The Indian Communist Party and the Sino-Soviet Dispute
(Reference Title: ESAU XVI-62)
by Office of Current Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency
February 7, 1962
THIS MATERIAL CONTAINS INFORMATION AFFECTING THE NATIONAL DEFENSE OF THE UNITED STATES WITHIN THE MEANING OF THE ESPIONAGE LAWS, TITLE 18, USC, SECTIONS 793 AND 794, THE TRANSMISSION OR REVELATION OF WHICH IN ANY MANNER TO AN UNAUTHORIZED PERSON IS PROHIBITED BY LAW.
THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA AND THE SINO-SOVIET DISPUTE
This is a working paper, the second in a series of ESAU studies assessing the effects of the Sino-Soviet dispute on certain key Communist parties. The paper tries to show how the development of a broad Sino-Soviet conflict in recent years has fostered pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese factionalism which now threatens to split the Indian party.
The preparation of this paper has been greatly aided by the cooperation and assistance of several other analysts, especially [DELETE] of the Asian-African Division of the Free World Area of OCI, Allen Whiting of the Special Studies Group of the Department of State, and the analysts of the Radio Propaganda Branch of FBIS. The first two chapters of the paper also reflect a debt to the work of Kautsky (Moscow and the Communist Party of India, New York,1956). Overstreet and Windmiiler (Communism in India, Berkeley, 1959), and Masani (The Communist Party of India, New York, 1954). We alone, however, bear responsibility for the conclusions reached in this paper.
The Sino-Soviet Studies Group would welcome comment on this paper, addressed to Harry Gelman, who wrote the paper, [DELETE]
THE INDIAN COMMUNIST PARTY AND THE SINO-SOVIET DISPUTE
[TABLE OF CONTENTS:]
• SUMMARY
• I. PROLOGUE: CPI STRUGGLE OVER THE FOUR-CLASS ALLIANCE (1947-1951)
o A. Soviet Shift to Militant Line (1947)
o B. Ranadive Rise to Power in CPI
o C. CPSU Shift Toward Broad Alliances, Away From Armed Struggle
• II. THE CPI AND THE CHANGING SOVIET LINE TOWARD NEHRU (1951-1955)
o A. Evolution of Soviet Line Before Stalin's Death
o B. Death of Stalin and Third (Madurai) CPI Congress
o C. The CPI and the Development of the Bandung Line
• III. CONSEQUENCES OF THE 20TH CPSU CONGRESS (1956-1958)
o A. The Effects of DeStalinization
o B. The Effects of the Line on Peaceful Transition to Socialism
o C. Formation of the Kerala Government and Its Aftermath
• IV. MOSCOW-PEIPING POLARIZATION OF CPI BEGINS: 1959
o A. The 21st CPSU Congress
o B. The Fall of the Kerala Government (January-July 1959)
o C. The Tibetan Revolt
o D. The Border Dispute
o E. The October Anniversary Talks
o F. Increasing Leftist Ties with Peiping
• V. THE CPI AND THE SINO-SOVIET POLEMIC: 1960
o A. Soviet Moves in Early 1960
o B. Peiping's Lenin Anniversary Articles
o C. The WFTU Clash in Peiping
o D. The Bucharest Conference and Its Aftermath
o E. The CPSU's August Letter and Its Consequences
o F. The Hanoi Confrontation and the CCP's September Letter
o G. The Moscow Conference (November)
• VI. THE INDIAN PARTY APPROACHES A SPLIT: 1961
• A. Left-Faction Resurgence Before the April Congress
• B. Soviet and Chinese Policy Toward India Before the Congress
• C. The Indian Party Congress, April
• D. The CPI Between Its Congress and the 22nd CPSU Congress
• E. The 22nd CPSU Congress and Its Aftermath
• F. Prospects for the Indian Communist Party
THE INDIAN COMMUNIST PARTY AND THE SINO-SOVIET DISPUTE
Summary
By January 1962 the Communist Party of India (CPI) had reached a point at which an open schism in the party in the coming year had become a serious possibility. The renewal of the Sino-Soviet conflict at the 22nd CPSU [Communist Party Soviet Union] Congress had greatly worsened an already tense situation within the Indian party, and strengthened forces which for many years had been working toward a split in the CPI: the growth of unprecedented factionalism and indiscipline, the weakening of the authority of the party center at the hands of defiant provincial party committees, the slow decline in the authority of the CPSU for many reasons and the growth of Chinese party prestige in the eyes of many CPI members, and the steady polarization of leftist and rightist Indian party factions along pro-Chinese and pro-Soviet lines.
This process had received its initial impetus during the internal CPI battle between 1947 and 1951 over the methods of struggle the party should follow, the immediate goal it should pursue, and the classes it should admit into its alliance. At that time the left-faction leader Ranadive took control of the CPI as general secretary, and in conformity with what he thought was CPSU policy he led the Indian party in the application of violent insurrectionary tactics against the Nehru government. Modeling his efforts on the Russian revolution, Ranadive gave primary emphasis to the struggle in the cities rather than in the countryside; and he called for a one-stage revolution to overthrow both the imperialist enemy and the Indian bourgeoisie simultaneously and bring about immediate Communist party rule in India. Ranadive's tactics failed dismally, and were disastrous for the party. Opposition to Ranadive rose throughout the CPI, and he attempted to suppress it ruthlessly, increasing the chaos within the party.
The leaders of the Andhra provincial party committee then came forward and attacked Ranadive's line; citing a relatively successful peasant revolt which had been going on for some time in the Telengana district of south India, they called for the party to abandon insurrection in the cities and to rely instead upon armed struggle in the countryside. They also demanded that the CPI ally itself for this purpose with anti-feudal sections of the well-to-do peasantry, as well as with anti-imperialist sections of the urban bourgeoisie (the "national bourgeoisie"). Therefore they wished the party to aim at a two-stage revolution in which efforts would be directed first at ousting from power the agents of imperialism and feudalism, and only later at securing firm Communist control of the Indian government. The Andhra leaders explicitly stated that the Chinese revolution rather than the Russian revolution was their model, and they fervently hailed Mao Tse-tung as their inspiration and guide.
