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Charles Wesley Ervin, The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon 1935-48
Charles Wesley Ervin, The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon 1935-48
ISBN 955-9102-83-4
Published by
Social Scientists' Association
No. 12, Sulaiman Terrace
Colombo 05, Sri Lanka.
Printed by
Karunaratne & Sons Ltd
67, UDA Industrial Estate
Katuwana Road,
Homagama, Sri Lanka.
Contents
Preface ............................................................................................ .
1. .Background ........................................•.................................... 1
2. The Pioneers ............................................................................ 48
3. The Formation of an Indo-Ceylonese Party........................ 94
4. The Quit India Revolt ............................................................ 113
5. The Interlude ..........................................•............................... 131
6. Rifts in the Party .................................................................... 154
7. Ballots, Barricades, and Bloodshed ...................................... 173
8. A Race Against Time .............................................................. 192
9. The Breakthrough .................................................................. 208
10. Independence .......................................................................... 218
11. Demise and Regeneration ...................................................... 232
Many books of this genre grow out of a PhD thesis. In this case that is
only half tme. My interest in the Trotskyist movements of India and
Ceylon did begin while I was a graduate student at the University of
Chicago in the early 1970s. But I was studying Indian art history, not
political science. My involvement with Trotskyism was purely extra-
curricular. For a while I pursued both with equal passion. But the extra-
curricular got the upper hand. I ended up abandoning my academic ca-
reer. Yet I never lost interest in my "Indian Trotskyism project." It re-
mained a hobby that I pursued, on and off, as circumstances permitted,
for the last thirty years. This book is the result.
As I travelled all over India, visiting the art museums and photo-
graphing old monuments, I looked up more "old timers" in my spare
time. Each interview gave me more pieces of the puzzle. I discovered
that in the turbulent years after WWII the Trotskyists made impressive
headway on the labor front in several areas. In Madras the Trotskyists
captured the largest and oldest union in India, and in 1947 led a huge
lOO-day strike, much to the chagrin of the Communist Party. I felt that I
was uncovering a buried chapter in history that deserved to be docu-
mented.
At that point the most informative source was Leslie Goonewardene, A Short His-
tory of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Colombo, 1960). The section on the BLPI
consists of only a few paragraphs. The American academic, George Jan Lerski,
published an in-depth study of the LSSP in 196&. George Jan Lerski, Origins of
Trotskyism in Ceylon (Stanford, 196&). However, he took the history only up to the
onset ofWWIl.
Charles Wesley Ervin, "Trotskyism in India: Origins through World War II (1935-
45)," Revolutionary History, vol. 1, no. 4 (Winter 19&&-&9), pp. 22-34; translated
and reprinted as "Le trotskysme en Inde pendant la guerre," Cahiers Leon Trotsky,
no. 39 (September 19&9), pp. 77-111.
11
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The SWP had been the official American section ofTrotsky's international move-
ment since 1929, when its founding leaders were expelled from the Communist
Party. In the 'thirties the American party played a key role in helping Trotsky, who
was then in exile, cohere his followers, scattered all over the world, into the Inter-
national Left Opposition, which in 1938 became the Fourth International. On the
eve of WWII, the SWP established mail contact with the LSSP and Trotskyists in
India. Once the war started, however, the mail was no longer reliable. The SWP
secretly started a very risky operation to re-establish contact with the Trotskyist
groups that had been forced underground throughout Europe and Asia. The SWP
had its sailor members sign up for supply ships sailing to Asia. Setting ashore in
Colombo or Calcutta, they would contact the underground Trotskyist groups, ex-
change letters and literature, and carry the contraband back to the US, where it was
sent to SWP headquarters in New York City. As a result.ofthese heroic operations,
the SWP amassed an archive of old Trotskyist newspapers, leaflets, internal bulle-
tins, and other party documents available nowhere else. Unfortunately, the SWP
kept these archives private. In the 1960s the SWP began to veer away from its
Trotskyist heritage and in the 1980s openly repudiated Trotskyism. In 1991 the
SWP literally jettisoned its past. It deposited its international files in the Hoover
Archives and the domestic records in the Wisconsin Historical Society. The SWP
archives at Hoover are divided into two collections, the Socialist Workers Party
Records and the Library of Social History Collection. I abbreviate these in the foot-
notes as SWP Papers and LSH, respectively. In addition: a number of SWP leaders
deposited their own archives at Hoover.
Charles Wesley Ervin, "Trotskyism in India, 1942-48," in Al Richardson (ed.),
Blows Against the Empire: Trotskyism in Ceylon (London, 1997), pp. 218-241.
iii
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
classify some of the official documents from the era of the Raj that had
been kept under wraps in the India Office Library, including the Indian
Political Intelligence Service files, which alone fill more than 700
boxes. 5 I made five trips to London, over a period of several years, to
mine those records, which yielded precious nuggets of information.
Given all this new material, I realized that I had to scale back my
ambitious plan to write a book documenting the history of Indian
Trotskyism from its origins to the present. I decided to limit this book
to the colonial period. The year 1948 is an appropriate end point for
two reasons. First, by 1948 both India and Ceylon had become inde-
pendent. Second, the BLPI entered the Socialist Party of India in that
year. This was an exercise in what Trotskyists call "entryism"-to
merge into a sympathetic left party, build up a Trotskyist left wing, and
exit stronger than before.
By the time the Trotskyist movement got going in India, the Con-
gress had been in existence for fifty years. Gandhi had already led two
tumultuous mass movements. The sun was setting on the Raj. Stalin
had become a Red dictator. A defeated but undaunted Trotsky formed
the Fourth International. Europe had been through the Great War, the
Depression, the victory of fascism in Italy and Germany, and the Span-
ish Civil War. There is no way a book like this can provide all that
background. However, I thought some kind of introduction would be
useful. The first chapter attempts to briefly summarize how the British
conquered and transformed India, how the Indian nationalists re-
sponded, and how the Marxists ahalyzed and intervened in that long,
complex, and fascinating process.
The IPI archives consists of surveillance reports and intercepts from MI6, MI5,
and the Special Branch, as well as a large number of intelligence summaries and
position papers. The collection consists of more than 57,800 pages in 767 files. For
brevity in citations I refer to the Oriental and India Office Collections in the India
Office Library as IOL. The files of Indian Political Intelligence (lPI) are part of the
Public and Judicial Department (Separate) Files, 1913-1947. Following the con-
vention used at the IOL, I abbreviate these files as LlPJ.
iv
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
I thank all those veterans who gave me oral histories, old party
documents, and answered my many letters over the last three decades:
S. Amamath, S.C.C. Anthony Pillai, K. Appanraj, Sailen Banerji, Jagu
Belani, Keshav Bhattacharyya, Tulsi Boda, Dulal Bose, Sudarshan
Chatterji, Sitanshu Das, Lionel Dissanayake, Trevor Drieberg,
Amaradasa Femando, Meryl Femando, Leslie Goonewardene, Osmund
Jayaratne, Jagadish Jha, V. Karalasingham, Ramesh Karkal, Sitaram
Kolpe, Minoo Masani, Hiranand Mishra, Basanta Dev Mukherji,
Murlidhar Parija, Selina Perera, Senadhira Piyasena, Vinayak Purohit,
S.R. Rao, T.R. Rao, Ajit and Annie Roy, Karuna Kant Roy, Purnangshu
K. Roy, Edmund Samarakkody, Indra Sen, Onkarnath Shastri,
Chandravadan Shukla, Tara Shukla, Mahendra Singh, N. Sivasambu,
Regi Siriwardena, S.P. Udyawar, and Michael van der Poorten (aka
Mike Banda).
Several key leaders who figure prominently in these pages had al-
ready died by the time I started my research. I gratefully acknowledge
the help I received from their families, in particular Dinesh, Lakmali,
and Prasanna Gunawardena (children of Philip Gunawardena); Rupa
Gunawardena (wife of Robert Gunawardena); and Gina Ismene Chitty
(daughter of Doric de Souza).
v
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
I thank the professional staff at the Hoover Archives, the India Of-
fice Library, the British Museum Newspaper Room, the Houghton Li-
brary at Harvard University, the University of Chicago Library, the
Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, the Indian National
Archives in New Delhi, the Glasgow University Library, the Karl Marx
Memorial Library in London, the Tamiment Library at New York Uni-
versity, the New York Public Library, the Maniben Kara Institute in
Bombay, and the Archives ofIndian Labour in Noida, India.
VII
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Shortly after I joined the LSSP, Stalin signed his infamous pact
with Nazi Germany. That was a bombshell. The differences in the party
could no longer be contained. The Trotskyist majority in the LSSP Ex-
ecutive Committee expelled the pro-Stalin faction and for the first time
openly proclaimed solidarity with the Fourth International, which
Trotsky had formed in 1938 as an alternative to Stalin's Third Interna-
tional. Up to that point the LSSP had no direct contact with Trotsky,
who was living precariously in Mexico. Stalin had already murdered
his son in Paris. One of our comrades, Selina Perera, was sent to Eng-
land to establish contact with the British Trotskyists. She proceeded to
New York and met the leaders of the American section of the Fourth
International. She tried to enter Mexico to visit Trotsky but was
stopped at the border. That was our last chance. Stalin sent a henchman
to murder Trotsky less than a year later. And so, the LSSP never had
the opportunity to collaborate with Trotsky himself. We got our
Trotskyism from books, in isolation.
Those books, however, were powerful. The Permanent Revolution,
first published in English translation in 1930, laid out his program for
revolution in colonial countries like Ceylon and India. Trotsky posited
that the national bourgeoisie lacked the strength and fortitude to drive
out the imperial power and carry through the tasks associated with a
classic "bourgeois democratic revolution." In his view, only the urban
workers, supported by the multitudes of rural poor, could wage such a
fight, and in so doing they would have to go beyond purely democratic
reforms and encroach upon capitalist interests. In contrast, Stalin in-
sisted that the Communist Parties support and bolster the so-called
"anti-imperialist" bourgeoisie. For us in the LSSP, that was absurd. Our
native elite was so conservative that many opposed the introduction of
universal suffrage in 1931!
Prior to his death, Trotsky predicted that the coming world war
would be the mother of revolution. That idea became our lodestar in
the LSSP. Our leaders articulated the view that the showdown with
British imperialism would take place on the mainland. However, with-
out a revolutionary leadership, the battle would be lost. Therefore,
since there was no mass revolutionary party in India, we concluded that
viii
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
it was our duty to help build· such a party in order to intervene in the
mass struggles that were sure to come. The LSSP already had connec-
tions with important Congress Socialists in Bombay and other cities.
Moreover, our leaders also had established contact with small groups
of Indian Trotskyists.
IX
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
x
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Some ten years ago I received a letter from the author of this book,
seeking my help in what he described as a personal research project in
Indian Trotskyism. I replied to him with a challenge: "I respect your
wish to write a historical account of the Trotskyist episode in Indian
revolutionary history. This will have to be against the background of
more than fifty years in India that scintillate with fabulous accounts of
bold thinking, fearless confrontation with the imperial state, and in-
credible inventiveness of strategy and tactics in the quest of popular
unity in a society teeming with all manner of divisiveness."
Hector Abhayawardhana
Colombo
May 2006
Illustrations
Phi lip Gunawardena with brothers Harry and Robert, Colombo, circa
1920
xii
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Murray Gow Purdy (right) with Z. Mugade, organizer for the Laundry
Workers Union, Johannesburg, 1934.
Photo: Baruch Hirson, London.
Murray Gow Purdy (holding hat) with comrades of the Native Laundry
Workers Union, Johannesburg, 1934.
Photo: Baruch Hirson, London.
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
.1........:.
~ ~1IAf'lil~ :
"...,(I&T 'I) •
.... !II):
111).
11 )11:
•••••••
•
V.S.S. Sastry (left) with RCP comrades during Neath Bye-Election campaign,
London, 1945.
Photo: Ted Grant, London.
Anant Mandekar, BLPI candidate Murray Gow Purdy, after release from
for Bombay Municipal prison in Bombay, circa December 1947.
Corporation, Bombay, 1947. Photo: Socialist [Bombay], 25 April 1948.
Photo: New Spark, 24 May 1947.
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
··il"
Background·
William Hawkins was eager to trade. But the Indian merchants had
little interest in coarse English broadcloth. The traders had to purchase
Indian products with silver and gold. Nevertheless, the investors in the
East India Company reaped double-digit profits. As the late Andre
Gunder Frank so aptly said, "Europe used its American money to buy
itself a ticket on the Asian economic train." 5 Without the plunder of
precious metals from the Americas, "Europe would have been almost
entirely excluded from any participation in the world economy." 6
Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley,
1998), p. 356.
Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient, p. 75. Others have made the same point. D.A.
Washbrook has shown that in the seventeenth century England was still peripheral
to India's dynamic trade networks. D.A. Washbrook, "Progress and Problems:
South Asian Economic and Social History," Modern Asian Studiell, vol. 22, no. I
(1988), p. 60.
2
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
A Mafia Raj
Clive and his cronies looted the Mughal treasury in Bengal, which was
like the Fort Knox of its time. Enriched with stolen wealth, the
Company men muscled their way into one profitable trade after
another. The Bengali weavers were forced to sell their goods at reduced
rates to gun-toting Company traders. The Company monopolized the
opium trade, creating what would today be called a drug cartel. Forget
about a civilizing mission. This was a mafia Raj.
Fearful for his throne, the Mughal Emperor in Delhi granted the
Company the right to take over the collection of taxes in Bengal. The
Mughals financed' their state by confiscating a share of the total
produce grown by each village. The Mughals assigned revenue-
collection rights to appointed aristocrats and military commanders,
who in turn gathered the specified tribute from the local gentry and
farmers, called zamindars and taluqdars. These landlords were allowed
to keep a tenth of the tribute to support their soldiers, build and
maintain irrigation systems, patronize cultural and religious activities,
and lead an opulent life of their own.
Driven by greed, the Company promptly put the squeeze on the
landlords, collecting twice the revenue in the first year alone.
Landlords who resisted got the strong-arm treatment. 7 It was the
peasants who sl:lffered most. Forced to hand over much of the harvest,
the farmers had little left to fall back on when the crop failed. In 1770
one third of the population of Bengal starved to death. "Enormous,
fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta," wrote Thomas
Macaulay, "while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the
last extremity of wretchedness." 8
In 1767 the Company instructed its men in the field to "rout out" zamindars who
did not "submit and engage for the regular payment of tht:ir revenues." Quoted in
Chitta Panda, The Decline o/the Bengal Zamindars: Midnapore 1870-1920 (Delhi,
1996), p. 9.
8 Macaulay s Essay on Lord Clive (New York, 1912), p. 64.
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
4
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The Mughal nobility could not freely buy and sell the land under
their jurisdiction. However, they could, and did, parcel out rights to a
share in the revenue. In the early stages of the system some nobles
granted revenue-collection rights to troops under their command in lieu
of pay. In time that practice expanded into outright rent-farming (ijara);
merchants and farmers would bid in auctions for leases that enabled
Journal of Peasant Studies. vo!. 1, nos. 2-3 (1985), pp. 44-53. For a survey of the
changing "official" Marxist views on India see Brendan O'Leary, The Asiatic Mode
of Production: Oriental Despotism. Historical Materialism. and Indian History
(Oxford, 1989), pp. 262-39. .
11 "The Mughal nobility, unlike contemporary European nobility, was not tied to the
land. Their jagirs (or revenue assignments) were transferred from one place to
another as a matter of routine, and many of them were naqdis. i.e., they received
their pay in cash directly from the treasury. But if the Mughal notables were not
hereditary landlords, it does not follow that they were a commercialized ruling
class. Salary, not commercial profit, was their main object in life. Nor did they, or
any substantial number of them, rise from a mercantile 'middle class', as was they
case with a big section of contemporary English 'oligarchy'." M. Athar AIi, The
Mughal Nobility Under Aurangzeb (Delhi, 1997), p. 154.
12 Quoted in Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of
Permanent Settlement (Durham NC, 1981), p. 33.
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
13 C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of
British Expansion, 1770-1870 (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 164-65; and Sanjay
Subrahmanyam (ed.), Merchants, Markets and the State in Early Modern India
(Delhi, 1990), p. 13.
14 Quoted in Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, "Land Market in Eastern India, 1793-1940.
Part I: The Movement of Land Prices," Indian Economic and Social History
Review, vol. 12, no. 1 (January-March 1975), p. 3.
IS Quoted in B.B. Chaudhuri, "Land Market in Eastern India, 1793-1940, Part I," p.
14.
16 Quoted in Chitta Panda, The Decline of the Bengal Zamindars, p. 12.
6
The Tlvtskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
17 Amit Bhadhuri, "The Evolution of Land Relations in Eastern India Under British
Rule," Indian Economic and Social History Review, vo!. 13, no. 1 (January-March
1976), p. 51; H.R. Sharnla, "Evolution of Agrarian Relations in India," Journal of
the Indian School of Political Economy, vo!. 4, no. 1 (1992), pp. 80-105; N.
Hamid, "Dispossession and Differentiation of the Peasantry during the Period of
Colonial Rule," Journal of Peasant Studies, vo!. 10 (1982-83), p. 59; P.A. Wadia
and K.T. Merchant, Our Economic Problem (Bombay, 1959), pp. 87-88; and Bipan
Chandra, "Re-interpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History,"
Indian Economic and Social History Review, vo!. 5, no. 1 (March 1968), pp. 46-59.
18 B.B. Chaudhuri, "Land Market in Eastern India, 1793-1940, Part II: The Changing
Composition of the Landed Society," Indian Economic and Social History Review,
vo!. 12, no. 2 (April-June 1975), pp. 133-67.
19 Quoted in B.B. Chaudhuri, "Land Market in Eastern India, 1793-1940. Pali I," p. 9.
20 Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (New York,
1997), p. 194.
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
21 Quoted in Romesh Dutt, The Economic History ofIndia. Vo!. 1 (London, 1902), p.
107.
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The Company used the taxes to purchase Indian goods for export
to England, where they were sold or re-exported to Europe. In other
words the Indians were essentially being robbed. This was the "drain"
that Indian nationalists later documented. The one-way transfer enabled
Britain to get a competitive advantage over its Continental rivals and
9
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
25 Karl Marx, Capital (1906 edition), p. 826. Brooks Adams, the grandson of the V.S.
President, saw a causal connection. "Very soon after Plassey the Bengal plunder
began to arrive in London, and the effect appears to have been instantaneous."
Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay; An Essay on History (New
York, 1896), p. 313. On the other hand Christopher Hill, who wrote the book on
seventeenth century England, argued that while "spectacularly large sums flowed
into England" from the slave trade and the looting oflndia, "we should attach even
more significance to family and group savings of small producers who ploughed
back their profits into industry or agriculture." Christopher Hill, Reformation to
Industrial Revolution, 1530-1780 (London, 1967), pp. 2000-01. However, as
recent studies have shown, the colonial tribute and domestic savings rate were
connected. "The colonial transfer, in short, enabled Britons to have their cake and
eat it too: to invest substantially even while saving very little out of domestic
income." Vtsa Patnaik, "New Estimates of Eighteenth-Century British Trade and
their Relation to Transfers from Tropical Colonies," in K.N. Panikkar (ed.), The
Making.of History: Essays Presented to Irfan Habib (London, 2002), pp. 389-90.
26 Quoted in H.R. Ghoshal, "Changes in the Organization of Industrial Production in
the Bengal Presidency in the Early Nineteenth Century," in Birendranath Ganguli
(ed.), Readings in Indian Economic History (Delhi, 1961), pp. 128.
10
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
In his seminal articles on India, written for The New York TriQune in
1853, Marx described how the onslaught of British cotton exports was
undermining the premier industry of India. 29 Nevertheless, while he
denounced the greed and cruelty of the British, Marx also thought that
Britain was carrying out a "double mission in India: one destructive,
the other regenerating-the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the
laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia." 30
27 Horace Hayman Wilson, The History of British India: from 1805 to 1835, vo!. I
(London, 1848), p. 385. .
28 Michael J. Twomey, "Employment in Nineteenth Century Indian Textiles,"
Explorations in Economic History, vo!. 20, no. 1 (January, 1983), p. 55. In 1830 the
balance of trade finally tipped in England's favor. K.N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World
ofAsia and the English East India Company, 1660-1760 (Cambridge, 1978), p. 456.
29 Karl Marx, "The British Rule in India" (10 June 1853), reprinted in On
Colonialism, p. 36.
30 Karl Marx, "The Future Results of the British Rule in India," p. 77.
11
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Marx was quick to add, however, that so far the British had
destroyed at lot and regenerated very little. "England has broken down
the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of
reconstitution yet appearing. The loss of his old world, with no gain of
a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present
misery of the Hindoo." 31
Marx was skeptical that the British would really create a "Western
society" in India. "The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new
elements of society scattered among them by the BritIsh bourgeoisie,
till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been
supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves
shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke
altogether." 32 Written in 1853, those were truly prophetic 'words.
their territory with the aid of loyal Indian troops after six months of
sieges, forced marches, heroism, and brutality.
Reading the slanted newspaper reports in England, Marx and
Engels recognized that some of the Indian rebels were fighting for
reactionary goals, such as restoring the ancien regime, whether Mughal
or Mahratta. But the fact that the rebel forces moved through the
countryside so quickly suggested that they had popular support. Marx
called the Mutiny a "nationl;ll uprising" led by a "revohltionary league." 34
Writing for the New York Herald Tribune, Marx asked rhetorically: "In
view of such facts, dispassionate and thoughtful men may perhaps be
led to ask whether a people are not justified in attempting to expel the
foreign conquerers who have so abused their subjects." 35
34 Karl Marx, "The Revolt in India" (18 September 1857), reprinted in K. Marx and
F. Engels, The First Indian War of Independence, 1857-1859 (Moscow, 1959), p.
88. Marx and Engels took a similar attitude to the Taiping Revolt that was sweeping
China that time. The Taiping rebels attacked the Ch'ing (Manchu) dynasty,
espoused social equality, abolished private property, and banned opium and
alcohol, until their defeat in 1864. Marx called their struggle "a popular war for the
maintenance of Chinese nationality, with all its overbearing prejudice, stupidity,
learned ignorance and pedantic barbarism if you like, but yet a popular war." Karl
Marx, "Persia-China" (5 June 1857), reprinted in Marx on China, 1853-1860
(London, 1951), p. 50.
35 Karl Marx, "Investigation of Tortures in India" (28 August 1857), reprinted in The
First Indian War of Independence, 1857-1859, p. 69.
36 In 1863 a British settlement officer described the situation, "The talookdar is in the
saddle, and the underproprietor has to unhorse him; this he can seldom do, and he
loses all in the encounter." Quoted in Thomas R. Metcalf,Land, Landlords and the
British Raj: Northern India in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 241-42.
13
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
and especially in Oudh." One British official called the landlords "a
most useful auxiliary to an alien Government such as ours." 37
After the Mutiny the government initiated what became a massive
program of building railways. In part the motivation was military;
troops could be rushed to future trouble spots quicker. But there was
also an economic incentive; the railways would open up new markets
in the conquered territories. As farmers switched to growing cash crops
for export, the value of the land boomed. 38 Hence the strident loyalism
of the Oudh and Punjab llindlords had an economic basis.
14
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
41 In 1862 the Secretary of State for India, Sir Charles Wood, wrote to the Viceroy:
"We have maintained our power in India by playing off one part against the other
and we must continue to do so ... Do all you can, therefore to prevent all having a
common feeling."
42 Gijsbert Oonk, "Motor or Millstone? The Managing Agency System in Bombay
and Ahmedabad, 1850-1930," Indian Economic and Social History Review, vo\.
38, no. 4 (2001), pp. 419-52; and Blair King, "The Origins of the Managing
Agency System in India," Journal ofAsian Studies, vo\. 26, no. 1 (1966), pp. 37-48.
15
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
fivefold. "Bombay has long been the Liverpool of the East," boasted
one newspaper, "and she is now becoming the Manchester also.",43
16
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
In its first two decades the Congress was more like an elite caucus
than a political party. The Congress met once a year, passed resolutions,
and then disbanded. The Congress regarded itself as the progressive
voice of the entire people. But it had a definite class bias. The early
nationalists, who were mainly from the well-to-do middle classes,
regarded the capitalist development of India as the road to progress.
18
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Yet the Indian bourgeoisie itself was still in its infancy. In that sense
the Congress had a vicarious quality and functioned as a surrogate for a
domestic class that was still in the process of formation.
In the West the nascent bourgeoisie had been pitted against the landed
aristocracy derived from the feudal era. In India, however, the modern
bourgeoisie was tied to the whole system oflandlordism that the British
created. In Bengal many of the educated nationalists came from
prosperous families who derived income from estates that had been
obtained in the various Zamindari settlements. Hence it is not
surprising that the Congress did not oppose the two "feudal"
institutions in India-the Princely States and the system of
landlordism.
ss Quoted in Shanta Sathe, Lokmanya Tilak: His Social and Political Thoughts
(Delhi, 1994), p. 79.
19
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
20
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
In 1906 the Congress called for a boycott of British goods until the
Partition of Bengal Act was revoked. The nationalists asked Indians to
buy domestic products, called Swadeshi [own country], rather than
British imports. For the first time the Congress appealed to the people
to come into the streets for demonstrations and rallies. In Calcutta
patriotic Bengalis gathered and burned their British clothing in big
bonfires. Surendranath Bannerjea, the old Moderate, delivered such
rousing speeches that he got the nickname, "Surrender Not."
59 A.P. Kannangara, "Indian MiIlowners and Indian Nationalism Before 1914," Past
and Present [Oxford], 40 (July 1968).
60 Like all consumer boycotts, the Swadeshi campaign didn't make. a lasting dent.
While British imports to Bengal slumped during 1905-06, they actually increased
in Bombay. And even in Bengal, the success was short-lived. By 1908 the import
of Manchester products had recovered and exceeded the 1905 level.
61 In 1883 Tata wanted to build an iron and steel plant in Bihar, close to the source of
the coal. The Viceroy was cooperative, but the Secretary of State in England was
hostile. Moreover, Tata's agent in London reported that British capitalists "would
not think of putting their money in the new enterprise especially when old and tried
industries were offering a more favourable and safer investment." Quoted in Vinay
Bahl, The Making ofthe Indian Working Class: The Case of the Tata Iron and Steel
Co., 1880-1946 (New Delhi, 1995), pp. 72-73.
62 V. Bahl, The Making of the Indian Working Class, p. 73.
21
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
As the protests in Bengal grew, the authorities cracked down hard. The
police whipped students who paraded the streets and dispersed
Congress meetings at gunpoint. The nationalist paper, Jugantar [New
Era], declared, "Force must be stopped by force." 63 As one radical
recalled, "everyone seemed to be saying, 'No. This can't go on. We've
got to blowout the brains of one of these bastards' ."64 Some Extremists
began recruiting youth for just that purpose.
Aurobindo Ghosh, who later became a famous mystic, was the
ideologue. His brother, Barin, taught the young patriots how to make
homemade bombs. Young Bengalis joined the secret societies "simply
out of an innate hatred of British rule." 65 The revolutionaries targeted
policemen, judges, and other government officials. The British used to
denigrate the Bengalis as an "effete" people, fit only to be clerks, not
warriors, like the "manly" tribes of the Northwest Frontier. This was
payback time.
22
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
As his comments on the Indian mutiny showed, Karl Marx would have
been delighted to see another popular uprising drive the British out of
India. In his mind colonial rule was not only unjust to the subject
peoples, but it also served to sustain and even reinvigorate capitalism. 66
In 1882 Engels wrote to Karl Kautsky, his protege and the future high
priest of Marxist doctrine in Germany: "India will perhaps, indeed very
probably, make a revolution ... The same might also take place
elsewhere, e.g. in Algeria and Egypt, and would certainly be the best
thing for us." 67
66 Marx mused in a letter to Engels: "There is no denying that bourgeois society has
for the second time experienced its 16th century, a 16th century which, I hope, will
sound its death knell just as the first ushered it into the world. The proper task of
bourgeois society is the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and of the
production based on that market. Since the world is round, the colonisation of
California and Australia and the opening up of China and Japan would seem to
have completed this process. For us, the difficult question is this: on the Continent
revolution is imminent and will, moreover, instantly assume a socialist character.
Will it not necessarily be crushed in this little corner of the earth, since the
movement of bourgeois society is still in the ascendant over a far greater area? "
Karl Marx to F. Engels, 8 October 1857, reprinted in Shlomo Avineri (ed.), Karl
Marx on Colonialism and Modernization (New York, 1968), p. 439.
67 Friedrich Engels, letter to Karl Kautsky, 12 September 1882, published as appendix
to K. Kautsky, Sozialismus und Kolonialpolitik: eine Auseinandersetzung (Berlin,
1907), p. 79. Most of the letter is reprinted in Shlomo Avineri, Karl Marx on
Colonialism and Modernization, pp. 447-48.
23
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
provided both the backbone and brains. In 1896 the London congress
of the International debated the national question and passed a vague
resolution opposing colonialism. 68 However, in practice the Socialist
parties in the imperialist countries did not act on that resolution. In
Britain the Labour movement tended to regard colonialism as a
capitalist distraction. 69 While he opposed British colonialism and
German imperialist ambitions, Kautsky stopped short of demanding
independence for India. 70 His rationale, however, was impeccably
Marxist.
As is well known, Marx regarded the Czar as the main threat to
European democracy. He viewed the national question in that context.
He supported freedom for the Poles and Magyars, on the basis that they
would be a buffer, while he opposed the movements of the Czechs and
South Slavs, on the basis that they would be stepping stones for further
Russian expansionism. Kautsky applied that logic in the case of India.
By the 1880s the Czarist state was on a collision course with the British
in Afghanistan. Kautsky feared that the "Great Game" would ignite a
world war. "Whatever one may think of the British regime in India,"
Karl Kautsky explained, "a Russian one would without a doubt be
worse ... Every particular national interest has to be subordinated to the
fight against it [Russian despotism], however important and legitimate
it be." 71
"Socialist Imperialism"
In 1901 Henri Van Kol, a Dutch Socialist who had worked in Indonesia
for fourteen years, argued that Socialists should adopt a more
68 The resolution merely expressed "sympathy with the workers of any country at
present suffering under the yoke of military, national or other despotisms." Quoted
in RH. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution. vo\. 1 (New York, 1951), p. 423.
69 Bemard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists (Oxford, 2004), pp. 217-18.
70 K. Kautsky, "Germany, England, and the World Policy," The Social Democrat, vo\.
4, no. 8 (August, 1900), pp. 230-36.
