of a feast given to all the friends and relatives of the deceased. The Sradh at Gaya marks the close of a definite period in the Indian Nationalist Movement—the preparatory period inevitably characterised by confusion of ideas and mistakes in tactics, but valuable for the political lessons to be deduced therefrom. The new period that lies ahead was inaugurated from the funeral ashes of the old. Viewed in this light, the Sradh at Gaya becomes no longer what it is heralded by the orthodox Gandhists to be—an unqualified victory and triumphant vindication of the principles of “pure Gandhism”—but a half-melancholy, half-pleasing ceremony of respect and relinquishment of the ties that bound the venerated dead to earthly affairs. As such, we profess our love and loyalty to their sacred memory, but we feel that they belong to us no longer, that they have passed beyond our ken forever. Such was the meaning of the six thousand Congress delegates assembled in the Vast Khaddar-pandal (homespun tent); such was the sentiment of the thousands of spectators who journeyed to Gaya for the sacred week; such was the nature of the resolutions passed by the sovereign assembly of the Indian people. Respect and veneration for the dead departed; the final separation of the ghostly wraith of Non-Violent Non-Co-operation based upon Love-Force from the pulsating life of the vital body politic—this was the actual significance of the funeral ceremony celebrated by the Thirty-Seventh National Congress at Gaya in December of the year 1922. II The social and economic background of the Thirty-Seventh National Congress was wide as the poles asunder from that which marked its predecessor at Ahmedabad the year before. Then, revolution was at its flood-tide; repression had only just begun to lift its ugly head in the arrest, a few weeks previously, of the popular Ali brothers and the President-elect of the National Assembly, Mr. C.R. Das. The adored Mahatma Gandhi was still free to lead his trusting followers whithersoever he willed, and the great masses of the Indian people stood ready, at his lightest command, to declare a National Strike, to refuse payment of taxes and to launch the entire country upon a campaign of Civil Disobedience which might have ended anywhere, even in the attainment of the mythical Swaraj which the Mahatma promised within one year. This year, how different the situation and general spirit of the people! A full year had rolled away without the slightest approach of the promised Swaraj. Mahatma Gandhi and twenty-five thousand faithful followers fill the Government “hotels” as a reward for having followed the injunctions of Non-Violent Non-Co-operation based on Soul-Force.

Mahatma Gandhi and twenty-five thousand faithful followers fill the Government “hotels” as a reward for having followed the injunctions of Non-Violent Non-Co-operation based on Soul-Force. The middle-classes, once the vanguard of the National Movement, are divided among themselves and weak in their counsels as to the future course to follow. Boycott of schools and law-courts, depending on them for fulfilment, has been an acknowledged failure; boycott of foreign cloth and liquor-shops, and the propagation of Khaddar and Charka (homespun and weaving), which depended on the masses for fulfilment, has equally failed, not for lack of goodwill or loyalty to the imprisoned Mahatma, but from sheer economic disability of the starving workers and peasants to pay higher prices and work longer hours in the sacred but abstract name of Patriotism. The chief clauses of the “Constructive Programme,” adopted at Bardoli in February, 1922 just after the riot of Chauri Chaura, and which urged the prosecution of the triple Boycott while suspending indefinitely the declaration of Civil Disobedience and Non-payment of Taxes as well as the use of all aggressive tactics, have had the ultimate effect of dampening the enthusiasm of the masses for the national cause and of withdrawing from it the backbone of mass-energy, while at the same time giving free play to the forces of Government repression, let loose in all their vigour since the departure of the Prince of Wales from Indian soil. The Report of the Civil Disobedience Committee, published ten months after its appointment by the Congress, confirms the indefinite suspension of the declaration of Mass Civil Disobedience, but lets loose a new issue upon the country—that of entry into the Government Reform Councils. Public opinion, misled by this red herring drawn across the trail, rages in controversy upon the vexed question; the Report of the Civil Disobedience Committee discloses its six members to be equally divided for and against; the speeches of Mr. C.R. Das, at Dehra Dun and Amraoti, a few weeks before the annual session of the Congress, declare that he and his followers will make the question of contesting the next elections to the Reform Councils an issue in the coming Convention. Meanwhile, what of the masses, of whom everyone in India, politically minded or otherwise, has learned to speak? From the Government and the landlords to the Congress politicians and the social reformers, an abnormal interest is displayed in the question of the “masses”—a vague term meant to include within its scope without being too explicit, the rebellious city-proletariat and landless peasantry, as well as those innocuous millions of “lumpen” proletariat, the Untouchables and Pariahs whom Mr. Gandhi and the Salvation Army alike reach out to reclaim from the cruel ostracism of Hindu orthodoxy. “Back to the masses,” “Back to the Villages,” has become the slogan of every shade of political opinion, and one hesitates to think whether this sudden enthusiasm for the “masses” should entirely be attributed to selfless patriotism, or whether that new and potent force in Indian National life, the hitherto dumb and inarticulate workers and peasants, has become a pawn in the political game, waged heretofore between the Government and the middle-classes. How otherwise to explain this eagerness to reach the “masses”; the sudden zeal for organisation and propaganda on the part of Congress-wallahs; the equally sudden desire to rush remedial legislation through unwilling legislatures, on the part of [he Government, to somewhat better the condition of rack-rented peasantry and sweated factory hands? With what tender solicitude the Government of India notices, whether it be in the speeches of Viceroy or Provincial Governors, or in the official Annual Reports, the effect of improving economic conditions, of better harvests and a favourable rainfall, upon the uncertain temper of the rural population and the belligerent spirit of the striking city-workers. The Thirty-Seventh Annual Session of the Indian National Congress met this year upon a background of comparative industrial calm, broken by sporadic strikes of a purely isolated and economic nature, in no way comparable with the country-wide fever of industrial unrest which displayed itself in political strikes and national hartals during the corresponding period of last year. But it met, at the same time, in a period of intense organising activity on the part of the working-masses, of the slow but persistent growth of trade-unionism and co-operative effort, of industrial and economic conferences and efforts at federating the loosely-scattered labour-organisations whose number and influence have immensely multiplied within the preceding twelvemonth. It met, at the same time, in the aftermath of several sharp agrarian revolts; in the south the Mophahs of Malabar, crushed after seven mouths’ guerrilla warfare, with unnumbered casualties and seven thousand victims condemned to penal servitude. In the North the Akalis, struggling in the name of religion for possession of rich temple-lands, had vindicated the dynamic possibilities inherent in organised mass-action by taking possession of the disputed lands by the use of direct action, and when impeded by the armed forces of the State, by offering themselves up in unlimited numbers for arrest. In the tug of war between Government and Akalis, the former found itself worsted, with public opinion steadily growing more alienated and strained. What began as a local quarrel developed into a national issue, and the Government withdrew, discomfited, but the price paid for this unrecognised victory of direct action was six thousand Akalis lying in jail, beaten, abused and maltreated, some to the point of death. Again, in Bengal, Behar and the Central Provinces, acute agrarian unrest was repeatedly put down in the course of the year; in Bombay the passive resistance campaign of the Mulshi Pethas to resist eviction from their land was compromised by the Government by the payment of compensation. The serious agrarian upheavals of 1920-21 in the United Provinces were stilled by the passage of a Land Act and by the “exemplary” punishment of the openly rebellious such as the recent wholesale condemnation of 172 villagers implicated in the riot of Chauri Chaura to death by hanging!

