100 Years of the CPI: Two Turbulent Periods: Some Issues

[Sukla Sen]

<https://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article15819.html>

A great document!

To an uninformed one like me, it looks that while BTR was bent on (sort of) copying the Russian model (without even any remotely comparable hold over the working class), Sundarayya wanted to emulate the -- far more immediate, in terms of time and space -- Chinese model. (Guess, in those turbulent days -- the momentous January '48 onwards -- Rajeswara Rao, also from Andhra, had shared the same position. Rao became the General Secretary during a brief interregnum of ten months between BTR and Ajoy Ghosh.)

Two fundamental problems.

One, every situation, to a varying extent, is unique.

Two, the Indian situation was/is far from static. As a result, while the Indian situation for a while looked somewhat closer to the Chinese one -- as compared to quasi-European Russia -- soon the wisdom of Gramsci, pertaining to "war of position" in particular, would start becoming more and more relevant.

In real life, there's very little room for just "copy/paste".

(It bears mentioning here that Chinese revolution, carried out on the back of a peasant army, had little resemblance with the Russian one -- some three decades earlier, wherein organised industrial workers had played the central role -- except for the fact that in both the cases the revolutions were spearheaded by avowedly Marxist political parties. (Never mind that Marx and Engels themselves, jointly, had issued injunction in the iconic "Communist Manifesto" in the most categorical terms: "The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties... They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.")

In the Cuban Revolution, another decade thence, neither the masses of workers nor the peasants played any direct role. It was brought about by a determined band of alienated and rebellious youngsters carrying the sparks of Latin American revolutionary traditions. Not only that, they would pick up the banner of Marxism only post-Revolution! Presumably, driven largely by the dire need to cement the ties with the Soviet Union to defend itself from the neighbouring Super Big Bully America out to crush it.)

There was also another very crucial dimension. An elephant in the room that anyone hardly talks of.

By the time, these debates started breaking out, the various Communist parties outside the USSR got habituated to functioning largely as the extension counters of the Soviet Foreign Office. Their principal task was identified as defending the "central axis of world revolution" -- the Great Soviet Union.

In the Indian case, the rather abrupt shift from "imperialist war" to "People's War" -- even at a huge cost of credibility at home -- in the early forties is a graphic exemplar. (There's an almost incredible realtime study of the (rather sudden)  shifts in the policies/programmes of the CPI, since January '48 in particular, in the immediate wake of the unceremonious exit of BTR in 1950, bringing out this dimension in granular detail: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/chaudhuri/1950/swing-back/index.htm>.

There's also another excellent study that'd, years later, examine this issue on the global scale: <http://www.marx2mao.com/PDFs/TCM75-1.pdf> and <http://www.marx2mao.com/PDFs/TCM75-2.pdf>.)

There's also yet another salient dimension. The emergence of the People's Republic of China headed by Mao Zedong, in early 1949, as a very significant partner and also a potential competitor of the Great Soviet Union. The imperative on the part of the latter to provide a seat, even if decidedly lower, to the former at the high table of "global revolution" -- in stark contrast with, soon-to-be-blackballed, puny Yugoslavia, the only country in the East Europe that had liberated itself by the end of the WWII without the Red Army playing any direct role. ('The Swing Back', published in early 1950, provides only a faint hint.)

As a result there arose a need to carve out an exclusive sphere of influence for this new Red Star. And a tussle would ensue as regards the specific location of India in that context and consequently whether Indian Communists would follow the (Russian) urban insurrectionary model or try to execute a protracted peasants' war in the hinterland that eventually catapulted the Chinese Communist Party to power.

As a slight digression, it may be recalled that much later, in 1965, when the "Star" was striving to become the sun, Lin Biao issued the clarion call: "Surround the Cities with Villages!" That means that this purported Chinese model is to be followed not only by individual countries but also the world as a whole! Too presumptuous!?

Quite interestingly, at the high noon of the Cuban Revolution -- the prestige of the regime  rising sky high -- its unofficial spokesperson then, the French radical journalist Regis Debray, penned, in 1967, a book, 'Revolution in the Revolution?', that prescribed formation of "guerrilla foco" -- supposedly what the Cubans had done -- as the way to go for all the countries of Latin America.

It's a strange obsession. Strange, but very real.

At any rate, in those days, these external factors -- seldom acknowledged by the insiders themselves -- had a strong bearing on the course that the local Comrades would eventually follow.

Acrimonious debates, at times, on the ground notwithstanding.

Sukla

Peace Is Doable