71 Karl Kautsky, Sozialismus und Kolonialpolitik, p. 70.
24
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
"positive" program on the colonies. His own party had turned a blind
eye to the question, neglecting to mention Indonesia in their founding
program or their election campaign. But Van Kol bent the stick far in
the opposite direction. By 1904 he was arguing that the workers had "a
powerful interest in the flowering of the colonies." 72
Kautsky and others attacked this resolution. But the most powerful
intervention came quite unexpectedly. Madame Bhikaji Cama, an
aristocratic Parsi who had become an ardent nationalist, mounted the
podium dressed in a flowing sari. A striking woman, she galvanized the
delegates with her fiery denunciation of British imperialism. And then,
in an electrifying gesture, she unfurled the tricolor nationalist flag and
declared, "This flag is of India's independence. Behold, it is born. It is
already sanctified by the blood of martyred Indian youth. I call upon
you, gentlemen, to rise and salute the flag of Indian independence."
The resolution for a "positive colonial policy" was rejected, albeit in a
close vote.
72 Cited in Erik Hansen, "Marxists and Imperialism: The Indonesian Policy of the
Dutch Social Democratic Workers Party, 1894-1914," Indonesia. vo1.16 (October
1973), p. 91.
7J Quoted in Karl Kautsky, Sozialismus und Kolonialpolitik. p. 7.
74 Quoted in Karl Kautsky, Sozialismus und Kolollialpolitik. p. 4.
75 Quoted in Karl Kautsky, Sozialismus und Kolonialpolitik. p. 6.
76 Quoted in Karl Kautsky, Sozialismus ulld Kolonialpolitik. p. 7.
25
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
26
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
27
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Gandhi solidarized with the Khilafat cause and called for nationwide
protests against the "Satanic government." He promised that if people
followed his non-violent creed, he could win "Swaraj in a year."
Though most of the protests were orderly, in Amritsar mobs looted
banks, torched government buildings, and killed several Europeans.
The local British 'commander retaliated with a mass slaughter, known
as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. 82 With that infamous act, the British
set India on fire for the Bolsheviks.
82 Although the governor of the Punjab had banned all public meetings, thousands
gathered peacefully in a walled park in Amritsar, known as the Jallianwala Bagh,
for an annual spring celebration. The local commander, Brigadier-General Dyer,
marched his troops to the park, blocked the single exit, and ordered his men to
open fire on the trapped throng. After ten minutes of shooting, hundreds of men,
women, and children had been killed. Dyer later testified that he had decided in
advance "to do all the men to death," because "it would be doing a jolly lot of good
and they would realise they were not to be wicked." Quoted in Savita Narain, The
Historiography of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, 1919 (South Godstone [UK],
1998), p. 37.The government forced Dyer to retire, the lightest punishment
possible. The House of Lords protested even this gesture, and the Morning Post
opened a fund for the "Savior of the Punjab."
83 At that point Trotsky had become the commander of the Red Anny which was
fighting anti-Bolshevik armies on all sides. In 1919, after the Reds had broken
through Kolchak's forces in Central Asia, Trotsky saw an opening for an offensive
towards the Northwest Frontier of British India. In a confidential memorandum to
the party leadership back in Moscow Trotsky posed the possibility of using the Red
Army to incite uprisings against the British. "The road to India may prove at the
given moment to be more readily passable and shorter for us than the road to Soviet
Hungary." Jan M. Meijer (ed.), The Trotsky Papers 1917-1922. vo\. 1 (The Hague,
1964), p. 623.
28
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
84 The Russian socialist scholar, David Riazanov (1870-1938), deserves much credit
for finding, validating, compiling, and publishing the dispersed works of Marx and
Engels. After the October Revolution, Riazanov became director of the Marx-
Engels Institute in Moscow. In 1925 he published Marx's articles on India from
1853. David Riazanov, "Karl Marx: ilber China und Indien," Unter dem Banner
des Marxismus, vo!. 1, no. 2 (July 1925), pp. 370-78. Even then, Riazanov didn't
have a complete file of the New York Tribune; in 1931 the Institute announced that
it had recently acquired Ha very rare file of the New York Tribune, including the
years when Marx and Engels collaborated with it." L.B., "The Marx-Engels
Institute," La Critique sociale, no.2, July 1931, pp. 51-52.
29
The Trotskyist.Movement in India and Ceylon
Roy, on the other hand, thought India was closer to Russia in 1905
than to France in 1789. In his opinion the rising progressive class in
Asia was the proletariat, not the bourgeoisie. He was not the first to
draw that analogy. In 1917 K.M. Troyanovsky, a Ukrainian Bolshevik,
declared that India would play the same role in the East that Russia had
30
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
in the West. 89 In his discussions with Lenin, Roy recited facts to show
how much Indian capitalism, and with it the working class, had grown
during the war. Lenin was receptive. He asked Roy to contribute
supplementary theses. Roy did so, and both theses were submitted to
the Colonial Commission which met during the Second Congress.
The "Lenin-Roy debate" in the Colonial Commission has been
rehashed a thousand times. Basically, the discussion raised more
questions than it answered. By all accounts Lenin showed a willingness
to reconsider some of his assumptions. He reformulated his
controversial thesis on supporting bourgeois nationalists: the
Communists should support bourgeois nationalists only if (a) they are
"really revolutionary" and (b) they allow the Reds to organize
independently. He also agreed that, as a theoretical proposition, the
"backward countries" could, with the help of the USSR and socialist
workers of the West, proceed to a Soviet order without having to plod
through a protracted period of capitalism. However, like Engels in
1882, Lenin refused to speculate about the class dynamics of that
process in any given country. He very deliberately left open the
question of "stages."
89 Xenia JoukoffEudin and Robert C. North, Soviet Russia and the East: 1920-1927
(Stanford, 1957), p. 92. Troyanovsky called India "the citadel of the revolution in
the East."
90 M.N. Roy, Memoirs, p. 552.
31
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
In his memoirs Roy recounts that the Bolsheviks thought that feudalism
was "the predominating social factor in contemporary India." 91 From
that assumption, they concluded that the Indian bourgeoisie was a
revolutionary force. If Marx's writings on India had been known to
them, they probably would have thought otherwise. Marx had made it
clear-from his New York Tribune articles in the 1850s up to the
copious notes on India he had taken in the year or so before he died-
that he did not regard India as feudal. 92 However, none of those key
writings had yet been published. 93
Though he did not know what Marx had written about India, Roy
independently arrived at many of the same conclusions. "Contrary to
the general notion," the book begins, "India is not under the feudal
system. In India, feudalism was destroyed, or more correctly speaking,
undermined not by a violent revolution, as in Europe, but by a
comparatively peaceful and gradual process." 94 He proceeded to
summarize the impact of the British land reforms and destructive trade
policies.
Roy did not ignore the vestiges of the old order in British India.
But, like Marx, he emphasized that colonialism produced a
contradictory amalgam, in which capitalist relationships were "grafted
on to the body" of the pre-capitalist society. 95 "The incurable economic
bankruptcy of the agrarian population of India is due to the fact that a
backward and antiquated method of production has been reduced to the
most modern and highly developed form of exploitation." 96
Despite its rapid growth during the war, "the Indian bourgeoisie is
still very weak and is bound to be unsteady in its purpose." 98 Roy
concluded that the bourgeoisie would not lead a national-liberation
movement very far: "Therefore, to rely on the national solidarity under
purely bourgeois leadership for the purpose of destroying British rule
in India may not be always safe. The overthrow of the British rule will
be achieved by the joint action of the bourgeoisie and the masses, but
how this joint action can be consumated, still remains a question." 99
100 Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Thy Hand. Great Anarch! India 1921-1952 (London: 1987),
p. 12.
101 David Hardiman, The Coming 0/ the Devi: Adivasi Assertion ill Western India
(Delhi, 1987), p. 4.
102 S. Amin, "Gandhi as Mahatma, Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921-22," in
Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies, vo!. 3, pp. 1-61.
103 S. Wolpert, Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny (New York, 1996), p. 46.
104 M. Gandhi, "Instructions to U.P. Peasants" (9 March 1921), in The. Collected Works
o/Mahatma Gandhi. Vol. 19 (Ahmedabad, 1966), p. 4 1 9 . '
105 Atlury Murali, "Civil Disobedience Movement in Andhra 1920-22: The Nature of
Peasant Protest and the Methods of Congress Political Mobilization," in K. Kumar
(ed.), Congress and Classes. p. 172; Stephen Henningham, Peasant Movements in
Colonial India: North Bihar 19/7-1942 (Canberra, 1982), p. 68.
34
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
106 William F. Crawley, "Kisan Sabhas and Agrarian Revolt in the United Provinces
1920 to 1921," Modern Asian Studies, vol. 5, no. 2 (1971), pp. 104-05; Arvind N.
Das, "Peasants and Peasant Organisations: The Kisan Sabha in Bihar," in Arvind
Das (ed.), Agrarian Movements in India" Studies on 20th Century Bihar (London,
1982), p. 54; Kapil Kumar, "Peasants' Perception of Gandhi and His Programme:
Oudh, 1920-22," Social Scientist (February 1983).
107 Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to
the Modern Age, p. 209; and C.A. Bayly, "Rural Conflict and the Roots of Indian
Nationalism: Allahabad District since 1800," in Paul R. Brass and Francis
Robinson (eds.), The Indian National Congress and Indian Society, 1885-1985:
Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Dominance (Delhi, 1987), p. 229.
108 B.B. Chaudhuri, "Agrarian Movements in Bengal and Bihar, 1919-1939," in B.R.
Nanda (ed.), Socialism in India (New York, 1972), p. 196.
109 K. Kumar, Peasants in Revolt: Tenants, Landlords, Congress and the Raj in Oudh
(New Delhi, 1984), p. 226.
110 Conrad Wood, The Moplah Rebellion and its Genesis (New Delhi, 1987), p. 216.
35
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
When he read the news, M.N. Roy grasped the significance. "The
interests of the propertied class must have first consideration: British
rule may be 'Satanic', but landlordism is sacred." 113 Just as he had
predicted, the Indian bourgeoisie was "incapable, even unwilling, to
push the Indian nationalist movement ahead towards revolution." 114
The Congress decision proved that "The liberal bourgeoisie, which
stands at the head of the national democratic movement, will not play
the revolutionary role which the European bourgeoisie played in the
18 th and 19 th centuries.... The preconditions for a pure bourgeois-
democratic revolution do not exist in India." 115
III M. Gandhi, "The Crime of Chauri Chaura" (16 February 1922), in The Collected
Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vo\. 22, p. 419.
112 M. Gandhi, "Working Committee's Resolutions at Bardoli" (12 February 1922), in
The Collected Works ofMahatma Gandhi, vo\. 22, p. 378.
113 M.N. Roy, "Confusion in the Congress" (15 August 1922), reprinted in Sibnarayan
Ray (ed.), Selected Works ofM.N. Roy, vo\. 1, p. 537.
114 M.N. Roy, "Confusion in the Congress," p. 540.
115 M. N. Roy, Preface to German edition of India in Transition, reprinted in
G Adhikari(ed.), Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India.
Volume One, 1917-1922 (Bombay, 1971), p. 364.
36
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
116 In the late nineteenth century the Russian Social Democrats all agreed that Czarist
Russia faced a belated bourgeois-democratic revolution. The Mensheviks held that
since the revolution was bourgeois in character, the liberal bourgeoisie would have
to lead. The Bolsheviks countered that the Russian bourgeoisie was too weak and
vested in the old order to carry out a radical democratic revolution. Lenin posed
the working class as the driving force. However, given the huge preponderance of
the peasantry, he believed that the working class would have to shate power with
the peasantry for a certain transitional period, which he called the "democratic
dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry." Trotsky, who stood outside both
factions, projected a third alternative, which he called the "permanent revolution."
He agreed with Lenin on the need for the worker-peasant alliance. However, he
denied that a two-class dictatorship (worker and peasant) was feasible. The
democratic revolution would result in a workers government, supported by the poor
peasantry. And that government would be forced by the class struggle which
brought it to power to carry out socialist tasks. In other words, the bourgeois
revolution would "grow over" into the socialist revolution without interruption.
117 M.N. Roy, "Danger Ahead" (15 June 1922), reprinted in S. Ray (ed.), Selected
Works of M.N. Roy, vol. I, p. 394.
118 M.N. Roy, "The Future of Indian Politics" (1926), reprinted in S. Ray (ed.),
Selected Works ofM.N. Roy. vol. 2, pp. 517-18.
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
had imagined. Gandhi defended the landlords against the peasants. The
progressive Turk, Mustapha Kemal, took Russian aid and then
suppressed the Communist Party in 1922. The heirs of Sun Yat Sen
would soon do much worse.
119 N.M. Roy, "Report on the Eastern Question" (1922), reprinted in S. Ray (ed.), In
Freedom's Quest: Life o/M.N. Roy, vo!. 1 (Calcutta, 1998), pp. 478-79.
120 In early 1921, as inflation and unemployment soared, there were violent strikes in
Gennany. The government security chief, a Social Democrat, sent police to occupy
the mining district of Mansfeld, where strikers were fighting the local police. The
Gennan Communist Party (KPD) appealed for resistance: "Every worker should
defy the law and take anns where he can find them." The strike spread, workers
seized their factories, and there was fighting throughout the district. On March 24
the KPD called for a general strike. The Social Democrats and their trade unions
denounced the attempted "rising. " The KPD rescinded the strike order a week later.
The damage to the KPD was severe. As a result of the putschist policy, the party lost
several leaders and a hundred thousand members, including many trade union cadres.
38
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
agitation rather than preparation for civil war." 121 Although the focus
was on Europe, Radek thought the tactic could also be applied in Asia.
The Comintern representative in China, Maring, wanted the
Communist Party (CCP) to join Sun Vat Sen's nationalist-populist
party, the Kuomintang. The CCP leaders, who sized up Sun better than
Maring, resisted that proposal. Radek, however, worried that the CCP
might indulge in the same putschism that had cost the German party so
dearly. He backed Maring, and in 1922 the CCP reluctantly joined the
Kuomintang. 122
121 Quoted in Jim Tuck, Engine of Mischief An Analytical Biography of Karl Radek
(New York, 1988), p. 62.
122 For the genesis of the Communist-Kuomintang alliance see Alexander Pantsov, The
Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution 1919-1927 (Honolulu, 2000), pp. 45-69;
Tony Saich, "Interpreting China: The Case of Maring," in Kurt Werner Radtke and
Tony Saich (eds.), China 50 Modernisation: Westernisation and Acculturation
(Stuttgart, 1993), pp. 59-82; and Hans J. Yan de Yen, From Friend to Comrade:
The Founding of the Chinese Communist Party. 1920-1927 (Berkeley, 1991),
pp. 99-108.
12l "One more thing: In this work, after we have rallied the workers around us, you
must go to the peasants and to the artisans, and you must become not only the
nucleus of the future workers party, but also of the future people's party." Cited in
M.N. Roy, "Eastern Question in the World Communist Congress" (I January
1923), reprinted in Sibnarayan Ray (ed.), In Freedom 50 Quest: Life of M.N. Roy.
vo!. I, p. 472.
124 M.N. Roy, "Report on the Eastern Question," pp. 479 and 481.
39
The Trotskyist Movement in India and eeylon
After the Fourth Congress Roy pursued the People's Party strategy
for India. He wrote article after article, and ultimately a whole book,
on how to transform the Congress into "a democratic party of the
people with a programme of Revolutionary Nationalism." 125 He began
to portray the capture of Congress as a necessary stage: "The capture
of the Congress by a mass party will have to take place before the goal
of national independence can be reached." 126
40
The Trotskyist Movement in Illdia and Ceylon
Roy was beginning to toy with the idea that other classes could be
pressured to start the revolution. "We must mobilize the workers and
peasants and lead this organized revolutionary army to support the national
middle class in its struggle against imperialism ... Our tactics must force
the indigenous bourgeoisie to put forth increased demands and to make
greater inroads into the sphere of power ofImperialism. In a word we must
prevent the fight for independence from being sacrificed on the altar of
compromise between the native middle class and the imperialists." 129
He was not alone in this wishful thinking. From 1923 on, the
Comintern Executive pursued precisely that policy in China. The
Comintern representative, Mikhail Borodin (who perished in a Stalinist
gulag in 1951), pushed the Chinese Communists deeper and deeper into
the Kuomintang.
Revolution in China
129 M.N. Roy, "On the National and ,?olonial Question," pp. 301 and 305.
130 Quoted in Alexander PantsoY, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution 1919-
1927. p. 90.
41
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Neo-Menshevism
Nikolai Bukharin, who was the brains behind Stalin at that time,
concocted the theory of "two-stage revolution" to rationalize the
conciliatory line in China. Bukharin argued (contrary to what Marx had
written on the subject) that Chinese society was predominantly feudal.
131 Therefore, the Communists had to remain embedded within the
131 Cited in Alexander Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution 1919-
1927, p. 135.
132 Feodor Dan, "Tuchi s vostoka" [Clouds Out ofthe East], Sotsialistichesldi Vestnik,
no. 8 (23 April 1927), p. 4.
42
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
!3J Conrad Brandt, Stalin 50 Failure in China, 1924-1927 (New York, 1958), p. 78.
134 Warren Lemer, Karl Radek The Last Internationalist (Stanford, 1970), p. 143.
135 Given what happened a week later, the Opposition demanded that this speech be
published. The Stalin faction refused. At the Eighth plenum of the ECCI, which
met in May 1927, the Serbian Communist Vujo Vujovic confronted Stalin with his
own words, which Vujovic had written down in his own notes at the time. Stalin
did not deny that he had made the speech and used those words. But he still refused
to let the speech be published. Alexander PantsoY, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese
Revolution 1919-1927, p. 241, footnote 31.
43
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
136 Curtis Stokes, The Evolution of Trotsky s Theory of Revolution (Washington DC,
1982), pp. 133ff.
IJ7 Warren Lemer, Karl Radek The Last Internationalist, p. 136.
138 Karl Radek, "'Izmena' Kitaiskoi krupnoi burzhuazii natsional'nomu dvizheniiu"
[The Infidelity of the Chinese Big Bourgeoisie to the National Movement], 1927,
pp. 42-43. Radek evidently circulated this document within the United Opposition.
There is a copy in the Boris I. Nicolaevsky Collection at the Hoover Archives, Box
797, folder 2.
44
The Trotskyist Movement ill India and Ceylon
two classes, but only against one, the bourgeoisie." That was a frontal
attack on the "two-stage revolution" theory.
Trotsky took this insight a step farther: "there is almost no class of
landowners in China, the landowners are much more intimately bound
up with the capitalists than in czarist Russia, the specific weight of the
agrarian question in China is therefore much lighter than in czarist
Russia; but for that, the question of national liberation occupies a large
place. Accordingly, the capacity of the Chinese peasantry for
independent revolutionary political struggle for the democratic
renovation of the country can in no case be greater than was the
Russian peasantry's." 139 In other words, since no radical peasant party
had emerged in China, the Communists would not be compelled to
share power in the first stage of the revolution. In April, 1927 Trotsky
posited for the first time "the possibility of the democratic revolution
growing over into the socialist revolution" in China, provided the CCP
could wrest free of the Kuomintang and mobilize the peasantry. 140
139 Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution (New York, 1931), p. 114.
140 Leon Trotsky, "Class Relations in the Chinese Revolution" (3 April 1927),
reprinted in Les Evans and Russell Block (eds.), Lean Trotsky on China (New York,
1976), p. 142.
141 lV Stalin, "Talk with Students of the Sun Yat-Sen University" (13 May 1927), in
On the Opposition (Peking, 1974), p. 668.
45
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
only postponed their fate; in 1938 all three were executed after the
notorious Moscow frame-up trials. Trotsky remained intransigent. He
was banished to remote Alma Ata, in Kazakhstan. Oppositionists were
expelled, fired from their jobs, and sent to Siberia by the thousands.
Stalin and Bukharin foisted the blame for the debacle in China on
others (the Chinese Communist leaders, M.N. Roy, etc.), while
insisting that their policy had been correct. Bukharin wrote the "two-
stage revolution thesis" into the program of the Communist
International, adopted at the Sixth Congress in 1928. That Congress
also made the "survival of feudal remnants" thesis into a dogma. That
created a problem for Soviet scholars who were debating the Marx
articles on India and China. In 1930 M.S. Godes warned his academic
colleagues: "the denial of feudalism in China, or the theory of it,
always leads to political errors, and errors of an essentially Trotskyist
order." 142 That was enough to silence most. 143 But Riazanov, the
director of the Marx-Engels Institute, was much too honest to falsify
Marxist doctrine. In 1931 Stalin had him arrested and exiled to the
forced labor camp at Saratov, where he perished during the Purges, as
did other historians who dared to defend Marx. 144
142 Stephen P. Dunn, The Fall and Rise of the Asiatic Mode of Production (London,
1982), p. 32.
143 The British Stalinist theoretician, R. Palme Dutt, was put on the spot. In 1925 he
had published the Marx articles on India and China in his Labour Monthly. Later
that year Dutt, translated the two key articles on India from the Gemlan journal and
published them in Labour Monthly, noting that the articles "were recently re-
discovered by Mr. Riasanov." Karl Marx, "India under British Rule," Labour
Monthly, vol. 7, no. 12 (December 1925), pp. 717-28. As always, Dutt toed the
Moscow line. He explained that Marx really envisioned the Asiatic mode of
production as "an Oriental form of Feudalism." R.P. Dutt (ed.), Karl Marx: Articles
on India (Bombay, 1943), p. 67.
144 Liudvig I. Mad'iar, a leading proponent of the "Asiatic mode of production" in the
Soviet debates of 1925-31 was purged in 1934 and perished in the Stalinist Purges.
See Marian Sawer, Marxism and the Question of the Asiatic Mode of Production
(The Hague, 1977), photo caption on back cover.
46
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
In 1930 Trotsky argued that the prospects for socialism in India were
more promising and likely than they had been in Russia in 1905 or 1917.
"If today the Indian proletariat is numerically smaller than the Russian,
this in itself does not mean that its revolutionary possibilities are not as
great... On the contrary, all the social peculiarities that made the
October Revolution possible and inevitable exist in India in a more
acute form. In this country of poor peasants, the hegemony of the city is
no less established than in Czarist Russia. The concentration of industrial,
commercial, and banking power in the hands of the big bourgeoisie,
primarily the foreign bourgeoisie, on the one hand, _and the swift growth
of an industrial proletariat on the other, exclude the possibility of the
independent role of the urban petty bourgeoisie and, to a certain extent,
even of the intellectual. This transforms the political mechanics of the
revolution into a struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie
for the leadership of the peasant masses. There is 'only' one condition
missing: a Bolshevik party. And this is where the problem lies now." 146
145 Leon Trotsky, introduction to the Russian edition of Permanent Revolution (1929).
146 Leon Trotsky, "The Revolution in India, Its Tasks and Dangers," reprinted in
Writings of Leon Trotsky [1930} (New York, 1975), pp. 245-46.
CHAPTER TWO
The Pioneers
There are several landmark studies devoted to the LSSP: George J. Lerski, Origins
of Trotskyism in Ceylon (Stanford, 1968); Y. Ranjith Amarasinghe, Revolutiol1G1Y
Idealism and Parliamentary Politics: A Study of Trotskyism in Sri Lanka
(Colombo, 1998); and AI Richardson (ed.), Blows Against the Empire: Trotskyism
in Ceylon (London, 1997).
The material on Philip Gunawardena in this chapter is drawn from my two
biographical studies: Charles W. Ervin, Philip Gunawardena: The Making of a
Revolutionary (Colombo, 2001) and Pilip Gunavardhana: Viplavavadiyakuge
Hadagasma (Colombo, 2005).
48
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Jayaprakash Narayan (1902-1979) was born in a little Bihar village, worked his
way through college in the USA, returned to India in 1929, and formed the
Congress Socialist Party in 1934. During the Quit India struggle he organized
guerrilla groups to harass the British. After Independence he lost faith in Marxism
and joined the neo-Gandhian Sarvodaya movement. He was jailed in the 'seventies
for protesting Indira Gandhi's "Emergency."
Avrom Mendel Landy (1904-1992) was raised in Cleveland, earned a BA from
Ohio State University and an MA from Madison. Abandoning a promising
academic career, Avrom and his wife, Goldie, moved to New York City, where he
became City Editor for the Daily Worker and Educational Director for the
Communist Party. He published Marxism and the Woman Question (1943) and
Marxism and the Democratic Tradition (1946). He quit the Communist Party in
1947.
In 1926 Willi Miinzenberg, an important German Communist wheeler-dealer and
agitprop czar, staged a conference against colonial oppression in Brussels, which
attracted such luminaries as Jawaharlal Nehru and Chiang Kai-shek. The Brussels
conference led to the formation of the League Against Imperialism in 1927. The
old Indian revolutionary, Virendranath ChaUopadhyaya, became the general
secretary. Munzenberg duped the likes of Albert Einstein, Henri Barbusse, and
Upton Sinc1air to adorn the Executive Committee.
Jose Vasconcelos Calderon (1882-1959) headed the Secretariat of Public Education
after the Mexican Revolution of 1910-17. He created a public primary school
system, presided over the National University, and patronized leftwing artists, such
as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. He taught for a while at the University
49
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
of Chicago and in 1926 attended the Brussels congress that led to the League
Against Imperialism. He was defeated in the 1929 Mexican presidential election
and forced into exile. Later he became an ardent Roman Catholic, a critic of
democracy, and a zealous supporter of Spanish tradition.
The Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), formed in 1921, was a special agency
responsible for keeping tabs on known and suspected troublemakers in England,
Europe, and America. The IPI reported to the Secretary of the Public and Judicial
Department of the India Office and the Director of Intelligence Bureau (DlB) in
India. The IPI worked hand in glove with Scotland Yard and MI5. The IPI
maintained a dossier on Philip Gunawardena. IOL: LlPJ/12/409.
50
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
always bet on the winning horse. He used the pages:of Labour Monthly
to explain, and justify, whatever the ruling clique lriMoscow said and
did. When Zinoviev opened his attack on Trotsky in 1923-24, Dutt
joined the smear campaign; Labour Monthly printed article after article
on the "errors" of the Opposition. Dutt, however, was a lot more
sophisticated than most of the hacks.
By the time Phi lip joined, the CPGB was already poisoned against
Trotsky and the Opposition. The Dutt brothers quickly recognized that
Philip was a good catch and took him under their wings. They co-opted
him into the Colonial Committee and gave him important assignments
in the League Against Imperialism and the Indian Bureau, a
subcommittee that worked with student contacts .and recruits in the
various universities. Patronized by the top brass, Philip rose quickly.
He was put on the staff of the Daily Worker. He took over the Workers
Welfare League of India, an organization founded by Saklatvala in
1917. And he became a trusted courier, making frequent trips to Paris,
Brussels, and Berlin to deliver party documents to high Communist
officials. 8 He certainly must have known more about all the behind-
the-scenes struggles and intrigues in the Comintern than most British
party members.
When Philip joined the CPGB, the party was beginning its lurch to the
left, following the new line introduced at the Sixth Congress of the
Comintern (1928). Most historians agree with Trotsky that the sharp
left turn was motivated by the factional struggle in JV1oscow. Under fire
from the Opposition, Stalin had to find scapegoats for the debacle in
China. He blamed Bukharin, M.N. Roy, and the Chinese Communists
who had carried out his orders. Stalin took up a posItion that seemed
more left than that of the Opposition. He sounded the bugle for a
revolutionary offensive everywhere.
Stalin claimed that the Socialists and Fascists were "twins" (this
was his infamous thesis of "social fascism"). But since the Socialists
could still dupe the workers, they were more dangerous. Dutifully
following this line, the CPGB snarled at the Labour leaders, who in return
excluded Communists from the mass organization of the British working
class. The Stalinists spit invective at Gandhi, calling the brave old man
In the 1920s M.N. Roy described the Indian National Congress as a "political
movement," rather than a political party, in which various caucuses jostled one
another for influence and power. In his view the early Congress was simply a
"bourgeois platform." However, during the Non-Cooperation movement the
Congress was transformed into "a gigantic mass organization focusing the
revolutionary will of the entire people." M.N. Roy, "The Indian National Congress"
(13 January 1927), in S. Ray (ed.), Selected Works ofM.N. Roy, vo!. 2, pp. 560-61.
Roy held open the possibility that the. Communists could capture the Congress and
transform it into a revolutionary of!~ailjzation.
10 In his critique of the Comintern Program (1928) Trotsky devoted an entire chapter
to ripping apart the Stalin-Bukharin theory of two-class parties. L.D. Trotsky, The
Draft Program of the Communist International: A Criticism of Fundamentals
(New York, 1929), pp. 123-34. He thought the Comintern line had sterilized the
Indian party: "It is doubtful if greater harn1 could be done to the Indian proletariat
than was done by Zinoviev, Stalin, and Bukharin through the medium of Roy. In
India, as in China, the work has been and is oriented almost totally toward
bourgeois nationalism." L. Trotsky, "Who is Leading the Comintern Today?"
(September 1928), in The Challenge of the Left Opposition 1928-29 (New York,
1981), p. 200. Trotsky recognized, belatedly, that the Opposition should have
fought this line much earlier, during ·1923-25, when it was being formulated and
implemented experimentally. Leon Trotsky, "The Opposition's Errors-Real and
Alleged" (23 May 1928), in The Challenge of the Left Opposition 1928-29, p. 90.
52
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Phi lip Gunawardena got tipsy on the strong rhetoric dished out by
Saklatvala and the Dutts. He wrote overheated articles for the Daily
Worker that portrayed the violent strikes and riots in India as harbingers
of revolution. He described the Communist Party ofIndia, which in fact
was in pitiful disarray, as the "vanguard of the Indian proletariat." He
lived the fantasy. He became part of a squad of hotheads who were sent
to disrupt meetings of opponents (which meant everyone who didn't
fully agree with the CommunIst line). On more than one occasion his
outbursts led to fist fights.
If such antics were farcical, the real tragedy was playing out in
Germany. The Nazis, who had been a marginal party just a few years
before, now had more armed men than the German army. As the
elections approached, the Na:?:is brawled in the streets with the
Communists. The leaders ofthe German Communist Party (KPD),
following the Stalin line, foolishly regarded fascism as the lesser evil,
if not a blessing in disguise. 12 From exile Trotsky appealed in vain for
a KPD-Socialist united front to roll back the Nazis. But the Socialists
put their faith in the wobbly Weimar Republic, while the KPD attacked
Socialists, courted "left" storm troopers, and recruited nationalistic
German officers, one of whom gave Hitler the KPD membership list.
The KPD would pay dearly for its stupidity. So would six million
innocent Jews.
53
The Trotskyist Movement.in India and Ceylon
Il Francis Ambrose Ridley (1897-1994) had studied divinity and wrote extensively
on historical and ecclesiastical subjects. He worked in the ILP as an independent
Marxist. He subsequently rejected Trotskyism and concluded that socialism was
not possible in the colonial world. See Al Richardson, "EA. Ridley (1897-1994):
An Appreciation," Revolutionary History, vo!. 5. No. 3 (1994), pp. 209-10.
14 Sam Bomstein and Al Richardson, Against the Stream: A History of the Trotskyist
Movement in Britain, 1924-38 (London, 1986), pp. 50-60.