The serious agrarian upheavals of 1920-21 in the United Provinces were stilled by the passage of a Land Act and by the “exemplary” punishment of the openly rebellious such as the recent wholesale condemnation of 172 villagers implicated in the riot of Chauri Chaura to death by hanging! In such an atmosphere, then, of subdued aspirations and fallen hopes, of disillusionment and sense of failure, did the Thirty-Seventh National Congress meet in the holy city of Gaya in the province of Behar, the stronghold of reactionary landlordism and remote from the industrial unrest of modern India. And the Congress met, not to give a new lead to the waiting people, nor to draw ripe lessons from the mistakes and failures of the past year, but to pay honour to the departed ghost of Gandhism; to hold a Sradh ceremony and offer Pinda to the defunct doctrine of Non-Violent Non-Co-operation based upon Soul-Force, as embodied in the corpse of the Constructive Programme. III Three events bade fair to disturb the harmony of the prospective solemnities and a fourth actually obtruded itself upon the Congress meditations, forcing same recognition from the Mourners there assembled of present-day actualities in the land of the living. We refer first to the publication, in November, of the Report of the Civil Disobedience Committee, which declared the country to be unfit for the inauguration of Mass Civil Disobedience including Non-payment of Taxes, but recommended, by an evenly split vote, the reconsideration of the Boycott of the Reform Councils, with the object of contesting the elections to be held in the spring of 1923. The second discordant note was struck by no less a person than the President-elect of the Congress, Mr. C.R. Das, newly released from six months’ confinement in jail, who after the report of the Civil Disobedience Committee saw fit to deliver himself of two speeches which set the whole country by the ears. In addition to echoing the heresy of the Council-entry, qualified with the object of “ending or mending them,” the Deshbandhu (Friend of the Country) startled his compatriots and the Bureaucracy alike by enunciating such heresies as the following:— “I do not want that sort of Swaraj which will be for the middle-classes alone. I want Swaraj for the masses, not for the classes. I don’t care for the bourgeoisie. How few are they? Swaraj must be for the masses, and must be won by the masses.” (Speech at the Dehra Dun, November 1st, 1922.) A few weeks later, he published a “Mass” programme, in his daily vernacular organ the Bangalar Katha, which declared for the Constructive Programme an election to the Reform Councils, and stressed the necessity for organising labour and peasant-societies as a means to declare a National Strike and enforce Non-payment of Taxes for the final winning of Swaraj, which vague term he recommended should be defined by a National Committee. Excitement and speculation were still bubbling over the Desbandhu’s heresies to orthodox Gandhism, when a third event on the very eve of the Congress plunged the entire nation into a fever of fright and bewilderment. This was the cabling out to India by Reuter, evidently under Government orders, of the complete Programme of Social Democracy drawn up for the consideration of the National Congress by the exiled “Vanguard” Party in Europe. The printed copies sent with the December 1st number of the “Vanguard” (now the official organ of the Communist Party of India), reached that country on December 19th and was promptly proscribed by the Bengal Government on December 20th. The cabled document was published in the entire Indian Press, Official, Moderate and Nationalist, on December 21, 22nd and 23rd, the comments thereon extending over the entire week that preceded the opening of the National Congress at Gaya. The object of the Government in the spectacular move, was to alienate the Moderates by the sceptre of Bolshevism, and to frighten the Congress, and especially Mr. Das’ party, out of any discussion that might remotely resemble the “Vanguard” programme. Both of these designs were successful. The landlords and Moderates rallied most satisfactorily to the side of “law and order,” and the Nationalists busily tried to whitewash themselves of any suspicion that they might faintly approve of such rash republican ideas. Needless to say, the “Vanguard” programme, though it might have been in the hearts of some, found no one to sponsor it in the national conclave, but thanks to the crude advertisement by the Government, its text was known to the entire country. That its classes of social and economic reform, such as the eight-hour day, the confiscation of large estates for re-distribution among the landless peasantry, and the nationalisation of public utilities, remained undiscussed, proves the crime of the Congress to be one of deliberate commission rather than omission. But when even Mr. Das’ mild programme proved too much for the Congress patriots to swallow, what hope was there for a programme branded as Bolshevik, which concerned itself chiefly with tin amelioration of the lot of the Indian workers and peasants The Sradh Ceremony at Gaya was not to be disturbed by such discordant notes, the High Priests’ oft-repeated protestations of love for the “masses” notwithstanding. But a gleam from the outer world did find its way into the Congress pandal towards the close of its deliberations. This was the reported news of the breakdown of the Lausanne Conference and the threatened possibility of war between England and Turkey This fact, of immense importance to the Indian Mussulmans assembled simultaneously in the annual session of the All-India Khilafat Conference at Gaya, agitated the overwhelmingly Hindu Congress to a ludicrously disproportionate extent. A clue to this otherwise inexplicable concern of the representatives of 250,000,000 Hindu for the success at arms of the Moslem Turks and the preservation of the Holy Places of Islam under Turkish control, is to be found it the fanatic zeal of the 70,000,000 Indian Moslems, determined to assist their brothers in the Faith, and in the vague assumption that the peoples of Asia are united in a solid bond of brotherhood to resist the encroachments of European “civilisation.” Hindu-Moslem unity is among the first essentials to a successful national struggle, and so far, this unity has been made to hang upon the perilous thread of a purely religious and artificial issue,—the championing by the Hindus of the cause of the Khilafat, in return for the support of the Indian Mussulmans to the national cause.