15 IOL: LlPJ/12/409, file P&J(S) 17/1930, folio 12.
16 Letter from Ellis Hillman, Revolutionary History (Summer 1988), p. 56.
17 IOL: LlPJ/12/42, file P&J(S) 759/1931.
18 IOL: LlPJ/12/363, file P&J(S) 1729/1930.
54
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
55
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Excommunication
The cat was out of the bag. The British Communist leaders
discovered that Philip Gunawardena "was secretly a Trotskyist." 27 He
was booted out of the party, and the Stalinists started their usual
campaign of character assassination to discredit him.
Philip, however, had already cultivated his own following outside the
CPGB. His circle included several Indians who were active in the
League Against Imperialism. Philip also was in touch with Ceylonese
students who were studying at Cambridge, the London School of
Economics, and the London University. He had already pulled together
a study group which included the very bright students who would later
help him form the LSSP. 28
56
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
No Passage to India
29 N.M. Perera interview with Jeanne Ratnavira, Ceylon Observer, 18 October 1961.
30 Quoted in E.P. de Silva, A Short Biography ofDr. N.M Perera (Colombo, 1975), p.40.
31 W. Howard Wriggins, Ceylon: Dilemmas ofa New Nation (Princeton, 1960), pp. 125.
32 V. Karalasingham, Politics of Coalition (1964), reprinted in Al Richardson (ed.),
Blows Against the Empire: Trotskyism in Ceylon, p. 211.
33 The Comintern line pretty much wrecked the Indian Communist Party, or rather,
what was left of it after the government arrested most of the leaders in 1929.
Following orders from London, the Indian Communists denounced the Congress
from the sidelines at the very moment Gandhi was rousing his second great mass
movement. The Communists split from the All India Trade Union Congress and set
up a rival "Red" federation, consisting of a dozeh new, unregistered unions. Their
strikes went down in defeat. By 1930 even the Comintern had to admit that the
Indian movement was in shambles.
34 IOL: LlPJ/12/409, file P&J(S) 1711930, folio 38.
57
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
58
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
In 1933 the Youth Leaguers got an opening on the labor front. The
Colombo 1abor boss, A.E. Goonesinha, tried to foist a settlement on the
workers at the Wellawatte Spinning and ~~aving Mills, one of the few
large factories on the island. Philip intervened, and he was elected
leader of the strike committee. Although the strike failed, his group got
an important base of support in the mill. They published a paper,
Kamkaruwa [The Worker], opened reading rooms for workers, and
started a Workers Education League. Thee?,perience that Philip got in
London was paying off.
59
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
movement into a Left and a Right," and while the Right decayed, "the
Left developed at his hand." 42
60
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The LSSP established links with the CSP in India. Starting in 1936
the LSSP sent delegations to the annual Congress sessions. These visits
enabled the Samasamajists to make valuable contacts in the Congress
and to meet other radicals, including, as we shall soon see, the pioneer
Trotskyists who likewise attended these huge gatherings.
The LSSP was not a Leninist vanguard party at the start. Indeed, in
hindsight, there was much about the early LSSP that might seem
"Menshevik" or "reformist." This is a case where context is critical.
The LSSP was really the first political party that had ever been formed
in sleepy Ceylon. Everything about it was new and, to many, quite scary.
The Samasamajists paraded in red shits, waved the red flag, and raised
the clenched fist salute. They went around painting the hammer and
sickle on walls. The government and the Ceylonese establishment saw red.
Like the CSP, the LSSP avoided divisive doctrinal issues. Even the
name Sama Samaja-literally "equal society"-was neutral. "At a time
when Constitutions are being changed overnight," wrote Colvin de
Silva to the local newspaper, "Communists or Socialists cannot confine
themselves to any particular method." 45 Philip Gunawardena, however,
made it clear that the LSSP did not take orders from Moscow. In a
speech he stated that the LSSP "is much less militant and less
demanding than the Communist or Third International." 46 No doubt
61
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
this was also a defensive p()sture. In India the government had just
banned the Communist party. Philip didn't want to put his neck in that
noose.
62
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
This was rough and tough work. The LSSP was out to unseat A.E.
Goonesinha, and he was not one to go without a fight. He sent armed
goons to attack LSSP meetings. One one occasion Philip was badly
bloodied. The LSSP fought back. Robert Gunawardena walked with a
steel-tipped cane in one hand and pistol in his pocket just in case. Philip
went to public rallies with bodyguards. Party comrades jokingly
referred to these worker militants as "Philip's cossacks."
63
The Trotskyist Movement in India and eeylon
64
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Phi lip Gunawardena steered the LSSP on its independent course. The
LSSP neither denounced nor endorsed the Popular Front. But on the
53 Jean Jaures, the French Socialist leader, called for an alliance of "pure republicans"
against the "reaction." This led to the bloc of the Socialists with the Radicals.
However, even the Socialists never went so far as to set up a common government
with the Radicals. They confined their policy to electoral agreements and common
parliamentary votes.
65
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
66
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
its bona fides Moscow cut off funds to the Indian Communist Party. S9
The Director of the Intelligence Bureau reported that "the active
promotion of a communist revolution in India has: receded from its
current politics." 60
In contrast the LSSP was vocal in its demand for the independence
of Ceylon and all colonies, no matter whether the imperial power was
democratic or fascist. When the matter of constitutional reform was
raised in the State Council, N.M. Perera stated: "So far as the LSSP is
concerned, we are not satisfied with responsible government. We stand
out for national independence." 61
Spain
The Popular Front was put to its greatest test in Spain during the civil
war (1936-39). Initially Stalin took a neutral position. 6~ However, once
Hitler started sending military aid to Franco, Stalin sent weapons and
S9 The Director of the Intelligence Bureau (DIB) in New' Delhi noted "the
comparatively recent closing down of the liberal supply of communist funds, which
used to reach India and other countries from Moscow and' the Comintern."
"Communist Activities in India. Extracts from Weekly Reports of the Director,
Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India;" No. 23, 11 June
1938. IOL: LIPJ/12/431, file P&J(S) 592/1938. In a subsequent report he stated
that there is "no Moscow gold" going to the CPI, the CPGB "has no money for
India" and the Indian Communist newspaper, National Front, was "rescued from
imminent bankruptcy" only by a special. donation from Communist students at
Cambridge "Communist Activities in India," No. 28, 27 July 1939. IOL: LlPJ/121
431. Victor Kiernan, one of the famous Cambridge Communists who went out to
India in 1938, recounted how he carried a document to the Indian party explaining
why "Moscow could not campaign at present for the legalization of the Indian
Party; the reason of course was Soviet eagerness for a collective security agreement
with Britain." Victor Kiernan, "The CPI and the Second World War" (1987),
reprinted in Prakash Karat (ed.), Across Time and Continents: A Tribute to Victor
G. Kiernan (New Delhi, 2003), p. 210.
60 IOL: LlPJ/12/431, file P&J(S) 812/1939.
61 Quoted in G Lerski, Origins ofTrotskyism in Ceylon, p. 97.
62 Stanley G Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism (New
Haven, 2004), pp. 126-27. .
67
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
"advisors" to help the Republican government. But Stalin did not want
the civil war to ignite a socialist revolution. The Comintern warned the
Communists not to do anything to destabilize the Popular Front or the
Azafia government. In April 1936 Dimitrov and Manuilsky stated that
"in the present situation the creation of soviet power is not the order of
the day." 63 The Spanish Communists began to discourage strikes and
dropped its demand for land confiscation without compensation.
The LSSP, like leftists the world over, championed the Republican
cause in Spain. In early 1937 Leslie Goonewardene visited Spain and
returned with an eye-witness report. In public the LSSP avoided
criticizing the Spanish Popular Front and tbe role of the Comintern. 66
But, especially after the Barcelona insurrection, the Trotskyists
68
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
At the height of the Popular Front period Stalin unleashed the Great
Terror in the USSR. Hundreds of Russian and foreign Communists got
that dreaded knock on the door in the middle of the night. The first
show trial was staged in 1937; three more followed. A pantheon of Old
Bolsheviks, including Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin, were tried for
plotting with Trotsky to destroy the USSR and shot. Others of lesser
stature didn't even get a show trial. Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, the
former secretary of the League Against Imperialism, was executed in
obscurity. 69
,69
The Trotskyist Movem.ent in India and Ceylon
In London the LSSP group hotly debated the Spanish Civil war and the
Moscow trials. The most senior Samasamajist, Dr. S.A Wickremasinghe,
who had returned to London after his defeat in the 1936 elections in
Ceylon, had gone over to Stalinism. He was close to the Indian
nationalist, Krishna Menon, the leader of the India League who had
also fallen for the Popular Front line. The Trotskyist faction consisted
mainly of students; including Doric de Souza, S.C.C. Anthony PiIlai,
WiIliam Silva, and V. Satchithanandam. Most of these students were
associated with the charismatic Trotskyist, C.L.R. lames.
70
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Stalin-Hitler Pact
On August 23, 1939 Stalin finally got his deal with Hitler. The USSR
entered into a Non-Aggression pact with Gennany. Gennan tanks rolled
into Poland, while the Red Army invaded from the East. Many
Communists were stunned. Some parties, not grasping what was
happening, persisted with the Popular Front line, reaffirming their
support for war against Gennany. 77 The Comintern soon deepened
their grasp of dialetics. The Good Guys became Bad Guys, and vice
versa.
71
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The LSSP did not change its position on the war, or the
"unconditional defense of the USSR." On September 5, 1939, when the
question of a war budget came before the State Council, Philip
Gunawardena stated, "The last world-war of 1914-1918 was an
Imperialist war fought for the division of colonies and semi-colonies.
This war too is a war between two I~perialist groups, the German
Fascist Imperialism and the British and French Imperialisms. This war
too is for the division and redivision of the colonies and semi-colonies.
We refuse to be a Party to any Imperialist War. We are against all
imperialist wars and exploitation." 82
78 One notable victim was Margarete Buber-Neumann (1901-89), the widow of the
German Communist leader, Heinz Neumann, who was executed in Moscow
during the purge of 1937,. She was sent to Siberia. After the Stalin-Hitler pact, she
was handed over to the Germans at Brest-Litovsk and spent the war at the
Ravensbriick concentration camp. She recounted her ordeals in Als Gefangene bei
Stalin und Hitler (Munich, 1949), translated as Under Two Dictators (London,
1949). She later became the companion of Kamalesh Bannerji, a founder of the
Indian Trotskyist movement who had moved to Europe in 1947 to participate in
the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International.
79 As recently discovered archives show, Stalin personally instructed Dimitrov, the
Comintern boss, to switch from anti-Nazi propaganda to anti-British propaganda.
Alexander Dallin and F. 1. Firsov (eds.), Dimitrov and Stalin 1934-1943: Letters
from the Soviet Archives (New Haven, 2000), documents 28 and 29, pp. 153 ff.
80 Daily Worker, 11 May 1940.
81 Albert L. Weeks, Stalin 's Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy. 1939-1941. p. 86.
82 Quoted in G. Lerski, Origins of Trotskyism in Ceylon. p. 206.
72
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
the SWP leaders a full report on the situation in Ceylon. 86 She stated
that "only technical reasons" prevented the LSSP from affiliating with
the Fourth International. 87 The SWP dispatched this encouraging news
to Trotsky in Mexico. 88
members. Harvard, bMs Russ 13.1, folder 1: letter 5364, folder 2: letter 5369. In
July, 1939 Trotsky wrote an "Open Letter" to the Congress Socialists. Leon
Trotsky, "Open Letter to the Workers of India," New International. September
1939, pp. 263-66. In his memoirs Masani stated that the Congress Socialists
understood that the letter was really an appeal to their party. Masani, Bliss Was It in
That Dawn (New Delhi, 1977), p. 140.
86 The SWP newspaper, Socialist Appeal. also interviewed her. The interview was
published in Socialist Appeal. 10 November 1939. The paper identified her only as
"a Ceylonese comrade."
87 Letter from Sherman Stanley [Stanley Plastrik] to Leon Trotsky, 2 May 1939.
Harvard: Trotsky Collection, bMS Russ 13.1, document 5367.
88 The letters from Plastrik to Trotsky are in Trotsky archive at Harvard, bMs Russ
13.1, folder 1: letter 5364, folder 2: letter 5369.
89 . "Minutes of the I.E. Club," 21 September 1939.
90 Interview with Selina Perera (Calcutta), 10 February 1974.
74
The Trotskyist Movement ,in India and Ceylon
When Selina Perera arrived in Ceylon, the situation in the LSSP was
tense. Philip Gunawardena and his group had decided that the Stalinist
minority could no longer be tolerated in the party. Both sides braced
for the showdown. Philip had an overwhelming majority.
In December, 1939 the Executive Committee met for what would
be a historic session. The Trotskyist faction introduced the following
resolution: "Since the Third International has not acted in the interests
of the international revolutionary working-class movement, while
expressing its solidarity with the Soviet Union, the first workers' state,
the Lanka Sama Samaja Party declares that it has no faith in the Third
International." 92 The gauntlet was thrown down at last. The resolution
passed, 29-to-5. 93
91 "A Letter on India," Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40) (New York, 1969), p. 14,
92 Quoted in G. Lerski, Origins of Trotskyism in Ceylon. p. 211.
93 The five Stalinists who cast the dissenting votes were Dr. S.A. Wickramasinghe,
M.G. Mendis, K:Ramanathan, W.Ariyaratne, andA. Gunasekera.
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
and British Communist parties to a jingoist line. He argued that the onset
of a new world war made the split in the LSSP unavoidable. "The Second
International betrayed the working class in the war of 1914-18. Today
the Third International by subordinating the International revolutionary
movement to Soviet Union foreign policy is commiting another
betrayal." 94 With that pamphlet the LSSP announced that it had formally
become a Trotskyist party in solidarity with the Fourth International.
76
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
That can only be achieved by our going into the CSP wholesale and on
ANY conditions that they lay down; we must work there as true members,
and no underhand work or attempts to capture power in haste." 97
97 M.S., "Some Rough Notes on the United Front," 6 July 1938, in "Communist
Activities in India. Extracts from Weekly Reports of the Director, Intelligence Bureau,
Home Department, Government ofIndia," no. 18,7 May 1938. IOL: LlPJ/12/431.
98 The United Provinces Political "Who's Who," 1936. This bound volume, prepared
by the Deputy Inspector-General of Police, Criminal Investigation Department
(Special Branch) at Allahabad, is preserved in the India Office Library as document
LlPJ/12/672. "Onkarnath Verma (alias Shastri)" is entry number 234. "Shastri"
was not an "alias." It was an educational degree bestowed on those who had
mastered Sanskrit to a certain level. The nationalists who earned the degree added
"Shastri" to their names as a title, showing their devotion to Mother India and her
ancient culture. Lal Bahadur Shastri, who succeeded Nehru as Prime Minister in
1964, is a prominent example.
99 Letter from Onkarnath Shastri to author, received June 1974.
100 Letter from Onkarnath Shastri to author, received June 1974.
77
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
78
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
104 Ansar Harvani, Before Freedom and After: Personal Recollections of One of the
Key Witnesses of Indian Events Over the Last Half Century (New Delhi, 1989), p.
21.
105 In the election campaign the Congress candidates promised to support the poor
peasants. Once in office the Congress started breaking their election promises.
Sardar Patel declared, "We shall have to resist the excessive demands Qfthe tenants
who have been worked up and expect too much from the Congress Ministries."
The Congress Ministry arrested peasant leaders. The Viceroy himself noted, "The
policy of the Congress party towards the kisan organizations has been firm, and
even repressive." Quoted in Kapil Kumar, "Peasants, Congress and the Struggle
for Freedom: 1917-39," in KapiJ Kumar (ed.), Congress and Classes: Nationalism,
Workers and Peasants (New Delhi, 1988), p. 247.
106 At the Seventh Comintern Congress the official reporter on the colonial question,
Wang Ming, stated that Communists should not demand expropriation of the rich
landlords without compensation: "Such demands on the part of our Indian
comrades can serve as an example of how not to carry on the tactics of the anti-
imperialist United Front." Quoted in Shashi Joshi, Struggle for Hegemony in India,
1920-47: The Colonial State, the Left and the National Movement. Vo\. 1: 1920-34
(New Delhi, 1992), p. 112.
107 Interview with Karuna Kant Roy, January 30,1974.
79
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
108 S.M. Pandey, As Labour Organises: A Study of Unionism in the Kanpur Cotton
Textile Industry (New Delhi, 1970), pp. 44-66.
109 Letter from Onkamath Shastri to author, postmarked in June 1974.
110 Letter from Onkamath Shastri to author, June 1974.
80
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
was arrested and locked up in the Agra Central Jail for making
"seditious speeches" against the war. Released, he continued to speak
out against the war. The government issued a warrant for his arrest
under Section 124A of the defense rules. "I was at Lucknow then,
where I went underground." III He had to move from town to town to
evade the police. As a result, his followers were left adrift.
81
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Trotskyism in Bombay
Murray Gow Purdy had gotten politicized while still a young man in
Johannesburg in the late 1920s. 117 He met Frank Glass, a former leader
of the Communist Party of South Africa who solidarized with the Left
Opposition. 118 Glass was in touch with the American Trotskyist group,
115 This group included Shukla, his wife, Ratilal Shah, and Natwar Bhavasar in
Ahmedabad and Rajendra Trivedi, Balwand Goswami, Anand Rawal, and Pranu
Bhatt in Bhavnagar.
116 "What is to be done?" Inkilab, no. 8, October 1941; "The Imperialist War and Its
Consequences Sharpen the Old and New Contradictions in India," Tanakha. no. 1,
[nd]; "Overthrow Imperialism," Inquilab. no. 9, March 1942; and "May Day
Manifesto," Inquilab. no. 10, May 1942.
117 Letter from Murray Gow Purdy to J.P. Cannon and Max Shachtman, dated
"beginning of December, 1938." Houghton Library, Harvard University. BMS Russ
13.1 (15281); and Letter from Frank Glass to Ernest Harsch, 17 April 1978.
Hoover: Joseph Hansen Papers, box 93.
118 C. Frank Glass (1901-1988) was born in Birmingham and emigrated with his
family to South Africa when he was 10. He was a founding member of the South
African Communist Party in 1921. He broke from the CPSA in 1928 and
supported the Russian Opposition led by Trotsky. In 1930 he relocated to Shanghai,
where he worked as a journalist and helped to establish the Communist League, the
Chinese section of the International Left Opposition. He used the pseudonyms Li
Fu-Jen, Ralph Graham, and John Liang. Glass reported for the American Trotskyist
82
.. '"":.
then called the Communist League, and sold its ~ewspaper, The
Militant, in the little left-wing bookshop he ran. Glass··recruited Purdy
and a few others, including RaffLee [Raphael Levy],)lvery talented, if
somewhat bohemian, organizer and writer. In 1931 Glass moved to
China, where he worked as a journalist and helped·the Chinese Left
Opposition group.
... :" .
newspaper, The Militant, during the 1937 Japanese inva;sion of China. He was
forced to leave the country in 1941 as Japanese troops approached Shanghai, and
he moved to New York, where he joined the SWP and worked on the Militant's
editorial staff for the remainder of World War n. He was a member of the SWP's
national committee from 1944 to 1963.
119 lan Hunter, "Raff Lee and the Pioneer Trotskyists of Johannesburg: A Footnote to
the History of British Trotskyism," Revolutionary History, v. 4. no. 4 (1993), p. 62.
120 Murray Gow Purdy, The South African Indian Problem-A Revolutionary Solution
(Bombay, 1943), p. 21. Hoover, LSH, box 52.
12\ Both Purdy and Lee were tough characters. Raff Lee h!id a police record for petty
burglary. John Saperstein, another early Trotskyist, served time for gun-running on
behalf of the Communist Party. lan Hunter, "Raff Lee and the Pioneer Trotskyists
of Johannesburg," p. 62. Baruch Hirson, the historian of South African Trotskyism,
notes that "Purdy's role was not very savoury." Letter from Baruch Hirson to
author, 21 September 1997.
\22 Letter from Baruch Hirson to author, 23 April 1992.
83
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
by Gandhi, calling him "the greatest politician the eastern world has
ever produced." 123 Purdy sent a letter to William Gallacher, the
Communist MP, demanding that British foreign secretary Anthony
Eden intervene on behalf of the Indians in Addis Ababa. The British
Ambassador told Purdy to leave the country.
123 Letter from Purdy to Max Shachtman and James P. Cannon, 1938.
124 Letter from Purdy to Max Shachtman and James P. Cannon, 1938.
125 Kama1 Biswas,. "Dictatorship of the Proletariat and U.S.S.R.," Congress Socialist.
5 June 1937. "Kama1 Biswas" might have been a pseudonym. The British
Communist Party sent a rebuttal. "The U.S.S.R. and the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat, Congress Socialist, 17 July 1937. Krishna Menon, the head of the India
League in London and a recent convert to Stalinism, fretted about the "streak of
Trotskyist deviation" in the CSP which he felt was "too pronounced to be ignored."
Quoted in Partha Sarathi Gupta, "British Labour and the Indian Left, 1919-1939,"
p. 117; and TJ.S. George, Krishna Menon: A Biography (London, 1964), p. 92.
The Congress Socialist published an article, "Popular Front: No Way to October,"
by "a Ceylon Marxist." The author was Vernon Gunasekera.
126 In the early 'twenties Lotvala patronized the handful of Communist sympathizers
in Bombay, financed a new English weekly, Socialist, and established a well-
stocked Socialist library. He went to England and worked with the British
Communist Party. After his return to India he studied the literature of both the Left
and the Right Opposition and published some of the documents in his journal, the
Advocate. A rich Parsi businessman, Lotvala owned several newspapers, including
the weekly Chitra, which carried pro-Trotsky articles. Lotvala later became a
devout Gandhian. Indulal K. Yajnik, Life ofRanchoddas Bhavan Lotvala (Bombay,
1952), p. 51. Yajnik was Lotvala's personal secretary.
127 Ratilal Mehta latet·became a sympathizer of the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India.
The party used hi's'·office in Bombay as a "cover" to receive mail from abroad.
Hoover: SWPPapers, box 38. .
84
The Trotskyist Movement ill India and Ceylon
Purdy cast off his Western clothes, donned khadi and a Gandhi
cap, and joined the Congress. 128 He evidently disagreed with Trotsky
on the nature of Congress. Purdy regarded the Congress as "a narrow
and capitalistically dominated type of united front," rather than a
capitalist party properly speaking. 129 Nevertheless, in practice his
approach seems to have been the same. "We shall struggle against the
[capitalist] leadership, but will not fool the masses about the
probablility of capturing the machine." He emphasized the need to
build an independent Trotskyist party outside the Congress.
Purdy saw his first task as the development of a Trotskyist program
for India. Over the next three years he wrote a 150-page treatise on
Indian society and history, which he subsequently boiled down to a
pamphlet: the Bolshevik-Leninist-Trotskyist Draft Provisional
Programme. 130 Purdy based his work on the program of the
International Left Opposition, adopted in 1933. 131 He apparently didn't
128 Purdy was always a man who lived his beliefs. He regarded European clothing to be a
sign of the "official white-man caste. snobbish and offensive to a degree." Murray
Gow Purdy, The South Afi-ican Indian Problem-A Revolutionary Solution. p. 3. He
ate from the food stalls in the streets and ended up getting sick for eighteen months.
129 "The Bolshevik-Leninists demand the right to operate as Congressmen and women,
and shall put forward our own Congress programme despite expulsions or other
pressure from the capitalist Right-Wing controllers who desire to exploit the masses
politically without opposition. We shal1 not be brow-beaten nor hood-winked into
abandoning our claim to speak as Congressmen, as active workers in the united
front ofthe nation now mobilized behind Congress." Yarrumji Eedrupji, Bolshevik-
Lenillist-Trotskyist Draft Provisional Programme. pp. 33-34.
130 In the preface Purdy emphasized that his pamphlet was a "draft provisional
program to be presented to the International, and it is put forward for discussion
and improvement by the leaders of the working class itself." Yarrumji Eedrupji
[Murray Purdy], Bolshevik-Leninist- Trotskyist Draft Provisional Programme
(Bombay, n.d.). "Yarrumji Eedrupji" is obviously "MUl'ray Purdy" spelled
backward, with the Hindi honorific suffix, "ji" (as in "Gandhiji"). Author's copy,
original in possession of the late Sitaram B. Kolpe.
131 Leon Trotsky, "The International, Its Tasks and Methods," December 1932. The
"eleven points" were adopted by the first conference (called a "pre-conference") of
the International Left Opposition, held in Paris, 4-8 February 1933. Most of these
points were incorporated into subsequent documents adopted by Trotsky's
movement, including the culminating "Transitional Program," adopted at the
founding conference of the Fourth International in 1938.
85
The Trotskyist Movemenrin India and Ceylon
86
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
136 Hetukar Jha, "Lower-Caste Peasants and Upper-Caste Zamindars in Bihar (1921-
1925): An Analysis of Sanskritization and Contradiction between the Two Groups,"
The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 14, no. 4 (October-December
1977), p. 549. Starting in the 1920s, low caste peasants would adopt high caste
names, like Singh or Rai, as a gesture of protest.
137 "Provisional draft programme of the Bolshevik-Leninists-Trotskyists of the Indian
Empire," I page typescript, n.d. Attached to his letter to Max Shachtman and James
P. Cannon, 1938. Hoover: SWP Papers, box 38.
138 Yarrumji Eedrupji, Bolshevik-Leninist-Trotskyist Draft Provisional Programme,
p.44.
139 Philip Spratt, for example, once declared, "we shall have to indulge in brutal,
dictatorial methods" and not disguise "the brutal, bloodthirsty side of our
proposals." Quoted in Shashi Joshi, Struggle/or Hegemony in India. 1920-47: The
Colonial SUite, the Left and the National Movement. Vol. I: 1920-34 (New Delhi,
1992), p. 115.
140 Minutes of the "Pan American and All Pacific Bureau," 16 August 1939. Harvard:
Trotsky Collection, bMS Russ 13.1. File 16410.
87
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
141 "Friends of Trotsky Society," printed flyer, n.d. Hoover: LSH, box 53. Purdy
appealed to the American Trotskyists and his former comrades in South Africa for
assistance. Letter from R. Lennard [Leon Sapire] and J. Murdoch to J.P. Cannon,
15 September 1938. Hoover: SWP Papers, box 44.
142 In December, 1922, Lenin, confined to a sickbed after two strokes, dictated a
confidential memorandum to the Politburo in which he candidly sized up each of
the top leaders. Lenin characterized Trotsky as "perhaps the most capable man in
the present C.C." He noted that Stalin "has unlimited authority concentrated in his
hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority
with sufficient caution." It didn't take long for Lenin to decide. In a postscript
added one month later Lenin called for removing Stalin as General Secretary. In
March, 1923 Lenin wrote to Trotsky proposing ajoint struggle against Stalin. That
proposal to Trotsky has been confirmed by the historians, R. V. V. Zhuravlev and
A.N. Nenarokov, in Pravda, 12 August 1988. See Pierre Broue, "Trotsky: A
Biographer's Problems," in Terry Brotherstone and Paul Dukes (eds.), The Trotsky
Reappraisal (Edinburgh, 1992), p. 20. Lenin also confided to his wife,
Krupskyaya, that he intended to "crush Stalin." But less than a week later he was
incapacitated by a massive stroke. In the Political Bureau Stalin and his aJlies voted
to suppress Lenin's testament; Trotsky wanted to publish the Testament within the
party. Krupskaya leaked the document to the west for publication. The Triumvirate
<;Ienied that the testament was authentic. In 1927 Stalin had to admit, in the
authoritative Comintern journal, International Press Correspondence (17
November 1927), that it was "perfectly true" Lenin had, in fact, caJled for
"replacing Stalin." Later Stalin claimed Lenin's Testament was a fabrication.
143 M.G Purdy, "Is War Inevitable?" Congress Socialist, 4 June 1939, p. 3.
88
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Trotskyism in Bengal
89
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
That book changed his life. "I remember that I took that book and I
started reading it the next day. The whole day I read it. I didn't go out,
and I didn't go out the day after, except to have my lunch, and I finished
that book in two days. I believe there was a chapter at the very end,
headed 'the theory of Socialism in One Country.' I read it and by the
time 1 finished it I said to myself that the Communists are a bunch of
liars, that the Stalinists were not communists at all, but a bunch of
murderers and traitors to Communism."
Gupta sent Roy to C.L.R. James. "I had rarely come across a finer
political polemicist than C.L.R. James. His attacks on Stalinism were
absolutely devastating." Working out of their shared flat on Boundary
Road, the two produced the journal, Fight. Roy wrote several articles
on political developments in India. ISO As one of his contemporaries
recalled, Roy was "an excellent speaker and popular among workers"
at Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park. 151
149 Ajit Roy, "Reminiscences of early days in India and Britain," unpublished
transcript of an interview recorded in December, 1975. Roy tape-recorded his
recollections at the request of his friend, the British Trotskyist historian, Sam
Bornstein. This interview is cited in Sam Bornstein and AI Richardson, Against the
Stream: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain. 1924-1938 (London,
1986), pp. 262-63. The 10-page transcript is in the Socialist Platform Archives
(Richardson Collection), London.
ISO Singh, "The Indian Elections," Fight. vol. 1, no. 6 (May 1937), pp. 11-12 and B.C.
Agarwal, "Congress and the Indian Masses," Fight. vol. 1, no. 11 (November
1937), pp. 11, 15.
ISI Bill Hunter, Lifelong Apprenticeship: The Life and Times of A Revolutionary
(London, 1997),p. 99.
90
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Bannerji had a magnetic personality. He'd sit for hours in the Cafe
de Monico and discuss politics with young student activists. One of his
recruits was Indra Sen, a student at Calcutta University. "We had no
sympathy for the CPI," says Indra Sen, "bu!wewanted to know why so
many students did." 153 Another recruit was Dulal Bose, a student at
Vidyasagar College in Calcutta who lat~r earned diplomas in both
French and Russian literature.
152 Letter from the Indian historian Gautam Chattopadhyaya (Calcutta), 21 February
1978. He believes Purvasha might have also been patronized by Saumyendranath
Tagore, the well-to-do critical Communist.
IS) Interview with Indra Sen, 26 April 1974.
154 "On the Necessity for an Independent Bolshevik-Leninist Organization in Britain,"
Submitted by the Revolutionary Socialist League, July 24, 1938, in National
Bulletin, prepared for the National Conference of the Bolshevik Leninist
Organisations in ,Britain, p. 4. University of Chicago Library.
91
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Bihar, who was on the run from the police. Shastri was impressed with
the sophistication of the Calcutta group. "When I first met Kamalesh,"
recalls Shastri, "I became enamoured of his English expressions!" 155
The two began to collaborate.
Repression in Ceylon
ISS Letter from Onkamath Shastri to author, undated, received June 1974.
IS6 Interview with Indra .Sen (Calcutta), I February 1974.
IS) LSSP leaflets reprinted in Labor Action [New York], 23 March 1942 and 19
October 1942.
92
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
meetings were banned. The LSSP knew in advance that the government
was going to strike. The Central Committee "ruled that Leslie
Goonewardene should go underground while the others should court
arrest." 158 That decision was a big mistake.
158 E.P. De Silva, A Short Biography of Dr. N.M. Perera. p. 7. Colvin de Silva gave a
similar explanation to an American Trotskyist visitor to India in 1944: "some of
our comrades went on with their work openly, waiting for the government to come
and get them so as to make a legal test and demonstration before the masses of our
position." Lewis Scott, "Red Passage to India," p. 14:
159 Letter from J.E.B. Stuart [Sam Gordon] to the Btitish Section, F.I., 11 November
1940. Hoover: SWP Papers, box 34.
93
CHAPTER THREE
Less than two months later the war began. The Cey Ion government
clobbered the LSSP. But India was seething with mass unrest. "There
could be little doubt," noted Hector Abhayavardhana, "that should the
British be thrown out of India, independence would come to Ceylon
almost as a logical consequence. The thesis, therefore, emerged in the
LSSP that the revolution In:Ceylon could only develop successfully as
part of the Indian revoh.,ltioti and, since there was as yet no dependable
revolutionary party in India, it was the historic task of the LSSP to
assist in forming such a party within a minimum period of time. The
best means of doing so, it decided, was by building a common
organization for both cotl:p~ries." 2
Leon Trotsky, "Open Letter to the Workers ofIndia," New International, September
1939, pp. 263-66. Reprinted as "India Faced with Imperialist War" (25 July 1939),
in Writillgs o/Leoll Trotsky 1939-40, pp. 28-34.
2 Hector Abhayavardhana, "Categories of Left Thinking in Ceylon" (1962), reprinted
in Rajan Phi lips (ed.), Sri Lanka: Global Challellges alld Natiollal Crises
(Colombo, 2001), p. 362.
94
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
As we have seen, the LSSP leaders had already made contact with
the Indian Trotskyist groups in Bombay, Calcutta, and the United
Provinces. The LSSP began to dispatch organizers to India, one at a
time, to help these fledgling groups. Leslie Goonewardene, the acting
party leader in the underground organization, was the driving and
directing force behind the India work. 3 The LSSP decided to secure a
beachhead of its own in Madras Province. The LSSP had members who
could speak Tamil, and Madura was just across the Palk Straights from
the northern tip of Ceylon.
First Steps
On July 23, 1941 the police arrested Balasingham along with three
of his contacts. The Chief Secretary of the Madras government
informed the Home Department that the Trotskyist nucleus in Madras
Province had bee!1 broken up. 5 The police arrested three more
95
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Pre-Conference in Ceylon
96
The Trotskyist Movement ill India and Ceylon
If there were minutes taken at this meeting, they haven't survived. I am indebted to
Leslie Goonewardene for this account of the meeting. According to his memory,
Edmund Samarakkody, the junior of the four LSSP prisoners in Kandy, did not
attend. Letter from Leslie Goonewardene to author, 30 April 1975.
97
The Trotskyist Movement in IlIdia and Ceylof/
98
The n"otskyist Movement in In.~ia and Ceylon
organizers, was placed under house arrest. IS With the police breathing
down his neck Bemard Soysa went to Bombay.
In March, 1941 the Trotskyists took the next step towards unification.
A clandestine conference was to be held in Ceylon. The LSSP secured
a "safe house" on the Hanguranketa Road in Kandy,l1ot. far from the
jail. Bernard Soysa arranged for Onkarnath Shastri, Kamalesh
Bannerji, and Indra Sen to come to Ceylon. At riiidnight on the
appointed day the LSSP prisoners again walked outof the Kandy jail
and were driven off to the meeting. The security was water tight.
15 Letter from Indra Sent to A.K. [Ajit Roy], n.d. [circa 1945]. Hull: Haston, DJHI
15G/14b.
16 Letter from Leslie Goonewardene to author, 30 Apri11975. A British government
report from 1947 mentions that "12 Indian delegates of no political standing"
attended this conference. National Archives oflndia: Home (Pol) File No. 7/7/47-
Poll (I). "Trotskyist Partie~ in India," p. 2. That seems to be misinforn1ation. The
same report mentions that one of the Indians was "Soma Ramamithan of Tanjore."
His name appears no where else, and none of the veterans from that period recall
anyone of such a name.
17 Since no minutes of this meeting survive, we don't know for sure who was assigned
to draft the program. In conversations with the author, HeCtor Abhayavardhana
recollects that Leslie Goonewardene and Doric de Souza were probably the main
authors, though others certainly contributed in the process of amplifying and
revising the drafts. . ...
18 C.P.S. [Chandravadan Shukla], L.S.G [Leslie Goonewardene}; E.B.S. [Bernard
Soysa}, Letter to the Secretary, Bureau of the Fourth Internati~hal, 29 June 1942.
99
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Shortly after this conference, the LSSP held its own meeting in
Matale. Leslie Goonewiudene presided; 42 delegates attended. Unlike
the Kandy conference the month before, the jailed leaders did not
attend; given the larger group, there were more risks that the police
would get wind of the gathering and pounce. That meeting formally
transformed the LSSP into a cadre party with a new program based on
the Transitional Program of the Fourth International. 19 The LSSP
conference also endorsed the decision to colonize India and merge the
LSSP into a larger all-India party. 20
19 Sections of this program were reprinted as "The Road to Freedom for Ceylon," in
Fourth International (April, 1942), pp. 117-18.
20 The only opposition came from a very junior comrade, the late Regi Siriwardena
[party name "Hamid"]. As Regi recalls in his memoirs, "I was imprudent and brash
enough to criticize the Indian plan as 'adventurist', urging that the party should
concentrate on strengthening its local base. For this parochial view I was, verbally,
slapped down by N.M., who in the course of his reply said, 'We can't all be as
learned as Comrade Hamid': this from a double-doctor to an undergrad, was irony
indeed." Regi Siriwardena, Working Underground: The LSSP in Wartime
(Colombo, 1999), p. 55.
100
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
In February, 1942 Purdy retreated a bit for the sake of unity: "we
withdraw the slogan of 'military aid to Russia on all fronts,' and
21 "25th Anniversary of the October Revolution," BLPI leaflet, n.d. [1942]. Hoover:
LSH, box 52.
22 Seven [Murray Gow Purdy], "A New Viewpoint on this War," Spark [July 1941],
p. 4. Hoover: LSH, box 54.
23 Interviews with C.Y. Shukla, 27 December 1973 and 13 June 1974.
24 "Overthrow Imperialism," Inkilab, no. 9 (March 1942).
101
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
replace it with 'Only revolution can help us help the Soviet Union." 2S
However, he left the door half open. He suggested, as a "compromise,"
that Trotskyists"help any effort made to collect money or materials to
be sent to the U.S.S.R., irrespective of whatever agency is responsible
for that support being sent." Kamalesh Bannerji, the leader of the
Bengal group; stated that unification with Purdy was impossible as long
as he held what was in effect a pro-war position.
"Colonization" of India
2S "Our War Line Today," 3-page typescript, 25 February 1942. Hoover: SWP Papers,
box 38.
26 Pulsara Liyanage, Vivi: A Biography of Vivienne Goonewardene (Colombo, n.d.),
pp. 37-38.
27 K. Appanraj, Anja Nenjan: Thoyizh Sangha Medai S.C.c. Antoni Pillai Vazhkai
Varalaru. p. 33.
102
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
103
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Jailbreak in Ceylon
In February, 1942 the Japanese took Singapore and drove the British
forces from Burma the following month. Japanese subs and cruisers
prowled the Bay of Bengal. On April 5, Japanese planes bombed
Colombo harbor, sinking the British heavy cruisers Dorsetshire and
Cornwall. The LSSP decided that the time had come to remove their
leaders from jail, lest they risk falling into the hands of the Japanese.
Two days later the LSSP spirited the four party leaders and their
warden away from the jail to a "safe house" in Nawala.
The escape brought down renewed repression. The government
arrested a dozen second-tier LSSP activists. The cops combed the
island looking for the fugitives. Holed up, with no opportunity to do
anything, Philip Gunawardena was anxious to get to the scene of the
action in India.
104
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
In June the Bureau of the BLPI wrote to the Secretariat of the Fourth
International in New York with a formal request for affiliation. It's not
exactly clear what happened, but the BLPI received no response. The
BLPI repeated this request on more than one occasion. The comrades
were pleased when they later received publications from New York which
referred to the BLPI as "the Indian section of the Fourth International."
Excluded from the merger, M.G. Purdy fonned his own party, called
the Mazdoor [Workers] Trotskyist Party ofIndia. In May, 1942 Purdy
issued his party's program and began to publish Kranti [Revolution] in
English. 31 By August the Indian police were already keeping tabs on
the Mazdoor Trotskyists. 32 Predictably, Purdy denounced the BLPI as
"petit-bourgeois" and "fundamentally similar and organisationally
connected to the capitalistic Sama Samaj Party of Ceylon." 33 The MTP
stated that workers, and only workers, were allowed to join their party. 34
30 Interview with Chandravadan Shukla, 12 June 1974. Inkilab (voI. 2, no. 11, July
1942) referred to the "Bolshevik Mazdoor (Leninist) Party ofIndia." Another issue
oflnkilab (20 November 1942) used the name, "Gujarat Branch of the Bolshevik
Mazdoor Party of India." Inkilab advertised Bolshevik Leninist as the theoretical
organ of the BMP.
31 Mazdoor Trotskyist Party of India. Draft Programme. Issued by the Provisional
Committee of the Mazdoor Trotskyist party of India, Calcutta. IS May 1942. Hull:
Brynmor Jones Library.
32 Home (Po 1) File No. 717147-Poll (I). "Trotskyist Parties in India," p. 1.
33 The Mazdoor Trotskyist Party of India. Draft Programme, appendix.
34 The MTP membership application form stated, "Any persons who function as
peasants, deriving their living from the exploitation of land, or whom, having lost
their land, still hope to recover it, or possess any ideology towards independent
exploitation of the means of production, or any other person who employs !!!!y
wage labourer in any business, workshop or elsewhere, shall be disqualified from
membership of the party." "Mazdoor Trotskyist Party. India. Application for
Membership," cyclostyled form, I page. Hoover: SWP Papers, box 38.
105
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
In its final form the party program was a lengthy document, consisting
of three sections: a summary of the British conquest ofIndia, a Marxist
analysis of the various classes and political groupings in India, and the
action program, based largely on the "transitional" demands listed in
the Transitional Program adopted by the Fourth International in 1938.
Given the sheer size and complexity of the program, it is impossible to
do it justice in a summary. I have reprinted the program in its entirety
in Appendix B. Here I will limit myself to just a few observations.
35 The Ceylonese and Indian Trotskyists evidently relied upon the influential book,
India Today (1940), by the British Stalinist theoretician, R. Palme Dutt, for this
material. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Dutt was the first to publish the key Marx
writings on India in his journal Labour Monthly in 1925. He used those writings in
his first book on India: R. Palme Dutt, Modern India (London, 1926). In that book
Dutt characterized the Indian bourgeoisie as a "counter-revolutionary force." (p. 17).
In India Today, written at the height of the Popular Front, Dutt corrected his previous
deviation and emphasized that the national bourgeoisie had a progressive wing.
106
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
107
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Geylon
The BLPI did not factor caste into its analysis. That was a real
shortcoming. Murray Gow Purdy had hit upon a very important aspect
of Indian reality wh.en he formulated his thesis of the "Harijan
Revolution." More deft dialecticians could have developed this insight
properly. Another shortcoming in the program was the communal
question. By 1941-42, when this program was drafted and discussed,
the communal issue loomed large in India. 36 The relationship between
the Congress and Muslim League had been strained during the period
of the Congress Ministries. The Muslim League started taking the
Pakistan slogan seriously in 1940. The BLPI program pretty much
ignored this burning issue. So did the rest of the left, for that matter.
36 The communaL. question had plagued the Indian nationalist movement from the
start. In the beginning the Indian National Congress reached out to the Muslims.
But the Muslim elite were indifferent, if not hostile. Their reasons were easy to
understand. Olltnumbered four-to-one by the Hindus, the Muslims didn't share the
dream of representative government. Sir Sayyid Ahmad pointed out that democratic
elections "would be like a game of dice, in which one man had four dice and the
~ther only one." Quqted in Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Proudest Day:
India's Long Roadio Independence (New York, 1997), p. 77. He denied that
Congress represented the Muslim "nation" within India. Quoted in Aziz Ahmad,
Islamic Modernism in India and Pakistan, 1857-1964 (London, 1967), pp. 32-33.
The Muslim League was formed in 1905 as a loyalist party seeking to get the best
deal possible for the Muslims. The Muslim League supported the British in WWI.
The defeat of Ottoman Turkey introduced strains. The Khilafat Muslims made
common cause with Gandhi in the Non-Cooperation movement. The communal rift
widened again after Gandhi terminated Non-Cooperation.
108
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
37 Reprinted with preface, dated September 1942, i.n The Revolution in India.
[Edinburgh] T. Tait Memorial Publication, 1942. Sections reprinted: Fourth
International, March 1942, pp. 82-87 and April 1942,pp. 122-25; October 1942,
pp. 309-14; "Thesis of Indian Fourth Internationalists, 1941," in Workers
International News [London], vol. 5, nos. 3/4, n.d., pp. 24-36 and The World
Revolution and the Tasks of the British Working Cla.ss. London: Workers'
International League, 1945.
38 Workers International News, vol. 5, no. 4 (October-November 1943), p. 1.
39 "Communist Survey No. 3 of 1944,~' 15 October 1944, p. 5. IOL: LlPJ/12/431.
109
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The main contingent went to Bombay, the center of the new party.
Philip roomed in a Buddhist hostel and assumed the names "Rup
Singh" and "Almeida." His brother, Robert, became "Vaidya" and
"Prakash." N.M. Perera was "A. Deshmukh." Colvin de Silva used the
name "C. R. Govindan." Govindan was the name ofa Tamil plantation
worker who had been shot in cold blood on the Mool-Oya Estate in
1940. Colvin de Silva represented his widow in court. In those days the
LSSP was proud to be known as a "pro-Tamil" party.
The Bombay Provincial unit (comprising Bombay city and
Ahmedabad) was the largest branch of the BLP!. Chandravadan Shukla
had groups in Ahmedabad and Bhavnagar, including about 20 textile
and press workers. With the influx of the Ceylonese, the Bombay
Provincial unit numbered aound 40 members in late 1942. Shukla
owned a rudimentary printing press which he used to print his Gujarati
newspaper, Inkilab, and a political journal, Bolshevik Leninist. With the
formation of the BLPI the Bolshevik Leninist became the principal
party publication. The first issue that appeared in the name of the BLPI
carried a statement on the war by Leslie Goonewardene. 40
110
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
In South India the BLPI now had party groups in both Madura and
Madras. More LSSP members, including Lionel Cooray, AlIan
41 C.P.S., L.S.G, E.8.S., Letter to the Secretary, ISFI, June 29, 1942.
111
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
In Ceylon the LSSP was a shadow of its former self. Several dozen
party members. including Jack Kotelewala, who had been the Secretary,
were behind bars, and more than a dozen party members had already left
for India. The government had shut down the Samasamajist and the union
newspaper, Kamkaruwa [Worker]. The party had to produce its literature
on a portable press which was moved from one safe house to another to
avoid detection. Doric de Souza and Esmond Wickremasinghe
remained behind in Ceylon to lead the clandestine party.
Looking back on those heady days, some LSSP veterans view the
exodus to India and formation of the BLPI as a futile exercise in
"revolutionary romanticism." 43 In 1942 the handful ofTrotskyists who
formed the BLPI truly believed that "tomorrow is ours." One can debate,
with the benefit of hindsight, whether or not their mission was hopeless.
Whatever their illusions, those determined Trotskyists succeeded, in
the face of daunting odds, and with considerable personal courage and
sacrifice, to at least unfurl the banner of the Fourth International. No
doubt Trotsky, ifhe had lived to see that day, would have been proud.
42 K. Appanraj, Anja Nenjan: Thoyizh Sangha Medai S.c.c. Antoni Pillai Vazhkai
Varalaru (Chennai, 1995), p. 34.
43 In 1947 Philip Gunawardena, looking back on the formation of the BLPI, called
the founders "revolutionary romantics" who lacked the political maturity needed
for such an undertaking. D.P.R. GUllawardena, "Bolshevik-Leninists Should Enter
Immediately the Socialist Party ofllldia (CSP)," Internal Bulletin [LSSP], vo!. 1,
no. 2 (March 1947), p. 2. In his memoirs Regi Siriwardena opines that the majority
of the LSSP "suffered from the same illusion that led Trotsky to form the Fourth
International: that the possession of a supposedly correct programme would make
people rally round the party." Regi Siriwardena, Working Underground, p. 65.
Hector Abhayavardhana, on the other hand, has called the Ceylonese odyssey to
India "perhaps one of the few signiiicant episodes in the modem political history
of Sri Lanka." Hector Abhayavardhalla, "Selina Perera-the Forgotten Socialist
Militant," Pravada [Colombo], vo!. 4, nos. 10-11 (1997), p. 19.
112
CHAPTER FOUR
The American military produced a secret report, "The Campaign in Burma," which
stated "From the start the British forces had executed one withdrawal after another
before the advance of the Japanese ... the main body of the British made little or no
efforts to stand and give battle ... the piecemeal defense was a piece of stupidity
which resulted in tens of thousands of casualties to the troops, the complete
destruction of every town and city in Burma, and the loss to both the Chinese and
the British of a vast amount of irreplacable installations and equipment." Quoted in
M.S. Venkataramani and B.K. Shrivastava, Quit India: The American Response to
the 1942 Struggle (New Delhi, 1979), pp. 178-79. Field Marshal William Slim,
who was then the Commander of the Fifteenth Indian Corps in Calcutta, described
the disarray of the British military and their plans "to destroy, if necessary, the many
installations in Calcutta that would have been invaluable to an invader." Quoted in
M.S. Venkataramani and B.K. Shrivastava, Quit India, p. 178.
After meeting with Gandhi in June, 1942, Jawaharlal Nehru sent a secret report to
the US President and Secretary of State, in which he reassured them that "Gandhi
does not intend starting any big movement unless he is forced to do so by British
policy." Quoted in M.S. Venkataramani and B.K. Shrivastava, Quit India, p. 170.
In his interviews with American newsmen around the same time, Gandhi stated that
"America can insist on the implementing of the Indian demand as a condition of
her financing Britain." Quoted in Harijan, 14 June 1942.
113
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
On May 12, 1942 P.C. Joshi met a senior Intelligence Bureau officer, Ghulam
Ahmed, to discuss his plans, which he had set forth a month earlier in a ten-page
confidential memorandum, dated 23 April 1942. The Stalinists used to claim that
such documents were anti-Communist fabrications. Unfortunately for the Stalinists,
the secret government files are no longer secret. In his book, A History of Indian
Freedom Struggle (1986) E.M.S. Namboodiripad, the CPI(M) leader, had to admit
that the CPI did in fact "establish contact with the government."
IOL: LlPJ/12/431. File poLeS) 1737/1942.
IOL: LlPJ/12/431. File poLeS) 1737/1942.
"Revolution: The Only Way to Smash Imperialism," printed leaflet. Hoover: LSH,
box 102. Excerpts reproduced in Fourth International. July 1943, p. 221. The
Chief Secretary ofthe Bengal government made a point of mentioning in his report
to the Home Office that the Congress leader, Haripada Sarkar, had this BLPI leaflet
in his possession when he was arrested in Calcutta. IOL: LlPJ/12/402. File poLeS)
938/D/97-109.
"The Real Fifth Column in India," Harijan. 9 August 1942, p. 271.
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The following evening Gandhi electrified the crowd with the battle
cry, Karenge ya Marenge! ["Do or Die!"]. But he gave no clear directions.
That suggests that Gandhi didn't really intend to launch a mass
struggle, or not at that point anyway. He had made it clear all along that
he wanted to negotiate a settlement. Just a few days earlier he stressed
that the passing of the Quit India resolution would not be the signal for
the launching of a mass movement. 8 He stated that he would send a
letter to the Viceroy and await a reply. "After my last night's speech," he
said to his private secretary on the morning of August 9, "they will
never arrest me." 9 The Mahatma was wrong. Shortly after daybreak
Gandhi and the entire Congress high command were on their way to jail.
"Mob Violence"
115
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
11 "March Separately, Strike Together," leaflet signed by the BLPI, one page, n.d.
Hoover: LSH, box 52.
12 IOL: LlPJ/12/484. File Pol.(S) 228211942.
13 "The Real Nature of the Anti-Fascist Peoples' War," printed leaflet signed BLPI,
n.d. Hoover: LSH, box 52.
14 "What is to be Done? Revolution - The Only Way of Defeating Fascism," printed
,leaflet signed BLPI, n.d. [1942]. Hoover: LSH, box 52.
15 These reports were delivered to Sir Reginald Maxwell and forwarded to Additional
Secretary ~ir Richard Tottenham. These reports became part ofthe National Archives
of India after independence. Who knows what else was documented in the
thousands of other files that the British bureaucracy burned just before they quit India.
16 IOL: LIPJ/12/43 1. File Pol.(S) 1737/1942,
116
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
rewarded. When all meetings were banned in Bombay, the CPI was
allowed to hold pro-war rallies. 17
Within days the disturbances spread across India. The storm center was
Bihar and the United Provinces, the Congress heartland. A magistrate's
report on the situation in Begusarai (Bihar) was typical: "The news of
the arrest of the all-India leaders caused wide agitation, especially
among the Congressites, and the student's section ... young volunteers
were deputed to villages to organise volunteers ... From the afternoon
the rural mob began to take the upper hand and the student section
began to loose prominence ... Then the situation was no longer in the
hands of the Congress." 18
After the initial explosion, the BLPI group in Bombay focused its
efforts on making contact with other underground leftists. It's not clear
117
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
to what extent the BLPI was able to contact the underground Congress
militants. 21 The BLPI informed the Secretary of the Fourth
International in New York that "the existence and line ofthe party became
widely known in political circles." 22 The Director of the Intelligence
Bureau believed that the Trotskyists were influencing the Congress.
"Distinct traces of Fourth International influences," he wrote, "have been
discernable in many recent illegal Congress bulletins and pamphlets." 23
21 Philip Gunawardena, the Ceylonese leader who was in Bombay at that point,
personally knew a number of prominent Congress activists from his old days in
New York and London. One of his old associates was N.B. Parulekar, the
prominent Bombay Advocate who led a group of students to ransack the Bombay
High Court. Philip knew Parulekar in New York, where he was associated with the
New York Chapter of the Hindustan Association of America, an offshoot of the
Hindustan Ghadr Association. IOL: L/PJ/12/33.
22 K. Tilak [Leslie Goonewardena), Letter to the Secretary, International Secretariat,
4th International, 25 July 1944. Typed, 2 pages. Hoover: SWP Papers, box 38.
23 IOL: L/PJ/12/484. File Pol.(S) 228211942.
24 The Labour member of the Governor General's Executive Council disclosed the
details in the Central Assembly in April, 1944. Dipti Kumar Roy, Trade Union
Movement in India: Role of M.N. Roy (Calcutta, 1990), pp. 90-9\. It was also
rumored that the CPI was getting government money, too. We now know from de-
classified government files that the CPI was spendingfive times its income just to
publish Peoples' War. LlPJ/12/431. File Pol.(S) 1737/1942.
2S Hector Abhayavardhana, "Selina Perera - The Forgotten Socialist Militant," p. 20.
Also interview with V. Karalasingham, 22 May 1974.
118
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
119
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Guerrilla Resistance
When the unrest died down in the cities, the Congress radicals shifted
their activities to the countryside. The Socialists formed armed bands
in V.P. and Bihar, called Azad Dastas, to harass the British, disrupt the
war effort, and incite rural revolts. Jayaprakash Narayan, the Socialist
leader who had just escaped from jail, set up a guerrilla training camp
in Nepal. The Azad Dastas carried out dacoities (robberies) to finance
their activities, a practice that the early Indian terrorists had also used.
The Stalinists attacked the BLPI, and everyone else who supported
the Quit India revolt, as "Fifth Columnists." 33 People s War called
Trotskyists "criminals and gangsters who help the Fascists." 34 P.C.
Joshi demanded that CPI members treat Trotskyists as "traitors" who
had to be "driven out of political life and exterminated." 35 In response
120
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Many Indians despised the CPI because it took orders from Russia,
rather than being true to Mother India. 38 The charge of treason
continues to haunt the CPI. The Trotskyists criticized the CPI for the
opposite reason-that it was betraying Soviet internationalism: "Unlike
the minions of the Kremlin boss, the 10shis and Mukherjees of India,
who have degenerated to the position of imperialist agents, we stand
for independent working class aid to the Soviet Union and will not for
121
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
At the same time the BLPI criticized the Socialists for their lack of
revolutionary program: "their methods did not differ in quality from
the Gandhians. They only substituted violent action for non-violence.
That was all. They provided no program whereby the masses could be
led along the path of struggle." 40 Summing up, the BLPI concluded
that the Socialists, for all their heroism, offered "only an aggressive
nationalism." 41 Given the lack of leadership, the revolt "never really
went beyond the proportions of a violent political demonstration, and
when it met the full blast of organised state repression, it collapsed." 42
The Quit India revolt was a dream come true for Murray Gow Purdy,
the apostle of violent revolution who had his own group separate from
the BLPI. On the eve of the revolt the Purdyites issued a leaflet that
pledged their support for any anti-imperialist struggle and called for
the formation of strike committees to prepare for a "workers satyagraha
general strike."43 The next day, when the violence started, the Purdyites
went underground and quickly produced the first issue of a newspaper,
39 "Twenty Fifth Anniversary of the October Revolution," n.d., signed by the BLPI.
Hoover: LSH, box 52.
40 H.A. Vardhan [Hector Abhayavardhana], The August Struggle and· its Significance
(Bombay, 1947), p. 5. Hoover: LSH, box 52.
41 "The Indian Struggle," Permanent Revolution, April-June 1943, p. 56. Hoover:
LSH, box 53.
42 Gafur Khan, "Lessons of the First Phase of the Anti-Imperialist Struggle,"
Permanent Revolution, January 1943, p. 7. Author's copy, original in possession of
the late V. Karalasingham.
43 "Support for Revolutionary Satyagraha: Mazdoor Trotskyist Party Programme," 8
August 1942. Hull: Brynmor Jones Library.
122
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
123
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Five months later the police nabbed Purdy and Gee and
subsequently found their safe deposit boxes containing "currency
notes, gold sovereigns, and American coinage to the value of about Rs.
90,000, some chloroform, gelignite, detonators and a diagram of a
home-made grenade." 53 Purdy was charged with "dacoity" and
"possession of high explosives." The government saw this as a
"startling reminder of the danger which representatives of the Fourth
International may present to security." 54
Standing trial at Bombay High Court, Purdy was defiant. When the
judge ordered his chains removed in the courtroom, Purdy retorted,
"What does it matter if I am in chains when all of India is in chains!"
The common jury found the two "not quilty." The judge called for a re-
trial. In January, 1946 a special jury found Purdy and Gee guilty of
impersonating a public servant, using a forged document, robbery, and
causing hurt. Purdy was sentenced to 10 years rigorous imprisonment
and Gee to five years of the same. 55
On the trip back to the jail Purdy asked his guards if he could use
the toilet in a wayside restaurant. Allowed to go unguarded, he slipped
through the window and escaped. He and one of his comrades,
Mahendranath Singh, hid in a hut at Malad, 15 miles outside of Bombay.
A week later the police found them. Purdy was imprisoned in the Arthur
124
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Road Jail. As fate would have it, his right hand man, Mallikarjun Rao,
was there. In April Purdy and Rao, along with two other inmates,
attempted to escape. 56 Purdy jumped the prison wall and hid in a garbage
truck. Arrested again, he was taken to the Yeravda Central Prison in
poona. The Purdyites formed a defense committee, endorsed by
prominent labor leaders. 57 The BLPI also demanded Purdy's release. 58
But the government regarded Purdy as a menace. So did the Congress.
purdy was one of the last political prisoners to be released in 1947 and
the new government promptly booted him out of the country. 59
125
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The Fourth International championed the Quit India revolt. "The Indian
Revolution is on the order of the day," declared the British Trotskyists.
"We must understand that every blow struck by the Indian workers
against British Imperialism is a blow against our own exploiters." 60
The French Trotskyists, working deep underground, hailed the struggle
in India in La Verite, their newspaper. 61
60 "End Indian Slavery," Militant [Socialist Left of the Labour Party], n.s. no. 9
(September 1942), p. 1; and Ajit Roy, "Some British 'Friends' of India," Fourth
International, March 1943, p. 95.
61 "Vive l'independence des Indes!," La Verite, no. 30 (10 April 1942); and "Les
Indes en lutte pour leur liberte," La Verite, no. 37 (15 September 1942).
62 The manifesto was reprinted in May, 1943 by the Bengal Committee ofthe BLPI as
the first pamphlet in its Fourth Internationalist Library series.
63 IOL: LlPJ/12/649.Files Pol.(S) 1984/1942 and Pol.(S) 1967/1942.
126
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The Smash
The government, noting that the Trotskyists have received "a measure
of prominence lately," stepped up their manhunt. 64 The Communist
Party willingly offered its services. The CPI got wind of the fact that
the BLPI was leading a Marxist study group in Bombay. The
Communists planted a student, named Kulkarni, in the group. 65 The
information he provided was passed to the police. The government now
had the BLPI leaders in its sights, thanks to the Stalinists:
64 IOL: LlPJ/12/484. File Pol.(S) 228211942; and Home (Pol) File No. 717147-Poll
(I). "Trotskyist Parties in India," p. 2. National Archives of India, New Delhi.
6S The BLPI documents do not give his full name. It might have been Rajaram Gopal
Kulkami, who was a Communist Party supporter and leader of the North Bombay
Students' Union. But that is speculation on my part.
127
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The Stalinist spy came to the police station and identified the
Trotskyist prisoners. The police inspector who interrogated Hector
Abhayavardhana stated, "You represent the most dangerous contagion
that has been brought into this country. Whether in jail or outside, we
will not allow you to infect the educated youth. We shall see to it that
you are effectively isolated." 67 The Trotskyists, including Kusuma and
her infant son, were jailed at the Arthur Road Prison.
66 The Indian BLPI members were Vinayak Purohit, Shanta Patel, Ramesh Karkal,
Raghuvir Kodial, and P.G. Koppar.
67 Interview with Hector Abhayavardhana, 18 December 1997, and subsequent letter
to author, 13 November 1997.
68 "Police Raid Trotskyist Centres in Bombay and Madras," Permanent Revolution
(July-September 1943), p. 27, and "The Stalinist-Police Alliance-The Summit of
Popular Frontism," Permanent Revolution (January-March 1944), p. 21. Author's
copies, originals in possession of the late V. Karalasingham.