A clue to this otherwise inexplicable concern of the representatives of 250,000,000 Hindu for the success at arms of the Moslem Turks and the preservation of the Holy Places of Islam under Turkish control, is to be found it the fanatic zeal of the 70,000,000 Indian Moslems, determined to assist their brothers in the Faith, and in the vague assumption that the peoples of Asia are united in a solid bond of brotherhood to resist the encroachments of European “civilisation.” Hindu-Moslem unity is among the first essentials to a successful national struggle, and so far, this unity has been made to hang upon the perilous thread of a purely religious and artificial issue,—the championing by the Hindus of the cause of the Khilafat, in return for the support of the Indian Mussulmans to the national cause. IV Certain outstanding figures in the Congress may be taken a symbolic of the tendencies that direct the current of national life in India to-day. The voice of Mr. C.R. Das, expressing the ideal and aspirations of the liberal Indian intelligentzia struggling to free itself from the social and economic interests of the bourgeoisie and opposed to him, the colourless figure of Mr. C. Rajagopalacharya the “deputy-Mahatma, “expounding the principles and dogmas of pure Gandhism,” and personifying the reactionary spirit of the lower-middle-class Extremism, sounding the death-knell to progress and scurrying to cover at the slightest hint of revolution. The voice of bourgeois radicalism, speaking in the person of N.C. Kelker, the leader of the Maharashtra school of political rationalism, as opposed to the metaphysical reactionaries of orthodox Nationalist and temporarily allied with the liberal intellectuals of the Left Wing in their common fight against the stand-patters of the Center, who still commanded an overwhelming majority. These were the voices of definite organised groups, representing the needs and more or less conscious aspirations of an entire class. There were other voices, less distinct and not so clearly heard, but nevertheless symbolic of rising social forces destined to dominate the sittings of future Congresses—the voice of Mr. P.K. Mazundar, echoing that of Hazrat Mohani at Ahmedabad, demanding the Swaraj be defined as “complete independence without foreign connection by the people of India by all legitimate and proper means.” Here spoke the new school of radical Republicanism, new as yet to India, but corresponding to the unexpressed desires and needs of a vast section of the people. Fainter still, and heard for the first time within the Indian National Congress, spoke the voice of the workers and landless peasants, through the lips of the venerable Mr. Singaravolu Chottiar, of Madras, who introduced himself, amid the cheers and laughter of the assembled delegates, as an “Indian Communist,” and who urged upon the Congress the necessity of making common cause with Labour to bring about a National Strike, so as to get rid of the domination both of the Government and of the bourgeoisie. Communists throughout the world, he assured his brother delegates, were with India in her battle for freedom. In a Manifesto issued just before the Congress, Mr. Singaravolu stressed the necessity of adopting an economic programme which would include the immediate grievances of the Indian workers and peasants within its scope. The great struggle between the two contending parties within the Congress, the Right and Left Wing combined against the Centre, apparently hung upon the burning issue of Council-entry—whether or not the Congress Party should change its tactics and contest the coming elections to the Government Reform Councils. But the real issue lay deeper, and was tersely expressed in the popular names given to the respective factions, viz., the parties of “Pro-Change” and of “No-Change.” Whether or not the Congress should exercise the right of private judgment upon the mistakes and failures of the past year, and reverse the programme and tactics sanctified by the benediction of Mahatma Gandhi, proven wrong by time and trial—or whether it should follow blindly the dictates of the Mahatmaji throughout the time of his incarceration, regardless of opinions to the contrary—this was the real issue of the struggle at Gaya. Every resolution brought before the house was presented in this spirit by loyal followers of orthodox Gandhism, and was voted upon in this form. “Change or No-Change,” “Love and Loyalty to the martyred Mahatma or Treason to his sacred memory”—thus was every question formulated and thus was it decided, in the Sradh ceremony at Gaya, where every vote cast was a Pinda offered to the beloved memory of the revered Mahatmaji. Orthodox Gandhism scored a complete and overwhelming majority in the Thirty-Seventh Session of the Indian National Congress, but for all that, orthodox Gandhism is dead, and what transpired at Gaya was merely the respectful offering of friends and relatives to the lingering ghost of the deceased, to release it finally and forever of the last earthly tie that still bound it to the life of the body politic. V A study of the resolutions accepted and rejected during the five days’ Congress deliberations reveals the nature of the struggle that has raged within the ranks of the Non-Co-operators throughout the past eight months. It is the struggle between the past and the present, between the dead and the living, between reaction and progress, which resulted in the temporary and. illusive triumph of the former over the latter. The orthodox No-Changers, in their zeal to paralyse the movement by laying upon it the skinny death hand of inaction and futility, rejected all the recommendations which their own Civil Disobedience Committee had recommended—the withdrawal of the boycott of law-courts and schools—and re-affirmed their faith in these confessedly moribund tactics. The recommendation of the same Committee to boycott British, as opposed to merely “foreign” cloth, brought forward as a resolution before the Congress, was likewise rejected on the grounds that the specific boycott of British goods implied a hatred foreign to the doctrine of Non-Violence and Love. The main bone of contention—that of Councilentry—was debated exclusively from the point of view, on the part of the orthodox No-Changers as to whether Mahatma Gandhi would sanction such a departure from the policy laid down by him at Ahmedabad and confirmed at Calcutta.