128
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
129
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
In 1940, shortly before his assasination, Trotsky predicted that the war
would beget revolutionary battles anew. The Fourth International
regarded the Quit India revolt as the first skirmish. The BLPI, despite
its small size and forced clandestinity, remained optimistic. The
Trotskyists believed that History was sweeping Stalinism into its
proverbial dustbin. The fact that Stalin dissolved the Comintern in
1943, as a gesture of appeasement to his allies, seemed to be another
powerful confirmation.
In 1943 Ajit Roy confidently predicted the death of the Communist
Party of India: "The coming months will witness the complete
disintegration and disappearance of Stalinism as a factor in Indian
politics. With the decline of Stalinism and its fast approaching death,
Marxism is once again coming to life in the young and growing cadres
of the Fourth International in India. In the months to come, as the
vanguard of the anti-imperialist masses of India turns away in disgust
from the bankrupt policies of the bourgeois nationalists and their
'socialist' allies, they will find in the programme and principles of the
Fourth International, the only guarantees for the ultimate freedom of
India." 74
74 Ajit Ray, ".India: The Role of the Congress Leaders," Workers International News.
vol. 5, no. 12 (August 1943), p. 7.
130
CHAPTER FIVE
The Interlude
As the Quit India movement ebbed, the tide of war turned. The British
military, now under the command of Mountbatten, held the line on the
India-Burma border. In 1944 Allied forces repulsed the Japanese in
Assam and the Arakan, beginning the counter-offensive that eventually
dislodged the enemy from Burma. The crisis that threatened the Raj
had passed.
Bombay
After the crippling police smash in 1943, the Bombay BLPI group was
reduced to just a handful of young comrades. The party units in Bengal
and Ceylon sent reinforcements to Bombay. I But they had a hard time
Karuna Kant Roy, who had been arrested in V.P. during the Quit India
disturbances, went to Bombay after he was released. He used the pseudonym
"Ranadhir," or "Randy" for short. The reinforcements from Ceylon included Hector
Abhayavardhana, Trevor Drieberg, Doric de Souza and his fiancee, Violet
Goonewardene.
131
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Calcutta
After the police raids in Bombay in July, 1943 the Ceylonese fugitives
who had escaped made their way to Calcutta. Assuming South Indian
names, they settled in the Entally suburbs. Compared to Bombay, the
morale in the Calcutta branch was good. The party group in Calcutta
had roots in the local political scene. There was plenty of work to be done.
132
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
133
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The BLPI recognized the need for a popular newspaper that would
be intelligible to the students who had just become radicalized during
the Quit India revolt. 12 But that paper, and other initiatives, couldn't be
carried forward due to the lack of funds. The Trotskyists, who aimed at
nothing less than world revolution, sometimes couldn't come up with
enough money to print Permanent Revolution. 13
The leader ofthe u.P. and Bihar branches, Onkarnath Shastri, had been
arrested in 1942, and the handful of remaining cadres were jailed not long
thereafter. 14 In late 1944 the Calcutta center sent a comrade to re-establish
contact with the isolated students in Allahabad who had been left adrift.
11 Manifesto o/the Fourth International on India; Leon Trotsky, Imperialist War and
Revolutionary Perspectives; Leon Trotsky and Max Shachtman, Fourth
International and the Soviet Union; K. Tilak [Leslie Goonewardene], From the
First to the Fourth International; Leon Trotsky, What is an Insurrection?; C.R.
Govindan [Colvin R. de Silva], The Dissolution o/the Comintern; and C.R. Govindan
[Colvin R. de Silva], First Round 0/ European Socialist Revolution. n.p. [1945].
12 "Report of the Provisional Central Committee of the BLPI," p. 12.
13 "Report of the Provisional Central Committee of the BLPI," p. 12.
14 Letter from Raj Narayan Arya to author, 31 March 1997. Apparently Vishwanath
Singh, an MSc student at Agra who had been recruited to Trotskyism, met Sitanshu
Das in jail.
15 Interview with Raj NarayanArya, 21 April 1974. Hector Abhayavardhana describes
Shastri as a man with "pathological leadership fantasies" who "was not interested
in building the party, except the party that was around him." Interview with Hector
134
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Madura
The BLPI group in Madura made its greatest progress on the labor
front. The Trotskyists developed footholds in the Madura Mills and the
135
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Harvey Mills, the largest British-owned textile mills east of Suez. The
Tamil mill workers, despite their "primordial loyalties of caste and
religion," were receptive to a militant alternative to the CPI. 21 When
the BLPI called a meeting, several thousand attended "to hear what the
Trotskyists were saying." 22 By 1944 the Madura unit had recruited a
dozen mill workers.
Madras
The Madras group likewise made headway on the labor front. In late
1942 the Trotskyists went into the MSM railway workshops located in
Perambur, on the outskirts of Madras. 24 The workshops had a long
136
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
2S In 1905, when the Extremist leader Tilak was sentenced, the Perambur railway
workers were the first to protest by staging a peaceful dharna for a few days. The
famous Theosophists, Dr Annie Besant and GS. Arundale, who pioneered the
Home Rule Movement, spread the message of nationalism among the Perambur
workers. In 1919 the reformers launched the Madras and Southern Maratta Railway
Employees' Union (known as M&SM). During the Civil Disobedience movement
in 1932 the Perambur workers occupied the workshops, staged processions and
public meetings, and went on strike for 77 days to protest the arrest of Gandhi and
Vallabhai Pate!.
26 The strike led to violent confrontations with the police, who opened fire on the
"rioting" strikers. IOL: LIPJ/5/208. File Po!. 12081/1945.
27 E.D. Murphy, "The Madras Labour Union, 1918-1922," Economic and Social
History Review (July-September 1977). In 1918 a Theosophist social-reformer,
B.P. Wadia, organized the mill workers into the Madras Labour. Binnys broke his
first strike. Another nationalist, T. V. Kalyanasundara Mudaliar, revived the union
and for 15 years battled Binnys to win recognition and the 8-hour day. Thiru V.
Kalyanasundara Mudaliar (1883-1953), popularly known as "Thiru Vi. Ka.," was a
well-known Tamil scholar, writer, poet, and trade-union pioneer. He co-founded
the Madras Labour Union with B. P. Wadia and started the Tamil weekly
Navasakthi in 1920. He was elected president of the Tamil Nadu Congress
Committee in 1926. He wrote nearly 50 books on a variety of subjects and followed
the teachings of Saint Sri Vallalar Ramalinga Swamigal. He retired from trade-
union and political activity in 1947.
137
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
28 "Notes from Tamilnad," Internal Bulletin, no. 2 (September, 1945), pp. 17-18.
29 "Notes from Tamilnad," p. 18.
30 Ceylon Daily News, 12 April 1945.
l38
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
31 The conference met September 20-25, 1944. "The All-India Conference of the
BLPI," Permanent Revolution, vo\. 2, no. 3 (October-December 1944), pp. 11-12.
Hoover: LSH, box 53. Reprinted: "India," Fourth International, April 1945, p. 126.
32 K. Tilak [Leslie Goonewardena], Letter to the Secretary, International Secretariat,
4th International, 25 July 1944. Hoover: SWP Papers, box 38.
II The delegates were Amar [Vinayak Purohit] from Bombay; Gupta [Indra Sen] and
Carlo Roy [V. Karalasingham] from Calcutta; Menon [S.C.C. Anthony Pillai] from
Madras.; "Somu [Sundarh Rajan]" from Madura; "Ganesha" and "Jayasinghe"
from Ceylon. "Minutes of the First Representative Conference of the BLPI," 25
September 1944.
34 The invitees were Tilak [Leslie Goonewardene], Nazeem [Sitanshu Das], Livera
[Doric de Souza], S.P. [Selina Perera], Manickam [Bodi M. Muthiah], Ranadhir
[Karuna Kant Roy], Surendra [Hector Abhayavardhana], Desai [?], and Govindan
[Colvin de Silva].
35 "The Present Political Situation in India," theses passed by the Political Committee,
4 August 1944. Typed with handwritten edits, 17 pages. Hoover: SWP Papers, box
38. Reprinted in Permanent Revolution, vo\. 2, nos. 2-3 (April-December 1944),
pp. 13-28. Hoover: LSH, box 53. Also Fourth International (October 1944), pp.
301-07; and Quatrieme Internationale (July-August 1945), pp. 25-27.
36 "The Present Political Situation in India," p. 14.
139
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
membership." 37 The BLPI believed that the right turn of the Congress
leaders would force the wavering Congress Leftists to "break with the
bourgeoisie."
140
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
141
The Trotskyist Movement in India and eeylon
142
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
143
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
In practice the CPI helped to build the Muslim League. The CPI
instructed its student members at Aligarh Muslim University to join the
All India Muslim Students Federation. 58 In Kerala E.M.S. Namboodripad
55 In September, 1942 the CPI central committee passed a resolution stating: "Every
section of the Indian people which has a contiguous territory as its homeland,
common historical tradition, common language, culture, psychological make-up,
and common economic life would be recognized as a distinct nationality with the
right to exist as an autonomous state within the free Indian Union or federation and
will have the right to secede from it ifit may so desire." Reprinted in N.K. Krishnan
(ed.), National Unity for the Defence of the Motherland (Bombay, 1943), pp. 24-
25. The "Adhikari Thesis" is reprinted in Amar Farooqui (ed.), Remembering Dr.
Gangadhar Adhikari: Selectionsfram Writings. Part 11. (New Delhi, 2000).
S6 The September, 1942 CPI resolution recognized the right of self-determination for
"the Muslims wherever they are in an overwhelming majority in a contiguous
territory which is their homeland." Reprinted in N.K. Krishnan (ed.), National
Unity for the Defence of the Motherland. p. 25.
57 Sajjad Zaheer, A Case for Congress-League Unity (Bombay, 1944), p. i. Zaheer
said the demand for Pakistan was the "logical expression of the development of
political consciousness among the Muslim peoples of India."
58 Mushirul Hasan, Legacy of a Divided Nation: India s Muslims Since Independence
(Boulder, 1997), p. 113.
144
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
145
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
During the war the American and British Trotskyists tried to help their
Indian and Ceylonese comrades. The mail was no longer reliable. The
American Trotskyists began a secret courier operation. Even after the
war, the operation was kept secret. 65 But thanks to the documents
62 Sitanshu Das, "The Pakistan Slogan and the Right of Self-Determination," Internal
Bulletin, no. 2 (September 1945), pp. 8-9. Hull: Haston, DJH/15G/14b.
63 "The Pakistan Slogan and the Right of Self-Determination," p. 10.
64 Henry Judd [Stanley Plastrick], "Behind the Hindu-Moslem Strife: National or
Religious Question?" The New International (December 1946), p. 300.
6S Jean van Heijenoort, the Fourth International's secretary stationed in New York
who used the name, "R. Clapper," remained tight-lipped about these covert
operations long after the war had ended. His biographer writes, "Only after insistent
questioning did he finally explain that the Socialist Workers Party had a network of
seamen, rank-and-file members of the SWP who had joined the merchant marine
instead of waiting to be drafted into the army or navy. These men sailed all over the
world and acted as couriers. They were able to deliver and receive letters,
newspapers, journals and other documents as well as messages which gave news
about what was happening in the areas they reached." Anita Burdman Feferman,
Politics, Logic, and Love: The Life ofJean van Heijenoort (Wellesley, 1993), p. 189.
146
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
deposited in the Hoover Archives, we now know what the SWP did and
how they did it. 66
Getting the literature ashore undetected was dicey. The sailors had
to pass through checkpoints on the docks. "The Militants can be
securely fastened under your trousers between the ankle and knee, and
the pamphlets put in your shorts, if you should come to this dock.
Books that are too bulky have t~ be cut in half." 68 Once ashore, the
couriers had to find their contacts. The seamen had to memorize their
names and addresses before they even boarded their ships. 69 Most of
the contacts lived in "native" neighborhoods that were off limits to
military personnel and sailors. The couriers had to navigate a maze of
unfamiliar, narrow alleys after dark without attracting unwanted
attention.
66 Report to the SWP, n.d. [circa July 1942]; Report to SWP, typed, no name and n.d.
[April 1944]; ["Comrade Hafer"], untitIed report, n.d. [December 1944]; Hoover:
SWP Papers, box 38.
67 Report to SWP, typed, no name and n.d. [Apri11944].
68 ["Comrade Hafer"], untitled report, n.d. [December 1944], p. 2.
69 In the Hoover archives there is a 2-page, typed list of names and addresses for open
party sympathizers in India and Ceylon with links to the underground Trotskyists.
Hoover: SWP Papers, box 38.
70 Report to SWP, typed, no name and n.d. [April 1944].
147
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
leader, P.K. (Nitai) Roy. "After asking several taxi drivers for the
address 1 was seeking, 1 found one who said he knew where the place I
wanted was. Nevertheless, after driving around for a considerable
length of time he confessed that he could not find the address 1 wanted.
We then stopped at a nearby Cafe to ask directions and an obliging
young man not only volunteered the information but also insisted on
getting into the cab to direct me." The helpful man turned out to be a
cop. Fortunately, the doctor had already gone to bed. "I then took the
police officer home and then taking still another cab, I circled back and
made contact with comrade Nitai. I explained the incident of the police
officer guide to Nitai, and he told me we had a very narrow escape, as
the police had been investigating their place several times recently."
148
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Manickam informed Scott that the BLPI had given out leaflets at
the union festival that very day. "But comrade," Scott asked, "how do
you give out leaflets? You are illegal." Manickam replied, "We tie them
here," raising the tails of his long shirt and pointing to his waist. "We
go into the crowd, let them fall to the ground, nobody knows who
dropped the leaflets but everyone takes one and they distribute
themselves. "
Manickam asked Scott to meet him the next day. He was still
testing this stranger. They went to a cafe and talked. Manickam told
Scott he would arrange another rendezvous later that day with a higher-
73 The M&SM Railway Employees Union Silver Jubilee was celebrated from 21 July
to 24 July 1944. IOL: LlPJ/5/207. File Po!. 746911944.
74 L. Scott, "Red Passage to India," typescript, [1944]. Hoover: SWP Papers, box 38.
149
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Later that day Manickam took Scott to a meet some of the party's
sympathizers from the Perambur railway workshops. They met in a hut
in the slums. None of the Tamil workers could speak English.
Manickam translated. Scott saw what it meant to be a Trotskyist in India.
Here, in a hovel, lit only by flickering candles, the BLPI was teaching
Marxism to illiterate workers who had just come off a 12-hour shift.
The British Trotskyists used their members who were serving in the
armed forces in India as a conduit to the BLPI and the LSSP. Several
were stationed in Calcutta and they were able to make contact with the
BLPI group there. The BLPI regarded all members of foreign sections
as automatic members of the Indian section for the duration of their
stay. These servicemen had the opportunity to observe the work of the
party close-up and participate in internal meetings.
75 Quoted in Sam Bomstein and Al Richardson, War and the International: A History
of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain 1937-1949 (London 1986), p. 86.
150
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Garbutt was struck by the sheer size and diversity of India. "India
is larger than Western Europe. It should not be surprising that
conditions vary so much-rather that they correspond to the degree that
they do." 77 Garbutt emphasized that the BLPI should work within the
"bourgeois" Congress in some areas. "At Trivandrum, in the native
states, an influential group inside the Congress has accepted our
programme and is in contact with the Party. The group has a wide
working class base but needs further ideological development before
entering the party. Due to the continued repression here, the Congress
presents the only field of work at the moment."
Fred Bunby was attached to the 136 Repair and Salvage Unit of
the RAF. Bunby made contact with several BLPI branches. 78 Bunby
sent his reports and documents back to the British party by the "Green
envelopes" and "privilege air letters" used by British forces in India. 79
He participated actively in the BLPI, writing documents under the party
name, "M. Usman."
16 Douglas Garbutt to E.R. Frank [Bert Cochran], 29 April 1946. Hoover: SWP
Papers, box 38.
11 D.G [Douglas Garbutt], "Report on the Fourth International Movement in India."
1B Fred Bunby to Jim (lames P. Cannon], 3 February 1945. Hoover: SWP Papers, box
38.
19 "Notes on Communications Between Egypt, Palestine, India, and England, United
States of America," from "Eric" to the C.C. of the RCP, 5 March 1945. Hull:
Haston, Dlli/15F/8.
BD Frank T. Reilly, known as "Tommy," was originally from Glasgow, where he had
joined the Independent Labour Party. In 1938 he moved to London and joined the
Workers International League, one of the Trotskyist groups then functioning in
Britain. At the onset of WWII, anticipating government repression, he shifted to
Ireland with Jock Haston, Gerry Healy, and others to set up a clandestine party
center with printing press. He was part of the First Wing B.B.R.C. in India in 1945.
151
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
(Scottish Rifles), part of the South East Asia Command. Like Bunby,
he helped to obtain badly needed literature for the BLPI. 81
Roy and Sastry recruited more Indians to the party, including A.V.
Angadi, a journalist who had become a Trotskyist in the late 'thirties. 84
The RCP made inroads into the Indian political milieu formerly
dominated by the Communist Party. The RCP developed close relations
152
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Tenacious Optimism
Despite all the obstacles, the BLPI remained optimistic. "Even if not
again during the war, then assuredly after the war, India, and with it the
whole world, will witness an upsurge of the masses the like of which
the world has not yet seen. For that upsurge we must prepare patiently
from now on." 87 That upsurge would come sooner than the BLPI
imagined.
153
CHAPTER SIX
The Trotskyists attributed the failure of the Quit India revolt to the lack
of a "revolutionary leadership." But how could their tiny group, new to
the scene and forced to operate underground, possibly provide that
leadership? The Communist Party and the Royists, with the help of the
government, had the labor movement in their grip. How could the
Trotskyists "short-circuit the official leadership of the working class
organizations and get through to the worker masses?" 1
In the history of the left there are examples aplenty of how a small
group facing enormous odds gets consumed in factionalism. That is
exactly what happened to the BLPI. This struggle, fought in the depths
of the underground, has never been adequately explained. It was
confusing, murky, and messy. In this chapter I reconstruct what
happened during those fateful years 1942-43 , based on memoirs of
participants, interviews, and contemporary party documents. 2
154
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Leslie Goonewardene, A Short History o/the Lanka Sama Samaja Party. p. 15.
Robert Gunawardena, "My Political Life," Daily Mirror, 4 December 1971.
155
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
156
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
In 1931 Philip Gunawardena, using the pseudonym "Gamaralla," wrote to Dr. S.A.
Wickremasinghe in Ceylon stating that "he hopes to form Marxist Study groups
there, by correspondence, before his return, taking over personal control in due
course." IOL: LlPJ/12/409, folio 23. A few months later, in a follow-up letter to
Wickremasinghe, dated 3 October 1931, he suggested that the Youth Leagues could
be transformed into a revolutionary organization "with an iron discipline and a
crystal clear ideology." IOL: LlPJ/12/409, folio 28. In November, 1931 he drafted
a document on the need for a Communist Party in Ceylon. IOL: LlPJ/12/409, folio
30.
10 Hector Abhayavardhana, "Marxism and Some Features of the Lanka Sama Samaja
Party," reprinted in Raj an Philips (ed.), Sri Lanka: Global Challenges and National
Crises, pp. 375-76.
11 Hector Abhayavardhana, "The War: Its Importance in Colvin's Development as a
Marxist Leader," Lanka Guardian, 15 June 1982, p. 13.
12 Arjuna, Pilip Gunavardhana caritaya (Moratuwa, 1969), p. 86; and "Report of the
Provisional Central Committee of the BLP!."
157
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
At that point there were several dynamics at play. When Philip was
arrested in 1940, the LSSP leadership collective changed. Philip was
no longer the dominant party leader. His lieutenants, N.M. Perera and
Colvin de Silva, were likewise removed. Doric de Souza became the
rising star. But Philip was not about to relinquish his throne. The initial
skirmish thus had a generational aspect, the Old Guard versus the
Young Turks.
Second, there was an ideological change. Before the war the LSSP
avoided doctrinaire politics. But after the Stalinists were expelled the
LSSP had to make up for lost time. The party intellectuals embraced
Trotskyism with a passion. Doric was fanatical. He could debate the
fine points of Marxist doctrine with other educated comrades. The
intellectuals could devour the latest Trotskyist journal received from
London or New York. But the LSSP trade unionists couldn't read or
understand English at that level. The ideological development of the
party, healthy in itself, thus opened a rift.
158
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Third, there were cultural and class tensions. Doric was Goan in
background. He was the epitome of the brainy, cosmopolitan, Marxist
intellectual. He also had the reputation for being arrogant and
demanding. The party workers were more comfortable with an
intellectual like N.M. Perera, who for all his learning had an easy-going
manner, than with Doric, an Anglicized intellectual who could barely
speak Sinhalese.
The Enigma
Caged in his cell, Philip Gunawardena had more on his mind than just
organizational questions. Something had happened in the party. It
involved his wife, Kusuma. Someone had done something that
offended and infuriated Philip. 15 Rightly or wrongly, Philip blamed
Doric de Souza, who was responsible for looking after Kusuma while
he was in jail. Whatever happened, it deeply wounded Philip. When he
was spirited out of jail on April 7, 1942, he was gunning for Doric.
That was when all hell broke loose in the LSSP.
15 In his memoirs Regi Siriwardena, who knows what really happened, states that
Philip suffered "a deep emotional disturbance that he was unable to control." Regi
Siriwardena, Working Underground. p. 54. Hector Abhayavardhana speculates that
Philip suspected, rightly or wrongly, that "Doric waS'. conspiring against him."
Interview with Hector Abhayavardhana and Osmond Jayaratne, 18 December 1997.
See also Hector Abhayavardhana, "Marxism and Some Features ofthe Lanka Sama
Samaja Party," p. 384; and, his introduction to Pulsara Liyanage, Vivi: A Biography
of Vi vien ne Goonewardene (Colombo, n.d.), p. 43.
16 Regi Siriwardena, Working Underground. p. 53. Regi Siriwardena recalls that the
meeting took place at "a large house that had probably been built for a Muslim
family." After the jailbreak the four leaders had hid together in a house in Nawala
which had been provided by Allan Mendis. After a while, Philip shifted to "The
Fortress," a huge mansion in Kollupitiya which belonged to a Muslim. Robert
Gunawardena, "My Political Life," Mirror, 4 December 1971. Kusuma, Philip's
wife, joined him shortly later at this house in Kollupitiya. Lakmali Gunawardena,
Kusuma: A Life in Left Politics (Colombo, 2004), p. 14.
159
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
all along where Leslie Goonewardene had been hiding. He knew where
the party press was concealed. He had driven one of the getaway cars
in the jailbreak. If he were a Judas, why were the police unable to find
Leslie or the press? Why did they allow the jailbreak to occur? The
accusation seemed prepost~rous.
Factional Warfare
In July, 1942, most of the LSSP leaders left for India. The exodus posed
anew the question of who should fill the vacancies in the Ceylon party
committee. "When Doric once again brought up the matter of filling
the vacancies with university graduates," recalls Robert Gunawardena,
"I lost my temper and nearly committed violence. But those around me
held me and prevented me." The feuding generated too much heat and
not enough light.
With the senior leaders gone, matters went from bad to worse in
Ceylon. A few months later a signific'ant section of the party rebelled
against the "petty bourgeois intellectuals." It was not a matter of a few
dissidents here and there. The opposition included a number of
founding party members, such as Susan de Silva, as well as most of
160
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
the trade unionists. They felt that Doric and his circle had hijacked the
party and were taking it in the wrong direction. Some rank-and-file
workers raised the slogan, "A Workers' Leadership for a Workers'
Party." This group was strong. They all lived in the same working-class
section of Colombo, which the locals dubbed "Trotskypura," or Trotsky
Town.
When this news reached Bombay, the Ceylonese leaders fonned a
"Workers Opposition faction" in solidarity with their followers in
Ceylon. 19 Philip Gunawardena, N.M. Perera, and Colvin de Silva were
the leading lights. 20 The Platform of the Workers Opposition
denounced the "petty bourgeois intellectuals" in Ceylon who had
turned the LSSP into "a narrow conspiratorial sect entirely cut off from
the masses." 21 Colvin de Silva declared that "the party cannot be
restored to health, unity and effectiveness unless this faction is
smashed." 22
19 The "Workers Opposition" faction was formed in October, 1942. The platform of
the faction was signed by nine expatriate Ceylonese leaders, including Philip
Gunawardena, N.M. Perera, and Colvin de Silva.
20 Other supporters of the Workers Opposition in Bombay included Hector
Abhayavardhana and Lionel Cooray. Leslie and Vivienne Goonewardene seem to
have kept neutral.
21 Quoted in "Report of the Provisional Central Committee of the BLPI," 20
September 1944.
22 "Platform of the Workers Opposition," August 1942.
23 Document dated 22 September 1942 and signed by 13 members of the Ceylon
Regional Committee, quoted in "Report of the Provisional Central Committee of
the BLPI," 20 September 1944.
161
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The BLPI Bureau suspended the three and instructed the Ceylon
comrades to convene a party conference. 26 An interim committee,
162
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
163
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Role Reversal
The situation in India changed dramatically over the next six months.
The Cripps Mission came and went. The Congress Left was clamoring
for action. There were sporadic outbursts oflabor militancy. Following
these events from afar, Phi lip Gunawardena sensed that a great struggle
was in the offing. If so, there would not be as much time for
propagandistic preparation as he had hoped just a few months earlier.
And so he supported the formation of the BLPI in May, 1942.
164
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
When Gandhi posed the Quit India ultimatum two months later,
Philip concluded that, ready or not, the BLPI would have to enter the
fray under its own banner. "The Indian bourgeoisie will start a civil
disobedience movement. When this movement develops and is
transformed into a mass movement, the working class will wrest its
leadership from the bourgeoisie. Under the unstained red banner of the
Fourth International, the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India will show
the way to the working class." 34 After writing those lines, he and his
comrades set out for India.
Once in Bombay the Ceylonese joined the local party group, which
was still using its pre-merger name, Bolshevik Mazdoor Party (BMP).
That in itself was symptomatic. C.V. Shukla, the local leader, ran the
group like it was still an independent party, his party. He wanted the
BLPI to be named BMP, rather than vice versa. He insisted on
maintaining exclusive control over his printing press, which he kept
hidden, and his group in Ahmedabad, which was independently
publishing its own newspaper, Inkilab [Revolution].
The Ceylonese transplants were appalled at this state of affairs.
They pressed Shukla to relinquish the press and integrate his groups
and newspapers. Shukla resisted. He wouldn't reveal where the press
was hidden. 35 Philip Gunawardena called Shukla a "narrow-minded
provincial." But Shukla had the Ceylonese over a barrel. On their own,
they couldn't do much in Bombay. They were foreigners, wanted by
the police, unfamiliar with the political scene, and unable to speak the
local languages. And so the Ceylonese leaders didn't force a showdown.
When the Quit India revolt erupted, the Bombay group suddenly
had new openings and new opportunities to pursue. Shukla wanted the
BLPI to intervene like a mass party, even though the Bombay branch
165
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
and paid party workers." 42 He said the Ceylonese used their personal
money to control the party. Shukla, who refused to hand over his
printing press, had the gall to accuse the Ceylonese of having "a
separate cyclostyle press and stock of paper, without the party being
aware of it, under its own control." 43
Shukla provoked Philip one time too many. Shukla had been sent
to a union convention. He procrastinated writing his report. At an
editorial board meeting, when asked again for the report, Shukla
replied that it was now so out of date it would be useless. Philip lost his
temper. He rose, grabbed Shukla by his shoulders, and shook him.
According to Hector Abhayavardhana, who was living with Phi lip and
Kusuma at that point, Philip came home from the meeting sorry for
what he had done. 44 He apologized to the central committee later.
When the police smashed the party a month later, Shukla managed
to avoid arrest (leading some of his former comrades to question his
bona fides). He continued to publish the Bolshevik Leninist, in the
name of the BMP and the Fourth International, as if nothing had
happened. 46 The BLPI denounced the BMP for "theft of the party
42 "Causes and the Significance of the Split in the Bolshevik Mazdoor Party ofIndia,
Section Fourth International," undated 5-page typescript, copy in the Haston
Archives, Hull University. Though unsigned, this is almost certainly by Shukla.
43 Letter to the Bureau, Fourth International, signed by Chandravadan Shukla and
seven other members of the Bolshevik Mazdoor Party, dated 7 August 1944.
44 Interview with Hector Abhayavardhana, Colombo, December 17-18,1997.
45 Letter from Leslie Goonewardene to the author, dated 30 April 1975.
46 See for example "Sampurn swatantrya ke /iye" [For complete independence],
BMP leaflet, dated January 26,1944.
167
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
press." 47 Recalling these events many years later, Shukla admits that
the rupture was motivated mainly by personal clashes and secondary
issues. 48 "The period of illegality," he said, "prevented full democracy
within the underground party. That increased the frictions within the
BLPI over organizational issues."
The BMP was almost a carbon copy of the BLPL Shukla claimed
his group was the true representative of the Fourth International in
India. 49 The BMP churned out a lot ofliterature for such a small group:
two journals, the Bolshevik Leninist and Jagat Kranti [World
Revolution], and a mass newspaper, Age Kadam [Forward March].
Shukla had recruited some energetic young members. 50 Shukla let his
fantasies of "mass leadership" flourish. He predicted that the revolution
in India would commence within two years. 51 "We are sure that the
BM PI will grow to its full stature as a political Marxist party of the
Indian proletariat within two years."52 Despite these over-optimistic
47 "To Our Readers," Permanent Revolution, July-September 1943, p. 25. The BLPI
reported to the Fourth International that Shukla split "due principally to his
disinclination to submit himself and the Ahmedabad organization (with which he
was the sole link) to the organizational discipline of the party." Letter to Secretary,
International Secretariat, Fourth International, from K. Tilak [Leslie
Goonewardene], dated July 25,1944. SWP Papers, Hoover Archives.
48 Interview with C.V. Shukla, 27 December 1973.
49 Letter from Bolshevik Mazdoor Party to Secretary, I.S., 7 August 1944; Letter from
Chandravadan Shukla to International Secretariat, El., 26 June 1945.
50 In late 1943 the Chief Secretary of the Bombay government informed New Delhi
that the BMP was distributing leaflets at students meetings. IOL: LlPJ/51164. File
Pol. 2673/1944.
51 According to the government, one of Shukla's leaflets urged students to prepare
"for the revolution which, in its opinion, will probably occur next summer in view
of the conditions prevailing.in· India at present." Report by H. Y.R. lengar, Home
Department (Special) to Conran-Smith, Secretary to Government of India, Home
Department,2 December 1943, p. 3. IOL: LlPJ/51164. In May 1945 the BMP
central committee passed a resolution calling upon Indian labor "to prepare itself
for the leadership of the Indian revolution, under the banner of its revolutionary
party, the BMPI, section Fourth International." "Resolution on Indian Political
Situation and Our Tasks," Bolshevik Leninist. vol. 4, no. 6 (May-July 1945), p. 20 .