The main bone of contention—that of Councilentry—was debated exclusively from the point of view, on the part of the orthodox No-Changers as to whether Mahatma Gandhi would sanction such a departure from the policy laid down by him at Ahmedabad and confirmed at Calcutta. In the words of Mr. Rajagopalacharya, known to the Congress as the “Deputy Mahatma”:— “The Congress should remember that no great change from the present programme could be recommended by any but the wisest and greatest of leaders. It is not possible for small men to ask the Congress to take a line different from what this house, sitting at Calcutta, decided, after a careful consideration.” All the speeches of Mr. Rajagopalacharya, in upholding or opposing the various resolutions put forward, were tuned to the same key, and made use of the same arguments, ad nauseam. There were eight counter-resolutions on the subject of Council-entry, representing every shade of compromise, leading to the extreme of Council-boycott on one hand, and Council-entry on the other, but to them all Mr. Rajagopalacharya opposed the same argument, which was less of an argument than a credo: “We must not change the policy of the Mahatma; we must complete the Constructive Programme” And confronted with this uncompromising issue of “loyalty” to the imprisoned Mahatma, the pilgrims of the Sradh at Gaya rendered their tribute to the dead, and the resolution on Council-entry was lost by a two-thirds majority. There were other resolutions lost, of equal if not more importance to that of Council-entry, which was stressed far beyond its due. The resolution presented last year by Hazrat Mohani, now in jail, demanding a change in the Congress programme by declaring the, goal of the Indian people to be the attainment of independence outside the British Empire, “by all possible and proper means,” was presented again this year at Gaya by the spokesmen of his party, which appears to have grown considerably in the past twelve months. Needless to say, the resolution was lost by an overwhelming majority, but the number of votes cast for it was larger than last year, and the speeches made in favour were more outspoken. The annual appearance of such a resolution denotes the growth of that hitherto rara avis in the constitutional Congress movement—a party of radical republicanism. Manifestly in order to show that the No-Change Party still asserted its right to give a lead to the people, and as a counter-irritant to the contagious cry of Council-entry, the Congress majority adopted two last-minute resolutions which would be laughable, were they not so pathetic in their inadequacy. One was on Civil Disobedience—ambiguously worded and vague in portent, but launched as a possible objective so soon as the faithful followers should complete the preliminary requirements, viz., the collection of twenty-five lakhs of rupees (�170,000) for the Tilak Swaraj fund, and the enrolment of 50,000 volunteers, pledged to Non-Violent Non-Co-operation and the fulfilment of the Constructive Programme. The resolution on Civil Disobedience, passed against the unanimous recommendation of the Civil Disobedience Committee appointed by the Congress, is one of those anomalies which can only be explained by a study of the psychology of the No-Changers. The very men who had most loudly cried down the use of this weapon as “dangerous,” now proposed its adoption and carried the resolution successfully through the hypnotised Congress. It was meant less as a threat to the Government than a bribe to the sensation seeker. But the Congress has cried “Wolf! Wolf!” too often for either the Government or people to pay heed. The resolutions affirmed the boycott of schools and law-courts, and providing for a conditional declaration of Civil Disobedience (which is to be individual and not mass), were best described by the Pro-Change Press as “whipping a dead horse.” The other last-minute resolution thrown as a sop to the sensation-monger bordered less on the Bolshevik, as described by the Anglo-Indian Press, than on the lunatic, taking into consideration the nature of the element which proposed it. It declared:— “The Congress hereby repudiates the authority of the legislatures—in future to raise any loan or incur any liabilities on behalf of the nation, and notifies to the world that, on the attainment of Swarajya, the people of India, though holding themselves liable for all debts and liabilities rightly or wrongly incurred hitherto by the Government, will not hold themselves bound to repay any loans or discharge any liabilities incurred on and after this date on the authority of the so-called legislatures brought into existence in spite of the national boycott.” This heroic gesture of defiance before the Government, the Councils and the world was presented on the last day of the Congress, without having been fully discussed in the Subjects Committee, where it was proposed for the first time late on the previous night, and in the absence of some of the leaders. Mr. Rajagopalacharya himself, who proposed the resolution, seemed a little amazed at his own temerity in departing so far from the footsteps of the Mahatmaji, and made little effort to support his point in the face of opposing speeches, which stigmatised the resolution as “non-moral, to say the least.” But his faithful followers, trained to obedience, voted blindly in favour, and to the great surprise of everybody present, the resolution was overwhelmingly adopted. By this dictum, the petty-bourgeoisie, represented by the Congress-patriots, have driven another nail into their own coffin, since who among the financiers, whether foreign or native, now investing their capital in India, will be interested in having come to power a class which has beforehand repudiated the principal and interest on those investments? The only other noteworthy resolution adopted by the Congress was that approving the organisation of Indian labour “with a view to improve and promote their well-being and secure them their just rights, and also to prevent the exploitation of Indian labour and Indian resources.” This resolution was passed unanimously, it being the fashion in Congress as well as other circles to talk about the “masses,” and a Committee on Labour Organisation was appointed “to assist the Executive Council of the All-India Trade Union Congress for the organisation of Indian labour, both agricultural and industrial.” A similar resolution was passed by the Congress two years ago at Nagpur, but nothing came of it.

It remains to be seen whether the present resolution will be taken more literally. VI A curious feature of all Indian National Congress Sessions, and in fact, of the whole nationalist movement, is its relationship to the politico-religious agitation over the Islamic Khilafat, to which the 70,000,000 Indian Mussulmans are pledged. The Near Eastern question, involving the struggle of Turkish nationalism against Franco-British Imperialism, is thus a not unimportant factor in Indian politics as well, for a common faith and fierce religious fanaticism sways the martial followers of the Prophet in India to sentimental and to a certain extent practical sympathy for their Mussulman brothers in Turkey. The extent of this sympathy is largely regulated by the priestly hierarchy known as the Jamiat-ul-Ulema, which pulls the strings behind the All-India Khilafat Committee, with its country-wide organisation. The older and sister organisation, the All-India Muslim League, which constituted the Mussulman counterpart to the largely Hindu National Congress, and whose aims were more political and more Indian than the religious ones of the Khilafat, has gradually waned in influence and to such an extent that this year’s annual session of the All-India Muslim League did not take place at all. Its former constituents have been fairly well merged within the ranks of the National Congress organisation (with which it was united in 1916 while maintaining a separate existence), and of the Khilafat Committee. Between these two more vigorous bodies, its own significance has become nil. It was formerly held to be a stroke of Mr. Gandhi’s inspired statesmanship that united the Hindus and Mussulmans of India in a common struggle with the slogan of “Swaraj and the righting of the Khilafat wrongs.” What was at best a mere superficial unity, brought about by the mingling of the waters of two streams, each having a separate source and contrary destination, has been rendered nugatory by the external events of the past year, reacting upon Indian political life. The military triumph of Mustapha Kemal Pasha, and the dethronement of the traitor Sultan, who was at the same time the Caliph of the world of Islam, was bound to have a repercussion upon Mohammedan sentiment outside of Turkey, to which the religious aspect of this bold step meant more than the political. The real meaning of the appointment of a new Caliph divested of temporal power has been well and aptly characterised as the separation of the Church from the State, of religion from politics by the new Turkish Government. Great Britain tried to make capital out of this courageous and necessary step by offering shelter to the ex-Sultan and seeking to foist him upon the Mussulman world as their spiritual head. But the Indian Mussulmans, steeped in fanaticism, saw through this move and supported the action of Mustapha Kemal. The Jamiat-ul-Ulema has not, however, given its sanction unconditionally. Certain sinister forces are at work within that ecclesiastical body, inspired more by dubious political than spiritual considerations. The same forces were at play during the recent simultaneous sessions of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema, the All-India Khilafat Conference and the National Congress at Gaya. There, the same questions of policy and tactics, discussed in the Congress, were decided by these bodies, and the curious fact is, that their decisions were not influenced by those of the Congress, but vice versa. The whole question of Council-entry was postponed by the National Congress until after the deliberations of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema and Khilafat Conference were announced, and even Mr. Das, leader of the liberal intellectuals, declared in his presidential address:— “It is needless to point out that should the Khilafat Conference come to the conclusion that under the present circumstances it would be an offence against their religion to enter the Councils, the Congress would unhesitatingly accept their decision, because no work in this country towards the attainment of Swaraj is possible without the hearty co-operation of both Hindus and Mussulmans.” The debate on the Council-entry resolution was postponed till the fourth day’s session of the Congress, in order to await the decision of the Ulema and Khilafat Conference. When given, it was unfavourable, the Ulemas declaring roundly that “even an attempt to stand for election to the Councils, though without the intention of entering them or of taking the oath of allegiance, is forbidden by religion.” The Khilafat Conference was so busy passing resolutions supporting Mustapha Kemal Pasha and upholding his claims at Lausanne, that the Council-entry resolution was postponed and finally dropped altogether. The Lausanne deadlock reacted in a notable way upon the deliberations of Indian nationalism, and the news of its possible breakdown which came in the midst of them, caused the Khilafat Conference to pass a resolution calling upon all Indian Moslems “to unite to oppose the hostile farces arrayed against the Turks, because Civil Disobedience is the best weapon in their hands to attain Khilafat demands and to force the hands of the Government.” A similar resolution, urged upon the National Congress in the very midst of the debate on Council-entry, was postponed, and passed at the close of the Congress session in a very diluted form, whereby:— “This Congress resolves that the Working Committee do take steps in consultation with the Khilafat Working Committee to secure united action by Hindus and Mussulmans and others to prevent the exploitation of India for any such unjust cause, and to deal with the situation.” Thus, the Khilafat stands committed to declare Civil Disobedience in the event of a new Turkish war, while the Congress has refrained from fully committing itself on this point. The Khilafat Conference also declared for the boycott of British goods, as well as of schools and law-courts; approved in rather lukewarm fashion of the organisation of labour “to prepare among them religious and political affairs,” and declared for the collection of ten lakhs of rupees (about �70,000) and the enrolment of 50,000 volunteers within three months time. Both Congress and Khilafat voted to form a Committee to inquire into the causes of the Hindu-Muslem friction, and to devise ways and.

means of drawing the two great religious communities closer in the national struggle. But the deepening of religious issues is indicated by the very significant resolution of the All-India Hindu Mahasabha (an orthodox body of Hindu Conservatives which also held its annual conference at Gaya), “to organise in all villages and towns Hindu Sabhas (societies) and bands of Hindu volunteers with the object of protecting the Hindu community from the attacks regarded to be aggressive and unjust.” This means the formation of a Hindu religious organisation on aggressive and orthodox lines similar in spirit to the purely religious Mussulman organisation of the Khilafat, and destined perhaps, to clash with it on the political field, as all such religious bodies inevitably must when permitted to meddle in and influence political issues. The growth of political consciousness and of political parties in India has not yet broken up the old religious divisions where the reactionary and orthodox members of each community are re-assembling their forces for future conflicts. This tendency will be aided, unseen, by the Imperialist ruler. VII The Congress ended, as was to be expected, in a split between the forces of the living from those which clung to the dead past. Mr. C.R. Das and his followers, on the termination of the Congress session, issued a Manifesto, announcing the formation, within the Congress ranks, of the “Congress Khilafat Swaraj Party,” based upon “the attainment of Swaraj by all the peaceful and legitimate means, working on the principle of Non-Violent Non-Co-operation. Mr. Das resigned his presidency of the Congress, on the ground that his views did not coincide with those of the majority, but declared his party would continue to work within the Congress until the majority were converted to their viewpoint, meanwhile reserving the right to follow those tactics which seemed best to them. The Executive of the new party numbers among it such men as Mr. C.R. Das, President, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Motilal Nehru, V.J. Patel, N.C. Kelker, M.R. Jayakar, C.S. Ranga Iyer, V. Abhayankar etc., etc.—names which speak volumes to those even slightly acquainted with the Indian nationalist movement. It means that the Left represented by C.R. Das and the liberal intellectuals, has temporally joined forces with the Right—that school of rationalist politicians who have long since headed a revolt away from Congress leading strings back into the ranks of the co-operating Moderates, and whose philosophy of nationalism is summed up in the phrase “Responsible Co-operation.” The new party, which met at the end of January to draw up a programme and line of action, has not yet published the result of its deliberations, which covered such questions as the formation of a Pan-Asiatic Federation (to supplant Pan-Islamist boycott of British goods, and participation in elections to the Reform Councils. A Committee is at work drawing up a tentative scheme of Swaraj, which the new party has set itself the task of defining and will place before the country for discussion and approval through the Press and platform. The scheme includes the main points set forth in Das’ presidential address before the Thirty-Seventh National Congress, viz.: (1) The formation of local autonomous centres on the lines of ancient Indian village system, integrated into a loosely federated national unit. (2) The residuary power of control will remain in the hands of the Central Government, so exercised as to interfere least with the local autonomy of the integrated village units. In view of Mr. Das’ reiterated insistence on the importance of attaining “Swaraj for the masses and not for the classes,” which raised such a clamour in the British and Indian Press, and led to his being stigmatised as “Bolshevik,” the specific declaration of the first convention of the new party on the rights of private property have a double interest and significance. The members declare that “private and individual property will be recognised and maintained and the growth of individual wealth, both movable and immovable will be permitted.” This frank declaration of class-affiliation and class-consciousness betokens more than the mere winning over of Mr. Das and the school of liberal intellectuals to the protection of bourgeois property-rights. It shows the rapid crystallisation of ideology in the Indian national struggle, and the presence of a predominating bourgeois element, determined to protect its class interests from the very outset against the rising flood-tide of mass-energy that may some day find an outlet in revolution. The Sradh at Gaya is over, and the door on the past two years of Non-Violent Non-Co-operation based upon Soul-Force is closed and sealed for ever.