. 52 Letter to the Bureau, Fourth International, 7 August 1944.
168
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
53 Leading BMPI members in Bombay at this time were Shanta Patel, Tulsi Boda,
Vasant Joshi, Tulsi Panchal, Nagjibhai Tapiawala, and Hansa Mehta.
54 "Bolshevik Mazdoor Party Addresses the Revolutionary Youths and Students," 20
March 1944; "For Complete Independence," 26 January 1944; and "Prepare for
the Coming Revolution," 9 August 1944. Hoover: LSH, box 52.
55 "To Comrades Raju, Rao, Randhir."
56 "The Indian Struggle, The Next Phase," typescript, 20 pages, n.d., signed "D.P.R.
Gunawardena, N.M. Perera. Lanka Sama Samaja Party. Section of the Fourth
International." Hull: Haston, DJH 15G/14b. Mukundlal Sirear, the General
Secretary of the All-India Forward Bloc, smuggled the document out of the jail.
Sirear was an important link between the Bombay Forward Block group and the
main party based in Bengal.
169
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Philip and Perera started from the premise that the revolutionary
groups were too small to make an impact on their own. Therefore, the
"genuine revolutionaries" in those parties should join together to fonn
a "united revolutionary front" functioning on an all-India basis. 57 The
document names four candidates for this merger in addition to the
BLPI: the Congress Socialist Party, the Forward Block, the
Revolutionary Communist Party led by Saumyendranath Tagore, and
the Bengal group led by Philip's old friend from London days,
Niharendu Datta Mazumdar. 58 The "central executive representing the
merging units" would work out "the details of the programme."
However, they did insist that the minimum precondition would have to
be rejection of Gandhian non-violence and support for "not merely a
national revolution but a social revolution and the dictatorship of the
proletariat." In this new party the Trotskyists would fight for
leadership. "As the only genuinely revolutionary organisation based on
class struggle and aimed at the dictatorship of the proletariat, we are
convinced that the future is with us."
The "Bolshevik" faction around Doric de Souza vigorously
opposed this strategy. In their mind the first duty of the BLPI was to
preserve its independence, as the only expression of the revolutionary
vanguard in India. The "Bolsheviks" cited the letter that Trotsky had
sent to Selina Perera in 1939, after she had tried to enter Mexico to
visit him. Trotsky stated that Indian Fourth Internationalists, while
supporting any anti-imperialist measures the Congress and "their petty
bourgeois agencies" might take, "must not confound our organization,
our program, our banner with theirs for a moment." 59
170
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
This proposal was not considered by the BLPI as a whole until the
first party conference in 1944. At that point all the Workers Opposition
leaders were back in jail. The "Bolsheviks" thus had no problem
defeating the proposal. "This proposal, we believe, if carried out, can
only result in the dissolution of the only party (however small it may
be) existing in India today with a clear-cut revolutionary programme,
and the creation in its place at the best of a broad centrist party." 63
171
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Time Out
On the other side the "Bolsheviks" had no clue how to get the
BLPI to critical mass. In their view the formal independence of the
party was sacrosanct. The BLPI would just have to soldier on,
recruiting members one by one. The BLPI leaders had faith in Trotsky's
prediction that the war would beget revolution. And when that
happened, the masses would flock to their party.
As we shall see in subsequent chapters, the factionalism resumed
with a vengeance after the war. All of the unresolved issues surfaced
again.
172
CHAPTER SEVEN
When the war ended, Britain faced a thorny political situation in India.
The Congress leftists were clamoring for a resumption of mass
struggle. The British troops were war weary and in no mood to remain
in India to put down unrest. Viceroy Wavell invited Congress and the
Muslim League to a summit conference at Simla. His goal was to bring
both parties into an expanded Executive Council. But the Congress and
League deadlocked. Jinnah insisted that all Muslim members of the
council would have to be Muslim Leaguers. The conference collapsed.
Shortly thereafter, the Labour Party won the general elections and
formed a government. The new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, was a
Fabian Socialist who favored Indian freedom. The Secretary of State,
Lord Pethick-Lawrence, admired Gandhi. Sir Stafford Cripps
suggested that a constituent assembly be created in India. On August
21, 1945 Wavell announced that elections would be held during "the
cold weather."
Rita Hinden, The Labour Party and the Colonies (London, 1946), p. 9.
173
The Trotskyist Movement in India alld Ceylon
2 P.C. Joshi, For the Final Bid for Power (Bombay, 1945), p. 118.
Quoted in D.G. [Douglas Garbutt], "Report on the Fourth International Movement
in India." emphasis in original.
4 "C.C. Report Presented to Party Convention Beginning May 1, 1947," Internal
Bulletin, vol. 2, no. 1 [May 1947], p. 12. Hoover: LSH, box 52.
174
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
at least paid lip service to the Quit India movement. But they put more
teeth into their proposal. They added two additional criteria, namely
opposition to the Gandhian Constructive Programme and to Congress
trade unions. In the United Provinces the small BLPI group called for
outright support to Congress.
The Central Committee re-convened and after two days of debate
adopted the "conditional support" position. The party prepared an
election manifesto, appropriately titled Vote for August - Vote for
Struggle. 5 The whole thrust was a call for renewed struggle against
British imperialism. "We, Fourth Internationalists, say clearly to the
masses: the elections open no road to freedom from national subjection
and economic exploitation; they open the road only to a re-arranged
imperialist-bourgeois-feudalist alliance that can signify only imperialist
domination reinforced."
The manifesto attacked the "Pakistan" slogan as a "pipe dream of
the Muslim feudalists," a "imperialist manouevre," and a "deceitful
slogan." The manifesto also attacked "the Congress policy of refusing
the rights of independence and secession to Indian nationalities. We
stand for the fullest right of self-determination for all nationalities, but
we point out that the very opportunity for the exercise of these rights
can arise only outside the imperialist structure." [emphasis in original]
The CC resolution, "The Tasks of the Party in the Coming Elections," formed the
basis for the party's election manifesto, Vote for August. Vote for Struggle
[December, 1945]. The pamphlet was translated into Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, and
Hindi.
175
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
In any case the BLPI manifesto concluded that the elections really
weren't all that important anyway. "Let the imperialists and the
bourgeoisie patch up their new agreements: they cannot halt the masses
on the march. For the day, let us prepare! For the day, let us plan! In
elections, through elections, and, more, independent ofelections /" That
day came sooner than anyone expected.
The Inside Story of the Calcutta Demonstrations (Calcutta, 1945), p. 12. Copy in
author's possession. Reprinted as "Les fusillades policieres de Calcutta,"
Quatrieme Internationale (August-s"eptember 1946), pp. 57-60.
Satyen Koley was a student at Presidency College. He became co-editor of the
BLPI's Bengali-Ianguage newspaper, Inquilab. along with Dulal Bose. Koley later
became the vice president of the Paschim Banga Patrika and Press Workers Union.
New Spark. 14 August 1948.
176
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
buses and trams. 12 As the violence escalated, the CPI, which controlled
the transport workers union, pulled the trams off the streets. The CPI,
however, was reacting to events, not leading the protests. The CPI
organzed a labor rally in Muhammad Ali Park, deliberately keeping the
workers separate from the students in Wellington Square. The CPI
called for an "enquiry" into the police violence, and left it at that. 13
The protests continued into the third day. The BLPI led two big
processions to Sraddhananda Park for a mass rally. The Trotskyist
youth, in the thick of the action, argued against senseless heroics or
adventurism. "The Trotskyist students who were seen addessing street-
corner meetings explained why interference with the military at the
given stage should be avoided." 14 Troops opened fire at least 14 times,
killing another 33 and wounding 200 more. A hundred and fifty police
and military vehicles were torched; 70 British and 37 American
soldiers were injured.
The Congress feared that the disorders were getting out of control.
Nehru told Sarat Bose to "get all these irresponsible demonstrations
ended, so that a normal atmosphere of peace may be created as soon as
possible." 15 The Congress President, Maulana Azad, appealed to the
students in Calcutta to desist from any more demonstrations. The
Congress student federation withdrew. The movement had reached a
critical juncture.
The Stalinists joined with the Congress and Muslim League to defuse
the situation. The Central Intelligence Officer in Calcutta reported that
178
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
"there was a definite move on the part of both the CPI and the Congress
to take active steps to stop further disorders." 16 The governor of Bengal
reported, "Congress and some Communist propaganda cars toured the
affected areas dissuading the students from further participation." 17
Round Two
On February 11, 1946 the joint Hindu-Muslim students rally took place
in Calcutta. The Trotskyist activist, Haradhan Chatterji, was one of the
speakers. 20 When police fired on the students, rioting broke out.
179
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
180
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
leaflet the BLPI called upon the radical students to "link themselves
with the proletarian class struggle and break with the bourgeois
Congress." 25 But the CPI leaders didn't sit on the fence very long.
Once again the CPI joined with the Congress and Muslim League to try
to calm the crowds. But the militants had experienced one Stalinist
betrayal and didn't want another. Crowds attacked the CPI "peace
vans." 26 The British put down the uprising after 72 hours. Over 200
were jailed, and 84 were killed.
Less than a week later the British government faced a new threat in
Bombay. Indian ratings (enlisted men) in the Royal Indian Navy
mutinied. Trouble had been brewing in the RIN for some time. The
ratings resented the bad food, low pay, and racist abuse from their
commanding officers. The INA trials had an effect, too. As one rating
recalled, "For the first time, many of us started feeling: What have we
been fighting for-the preservation of empire? Shouldn't our own
country be free?" 27
The ratings decided to mutiny to get the attention of Congress. "If
all of us refuse to eat breakfast, that will be mutiny; and once the
mutiny happens, we'll take over the navy. Once we take over the navy,
those national leaders who have gone underground to fight the British
will come and lead us." 28 Some approached the CPI in Bombay.
However, the CPI leaders refused to support their plan and told the
ratings "to stay with the rest." 29 The ratings got a better reception from
Aruna Asaf Ali, the Congress Socialist Party leader. The fact is the
ratings were on their own from the start.
181
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The revolt started on Monday, February 18, 1946 at the RIN shore
signal school, HMIS Talwar. After confronting their officers the
ringleaders seized the communications room and broadcast their revolt
to every ship and shore base. A little after midnight ratings at HMIS
Hernia joined the mutiny. The revolt spread quickly to 22 ships in
Bombay harbour and the Castle Barracks and Fort Barracks shore
bases. Many petty officers, and a few ranking officers, joined the
rebels.
The next morning mutineers seized military vehicles in the
dockyards and drove around Bombay shouting slogans in support of
the INA prisoners. The Central Strike Committee issued a leaflet which
ended with the call, "Long live the solidarity of workers, soldiers,
students and peasants. Long live the Revolution!" 30 The ratings were
in a celebratory mood. The government held back while the ratings
held a peaceful mass rally and led an orderly march in Bombay.
The BLPI was the first party in Bombay to call for a general strike in
support of the mutiny. "As news of the Naval Mutiny spread through
Bombay," remembers Indra Sen, "the BLPI got its followers together
and decided to call a general strike. Our night workers in the textile
mills-Prabhakar More and Lakshman Jadhav-Ied the third-shift
workers out of the mills. By early morning we had issued a leaflet. We
painted the word, 'Hartal!', on the sidewalks." 31
30 Quoted in Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking ofBritish India (New
York, 1998), p. 593.
31 Interview with Indra Sen, 1 February 1974.
182
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
flag with our device on it!" 32 The "device" refers to the emblem of the
Fourth International-the hammer and sickle with the numeral four.
While the Trotskyists might have been the first to hit the streets,
the general strike in Bombay was essentially spontaneous. The ratings
had appealed to the people of Bombay for support. The textile workers
responded, shutting down 70 of Bombay's 74 cotton mills. On the
morning of the hartal the CPI leadership took out a procession of
30,000 trade-unionists. The Stalinists chanted, "Congress, League, and
Communists, unite!" 33 The CPI emphasized that the hartal should give
"peaceful expression to the protest against military atrocities." 34
The BLPI sent members down to the dock area to make contact
with the mutineers. But the British had massed troops around the shore
stations, cutting the rebels off from the city. Ramesh Karkal, the BLPI
organizer in Bombay, recalled, "we were beset on all sides by trigger-
happy British tomies." 35 At Castle Barracks the ratings broke into the
armoury, seized three machine guns and 150 rifles, and blazed away at
British troops for eight hours. Indian gunners on two ships joined the
battle. The revolt spread to 30,000 sailors on 20 shore bases and 78 ships.
32 Letter from Douglas Garbutt to Frank [E.R. Frank], 29 April 1946. Hoover: SWP
Papers, box 38. The SWP solidarized with the uprising: Robert Birchman,
"Revolutionary Developments in India," Fourth International (May 1946), pp.
158-59; and Indra Sen, "India Correspondence, Fourth International (October
1946), pp. 310-12.
33 G Adhikari (ed.), Strike: The Story o/the Strike in the Indian Navy (New Delhi,
1946).
34 Keka Dutta Ray, Political Upsurges in Post-War India, 1945-46, p. 28.
3S Socialist Appeal [New Delhi], vol. 2, no. 17, late September 1953.
36 Cited in Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking o/British India, p. 598.
183
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Indian Army Service Corps solidarized with the ratings. Ground crews
mutinied in Madras, Karachi, Poona, Allahabad, and Delhi. Nearly
2,000 men in the Royal Indian Army Signal Corps mutinied near
Jabalpur. There were mini-revolts by Indian gunners in Madras,
signallers at Allahabad, and clerical staff at army headquarters in Delhi.
The government had the full support of the Congress and the
Muslim League. On Friday, February 22 the head of the Bombay
Muslim League and the secretary of the Bombay Provincial Congress
Committee called the governor to express "their anxiety to allay the
disturbances, and offering the help of volunteers to assist the police." 37
Gandhi declared that "a combination between Hindus and Muslims and
others for the purpose of violent action was unholy." 38
As the gunfire boomed over Bombay, throngs vented their anger at
symbols of British authority, like banks, post offices, and shops. The
Chief Secretary reported that it was the Congress Socialists, not the
Communists, who were whipping up the "large unruly element." 39
Workers dug up the streets and built barricades. The mill districts
looked like a battle zone. "At a number of places," reported the
Bombay governor, John Colville, "the mob offered determined
resistance, erecting road blocks and covering them from nearby
buildings; anyone who tried to clear the road block was stoned." 40
Jawaharlal Nehru's sister could never forget the sights and sounds of
the battle. "For three days and three nights the shooting and rioting
went on as the city rose in sympathy with the sailors." 41
184
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
42 Anirudh Deshpande, "Sailors and the Crowd: Popular Protest in Karachi, 1946,"
The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vo!. 26, no. I (January-March
1989), p. 12.
43 Anirudh Deshpande, "Sailors and the Crowd: Popular Protest in Karachi, 1946,"
p. 12.
44 Anirudh Deshpande, "Sailors and the Crowd: Popular Protest in Karachi,
1946,"p.13.
45 Gautam Chattopadhyaya, "The Almost Revolution: India in February, 1946,"
Indian Left Review (April 1974), p. 45. This article initiated what has become a
tendency in Indian historiography to "rehabilitate" and prettify the CPI as much as
possible. See for example Sumit Sarkar, "Popular Movements and National
Leadership, 1945-47," Economic and Political Weekly, April 1982, pp. 677-89.
185
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
glorification of' August' and the INA heroes should now stop."
Outgunned and cut off from the city, the ratings surrendered
Saturday morning, February 23. The military arrested over 1,300
ratings and dismissed 1,000, contrary to Patel's promise of no
victmization. Even after the ratings surrendered, there was sporadic
resistance in the mill districts of Bombay. Tanks rumbled through the
streets. Small groups fought guerrilla style. Mosquito bombers roared
overhead. The British light carrier, Glasgow, guns at the ready, steamed
into the harbour. Sympathy strikes continued in Calcutta, Madras,
Madura, and Trichinopoly.
The CPI issued an appeal on Monday, February 25 for all workers
to return to work the next day. 50 The CPI dissociated itselffrom a strike
held that very day to protest the repression. The CPI did, however,
stage a joint rally in Calcutta with Sardar Patel-the man most
responsible for duping the sailors into surrender. 51
186
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The day after the Bombay mutiny broke out Prime Minister AttIee
announced to the House of Commons that His Majesty's Government
would send a cabinet mission to India. The delegation arrived on March
24, 1946, and after touring India for three months invited the Congress
and Muslim League to another summit conference at.Simla. By this
time the Muslim League's position on Pakistan had hardened into an
all-or-nothing ultimatum. 52 The Congress and the League again locked
horns over the issue of communal representation. Wavell announced
that the conference had failed.
52 Jinnah had got the League to pledge to fight for Pakistan. H.S. Suhrawardy, the
Muslim League boss in Bengal, vowed, "Let me honestly declare that every
Muslim of Bengal is ready and prepared to lay down his life." Quoted in Stanley
Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (New York, 1984), p. 260.
53 Spark, no. 5 (Late April 1946), p. 1.
54 Spark, no. 4 (Early April 1946), p. 1.
187
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
188
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
60 Quoted in LeonardA. Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj (New York, 1990), p. 566.
61 Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight (New York,
1975), p. 35.
62 Pulsara Liyanage, Vivi: A Biography of Vivienne Goonewardena (Colombo, 1998),
pp. 42-43.
63 Hector Abhayavardhana, "Selina Perera - The Forgotten Socialist Militant," p. 21.
189
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
190
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
67 Colvin R. de Silva, "The Muslim League, Its Class Role, and the Riots," Internal
Bulletin (23 April 1947), pp. 1-7. Hoover: LSH, box 52. Also K. Tilak [Leslie
Goonewardene], "Character of Direct Action by the League," resolution discussed
in the Calcutta Unit of the BLPI, 8 September 1946, pp. 1-6. Hull: Haston, DJH/
15G/14b.
68 K. Tilak [Leslie Goonewardene], The Rise and Fall of the Comintern: From the
First to the Fourth International (Bombay, 1947), p. 122.
191
CHAPTER EIGHT
The BLPI remained optimistic. Yet the gap between ends and
means was enormous. The BLPI only had a couple hundred members.
Most of the Ceylonese cadres who had been living in India returned
home. I The national office in Bombay couldn't even afford to buy a
typewriter. In 1946 the government forced the BLPI to shut down its
newspaper, Spark, after only five months. The Trotskyists were
muzzled for the next crucial nine months. The BLPI resumed a newspaper,
New Spark, only in April, 1947, just four months l>efore Independence.
192
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
On June 24, 1945 the Ceylon government finally released the LSSP
members from jail at Badulla. The LSSP staged a huge show of support
for the party that the government once had pronounced dead. The
motorcade which brought the party members back to Colombo passed
crowd after crowd of waving villagers who had been mobilized for the
event. In Colombo thousands turned out to wildly cheer the two most
popular leaders, Philip Gunawardena and N.M. Perera.
Behind the scenes, however, the picture was not so rosy. An
American Trotskyist sailor who put ashore in Colombo a week after
the prisoners were released reported that the comrades were divided
along the old factional lines. "From what I can gather each group is
going over the other's documents and past actions with a microscope
looking for flaws." 2 The situation was tense. Philip Gunawardena
hadn't forgiven Doric de Souza. He and his followers gave the local
BLPI group the cold shoulder.
"Personal Report On B.L.P.I.," unsigned, 12 July 1945. Hoover: SWP Papers, box
38. Others also reported that both sides nursed their old grudges and suspicions.
See "Report by a Ceylon Comrade," Internal Bulletin, no. 2 (September 1945), pp.
14-15. Hull: Haston, DJH/15G114b.
Philip Gunawardena had the position, since 1943, that the BLPI was pretty much a
"fiction." He stated that the BLPI "existed merely on paper and at the moment the
supplies were cut off from Ceylon the whole thing would fizzle out." Cited by
Kamalesh Bannerji, in "Extracts from CC Representative's Report to Secretary, CC
ofBLPI," Internal Bulletin (10 April 1947), p. 6. Hoover: LSH, box 52.
193
The Trotskyist Movement in India and eeylon
Colombo. 4 He was openly hostile to the RC. During the strike wave in
Colombo in 1945, he issued leaftlets warning the workers not to trust
the "Parlour Bolsheviks" who had usurped the mantle of the LSSP. 5
After the aborted unity, Philip and N.M. Perera went their own
way, as if the RC didn't exist. They played the media, toured the island,
and visited LSSP members and sympathizers who had fallen away
during the war. They held their meetings in the name of the LSSP. They
resumed the familiar old Samasamajist. Outflanked, the doctrinaire
Trotskyists in the RC saw all this as an attempt to turn the clock back,
to revive the old "Menshevik LSSP" of the prewar years.
When strikes flared in Colombo in late 1945, Phi lip and N.M.
Perera were making headlines once again. Phi lip formed an alliance
with A. Gunasekera, the head of the Ceylon Federation of Labour
(CFL). Gunasekera was a follower of M.N. Roy in India. He had
supported the war and become a trade-union boss. While the purists in
the BLPI saw this as gross opportunism, Philip pulled off a spectacular
coup. Philip was adept at the bear hug tactic. He took over the CFL.
4 Leslie Goonewardene, A Short History a/the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, pp. 22-23.
5 "The Ceylon Unit in the Recent Colombo Strike Wave," Internal Bulletin, no. 2
(September 1945), p. 13. Hull: Haston, DJHI1SG/14b.
194
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Re-Unification
At the end of 1945 the LSSP proposed unity to the Ceylon unit of the
BLPI. The Ceylon unit duly referred the matter to its parent, the Central
Committee of the BLPI in India. The BLPI Central Committee didn't
accept the unity offer until June 1, 1946. It is unclear why there was
such a long delay. In any case the BLPI leadership imposed one
condition: Philip had to either repudiate his charge against Doric and
make a "suitable apology" or submit the matter to a party "court of
Philip Gunawardena mocked the BLPI as a party of lawyers who loved to make
formalistic arguments. Many ofthe BLPI leaders in Ceylon had in fact been trained
as lawyers: Colvin de Silva, Leslie Goonewardene, Edmund Samarakkody,
Cholomondeley Goonewardene, William Silva, and Jack Kotelewala.
"The Ceylon Unit in the Recent Colombo Strike Wave," Internal Bulletin, no. 2
(September 1945), p. 14. Hull: Haston, DJH/15G/14b.
Fight, 13 November 1945, p. 4.
"The Split-away from the Lanka Samasamaja Party, Ceylon Unit ofthe Bolshevik-
Leninist Party of India, Section of the Fourth International," Resolution of the
Central Committee of the BLPI, 8 October 1945, reprinted in Fight, 13 November
1945, p. 2.
195
The Trotskyist Movement in India. and Ceylon
inquiry" and abide by its decision. 10 The LSSP accepted the proposal
four months later, and Philip opted for a court of enquiry.
The two Trotskyist groups merged their leaderships in September,
1946. The unification was formalized at a Unity Conference in
November. The unified group took the name LSSP and kept the
Samasamajist as the party newspaper. There were disputes, however,
over certain members being admitted to the party. The BLPI side
complained that the LSSP had admitted "petty bourgeois radicals" and
other "non-Bolshevik" ilk into its ranks. The BLPI leadership in India
sent Kamalesh Bannerji, the most senior Indian Trotskyist, to
investigate and to conduct the Court of Inquiry.
10 "Extract from C.C. Resolution of 1-6-46," Special Internal Bulletin, BLPI, n.d.
[1947], p. 1.
11 "An Analysis of the Judgement," in Internal Bulletin [LSSP], vol. 1, no. 2 (March
1947), p. 10. Reprinted in Samasamajist, 1 June 1947. Although the document is
not signed, there's no doubt that it was Philip's.
12 Special Internal Bulletin, BLPI, n.d. [1947], p. 1. Hoover: SWP Papers, box 45.
13 "An Analysis of the Judgement," p. 10.
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
De-Unification
At the next party meeting N.M. Perera declared that Philip was still a
member. Colvin de Silva and his supporters walked out. On February
10 the BLPI Central Committee voted to expel Philip. Bannerji was
sent back to Ceylon to enforce the decision. At the meeting, on
February 19, the motion to remove Philip was narrowly defeated.
Bannerji declared the Ceylon party committee dissolved and walked
out with his six supporters. 15
197
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Bombay
In 1945 the government flattened the Bombay branch of the BLPI for
the third time. The BLPI had to rebuild almost from scratch. The party
groups in Calcutta, Madras, and Colombo sent comrades to Bombay.
Indra Sen, a member of the central committee, moved from Calcutta.
R.H. Vanniasingham, .a member of the Ceylon unit, became the
secretary. The BLPI also appealed to the British section of the Fourth
International to send reinforcements. 20 The British party gave up V.S.S.
Sastry, one of their most effective organizers. 21 Ajit Roy, another
member of the central committee, followed later.
198
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Geylon
199
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
26 The BMP conference met at Palitana (Gujarat) in January, 1947. "For the
Information of All Units," bulletin issued by the Bureau, Central Committee ofthe
BLPI, 12 March 1947.
27 The Bhauvnagar unit of the BMP took a "neutral" position between Shukla and the
BLPI, and the Nagpur branch disintegrated.
28 IOL: LlPJ/5/168. File Po!. 6555/1947.
29 IOL: LlPJ/5/168. File Po!. 7885/1947. Also New Spark, 26 April 1947, 10 May
1947,24 May 1947,7 June 1947,5 July 1947, and 16 August 1947.
30 New Spark, 8 November 1947 and New Spark, 6 December 1947.; and "Report by
JF on the Activities ofthe Bolshevik Leninist Party ofIndia During 1947."
31 New Spark, 8 November 1947.
32 Ramesh Karkal, the Bombay organizer, recalled how Jadhar's mother worried: "How
many of us had noticed how, with a dimly burning kerosene lamp beside her, she
lay awake in her little room till her son's return from party work in the late hours of
the night. .. she served the cold dinner to her son. Only then would she herself sit to
still her own hunger." Socialist Appeal [New Delhi], vo!. 2, no. 17, late September
1953.
200
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Bengal
While the Bombay group was getting on its feet again, the Calcutta
branch functioned as the propaganda center' of the party. It published
several of Trotsky's books, including Permanent Revolution and
Stalinism and Bolshevism, through Gupta Rahman & Gupta in Calcutta.
The Calcutta group also published Bengali translations of Permanent
Revolution, Open Letter to the Workers of India, Stalinism and
Bolshevism, and the introduction to Harold Isaac's Tragedy of the
Chinese Revolution. The Trotskyists published a twice-monthly local
newspaper, Inquilab [Revolution].
The Calcutta branch had several very capable organizers. One was
Z.H. Khan. He started organizing the firefighters in 1945. Before he
could form a union, the police provoked a strike in May, 1946. The
Calcutta branch suddenly had to lead a mass labor action. At one point,
after the police attacked the firefighters in their barracks, the
Trotskyists led a disciplined procession of two thousand strikers
through the city. Young recruits, like Jagadish Jha and Umar Abid
Zuberi, who later became mass leaders, got their first experience
during this strike. After eleven days the strikers won a "substantial
victory." 34 The BLPI formed the Damkal Mazdur Union.
201
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
35 New Spark, 13 September 1947. The Chief Secretary of the Bengal government,
H.S.E. Stevens, made note of this strike in his periodic secret report to the Home
Department in New Delhi. IOL: LlPJ/5/153. File Pol. 12444/1946.
36 New Spark, 27 September 1947. In early March the government reported that the
Mercantile Employees Union was threatening to strike. IOL: LIPJ/5/154. File Pol.
7136/1947.
37 New Spark, 20 December 1947 and 6 March 1948.
38 New Spark, 14 February 1948.
39 New Spark, 16 August 1947.
40 New Spark, 26 April 1947.
41 IOL: LlPJ/5/154. File Pol. 7531/1947.
42 New Spark, 22 November 1947.
202
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The BLPI sent Haradhan Chatterji and Z.H. Khan to work in the
industrial belt along the Bengal-Bihar border. In 1947 they organized
the workers at the Burn & Co. pottery works. Khan was elected the
union president. The Trotskyists also developed a base in the Bengal
Paper Mill Company Ltd in Raniganj. 44 Amal Bagchi led the Bengal
Paper Mill Mazdoor Union. Through the Paper Mill Workers
Federation the BLPI gained control over the mills at Hajinagar. Khan
and Dulal Bose carried out a 60-day strike of paper workers which
ended in "complete victory." 45 Khan was elected president of the Paper
Mill Workers' Union and became widely known as a trade union leader.
203
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
48 S.N. Tagore was a bourgeois Bohemian turned communist. He had joined the
Communist movement in 1926 and the following year at his own expense went to
Moscow, where he witnessed the defeat of the Oppositions. After his return to
Calcutta, he formed the "Ganabani Group" in 1935. In 1938 his group became the
Communist League, which criticized the turn to the Popular front and attacked
"foul and pestilential Stalinism." S.N. Tagore, United Front or Betrayal (Calcutta,
1938), p. 16. However, he did not break decisively with the Comintern until the
turn to the Peoples' War line. In 1943 he re-named his group the Revolutionary
Conununist Party (RCP). Arrested during the Quit India upsurge, he landed in jail
with the BLPI leader, Kamalesh Bannerj. Perhaps as a result of their discussions,
Tagore moved close to the BLPI on the nature of Congress and the character of
the Indian revolution. S.N. Tagore, Revolution and Quit India (Calcutta, 1946),
pp. 11-12.
49 Tagore claimed that "Lenin was just as much a champion of the permanent
revolution as Trotsky was and with a much more sure grasp of the revolutionary
reality." S.N. Tagore, Permanent Revolution (Calcutta, 1944), pp. 43-44. In
response Leslie Goonewardene showed how Lenin and Trotsky had critical
differences on the question ofthe Russian revolution prior to 1917. K. Tilak [Leslie
Goonewardene], "Saumyendra Nath Tagore and Permanent Revolution,"
Permanent Revolution, vo\. 3, no. 1 (January-March 1945), pp. 1-17. The Tagore-
Tilak exchange was a war of quotations. Neither attempted to show how their
theory fit India's reality.
so Sudarshan Chatterji was the leader of this pro-Trotsky tendency. During the
war he had spent time in jail with Murray Gow Purdy. After his release he
continued discussions with BLPI members. Interview with Sudarshan Chatterji, 3
February 1974.
SI Letter from C.R. Govindan [Colvin de Silva] to Secretary, International Secretariat,
18 July 1945. Hoover: SWP Papers, box 38.
204
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
205
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Madura
In South India the BLPI faced a situation that was almost the opposite
of Bombay. In Madura and Madras the Ceylonese transplants who
could speak Tamil were not such "outsiders." Despite the police raids
during the war, the Trotskyists managed to build an effective
underground organization. The BLPI groups in Madura and Madras
developed cells in key factories. The Congress Socialists had no
significant base whatsoever in Madras province. And so when CPI lost
its favored position after the war, the Trotskyists had a clear shot at
leadership.