The Sradh at Gaya is over, and the door on the past two years of Non-Violent Non-Co-operation based upon Soul-Force is closed and sealed for ever. The ghost of Gandhism is released from its earthly moorings, and Indian politics is freed from its spiritual bondage to pursue its temporal course, for better or for worse, towards some kind of Swaraj within or without the British Empire. New forces have been released in the struggle, temporarily confused and merged, but destined each day to grow more distinct, more conscious of the mission each is to fulfil. The sentimental liberalism of Mr. Das and his disciples has been drowned beneath the advancing wave of bourgeois rationalism; intent upon winning for itself a place in the sun. But the revolutionary energy of the masses is yet to be reckoned with. In the words of the “Open Letter to Mr. C.R. Das and His Followers”:— “There are but two ways ahead: reversion to the Constitutional Democracy of the Liberals, or adoption of more revolutionary methods.—Either Mr. Das will soon have to abandon his original position in favour of the Responsive Co-operation of the Mahratta Rationalists, or he will have to part company with them in order to organise the third party inside the National Congress—the party of workers and peasants, which will infuse vigour into the national struggle by means of revolutionary mass action.” (Open Letter to Chittaranjan Das and His Followers, by M.N. Roy, Zurich, February 3rd, 1923.) Only the organisation of such a mass party can save the Congress from sinking into permanent imbecility and decay, rendered useless on the one hand by the growing importance of the co-operating Moderates, representing the interests of the powerful Indian bourgeoisie, and on the other, by the organisation of the Indian workers, and peasants to struggle for the improvement of their economic position, abandoning the political arena for a decade to the Home Rulers and adherents of the Liberal League. Evelyn Roy ArchiveThe Communist International Index

Evelyn Roy The Revolution in Central Asia—The Struggle for Power in Holy Bokhara, pt. I Source: Labour Monthly, Vol. 6, July 1924, No. 7, pp. 403-410. Transcription: Ted Crawford HTML Markup: Brian Reid Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2009). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. There are two aspects of the Bokharan Revolution of 1920 which resulted in the declaration of a People’s Soviet Republic—one is national, the other international. It is the latter which makes this event significant for the man in the street, who in all probability has never heard of Bokhara the Holy, except as a name for expensive rugs adorning the houses of the rich; nor of its Amir, once rejoicing in the title of “Commander of the Faithful,” and venerated by the Moslems of lands other than his own as second in sanctity only to the one-time Caliph of Constantinople. Had it not been for the immense international significance of this national revolution in Bokhara, the latter might have occurred in 1917 instead of 1920, almost simultaneously with that of the November Revolution in Russia, and might have accomplished its purpose with very little fighting or bloodshed, and almost no loss of life—for the whole population of Bokhara, except for the thin upper strata of corrupt nobles and clergy surrounding the court of the Amir, were unanimous in their desire for freedom. Unfortunately, however, for the Young Bokharans who formed the vanguard of the revolutionary people, and for the oppressed and exploited masses who aspired to emancipation from their earthly miseries more ardently than for the promised delights of Mohammed’s Paradise, the enslavement of Turkesthan had proved essential to the interests of two of the world’s Great Powers whose rival imperialism had come face to face in Central Asia. One after another, all the five Khanates of Turkesthan—Tashkent, Khokand, Bokhara, Merv and Khiva—had surrendered their sovereignty to the advancing armies of the Russian Tsar in their projected march on India; while from the south and east, the outposts of British Imperialism responded to this advance by the rape of Baluchisthan and the subvention of Afghanisthan and Persia. The disintegration of Russian Imperialism by internal revolution brought about a momentary cessation of this struggle for power in Central Asia—a struggle destined to recommence again almost immediately when the contagion of revolutionary ideas spread eastward as well as westward, and the desire for national freedom on the part of native populations long suppressed saw at last an opportunity to express itself. The Russian Revolution of November, 1917, with its proclamation to the various peoples and races that went to make up the former Russian Empire that henceforth they would enjoy equality and sovereignty, with the right of free self-determination, met with an immediate response on the part of all the Russian Asiatic dependencies which had groaned under Tsarist tutelage, and had tried vainly through their several revolutionary parties to win a modicum of freedom from the tyrannous exactions of the Khans and Mullahs (kings and priests) who were backed up by the Imperial armies of the former Russian state. From March to November of 1917, the months that separated the bourgeois republic of Kerensky from the rise of the Bolsheviks to power, these nationalist revolutionary movements in the Central Asiatic provinces gained more and more headway, though still controlled by the old machinery of repression. The victory of the Second Revolution in European Russia was followed almost immediately by the declaration of a Soviet Republic from Tashkent, the capital of Turkesthan. What had been the very heart of patriarchal autocracy became threatened by an inundation of the reddest of revolutionary ideas. The disintegration of Tsardom spelt the ultimate collapse of the Khanates and Emirates of Central Asia, with all their centuries of incalculable corruption, oppression and vice. The advance of the victorious revolution threatened to undermine the feudal monarchies of Persia and Afghanisthan. With a whole ancient world tottering to its fall, the revolution with its message of emancipation would be carried to the very gates of India! British Imperialism, the triumphant survivor of its once deadly rival, felt itself newly menaced, and henceforth became the most inveterate foe of the Revolution in Central Asia—became the backbone and foundation of the counterrevolution. Those who read the daily papers without pausing to consider the hidden meaning of nine-tenths of what is published as mere “news,” may remember having seen published in the world Press in June of 1923 an “Appeal from the Amir of Bokhara” against Bolshevik oppression, addressed to the governments of Great Britain, Japan, China, the United States, Turkey, Persia and to the League of Nations. This “Appeal” was given unusual prominence in most of the great London organs of capitalist opinion, and leading articles were written to add weight to the document itself, which aimed to expose Bolshevik barbarities in Central Asia. The cause of the victimised Amir was warmly espoused by these worthies—just as recently that of the deposed Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid and of his successor, the ex-Caliph of Islam, Abdul Mejid, has been similarly defended against the energetic action of the Angora Government. When the European Press begins with such unanimity to defend a lost cause so ardently, it is well to look below the surface and try to discover the reason thereof. The “Appeal” set forth in extremely vivid and picturesque language the “low and abominable character” of Bolshevik policy in Central Asia, which had abolished the independent governments of the Bashkirs and the Usbecks, “flooding the entire country with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Mussulmans”—“the Red Army bought and sold each others’ wives and daughters, scoffing at the tears of their victims.” The culmination of this devastation and oppression of Turkesthan by the Bolshevik forces was reached in the bombardment of Bokhara, whereby “one-third of the population was lost, mosques destroyed, the inhabitants (including the Amir) forced to flee and a government organised, calling itself the Independent Republic of Bokhara.” Such in brief is the context of this pathetic appeal to the civilised world to come to the rescue of the deposed Commander of the Faithful, so iniquitously robbed of his throne and driven forth from his kingdom.

The “Appeal” set forth in extremely vivid and picturesque language the “low and abominable character” of Bolshevik policy in Central Asia, which had abolished the independent governments of the Bashkirs and the Usbecks, “flooding the entire country with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Mussulmans”—“the Red Army bought and sold each others’ wives and daughters, scoffing at the tears of their victims.” The culmination of this devastation and oppression of Turkesthan by the Bolshevik forces was reached in the bombardment of Bokhara, whereby “one-third of the population was lost, mosques destroyed, the inhabitants (including the Amir) forced to flee and a government organised, calling itself the Independent Republic of Bokhara.” Such in brief is the context of this pathetic appeal to the civilised world to come to the rescue of the deposed Commander of the Faithful, so iniquitously robbed of his throne and driven forth from his kingdom. The world, particularly the Mussulman world, may have felt some acute twinges of indignation at this fresh instance of Bolshevik enormities, but, oddly enough, the League of Nations did not equip and send forth a band of holy crusaders to do battle in the cause of righteousness, and the Amir remains in exile in the court of his brother-potentate, the Amir of Afghanisthan, who kindly gave him shelter. The Bokharan People’s Soviet Republic remains in power and continues to maintain the closest relations with the. Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, to which it is federated. Nearly a year has rolled by since the launching of that forgotten Appeal, and though recent items in the world Press would have us believe that a new attempt is being made on the part of Russian White Guards and native bandits to upset the status quo in Central Asia, we may take it that this is but another indication of the fact that the struggle for power in that remote but important region of the earth is not yet ended, and that in spite of reports to the contrary, the Bolsheviks are holding their own. So much having been said on the international aspect of the Bokharan Revolution, a few facts may be cited which throw new light on the national side of the struggle, which resulted in the establishment of a republic in 1920. What were the conditions that led up to this revolt, and how came it to be successful in the end? The Bokharan Revolutionary movement had existed since the end of the nineteenth century, as a natural result of the intolerable conditions which prevailed under the combined oppression of the Russian and Bokharan autocracies. Open rebellion had been prevented by the armies of the Tsar, which were placed at the disposal of the Amir. The government of the latter, nominally independent, was in reality a protectorate of Russia, which kept a Resident Agent there to exercise control. Railways and telegraphs, built by the Tsar’s government, were entirely controlled by the latter, and Russian garrisons maintained respect for the real power behind the Amir’s throne. This theocratic potentate, regarded by the Moslems of Central Asia and neighbouring countries as the embodiment of powers not only earthly, but divine, was held in superstitious veneration by the Moslem world, and the fame of Bokhara el Sharif as a centre of Islamic culture attracted pilgrims and students from all the Mussulman countries. Such international prestige in no way lightened the burden which official robbery, corruption and vice imposed upon the Amir’s immediate subjects. This despot regarded Bokhara as his own personal estate, and the government income, wrung from the labour of the people, as his pocket-money. Over one-half the national income was given over forthwith to himself and the Mullahs and Begs (clergy and nobles). The wealth extracted from the miserable populace was squandered in the licentious pleasures of the court and harem, and in maintaining the dignity of the Amir in neighbouring capitals. One of his pleasure-palaces in the Russian Caucasus has now been turned into a rest-house for convalescent workers, who to-day enjoy the luxury which was wrung from the sweat and blood of the Bokharan peasant and handicraftsman. It is one of the minor conquests of the Russian Revolution. Political suppression naturally accompanied these economic exactions, which were a constant provocation to revolt on the part of the masses. The Amir’s power was absolute; the rights of the people nil. Those who were brave or rash enough to urge for reform were either imprisoned, tortured and executed or massacred outright. These patriarcho-feudal rights of the Bokharan ruler were protected by the rifles of the Tsar, and the fact that he was a mere puppet of the Russian autocracy increased the hatred of his own people against him. This feeling was shared even by some of the younger priests, drawn from the ranks of the people. Large numbers of Mullahs joined the Bokharan secret revolutionary organisations, one Mullah Ikram being a prominent leader. The Shiahite massacre of 1909, directed against the Bokharan Government for giving the biggest posts to the Shiah sect of Moslems, and repressed by the Tsarist troops, was organised by another priest, Mullah Bachi. But the real centre of discontent lay in the exploited peasant masses, whom exorbitant taxation has reduced to the direst poverty. Not a year passed by without its peasant riot or rebellion, put down with the utmost cruelty. There was little opportunity for a strictly nationalist movement to develop in a country where no chance was given for a native bourgeoisie to evolve. Russian capital ruled uncontrolled, enjoying every guarantee, while native capital had none.