In Madura the BLPI branch was led by K. Appanraj. The
Trotskyists developed a workers' group in the Harvey Mills. 59 One of
the Ceylon Tamils, B.M.K. Ramaswamy, organized workers in the
Meenakshi Mills and the Mahalakshmi Mills. In 1946, when the BLPI
called a meeting, several thousand textile workers showed up "to hear
what the Trotskyists were saying." 60 The BLPI led several strikes, one
lasting 45 days. The Trotskyists recruited workers directly from the
shop floor.
59 A. & F. Harvey Ltd. were the managing agents for the Madura Mills Company. The
mills were popularly called "Harveys."
60 D[ouglas] G[arbutt], "Report on the Fourth International Movement in India."
61 New Spark, 20 December 1947.
206
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Union. The BLPI group in the union played a leading role in a strike.
The BLPI formed several other unions in Tuticorin in 1946-47.
The Madura party got a peasant base in Sholavandan. Their
Congress sympathizer, T.G. Krishnamurthy, had organized a peasants
union in Sholavandan which was agitating for a greater share in the
harvest. Irritated, the Congress Ministry had Krishnamurthy and his
comrades arrested. The BLPI sent organizers to Sholavandan to take
over the agitation. The government eventually had to back down. The
BLPI recruited peasants from Sholavandan to act as defence guards for
its union meetings in Madura. "In the dark night, when I addressed the
meetings" remembers K. Appanraj, "the swords that were brought by
peasants would glitter under the lamps of the mill gate. "62
207
CHAPTER NINE
The Breakthrough
The BLPI had its greatest success in Madras. In 1946 S:C.C. Anthony
Pillai, the Ceylonese Tamil, was elected president of the Madras
Labour Union (MLU), the oldest union in India, with nearly 14,000
workers. That was an enormous coup. But on top of that he was elected
president of the Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway Workers
Union. Pillai led two huge strikes at the Buckingham and Carnactic
Mills, one of the largest factories in British India. Even the CPI had to
admit that the Trotskyists "stole" the initiative. I How did that happen?
During the war the CPI tried to capture the MLU. 2 The BLPI
cadres working in the mills opposed the no-strike policy of the CPI.
The struggle became so violent that the government banned meetings
in the mills after dark. 3 The CPI eventually retreated. In 1946 the
Trotskyists proposed that Anthony Pillai succeed T.V. Kalyanasundara
Mudaliar (popularly known as "Tiru Vi. Ka.") as MLU president. Pillai
had just been released from two years in prison for his political
activities in Madras. The MLU executive committee respected Pillai
and his comrades. 4 On June 6, 1946 he was elected president. In that
capacity he could name his own union officials.
Pillai faced his first challenge the very next day. A fight broke out
between some workers and company security guards at the B&C Mills.
On June 8 the workers called a strike on the spot to force the company
The CPI boss, S.A. Dange, admitted that "Trotskyites and other elements stole the
leadership as in the case of the Madras Binny strike." S.A. Dange, On the Trade
Union Movement: Reports to a Convention o/Communist Party Members working
in the Trade Union Movement (Calcutta, 1952). New York: Tamiment Library, New
York University.
IOL: LlPJ/5/207. Files Pal. 4879/1944, Pal. 4995/1944, and Pal. 6093/1944.
IOL: LlPJ/5/207. File Pal. 7899/1944.
4 E.A. Ramaswamy, Worker Consciousness and Trade Union Response (Delhi,
1988), p. 117.
208
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The strike lasted 48 days. The union won its key demands: the
transfer of the security guards and an end to company control over the
employee's welfare association. "Under Anthony Pillai and a vigorous
209
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Strike!
211
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
acting president, tried to pacify the crowd and called for a mass meeting
that evening. At that meeting Caroline Anthony PilIai delivered a rousing
speech. The meeting adopted a resolution that backed the union's
demands and called for the immediate release of the MLU leaders.
The next day the MLU called the strike. Not a single worker
entered the B&C Mills. The Trotskyists were the backbone of the strike
committees. The active militants included G. Balaram, C.K.
Narayanana, Krishnaiah, Venugopal, Parthasarathy, and R.N.
Selvaraj. 15 The Trotskyists issued a strike bulletin every day. 16 The
government moved Pillai from Vellore to Rajahmundry Jail, far away
in Andhra, where he was placed in solitary confinement. 17
Two days after the strike began the union led a procession of
strikers through the streets of Madras to the residence of the Minister
for Industries and Labour. 18 The Premier of Madras'demanded that the
strike be called off. In response the uni'on called a mass rally for March
28. Strikers, their families, and supporters from all walks of life in
Madras-a huge throng of 40,000-converged on the rally. Caroline
Anthony Pillai declared from the podium that no negotiations would be
held until Anthony Pillai and other union leaders were released. 19 The
strike committee called for a one-day hartal in Madras in support of
the str~ke.
On March 31 more than 100,000 observed hartal. 20 The entire
Perambur railway workshop downed tools. The trams didn't run, and
only a few buses were on the road. 21 The municipal workers, staff from
15 K. Appanraj, Anja Nenjan: Thoyizh Sangha Medai S.C.C. Antoni Pillai Vazhkai
Varalaru, p. 64.
16 New Spark, 5 July 1947.
17 IOL: LlPJ/5/21O. Po!. 7296/1947.
18 IOL: LlPJ/5/21O. Po!. 7728/1947.
19 Manickam [Bodi M. Muthiah], "100,000 Madras Workers Protest Trotskyist Union
Leader's Arrest," 2-page typed document, n.d. [April 1947], p. 2. Hoover: SWP
Papers, box 38.
20 Quatrieme Internationale (May-June 1947), pp. 75-76.
21 IOL: LIPJ/5121O. File Po!. 7684/1947.
212
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
213
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The strike, now in its third month, had escalated into a national crisis.
Archibald Nye, the governor of Madras, wrote to Viceroy Mountbatten
that "our cloth position is serious, almost desperate." 32 The Prime
Minister called upon the strikers to resume work immediately. The
government allowed the acting union president, Tiru.V. Ka, to visit
Anthony Pillai in jail "to explore the possibility of a settlement." But
the meeting was "quite disappointing." 33 The union insisted that its key
demands had to be met before the strike would be ended.
214
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
International Solidarity
The BLPI appealed to its comrades abroad to mobilize support for the
strike. The American SWP cabled protests to Nehru and the Madras
Congress Premier. The Militant publicized the strike. 34 Other sections
of the FI also sent letters of protest to the Madras government. 35 These
protests seemed to have had an effect. On May 11 the police fetched
Pillai from jail, escourted him to Danushkodi, put him on the boat to
Ceylon, and at mid-point served a formal order of externment,
prohibiting his return to India. In Colombo Pillai got a doctor to give
him a medical certificate stating that he had a heart condition. Armed
with this ruse, he boarded a flight to Bombay, ostensibly to see a
doctor. In fact, he was headed to the BLPI national conference, which
was about to convene on May 21.
In those days there were no direct flights from Colombo to
Bombay; you had to go to Madras first. Arriving in the Madras airport,
Pillai was recognized and detained for questioning. He produced his
medical certificate. The detectives, not quite sure what to do, decided
to let Pillai proceed to Bombay. But his flight had already departed.
The authorities radioed the plane and had it circle back to Madras to
take away the troublesome Trotskyist.
At the party conference in Bombay the BLPI debated what to do
about the strike in Madras, now in its third month. The ranks were
exhausted. The executive committee was divided; one. of the vice
presidents, a Congressman, called for an end to the strike. The MLU
executive committee agreed to accept arbitration, if the externment
order on Pillai were lifted. Given the unfavorable situation, the BLPI
decided that Pillai should return to Madras without delay and seek a
negotiated end to the strike.
Travelling in disguise, in third-class train coaches, Pillai made the
long train journey to Madras. Arriving at Villivakkam at dawn on May
34 Militant,3 May 1947. The SWP also issued a press release signed by a number of
prominent literary figures, including the novelist, James T. Farre!'
35 New Spark, 10 May 1947.
215
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
31, he went to the first house he found that was flying the red union
flag. He sent word to his wife and Tiro Vi. Ka. to call a mass meeting
that evening at Ayanpuram, on the outskirts of Madras. N0 one else
knew that he had returned.
That evening, after the meeting got underway, Pillai came riding
up on a bicycle. He mounted the stage. The crowd went wild. It took
more than a half hour to restore quiet. Pillai began to speak, saying he
was going to negotiate with the Minister of Labour. "Before Comrade
Anthony Pillai could finish his speech," wrote one young Trotskyist
eyewitness, "the Deputy Commissioner of Police with a posse of over
200 constables and inspectors swooped down on the meeting and
arrested Comrade Anthony Pillai. A free fight ensued. The police lathi-
charged and later opened fire. The workers hurled stones, the only
available weapons. Thirty constables were injured and several workers
were arrested on charges of rioting and unlawful assembly." 36
Pillai was hauled off to Vellore jail again. After a legal tussle, he
was released on bail but immediately re-arrested. under the Public
Safety Ordinance. Other union militants were also jailed. Workers
demonstrated in several parts of the city. 37 On June 9 the· government
illegalized the MLU, seized its funds, locked its headquarters, and
arrested 49 "men of the Fourth International." 38 Night after night a
virtual army-l0,000 Malabar Special Police-terrorized the mill
districts. In one night raid more than a th9usand strikers were arrested.
216
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
that "the strength of the unions in Madras is very great and the
workmen implicitly obey the instructions of the leaders quite
irrespective of the merits of the case." 40
The MLU ended the strike on June 19, 1947, after more than 100
days. Even then nearly three thousand workers stayed away in protest.
Two small home-made bombs exploded in the spinning department of
the mills on opening day. 41 The government illegalized the Volunteer
Corps as a "communist organization" and arrested 13 volunteers. But
the MLU wasn't broken. The union went to court and forced the
employers to build 200 houses for workers and reinstate the 52 workers
who had been dismissed during the Quit India movement. Most of the
jailed union militants were released two months later when India
became independent. Pillai was sentenced to one year in prison. A
prominent lawyer, Muthaiah Mudhaliar, appealed and won.
The BLPI emerged from the battle with tremendous prestige. Pillai
was a hero. The BLPI called several public meetings in Madras in its
own name. These rallies attracted thousands. 42 The BLPI launched a
Tamil-language newspaper, Poratam [Spark]. In 1948 Pillai
campaigned for the Madras Municipal Council as a Trotskyist. He got
more than 5,000 of the 7,000 votes cast. 43 He had become a trade union
leader with national stature. In 1947 he was elected to the General
Council of the All-India Trade Union Congress.
The MLU strike was a landmark labor struggle. "Though the union
eventually had to surrender," writes one historian, "the workers of all
communities remained loyal to their leaders. The defeat and attempts
by the Congress government to suppress the union only strengthened
the unity. Eventually Binnys accepted the inevitable and granted the
union full recognition." 44 Tha.t epic struggle in 1947 was the high water
mark of the Trotskyist movement in India.
217
CHAPTER TEN
Independence
Like most of the Indian left, the BLPI believed that the British would
never voluntarily relinquish power in India. Trotsky himself was
certain: "Only a victorious revolution can liberate India." I The theory
of Permanent Revolution held that only the "proletariat in power"
could carry out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution, including
independence. And since there was no revolution in sight, the British
would surely remain the ruling power for the foreseeable future.
With this perspective, the BLPI could only view the political
drama unfolding in India as a huge charade deliberately orchestrated to
fool the masses. The BLPI ridiculed the Interim Government as a farce
played out to hide "the real imperialist designs and intentions of our
rulers." 2 The BLPI dismissed the Constituent Assembly as "hopelessly
unreal." 3
Just a few months later Prime Minister Attlee delivered his famous
speech in the House of Commons declaring that Britain would leave
India no later than June 1948. He sacked Wavell and gave Lord
Mountbatten the mandate to transfer power to responsible Indian
Leon Trotsky, "The Betrayers ofIndia," in Writings ofLeon Trotsky 1938-39 (New
York, 1974), p. 199. Trotsky counterposed the need for revolution to the reformist
perspective of the Stalinist Popular Front. "India can only be liberated by the joint
and open revolutionary struggle of the workers, peasants, and the English
proletariat." Leon Trotsky, "Ignorance is not a Revolutionary Instrument," in
Writings of Leon Trotsky 1938-39, pp. 185-86.
New Spark, 26 April 1947.
Spark, no. 8 (Late June 1946), p. 5. The BLPI was not the only Trotskyist party in
the world to misread the unpredictable reality of those times. The American
Socialist Workers Party went one better. Trotsky had predicted that the war would
lead to the collapse of the Stalin regime. Since Stalin was stilI in the Kremlin, the
American Trotskyists insisted-as late as November 1945-that "the war is not
over." Militant, 17 November 1945.
218
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
parties and insure the unity of the Indian Union. Mountbatten soon
discovered that he had less time than anyone thought. The communal
violence was spreading rapidly and had infected the police, army, and
civil service. He formulated "Plan Balkan," which evolved into "Plan
Partition." .
In 1938 Jawaharlal Nehru had got the British Labour leaders to promise
that when Labour came to power, they would summon a Constituent
Assembly, freely elected on the basis of universal adult franchise, to
frame a constitution for a free India, subject only to an Indo-British treaty
safeguarding British interests for a transitional period. 4 But that is not
what the Cabinet Mission proposed. Their Constituent Assembly would
neither be elected on the basis of universal adult suffrage nor would it
have sovereign power. Nehru denounced their proposal as a fraud.
The BLPI agreed with Nehru. The party had been lukewarm to the
Consituent Assembly slogan from the start. In its 1942 program the
BLPI characterized the slogan as "illusive and deceptive." The party
would only give "critical support to the slogan, not as one capable of
objective fulfilment even for a successful revolution, but as a rallying
cry in the specific stage of the struggle." Meeting in June, 1946 the
BLPI Central Committee decided not to even demand a "genuine"
Constituent Assembly as an answer to the fraud. 5
4 Partha Sarathi Gupta, Imperialism and the British Labour Movement, 1914-1964
(London, 1975), pp. 257-59.
5 The rationale was that "the Congress itself was not claiming the so-called
Constituent Assembly to be a real Constituent Assembly." "C.C. Report Presented
to Party Convention Beginning May 21, 1947," p. 12.
219
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
6 Leon Trotsky, "The Revolution In India, Its Tasks and Dangers," p. 250.
7 Leon Trotsky, The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth
International (New York, 1970), p. 31.
8 New Spark, 26 Apri11947.
9 New Spark, 26 April 1947.
10 New Spark, 26 April 1947.
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
11 This group included P.K. Roy and Hiranand Mishra. Roby, Chester, and Bibhuty,
"A Criticism of the Draft Resolution as Submitted by the CC," Internal Bulletin (I
April 1947), pp.6~7. Hoover: LSH, box 52.
12 The main proponents of this position were P.K. Roy, Hiranand Mishra, and Doric
de Souza. "Report of the First Party Convention Held May 21-24, 1947," Internal
Bulletin, vo!. 2, no. 1 [May 1947], p. 5; Arun Bose, "Programme and Reality,"
Internal Bulletin, vo!. 2, no. 3 (25 September 1947), pp 13-16; P.K. Roy,
"Opportunism on the Question of the Constituent Assembly," Internal Bulletin, vo!.
2, no. 3 (25 September 1947), pp. 17-21. Hoover: LSH, box 52.
13 H.A. Vardhan [Hector Abhayavardhana], "Convention Discussion on the
Constituent Assembly: A Summing Up," Internal Bulletin, vo!. 2, no. 3 (September
25, 1947), p. 4-12. Hoover: LSH, box 52.
221
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
222
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Pakistan Revisited
223
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
towards the communal riots that have been ravaging the countryside
(for the authors the communal riots as well as the Muslim League do
not exist at all!)." 21
Up to that point the majority of the BLPI denied that the Muslims
in India, taken as a whole, constituted a nation, according to the classic
Bolshevik definition. That was true. Like the Jews in Europe before the
war, the Muslims in India were a religious minority dispersed within
larger nations and nationalities. But, just as the Holocaust set the stage
for mass Jewish emmigration to Palestine, laying the basis for a Jewish
nation, so too the communal killing, dislocation, and population
transfers created the objective basis for the consolidation of Muslim
nations on the subcontinent.
Unlike the CPI, which cheered the Mountbatten Plan, the BLPI
refused to support Pakistan in any form. The BLPI pointed out that
Pakistan will require "the transfer of populations" and carving up "the
living bodies of the crystallising nationalities in India." In order to
create an eastern Pakistan the Bengali nation would have to be divided.
If Assam were grafted on, then the Hindu minority would be trapped
within the new state. That was a recipe for reversing the terms of
oppression. Whichever way Calcutta went, half the people would be
losers. Hence the BLPI concluded that "the religio-communal partition
of India is an unrelievedly regressive act." 23
21 Roby, Chester, and Bibhuty, "A Criticism of the Draft Resolution as Submitted by
the CC," p. 6.
22 "Political Resolution," adopted at the second conference of the BLPI, reprinted in
New Spark. 21 June 1947.
23 New Spark. 24 May 1947.
224
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Others took the position that Britain would switch from "direct
rule" to "indirect rule." But there were differences over what "indirect
rule" signified. Hector Abhayavardhana argued that, despite the
transfer of power, India "will remain a colony." 24 Doric de Souza
\
24 "Report of First Party Convention Held May 21-24, 1947," pp. 3-4.
25 During the war the BLPI had speculated that the US might try to turn India and
China into semi-colonies. "The present perspective of American Imperialism in
regard to India and China is to secure the domination of American finance capital
not through direct political rule, but rather through the strength of its economic and
financial stranglehold, utilizing the bourgeoisies of these countries as its agents for
the administration of the country ... In other words this is nominal independence on
the model of the South American semi-colonies." "American Imperialist Aims in
India," The Bolshevik Leninist. vo!. 2, no. 1 (February 1943), p. 1.
225
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
At the end of the debate the delegates adopted the "indirect rule"
position. According to the conference resolution, the transfer of power
will "not mean either India's freedom or the end of British
Imperialism." 26 On the contrary, "the domination of Britain will be
preserved in India, and can only be ended by revolutionary action."
•
Doric de Souza explained the BLPI's position in an article written for
the American journal, Fourth International. He emphasized that "in no
case does the loosening of political ties mean the liquidation of British
Imperialism, or the freedom of the colonies." 27
At bottom the BLPI position was that India could not "really" be
independent as long as she was economically subordinate to Britain.
The implication is that India could become economically independent.
That logical conclusion, however, runs counter to the Marxist theory of
imperialism. As long as imperialism remains dominant on a global
scale, no nation can ever be "financially independent." Lenin had
emphasized that finance capital dominates "even states enjoying the
fullest political independence." 28 Trotsky likewise stated that even the
USSR, which had a monopoly on foreign trade, could never escape
completely the pressure of world imperialism. That is precisely why
he objected to the Stalinist theory of "building socialism in one
country."
Freedom at Midnight
226
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
the cooperation of all who deserve freedom above all." 29 The CPI
newspaper declared, "All support to Government." 30
227
The 1i'otskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Two months later the BLPI organized a national tour featuring Ajit
Roy, a powerful platform speaker, who had recently returned to India
from England. Roy blasted the "fake independence" deal, the partition
of India, the repressive policies of the Nehru government, and the
"betrayal" of the Communists and Socialists in supporting the
"capitalist government." In Madras thousands attended two BLPI
rallies to hear Ajit Roy, as well as the Trotskyist trade-union leaders
from the Perambur Railway Workshops and the B&C Mills. 36
In these rallies the BLPI criticized the Nehru government for
failing to release political prisoners, restore democratic rights,
reorganize the provinces along linguistic lines, and abolish the Princely
States. The BLPI declared that "the Congress in power needs, just as
badly as the British imperialists, to maintain undisturbed the existing
administrative setup." 37 The BLPI raised the demand for Revolutionary
228
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Cey/on
Like their comrades on the mainland, both the LSSP and the BLPI
characterized the transfer of power as "fake independence" [eeniya
nidahasa]. Both maintained that "direct rule" would be replaced by
"indirect rule." But there were differences. The BLPI declared that
Ceylon would continue to be a colony. "Ceylon is thus not free but
continues to be in chains." 39 Philip Gunawardena, who was not so
blinkered by theoretical formulae, thought that was ridiculous. He
argued that Ceylon would get political independence but not economic
independence. "Henceforth the Ceylonese bourgeoisie will rule in
Ceylon, whilst British imperialism will continue to reign." 40
When the independence bill came before parliament, the LSSP
abstained in protest, while the BLPI delegation voted against the bill.
That led to a new round of polemics between the rivals. The LSSP took
the sensible view that a Marxist party can not oppose independence, as
limited as it was. The BLPI declared that the LSSP was moving
"progressively in the direction of becoming a petty bourgeois party." 41
Nevertheless, both the LSSP and BLPI boycotted the official
celebrations. Both mocked the "fake independence" and demanded an
229
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Other BLPI leaders had growing doubts about this line. Indra Sen,
the editor of New Spark; thought that the BLPI was denying reality in
order to defend doctrine. He published articles in the party newspaper
that implied that India was really independent. That provoked criticism
from those who thought India was still a colony or semi-colony. 43 The
whole question had to be re-opened at the next party conference, held
in Calcutta in 1948.
42 Colvin R. de Silva, The Present Political Situation in India. Being the Inaugural
Address delivered on 5-3-48 at the All Bengal Students' Congress Annual
Conference at Uluberia (Calcutta, 1948), pp. 8-9.
43 Y. Chester [Y. Karalasingham), "The Obscurantism of Eclectics," Internal Bulletin,
vol. 3, no. 1 (1 March 1948), pp. 5-8. Hoover: LSH, box 52.
44 "Summary of Minutes of the Calcutta Convention of the BLPI, 1948," Internal
Bulletin, 31 August 1948, pp. 2-3. Hull: Haston, DJH/15G/14b.
230
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
231
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The partition of the subcontinent in 1947 marked the end ofa long era.
It was hard to keep faith in the dream of united class struggle when the
reality was mass slaughter and forced population transfers. Even
Gandhi fell victim. The BLPI had to do some serious rethinking of its
strategic perspectives. The Nehru government, though beset by crises,
had popular support. The BLPI remained a small party. Once again, the
Trotskyists wrestled with the question: What is to be done?
232
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Though Philip was the godfather, the entry proposal had its own
independent sponsors in the BLPI. The initial champion was V. Sastry
in Bombay. 5 As mentioned earlier, Sastry had come from the UK in
1946. At that point the "entry tactic" was being hotly debated within
the British section of the FI. A minority wanted to enter the Labour
Party. In their view the radicalization of the British working class
would be expressed within the Labour Party. Therefore, the Trotskyists
had to go where the action was and sink deep roots.
One newspaper reported, "Some of the members who have resigned are considering
the formation of a branch of the Fourth International in Kerala." Mathrubhumi, 9
July 1947.
"it was V.S. Sastry who unhesitatingly pushed the need to enter the C.S.P." Letter
from Hector Abhayavardhana to the author, 10 May 1999.
Situ [Sitanshu Das], "Resolution for Entry into the Socialist Party," Internal
Bulletin (5 May 1947), pp. 1-2. Hoover: LSH, box 52.
233
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
234
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Although the entry proposal had been defeated at the 1947 party
conference, the advocates persisted. On September 7, 1947 the "Entry
Group" met in Bombay. 12 The group included the General Secretary of
the party (Hector Abhayavardhana) and another member of the central
committee (V. Sastry). According to the minutes of this meeting,
235
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
various arguments were advanced in support of the entry tactic. But the
common denominator was the belief that the Socialist Party would
mushroom and radicalize, providing a fertile field of recruitment for
the Trotskyists. The Entry Group circulated the minutes of this meeting
within the BLPI as a discussion document.
13 Khan [Zahrul Hasan Khan], "An Open Letter to the 'Entrists' ," Internal Bulletin,
vol. 3 no. 1 (1 March 1948), pp. 8-9. Hoover: LSH, box 52.
14 V. Chester [V. Karalasingham], "The Grave-Diggers of the BLPI," Internal
Bulletin, vol. 3, no. 1 (1 March 1948), pp. 13-19. Hoover: LSH, box 52.
15 Bunby explained that he had supported the entry tactic, thinking that there would
be an "extremely rapid" radicalization of the masses in India. However, that had
not happened. Instead, there was a "profound political lull." Given the obvious
popularity of the Nehru government, the BLPI had to bite the bullet and patiently
build up its forces. M. Usman [Fred Bunby], "Why I Now Oppose Entry," Internal
Bulletin, vol. 3, no. 1 (1 March 1948), pp. 11-12. Hoover: LSH, box 52.
236
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
A New Perspective
237
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
In late 1947 the BLPI sent Kamalesh Bannerji to Paris to represent the
BLPI in the International Secretariat (IS) and the International
Executive Committee (1EC) of the Fourth International. Bannerji
opposed the entry proposal, or at least the way in which the discussion
was proceeding in the BLPI. The IS agreed and decided to intervene.
238
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
239
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
this new instrument which the masses desired for fighting Congress
and the Capitalists."
The two anti-entry delegates, P.K. Roy and Hiranand Mishra,
opposed the resolution. But when it was put to the vote, they
capitulated, declaring that "it is better that the Bengal Unit enter
unitedly." Thus, the entry resolution was adopted unanimously.
The convention also discussed what to say to the International
Secretariat. The conference adopted the following resolution: "While
being fully conscious of the right of the IS to intervene and even over-
ride the decisions of the sections of the International, this convention
considers it would be a tragic set-back to the Party in India and to the
FI movement as a whole, if the IS either through delay in replying or
by reversal of the unanimous decision of this Convention, were to
prevent the Indian Party from carrying out in an effective and timely
manner the tactic of entry into the SP." 24 In other words the BLPI
presented the IS with a/ait accompli.
After the conference the BLPI leaders met with their Socialist
counterparts. The BLPI proposed a formal merger. But the Socialists
were no fools. In the late 'thirties J.P. Narayan had welcomed the CPI
into the Socialist fold. Once burned, twice shy. The Socialists insisted
that the BLPI would first have to dissolve. After that, its members
could apply for membership, as individuals. The Socialists warned that
no factions or separate discussion bulletins would be tolerated. 25
Moreover, the former BLPI members were to sever all connections
with the Fourth International. If these conditions were met, then the
Socialist Party's General Council would ratify the deal.
The terms could not have been much worse. But the BLPI
leadership agreed. When the terms were presented to the membership,
the BLPI leaders promised that a guiding center would be established
in Bombay. "When the leadership decided on entry," recalls Raj
Narayan Arya, "it promised to maintain a nucleus to guide its members
in the S.P. but the stress was on discreetness." 26 In September, 1948
the BLPI published the last issue of New Spark. In Bombay and U.P.
the Trotskyists joined well-established Socialist Party branches. 27 In
Madras the Trotskyists formed branches where none had existed
before.
As promised, the Socialists gave the Trotskyists key positions in
the party. Ajit Roy was co-opted into the National Executive
Committee. Indra Sen became joint editor of Janata, the Socialist
newspaper. Hector Abhayavardhana became Joint Secretary of the
Socialist Party in Madras. Anthony Pillai became a big gun in the Hind
Mazdoor Sabha, the Socialist labor federation. 28 By all accounts the
Trotskyists worked energetically to establish their credentials as loyal
members of the Socialist Party. All the former BLPI leaders contributed
regularly to Janata. Pillai ran for Madras Municipal Council on the SP
ticket and won. In Bombay the Trotskyist trade unionists began training
a new generation of rank-and-file labor leaders.
After some months Janata praised the Trotskyists: "In the trade-
union field as well as in the political sphere, it [the Socialist Party] has
secured the complete support of the Bolshevik Leninist Party and now
that party has completely merged itself with the Socialist Party. This
party had considerable organised strength in the labour field in Madras,
which is now the united strength of the determined Socialist movement.
This is indeed a remarkable achievement and the credit for it goes as
much to these broad-minded and earnestly Socialist comrades as to the
sincere desire of the party to extend its hand to every genuine Socialist
241
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
A Handicapped Opposition
242
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
an article stating that a more militant policy was "the need of the hour,"
he was dismissed as Janata co-editor. 33 In Calcutta Selina Perera was
disciplined for teaching new recruits that a revolution was consistent with
the Socialist Party's original Policy Statement, which in fact did contain
a reference to armed insurrection, a hangover from even earlier times.
In 1950 the main political issue of the day was the Korean war. The
Socialist Party took the position of the Socialist International, calling
for a "Third Camp" between the two superpowers (the USA and the
Soviet bloc) to oppose both Imperialism and Stalinism. In their view
the key issue was the violation of South Korean independence. The
Shachtman group in the US took the same line. The Fourth
International, on the other hand, saw the conflict in terms of the global
Cold War. In their view China and North Korea were "deformed
workers states." Hence, in any conflict with "imperialism" and its
surrogates, like the United Nations, the workers states had to be
unconditionally defended, despite their Stalinist regimes.
243
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
244
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
they have invited us-and then use that apparatus against us." 41 He
called the entry a "fatal step."
245
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
and then retired from politics. After he was sacked as Janata co-editor
Indra Sen also had to leave Bombay in order to support himself.
Ramesh Karkal and Tulsi Boda remained the Trotskyist stalwarts in
Bombay.
246
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
In 1951 the Nehru government called for a general election, the first
since Independence. The Socialist leaders had high hopes. The party
fielded candidates all over the country. The Socialists claimed to stand
for the ideals of the old Gandhian Congress, which they said placed the
interests of workers and peasants before those of landlords and
capitalists. lP. Narayan, the old Socialist warhorse, attacked Congress
for betraying its commitment to the poor.
247
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Cey/on
The former BLPI leaders decided to defy the merger and keep the
flag of the Socialist Party flying. On September 27, 1952 the dissidents
held a conference of "loyal Socialists" in Bombay. The former BLPI
leaders who participated included Tulsi Boda, Hector Abhayavardhana,
Selina Perera, S.C.C. Anthony Pillai, Indra Sen, S. Am arnath , and
Rajendra Trivedi. They called their rump organization the Socialist
Party (loyalist). Hector Abhayavardhana became editor of their
newspaper, Socialist Appeal, published in Madras. They issued a
pamphlet condemning the merger.
248
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
wing social democrats. They proudly claimed that they were the true
Socialists. Alas, for some, the mask had become the face.
Regeneration
so In Bombay the MTP was active in the Electrical Service Workers Union, the
Reshim Kamgar Union, the Transport Workers Union, the Textile Labour Union,
lel Employees Union, the Vegetable Products Workers Union, and the Rubber
Workers Union. In U.P. the MTP capitalized on the fame of Ambika Singh and
organized the Gavai Mazdoor Sangh [village workers' associations]. The MTP led
some militant peasant struggles in Jaunpur, Pratapgarh, Sultanpur, Rai BareIli, and
Benares. In Hyderabad Mallik Arjun Rao became a leader in the railway workers
union.
249
APPENDIX A
Biographical Notes
Amarnath, S. (?-1981)
Joined BLPI in Madras while a student. Captain, B&C Mills Volunteer
Corps, 1947-48. Jailed 1947-48. Worked in union of Non-Gazetted
Officials of the Madras Government, 1948. Entered Socialist Party,
250
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
251
The r,'otskyist Movement in India and Ceylol1
252
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Bagchi, Amal
Joined BLPl in Bengal. Leader, Bengal Paper Mill Mazdoor Union,
Raniganj. Working Secretary, Paper Mills Employees Union, Titagarh
and Kankimara. Secretary, Titagarh Jute Workers Union, 1948.
253
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Balasubramaniam, V.
Born Bodinayakkanur (Theni District, Tamil Nadu). Joined BLPI
during WWII. Author: October Puratzhi: Trotsky [October
Revolution: Trotsky] (1991).
Banerjea, Dhiren
Joined BLPI in Calcutta. Worked as a teacher. Active in All Bengal
Teachers Association after independence. Settled in Dalmianagar,
Bihar.
254
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
the Socialist Party, 1950-51. Sided with Michel Pablo in split in IS,
1953. Became estranged from the Fourth International leadership.
Companion to Margarete Buber-Neumann (1901-89). Returned to
India, 1967.
255
The Trotskyist Movement in. India and Ceylon
Cooray, Liooel D.
Born Moratuwa, Ceylon. Joined LSSP and went to Madras, 1942.
Jailed, 1943-1945. Secretary, LSSP (Phi lip Gunawardena group),
1945-46. Co-editor, Samasamajist, 1945-50. Elected to Ceylon
Parliament, 1947. Left LSSP for VLLSP, 1953. Became private
secretary for P.H. William Silva when he became Minister in MEP
government, 1956.
256
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Drieberg, Trevor
Born Ceylon, to an illustrious Burgher family. Educated University of
Ceylon. Joined LSSP, 1939. Emigrated to Bombay, 1944,joined BLPI,
and worked at Stronach & Co. Left BLPI, 1946. Later joined
Congress. Author: Indira Gandhi: A Profile in Courage (1972),
Towards Closer Indo-Soviet Cooperation (1974), Four Faces of
Subversion (1975), Emergency in India (1975), Jammu and Kashmir:
A Tourist Guide (1978), and Agriculture in India (1980).
257
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Elayaperumal
Joined BLPI in Tuticorin during WWII. Leader of Tuticorin Mill
Workers Union. After Independence, remained an indepenent
Trotskyist trade union leader in Tuticorin.
Garbutt, Douglas
Joined Workers International League. Affiliated with the "Trotskyist
Opposition" faction. Enlisted in RAF and stationed in India, 1943-45.
Worked with the BLPI in Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. Left India in
August 1946.
258
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
259
The Trotskyist Movement in India alld Ceyloll
260
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
261
The Trotskyist Movement in India and eeylon
262
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Kodial, Raghuvir
Party pseudonym: Kabir.
Joined BLPI in Bombay during the war. Worked at the All India
General Insurance Company, Ltd. in Fort, Bombay.
Koley, Satyen
Educated Presidency College, Calcutta. Joined BLP!. Active in All
Bengal Students' Congress, the Bengal Student Federation, and
Chhatra Sangram Parishad [Students' War Council], 1947. Arrested
for protesting "Black Bill," 1947. Vice President, Paschim Banga
Patrika and Press Workers Union, 1948. Editor, Ir..quilab, 1947-48.
263
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
264
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Mendis, J. AlIan
Born Ceylon. Joined LSSP. Worked at Whittall & Co. in Colombo;
active in Mercantile Employees Union. Member, BLPI, Madras, 1944-
45. Arrested in Madras, sentenced to two years Rigorous
Imprisonment, and deported to Ceylon, 1945. Active in LSSP until
his death.
Mishra, Hiranand
Joined BLPI in Calcutta. Editor, Spark, 1946. Delegate, BLPI
conferences, 1947 and 1948. Central Committee, BLPI, 1947-48.
Entered Socialist Party, 1948. Bengal Executive Committee, SP.
Played leading role in Trotskyist groups in 'fifties. Central Committee,
Revolutionary Communist Party of India, 1960. Author: Stalinism.
What it Means (1956) and East European Crisis of Stalinism (1957).
265
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
266
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Parija, Murlidhar
Party pseudonym: V. Markandu (?).
Joined Purdy group in Bombay before WWII. Founding member,
Mazdoor Trotskyist Party, 1942. Arrested for dacoity during WWII.
President, Bombay Committee of MTP, 1948. Trade unionist, Ravi
Uday Litho Workers Union, Bombay State Electrical Employees
Union, Engineering Workers Union, Bombay and Suburban Reshim
Kamgar Union (silk workers), and Bombay Textile Labour Union.
Founding member and Joint Secretary, Bombay State Committee,
United Trades Union Congress. Co-editor, Socialist, 1948. Editor, The
Militant, 1959-60; Marxist Outlook, 1966-70. General Secretary,
Revolutionary Workers Party, 1958-60. Activist, Pragatshil Yuvak
Mandal, Ahmedabad, 1959-60.
267
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylol/
268
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
269
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Rajan, Sundarh
Party pseudonum: Somu
Joined BLPI in Madura during WWII. Delegate from Madura to first\
party convention, 1944.Dropped out of BLPI after the war.
Rao, M. Madhava
Born Nellore (Andhra Pradesh). Educated Stanley Medical College,
Madras. Joined BLPI while still a student. Leader, All India Student
Federation in Madras. Took active role in B&C Mills strike, Madras,
1947. Editor, BLPI Tamil newspaper, Porattam [Struggle], 1948.
Delegate to BLPI conference, 1948. Entered Socialist Party, 1948.
Joint Secretary, Andhra Provincial SP. Wrote for Socialist Vanguard,
270
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Rao, T.R.
Joined BLPI in Bombay after the war. Joined Socialist Party, 1948.
Started Modern India Publications and published numerous works by
Trotsky and other Marxists in the 'fifties and 'sixties.
272
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
273
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Joined BLPI during war. Delegate, All India Students' Congress, 1945.
Delegate to BLPI conferences, 1947 and 1948. Entered Socialist Party,
1948. Joined SP (Loyalists), 1952. Moved to UK. Author: The
Meaning o/the Simla Surrender (1945).
Sethuraman
Educated Madras University. Joined Congress in Madras and worked
as a clerk in the Labour Section of the Congress Committee. Joined
BLPI. Became full-time worker for Madras Labour Union. Active in
274
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
B&C Mills strike, 1947. Delegate, BLPJ conference, 1948. Later went
to Dindigul (Dindigul District, Tamil Nadu) for employment and left
politics.
275
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
276
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
277
The Trotskyist Movement in India alld Ceylon
Udyawar, S.P.
Joined Royist group in Bombay; worked on trade-union front.
Opposed support to WWII. Recruited to BLPI, 1942-43. After war
involved in BLPI's publishing efforts; published Rise and Fall of the
Comintern by Leslie Goonewardene. Left BLPI in 1948.
278
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
280
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
direct support to her social and political structure. The plunder of India
was a main source of the primitive accumulation of capital which made
possible the English Industrial Revolution. The exploitation of the
Indian market and of Indian raw materials provided the basis of British
industrial expansion in the 19th century. Today India provides a field
of investment for a quarter of the British overseas capital holdings, and
sends to Britain roughly £ 150 million annually, as tribute, in various
forms.
After 200 years of Imperialist rule, India presents a picture of
poverty and misery of the masses, which is without equal in the
world-the more striking because up to the 18th century the economic
condition of India was relatively advanced and Indian methods of
production and of industrial and commercial organizations could
compare with those of any part of the world, and because of the vast
natural wealth and resources of the country, which cannot be utilized
and developed under the system of imperialism.
European capitalist penetration ofIndia began with the Portuguese
establishment of their factory in Calicut. The British (1600), the Dutch
(1602), and the French (1664), formed their trading companies in the
course of the 17th century. The British conquest of India, carried out
piecemeal, and in the most ruthless, vindictive and deceitful manner,
differed from every previous conquest of India in that, whereas earlier
foreign conquerors had left untouched the traditional economy, British
Imperialism "broke down the whole framework of Indian society." 2
The first steps of this destruction were carried out by (a) the colossal
This quote, and the others that follow, is from Karl Marx, "The British Rule in
India," an article originally published in The New York Tribune (25 June 1853).
These articles slipped into obscurity. David Riazanov, the director of the Marx-
Engels Institute, combed through old issues of the New York Tribune and found
this and other articles that Marx had written on India and China. In 1925 he
published several of these articles, including "The British Rule in India," in Unter
dem Banner des Marxismus. R. Palme Dutt translated the article back into English
and published it in Labour Monthly (December, 1925). Dutt quoted from this and
the other long-lost Marx articles in his two books on India, Modern India (1926)
and India Today (1940). The BLPI very likely got these quotes from India Today.
281
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceyloll
direct plunder by the East India Company; (b) the British neglect of
irrigation and public works; (c) the wrecking of the Indian land system
and its replacement by a system of landlordism and individual land
holding; (d) the direct prohibition of and heavy duties on the export of
Indian manufactures to Europe, and to England ..
282
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The last decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th were
marked by the imperialist export of finance-capital from the countries
of Western Europe and North America to every corner of the globe, and
by the conquest and exploitation of all backward countries through the
colonial system. Between 1880 and 1914 the major European powers
and the U.S.A. had carved up the whole world into colonies and
spheres of exploitation. This period of modem imperialist expansion
was marked in India by an intensification of British exploitation and a
corresponding change in its character, wherein the finance-capitalist
exploitation of India came to dominate all other forms. Nevertheless
the new basis of exploitation did not replace the already established
forms of plunder and industrial and trading exploitation, but was
auxiliary and paralled to these processes.
283
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
284
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
285
The Trotskyist Movement ill IlIdia and Ceyloll
manganese, and other minor types. This period was utilized for
investment by British capital which, during the years 1921 to 1923 ,
flowed in at an average annual rate of over £30 millions. But the brief
post-war boom was followed by a period of stagnation and decline,
prolonged by the currency policy of the Government, and finally
intensified by the world economic crisis of 1929. Indian industry shows
even today no indication of recovery. The scope of the industrialization
undertaken for defence purposes during the present imperialist war is
not calculated to include an all-sided development of Indian industry
but is restricted to the strategic needs of British Imperialism. Such an
all-sided development of industry is excluded by the conditions of
imperialist exploitation itself, by the direct hostility of the Government
to industrial development in India, by the determination of Britain to
maintain its share of the Indian market, and above all by the insoluble
problems of the home market caused by the extreme impoverishment
of the agricultural population under Imperialism. The industrialization
of India, on which her future depends, cannot be carried out without
the overthrow of Imperialism and a sweeping transformation of
agrarian relations.
286
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
287
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceyloll
288
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
7 The quote is from Karl Marx, "The Future Results of the British Rule in India,"
published in The New York Tribune (22 July 1853), and quoted in R. Palme Dutt,
India Today (1940).
This quote is a paraphrase. In Modern India (1940) R. Palme Dutt gives the
following quote from the speech of Lord WilIiam Bentinck, the Governor-General
of India from 1828 to 1835: "If security was wanting against extensive popular
tumult or revolution, I should say that the Pemlanent Settlement, though a failure
in many other respects and in its most important essentials, has this great advantage
at least, of having created a vast body of rich landed proprietors deeply interested
in the continuance of British Dominion and having complete command over the
masses of the people." R. Palme Dutt, India Today (1940), pp. 211-12.
289
The Trotskyist Movement ill India and Ceyloll
From the beginning, landlordism under British rule has been parasitic
in character, since, landlords neither supply agricultural capital nor
control farming operations. Today landlordism, taken in conjunction
with its superstructure of sub-infeudation and sub-letting, is the most
effective barrier to the development of modern large scale farming.
290
The Trotslcyist Movement in India and Ceylon
291
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylol1
The revolt of 1857 represented the last attempt of the old feudal ruling
class of India to throw off the British yoke. This revolt, which despite
its reactionary leadership, laid bare the depths of mass discontent and
unrest, created an alarm in the British rulers, and led to a radical change
of their policy in India. Seeking for bases of social and political support
within India, the British abandoned the policy of annexing the Indian
States within British India, and embarked on a policy of guaranteeing
the remnants of the feudal rulers their privileged and parasitic positions
in innumerable petty principalities, buttressing their power and
protecting them against the masses, and receiving in return the
unqualified support of these elements for the British rule. The princes
of the Native States, maintained at the cost of a chaotic multiplication
of administrative units, are today only the corrupt and dependent tools
of British Imperialism; and the feudatory states, "checkerboarding all
India as they do, are no more than a vast network of fortresses" erected
by the British in their own defence. 9 The variety of the states and
jurisdiction of the feudal princes defies a generalized description, but
they bolster alike the reactionary policies of Imperialism in India. The
despotism and mis-government practiced by the great majority of these
rulers in their territories, have created and perpetuated conditions of
backwardness extreme even in India, including the most primitive
forms of feudal oppression and the institution of slavery itself. Their
collective interests are represented by the Chamber of Princes,
instituted in 1921, which is the most reactionary political body in India.
This quote seems to be a paraphrase. In Modern India (1940) R. Palme Dutt quotes
L.F. Rushbrook-Williams, a forn1er government official, as follows on page 395:
"The situation of these feudatory States, checkerboarding all India as they do, are a
great safeguard. It is like establishing a vast network of friendly fortresses in
debatable territory."
292
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The Landlords
The most solid supporters of British rule in India, after the princes are
the landlords. In fact the majority of the princes are themselves no more
than glorified landlords, playing the same parasitic role as the landlords
of British India. The rapid extension of landlordism in modern times
through the development of intermediary and new parasitic classes on
the peasantry, has not only increased the numbers of those who receive
land-rents, but firmly linked their interests with those of the Indian
capitalist class, through the ties of investment and mortgage. The
political role of the landlords has always been one of complete
subservience to British Imperialism, which alone guarantees their
parasitic position. Landlordism is today the most formidable buttress
of British Imperialism within Indian society, as well as the greatest
obstacle in the way of agricultural development which demands a
thorough-going democratic revolution in the agrarian field and the
liquidation of landlordism in all its forms.
The second half of the 19th century saw the rise of an Indian capitalist
class in Bombay and other industrial and commercial centers. The
Indian bourgeoisie of the early period, being of a predominantly
commercial character, and conscious of their own weakness and
completely dependent position in economy, offered no challenge
whatever to British rule. This weakness found its reflection in the early
policies of the Indian National Congress, which, since its inception in
1885, loyally co-operated with British Imperialism and offered only the
mildest criticism of governmental policies. But the growing strength of
the industrial bourgeoisie in the last two decades of the 19th century
and the deep economic conflict between their own interests and those
of their British competitors, drove them, from the first decade of the
20th century, to utilise the national political movement as a means to
strengthen their bargaining power against British Imperialism and
extend their own field of exploitation. The growing strength of the
industrial bourgeoisie was reflected in the change of policies of the
Indian National Congress since the early years of the present century.
293
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The last years of the First World War, and the years which
immediately followed it, were marked by the development, for the first
time since 1857, of a mass struggle on a national scale against
Imperialism, based on the discontent and unrest of the peasantry and
the working class. This discontent was especially marked in Bombay,
where the wave reached its highest point in 1920, for which year the
number of strikers reached the gigantic total of 1.5 millions. The
Montagu-Chelmsford reforms were designed to meet this rising threat
by buying off the bourgeois leadership, and they succeeded to an
extent, that section of the bourgeoisie who wanted whole-hearted co-
operation with the government seceding from the Congress to form the
Liberal Federation (1918). But taking advantage of the growing mass
movement, the Congress bourgeoisie launched under its own banner
the passive resistance movement, and the later mass civil disobedience
movement of 1921-22, but betrayed the movement from the inside the
moment it showed signs of developing into revolutionary channels. The
movement, which despite its timid and unwilling leadership, had
attained the undeniable character of a mass revolt against the British
Raj, was abruptly called off when at its height by the bourgeois leader
Gandhi, and a period of demoralization for the masses followed. The
reactionary and treacherous character of the bourgeois leadership was
shown clearly in the Bardoli resolution of 1922, which condemned the
no-tax campaign of the peasantry and insisted on the continuation of
rent-payments to the landlords, assuring the Zemindars that the
294
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
295
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Since 1934, Gandhi and the leaders of the National Congress have
had as their chief aim that of preventing the renewal of the mass
struggle against Imperialism, while using their leadership of the
national movement as a lever to secure the concessions they hoped to
obtain from Imperialism. They see in the rising forces of revolt, and
especially in the emergence of the working class as a political force, a
threat to their own bases of exploitation, and are consequently
following an increasingly reactionary policy. Re-organizing the party
administration so as to secure to the big bourgeoisie the unassailable
position of leadership (1934), they transferred the center of activities
to the parliamentary field and to working the new constitution in such a
way as to secure the maximum benefits to the bourgeoisie; until the
intransigence of the British Government in the war situation and the
withdrawal of many of the political concessions of Provincial
Autonomy again forced the Congress into opposition (1939). At present
the Congress bourgeoisie is engaged in a restricted campaign of
individual (non-violent) civil disobedience, with narrowly defined
bourgeois aims, and under the dictatorial control of Gandhi himself.
By this move they hope to prevent the development of a serious mass
struggle against Imperialism, the leadership of which will be bound to
pass into other hands.
296
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
297
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The Peasantry
It is precisely the depth and scope of the agrarian crisis that places
the revolution against Imperialism on the order of the day, contributing
to it the driving force and the sweep which are necessary to accomplish
the overthrow of the ruling power. Nevertheless, the agrarian crisis
alone cannot produce a revolution, and the peasantry requires the
298
The Trotskyist Movement in India alld Ceylon
299
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceyloll
The growth of the peasant movement in recent times has led to the
formation of various mass organizations among the peasantry, among
which the most important are the Kisan Sanghas, (Peasant
Committees), which are loosely linked up on a district, provincial, and
finally all-Indian scale in the All-India Kisan Sabha, whose
membership in 1939 was 800,000. These associations, whose precise
character varies from district to district, are in general today under the
control and influence of petty bourgeois intelligentsia elements who, as
pointed out before, cannot follow a class policy independent of the
bourgeoisie, although the growing mass pressure upon them is reflected
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The Trotskyist Movement ill India and Ceyloll
The wage rates of the Indian proletariat are among the lowest, the
living conditions the most miserable, the hours of work the longest, the
factory conditions the worst, and the death-rate the highest, in the
civilized world. When these facts are taken together with the fabulous
profits made by the capitalist, (British and Indian alike), out of Indian
industry, it becomes clear that the working class is the most ruthlessly
and directly exploited class in India. The fight to remedy these
intolerable conditions and to protect themselves from the steadily
worsening conditions of exploitation bring the workers directly to the
revolutionary struggle against imperialism and the capitalist system,
the destruction of which is necessary to their emancipation.
Working-Class Struggles
The record of proletarian struggle in India can be traced back to the last
century; but the movement took on an organized character only in the
post-war period. The first great wave of strikes (1918-21) signaled the
emergence of the Indian working class as a separate force, and gave to
the national political movement during this period a truly revolutionary
significance for the first time in its history. In 1920, on the crest of this
strike wave the Indian Trade Union Congress was formed. The second
great strike wave of the late twenties, es·pecially in Bombay, showed an
immense advance in the working class movement, marked by its
increasing awakening to communist ideas.
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The Communist Party ofIndia which alone in the last two decades
could have afforded the Marxist leadership that, above all things the
working class needed, made instead a series of irresponsible mistakes,
which find their expression in the bureaucratically conceived policies
of the Comintern. In conformity with its false central programmatic
aim the "democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants," the C.P.I.
fostered the growth of Workers' and Peasants' Parties from 1926-28, at
the expense of an independent working class party. This policy was
shelved in 1929 to make way for an ultra-left sectarian policy, (in the
celebrated "Third Period" days of the Comintern), the signal
expression of which lay in the splitting of the trade union movement by
the formation of "Red Trade Unions." This sectarian policy of the C.P.I.
led to its isolation from the mass struggle of 1930-31, and made the
bourgeois betrayal of the struggle so much the easier. In the period of
ebb which followed, the C.P.I. was illegalized (1934) and has remained
so since. From 1935 onwards the C.P.I., (again at the behest of the
Comintern, now openly and flagrantly the tool of the Soviet
bureaucracy), reversed its policy once more, and held out the hand of
collaboration to the bourgeoisie through its policy of National Front
which credited the bourgeoisie with a revolutionary role. The C.P.I. was
transformed into a loyal opposition within the Congress, having no
policy independent of that organization, a state of things which
continued even into the period of the imperialist war.
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The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
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The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
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The 1iYJtskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
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The supreme task of the Indian proletariat is the conquest of power and
the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But, to fulfil this
task the proletariat must, as a pre-condition, lead the peasantry and
other democratic petty bourgeoisie to the overthrow of British
Imperialism, the liquidation of landlordsim and the abolition of the
Native States. This is the only road in India to the proletarian
dictatorship. The struggle for the revolutionary achievement of these
democratic tasks can go forward only under the leadership of the
proletariat and will necessitate the most resolute struggle against the
Indian bourgeoisie and their petty bourgeois agencies in the political
movement.
Hence, the Indian situation not only demands that the Indian
proletariat advance by all the means within its power its own class
struggle against capitalism, imperialist and native alike. It is also
imperative that the proletariat should participate actively in the wider
national political movement, with the aim of wresting the leadership Of
the anti-imperialist struggle from the hands of the reactionary native
bourgeoisie, and further that it should give its fullest support to the
developing peasant struggle against landlordism, thereby laying the
foundations of the revolutionary worker-peasant alliance, which is the
absolute pre-requisite of the victory of the Indian revolution.
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Constituent Assembly
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Democratic Rights
With the development of the mass political struggle in India since the
beginning of the century, British Imperialism has instituted a system of
repressive legislation, progressively inaugrating a gendarme regime not
less systematic and ruthless than that of Russian Czarism or German
Fascism. Since the commencement of the imperialist war repression
has been many times intensified. Even those nominal rights previously
possessed by the masses have been openly withdrawn, and a naked rule
of terror substituted through the Defence of India Act, administered by
a bureaucracy discarding every pretence of constitutional government.
The press has been gagged by a series of iniquitous Press Acts and a
systematic police censorship of all publications. Rights of free speech
and assembly have been so curtailed that they are practically non-
existent. Radical and revolutionary political parties are compelled to
lead an underground existence. Even the formation and functioning of
mass organizations, such as trade unions and kisan sabhas, is seriously
hampered by innumerable restrictions on their working, by the
persecution of their members, and by the frequent illegalization of the
organizations themselves. The right-to-strike no longer exists in all
"essential war industries," and elsewhere is so fettered by arbitrary
legislation as to be practically non-existent. Thousands of militant mass
leaders have been imprisoned on flimsy pretexts or detained without
trial. The restriction of individual movement by means of externment
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produces and has produced in the Native States, only reinforces the
closeness and even identity of the two movements.
Against the bounding rise in prices caused by the war, one can
fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that
collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in
proportion to the increase in prices of consumer goods.
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Factory Committees
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Unemployment
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(3) we call upon the masses to rely only upon their own revolutionary
strength; (4) we link up the question of expropriation with that of the
seizure of power by the workers.
The Peasantry
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Soldiers
The rank and file of the Indian Army is recruited almost exclusively
from the peasantry and increasingly from its more depressed and
backward strata. By a policy of carefully segregating the army from the
mass of the population and of making invidious distinction between so-
called martial and non-martial races, British Imperialism attempts to
keep the army immune from the political ferment in the country. The
soldiers, however, being mainly peasants in uniform, are naturally
sensitive to peasant demands and cannot fail to be affected by an
agrarian upsurge in the country. Since the attitude of the soldiers is of
decisive importance in every revolution, the Bolshevik-Leninist Party
must face the urgent task of widespread revolutionary propaganda
(against imperialism and the imperialist war and on the land question)
in the Indian Army. It must link up this propaganda with the concrete
grievances of the soldiers-the unsatisfactory conditions of service,
their despatch for wars abroad, etc. This task, which has been
immensely facilitated by the increased accessibility of the soldiers in
the prevailing war conditions (the quartering of troops amidst the
civilian population, frequent movement of troops, etc.), becomes all the
more urgent with the heavy recruitments that are increasingly being
made for the purposes of the imperialist war.
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Students
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Soviets
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The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
and therefore voicing with the least distortion the ever sharpening
demands of the masses in the struggle. The soviets will concretize the
worker-peasant alliance.
Soviets can arise only when the mass movement enters an open
revolutionary stage. From the first moment of their appearance the
soviets, acting as a pivot around which millions of toilers are united in
their struggle against the exploiters, become competitors and opponents
of local authorities and then of the central government. The soviets
initiate a period of dual power in the country.
With the entry of the struggle into the open revolutionary stage the
Bolshevik-Leninist Party calls for:
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SECTION 5. INTERNATIONAL
The working class ofIndia, like their fellow-workers all over the world,
are today in the throes of the Second Imperialist World War. From the
time when, expanding imperialism partitioned up the world into
colonies and spheres of influence, alterations in the relative strength of
rival imperialisms led to new armed struggles for the redistribution of
colonies in accordance with the new correlations of power. But, the
First Imperialist World War of 1914-18, which forced every
Imperialism to enter the arena, signalled the entry of World Capitalism
into the stage of permanent decline.
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The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
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The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
The Social Democracy bears the historic responsibility for the failure
of the World Revolution at the close of the First Imperialist World War
and in the years immediately following. Formed in 1889, the Second
International was a loose federation of the majority of the Social
Democratic parties of Europe. Though freely using the name and
ideology of Marx, the parties of the Second International, basing
themselves on a privileged upper stratum of workers and on sections of
the petty bourgeoisie, who are bribed by concessions made possible by
colonial exploitation and plunder, increasingly followed a policy of
opportunism. On the outbreak of the Imperialist War, the opportunism
of peace-time gave place to the most rabid social-chauvinism, and they
wholeheartedly supported their own governments in the imperialist /
carnage. And in the revolutionary upsurge at the close of the war, they
became indispensable instruments in the hands of the bourgeoisie for
arresting and defeating the revolution and preserving the dictatorship
of finance-capital. Today these agents of the bourgeoisie are repeating
their betrayal of the workers' struggle by supporting the bourgeoisie of
the "democratic" countries in the Imperialist War.
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But with the rise of the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union with its
abandonment of the path of world revolution in favor of the impossible
aim of building socialism in one country, the Comintern itself was
transformed into an instrument of the Soviet bureaucracy, and entered
a period of progressive degeneration and decline. The ultra-leftist
policy of adventurism and putschism pursued by the Comintern in the
years 1924-25 (at a time when the European working class movement
had entered a period of ebb), was responsible for crushing defeats of
the European proletariat. A rightward swing followed in the years
1925-27 (in which period the Stalinist bureaucracy was leaning on the
kulak and the Nepman in the Soviet Union in its struggle against the
proletarian wing of the party). This opportunist policy led to the fiasco
of the Anglo-Russian Committee, which served as a cloak for the
British trade union bureaucracy to hide their betrayal in the General
Strike of 1926, and was responsible for the strengthening of the hold of
the reactionary trade union bureaucracy over the British proletariat.
This same policy was responsible for the tragic fate of the Chinese
Revolution (1925-27), where the young Communist Party of China was
tied firmly to the boot-strings of the Kuomintang, and the workers and
peasants delivered, bound hand and foot; to the bloody vengeance of
the Chinese bourgeoisie.
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revolutionary proletarian vanguard, not only paved the way for Fascism
but executed in advance a goodly share of its labors. In France, the
growing revolutionary wave, which reached its peak in the General
Strike of 1936, was repeatedly stemmed by the Communist Party of
France in the interests of maintaining the Popular Front Government.
By the treacherous policy of Popular Front the Comintern actively
aided the bourgeoisie of Britain and France to draw the workers into
the imperialist war.
With the radical change in the foreign policy of the Soviet Union
consequent on the Russo-German pact of non-aggression, the line of
the Comintern was accordingly changed. The myth of a "war against
Fascism" was now abandoned, and the Comintern, incapable of a
policy of revolutionary defeatism, imposed a policy of military
defeatism on its sections in the Allied countries, which made them not
the representatives of the revolutionary proletariat but in effect the
agents of the German Imperialists. With the attack by Germany on the
Soviet Union, yet another "volte face" has been made, and the masses
in the "democratic" countries and their colonies are being called upon
to support the imperialist war which is claimed to have transformed
itself into a war of the democracies fought for the principles enunciated
in the Atlantic Charter.
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GOVERNMENT RECORDS
India Office Library and Records, British Library, London. Public and
Judicial Department Records. Abbreviated in footnote citations as
IOL: LlPJ.
Home (Political) Department Records, National Archives ofIndia, New
Delhi.
Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky. 1879-1921 (New York, 1954); The
Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky. 1921-1929 (London, 1959); and The Prophet Outcast:
Trotsky. 1929-1940 (London, 1963). Since then the volume of "Trotsky studies" has
grown tremendously. The late Pierre Broue, the most eminent Trotsky scholar since
Deutscher, has made a notable contribution with his biography. Pierre Broue, Trotsky
(Paris, 1988). Broue also deserves credit for publishing the first account of the Indian
Trotskyist movement. Pierre Broue, "Notes sur I'Histoire des oppositions et du
mouvement trotskyste en Inde dans la premiere motie du XXe siecle," Cahiers Leon
Trotsky. March 1985, pp. 11-44.
The most complete single work on the Fourth International is Robert J. Alexander,
International Trotskyism 1929-1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement
(Durham, 1991). There are several journals which publish specialized research on
various Trotskyist parties and personalities: Cahiers Leon Trotsky (since 1979),
Revolutionary History (since 1988), and Journal of Trotsky Studies (since 1993). There
are also several "Trotsky institutes" which issue publications: In Paris the Centre
d'Etudes et de Recherches sur les Mouvements Trotskyste et Revolutionnaires
Internationaux (CERMTRI) publishes the Cahiers du Mouvement Ouvrfer. In Italy the
Centro Studi Pietro Tresso, founded in 1983, publishes Quaderni Pietro Tresso. In
Buenos Aires the Centro de Estudios, Investigaciones e Publicaciones Le6n Trotsky
publishes the Boletin del CEIP and specialized studies.
337
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
ARCHIVAL COLLECTIONS
338
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
339
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
340
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Geylon
UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS
341
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceyloll
342
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
343
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
344
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
345
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346
The Trotskyist Movement ill India and Ceylon
347
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
Interviews
348
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
SECONDARY SOURCES
350
The 1i"Otskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
351
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
352
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
353
The Trotskyist Movement ill India and Ceylon
354
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
355
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
356
Index
357
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
358
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
359
The r,'otskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
360
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
361
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
362
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
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The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
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366
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Cey/on
367