Russian capital ruled uncontrolled, enjoying every guarantee, while native capital had none. After the construction of the Trans-Caspian Railway, an immense trade developed between Central Asia and Batoum on the Black Sea, to which a branch railway ran, connecting it with the Trans-Caspian. For one hundred and fifty miles, this Central Asian railway line traverses the territory of Bokhara, resulting in a great stimulation of trade. A certain number of Bokharan intelligentsia, educated in Russia and imbibing the ideas of the revolutionary movement there, constituted the nucleus of the Young Bokharan Party, which together with the discontented elements among the priests and trading class agitated for the granting of constitutional rights and the limitation of the power of the Amir. After the Russian Revolution of 1905, which had its echoes in Bokhara as well, all the revolutionary parties and factions united into one central organisation known henceforth as Mlada Bukharsi. (To be concluded) APPENDIX COPY OF TREATY BETWEEN GREAT BRITAIN AND THE DEPOSED AMR OF BOKHARA1 (Translation from the original) In the name of God Powerful and Almighty, I, the humble Mahmed Taghi-Beg, son of the Premier of the Government of Bokhara, have prepared myself for the solving of the Peace of Bokhara, Amir-Ali-Khan, Shadow of God, who was compelled because of the aggression of the Russian and Bokharan Bolshevist Parties, to leave the country and flee to Afghanisthan, and who is at present under the protection and surveillance of the Afghan Government. Also in the name of all Moslems; of the Court of the Islamic nobility of those localities, and of the merchants and landowners and individuals of Bokharan nationality, for the regaining of our Holy Lands, we conclude a semi-official Treaty with the Military Attaché Consul-General of the great State of England, plenipotentiary to Meshed, which is one of the regions of Persia. In every way, before beginning the struggle for the conquest of Bokhara and the liberation of these territories from the hands of the Russian and Bokharan revolutionaries, to acquire and strengthen the friendship, to begin a review in the Council of the Holy National Assembly (may Allah be pleased), and also in International Conferences, after raising the question of the defence of the defeated rights of the weak Bokharan nation, and of liberating its dear lands from the hands of the conquerors and enrolling it as one of the defenceless States of the world. And also a request on the part of the defenceless Bokhara to the Council of the National Assembly and the Council of Ministers of the great ruler of England, that through the Minister of Foreign Affairs, to demand one representative from Bokhara, in order to receive a voice at International Conferences. In order that, at the sessions of the Court of the English State and for the discussion of any questions pertaining to the Bokharan nation, and for reports at the Conferences of other Powers—we present one semi-official Treaty, in order to rise for the conquest of the State of Bokhara; and the Bokharan nation preparing itself to move into Bokhara, and after attaining its aims, the nation of Bokhara is ready to support all plans and wishes of the English Government with regard to Turkesthan, and to render moral, material and armed assistance and, like other nations, to submit completely to (national?) orders of the great State. And the other condition is, that all expenditures during the time of war must be made by England, upon the condition that one of the true representatives of Bokhara should enter this Commission. (1) The Government of Bokhara will accept all expenses necessary for the liberation of Bokhara from the hands of the Bolsheviks from the Official Commission empowered by the English Government. (2) For all expenses, the Government of Bokhara is ready to give away to the English any choice place, without discussion, for use for an indefinite time. (3) The Government of Bokhara is ready, during the time of the reconquest of Bokhara and her liberation from the hands of the Russians, to accept all orders and counsels, without any refusals, up to the time of final peace in Bokhara. (4) I, Mahmed-Taghi-Beg, son of the Prime Minister of Bokhara, have the plenary power to conclude such a semi-official Treaty with the British representative in Meshed, and ask among other things, that the English Government enter into negotiations with Afghanisthan and first receive permission for his departure, and in case of failure to receive this permission, then the support of the English Government for the nation of Bokhara must pass either through the son of the Amir of Bokhara, or with the aid of some members of the Court of these localities. (5) The Government of Great Britain knows that during the stay of the Russians in Turkesthan, they had been the cause of the war, and having semi-officially taken away Samarcand from the Amir of Bokhara at the time of the conclusion of the Treaty between Russia and Bokhara, Samarcand was included by the Russians in their territory, and Katta-Kurgan declared as the boundary of the State. Consequently, after the reconquest, Samarcand should be as before included in the territory of the State of Bokhara. (6) The Government of Bokhara is ready to accept all expenses incurred by the English, with expenses for all kinds of wars and military armaments up to the conquest of the territories of Bokhara and Samarcand, upon presentation of a bill by aforesaid Commission. (7) The Government of Bokhara takes upon itself the obligation, after the reconquest of Bokhara, during thirty years to leave the military rule of the British, and after thirty years, the military chiefs and commanders shall be British, while all armies shall be composed of the nationals of Bokhara. (8) The Government of Bokhara pledges itself, after concluding the Treaty with England, to make no treaties with any one else, except in case when the English give their permission.

(9) The Government of Bokhara is ready to cease all friendship with the Afghans and Persians and Turks and Khivans and to be exclusively under the control of the Government of Great Britain. (10) The Government of Bokhara pledges itself not to bring its wares on the European market and not to trade in them, without the permission of the English. (11) The Government of Bokhara is ready to transfer the telegraph, posts customs, and internal and external transit into the hands of British supervisors. Telegraph, post and customs will be in English hands. (12) The Government of Bokhara will leave up to a certain time, to the plenipotentiaries of England, all ministerial institutions for the carrying out of order inside and outside the country. (13) The Government of Bokhara undertakes the obligation to receive no representative of Russia or any other European power or of other governments in general, without the permission of England. (14) The Government of Bokhara will send the best sons of the nation nowhere else but to England for study, and all the students of Bokhara in Great Britain will be cared for in moral and material way, by the British. (15) The Government of Bokhara presents to Great Britain all internal revenues arising from mines, subsoil, and running rivers from which profits can arise. (16) The Government of Bokhara may circulate no money out of the British coins, excepting that part of the gold which will be placed in the Bank of Bokhara under the control of the internal Government. (17) The Government of Bokhara buys in England the machinery for the erection and running of factories; in some cases where it will be to a greater advantage, it has the right to purchase them from other governments. (18) The Government of Bokhara will receive and bring over military equipment for a time from England, but later, upon the decision of the Government, may erect in its country factories for war-supplies, without prohibition by Great Britain. These eighteen points, in the semi-official form of a Treaty, are concluded between the Governments with the aid of the Major Attaché of the Consulate of the Government of Great Britain in Meshed. The nation and the Government of Bokhara hope that England will pay some attention, if only for the sake of friendship, and in a brief time before the International Conference will make clear that it supports the Government of Bokhara and will remove this pernicious Russian force and liberate our defenceless and unhappy nation. And if England should find some deficiencies contained in the eighteen points of this Treaty, the Government of Bokhara promises to accept all propositions of the National Assembly. Also, if in this Treaty contained in these eighteen points, which is presented to the Consul-General and to the Major-Attaché, the Government of Bokhara or the Bokharan nation should desire to introduce some changes, Great Britain shall, without taking offence change the Treaty and replace the disputed paragraphs. I, on my side, Mahmed-Taghi-Beg, son of Bashi-Beg, the Prime Minister of Bokhara, conclude with the permission of Amir-Ali-Khan ,as well as in the name of the entire nation of Bokhara, this Treaty in Meshed with the Consul General and the Major-Attaché of the British Government for the friendship of the two States, in the hope that what shall be necessary will be done to achieve the liberation of Bokhara. If this Treaty should have deficiencies, let know, in order to change it. Place of Seal. (Signed) MAHMED-TAGHI, Son of MULLAH KHALI MIRZA NYUN GASHI BEG. Khed. . . . (Signatures of copyists, translators, &c.) Year 1341 (Arabian style) Month Djanzadnal Akhir. Notes 1. When the existence of this agreement was announced in the Isveztia, in June of last year, the British Foreign Office issued the following official statement: “There is not the least foundation for a statement published in Moscow that Great Britain has concluded an agreement with the anti-Soviet Emirs of Turkesthan by which she would accept a protectorate in that region.” There is, however, no question as to the authenticity of the document published above, which was signed in December, 1922, by Mr. Prideaux, as representative of the British Consul. The India Office may, however, have refused to ratify the Treaty.—EDITOR, THE LABOUR MONTHLY. Evelyn Roy Archive The Labour Monthly Index