Ranadive responded with public attacks not only upon the Andhra leadership but also upon Mao; Ranadive attempted to portray Mao's advocacy of alliance with the national bourgeoisie as an anti-Marxist betrayal of the revolution and an attempt to restore capitalism. There is evidence, suggesting that Ranadive was encouraged to do this by signs of serious strain between Mao and Stalin at the time the CCP was coming to power in 1948 and 1949. Eventually, however, the CPSU accepted the desirability of the alliance with the national bourgeoisie and the two-stage revolution, and Ranadive fell from power in the CPI, to be replaced by the Andhra leadership. The Andhra leaders publicly apologized to Mao for Ranadive's attacks, and attempted to apply the line they had advocated. Peasant revolt, however, proved no more successful than urban insurrection, and armed struggle was finally abandoned altogether, with the Andhra group in turn replaced by a new leadership headed by Ajoy Ghosh as general secretary.
Two lasting results flowed from these events. First, although the "Chinese path" had not proven entirely applicable to India, a degree of Chinese influence was implanted and permanently legitimized within the CPI as a source of inspiration and guidance second only to the CPSU. Secondly, the factionalism, blatant indiscipline, and regional disregard for central authority which had grown during the struggle against Ranadive became permanent features of CPI life, to a degree seen in hardly any other Communist party. The authority of the central CPI machinery was henceforth so weakened in relation to the provincial party organizations that never again did the central party leadership make a serious attempt to enforce a uniform, rigid line upon the often defiant provinces.
The most important feature of the next few years (1951-55) for the CPI was the gradually softening Soviet attitude toward Nehru. By slow degrees the Indian party was forced to follow the evolution of Soviet policy in agreeing first that there were some positive aspects to Nehru's generally black foreign policy, then that Nehru's foreign policy was generally good but that his domestic policy was bad, and finally that there were favorable features of his domestic policy as well. The CPI had to be bludgeoned by Moscow and its agents in the central CPI leadership into taking each painful step along this path, usually with a considerable time lag behind the development of Soviet policy; each such gradual modification of line toward Nehru was accomplished only over the strenuous objections of a large section of the Indian party which did not wish what it regarded as opportunities — to advance the cause of Communism in India by opposing Nehru — to be sacrificed for the sake of Soviet foreign policy interests. Such CPI recalcitrance was reflected in the party program adopted in 1951, and then was strongly manifested at the Third CPI Congress at Madurai in December 1953. However, the Soviet movement away from hostility to Nehru, begun cautiously three years before Stalin's death, accelerated greatly thereafter in the Bandung period of 1954 and 1955, when Nehru exchanged visits with the Soviet and Chinese leaders and the USSR began a program of economic assistance to India. Under the impact of these events, the CPI became increasingly bound to a moderate policy involving reliance upon parliamentary elections. This trend was to receive its greatest development after the 20th CPSU Congress in 1956.
By the time of Stalin's death, any serious divergence between Chinese and Soviet policy toward the "national liberation movement" would seem to have disappeared, and Moscow and Peiping appear to have acted in close coordination in fostering warmer relations with Nehru in 1954 and 1955. However, the relative importance of the Chinese party and the Chinese revolution as a guide to Asia — which the CCP had stubbornly upheld during Stalin's lifetime — was inevitably increased as a result of his death, a fact reflected during this period in statements by both Soviet and Chinese leaders.
The 20th Congress of the CPSU in February 1956 and the events which flowed from it administered a series of fundamental shocks to the CPI with results which were to affect greatly the relationship of the Indian party to Moscow and to Peiping down to the present day. The first and most important of these shocks was that of deStalinization, which on the one hand greatly intensified the spirit of cynicism, the internal disorganization, and the personal indiscipline already widespread because of the party's previous history, and on the other hand greatly accelerated the long-term decline in the authority and prestige of the CPSU which had begun with the death of Stalin, while simultaneously enhancing the appeal of the CCP to those sections of the Indian party sympathetic to Peiping's viewpoint. This development was followed by the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and the subsequent execution of Nagy, which weakened the CPSU's position among rightist sections of the party. A third difficulty was meanwhile occasioned by the 20th Congress line on peaceful transition to socialism, and particularly by the extreme interpretation of that line as applied to India provided by an authoritative Soviet article in the summer of 1956 which implied that Nehru, and not the CPI, would lead India into the socialist system. This viewpoint was directly challenged in public by general secretary Ghosh, and the CPSU soon retreated to a more orthodox position — which, however, still enjoined CPI support for Nehru and CPI reliance primarily upon parliamentary tactics. Forces in the Indian party favoring the parliamentary path were strengthened by the party's accession to power through elections in the state of Kerala in April 1957; and the CPI moved from the April 1956 line of the Palghat party congress (where the party cautiously acknowledged the possibility of peaceful transition to socialism through parliamentary means backed by mass movements, and announced its intention to explore this possibility by conducting itself as a parliamentary opposition) to the April 1958 line of the Amritsar Congress (which exuded confidence that the parliamentary takeover in Kerala could be repeated in other Indian states and eventually even in the center).
Meanwhile, by the fall of 1956 the first indications began to appear of growing divergence between the Chinese and Soviet parties over how far the soft line toward the national bourgeoisie of Asian countries should be pursued. Chinese objections on this score, originally suggested at the time of the Eighth CCP Congress in September 1956, were reinforced as the Indian Communist party became increasingly committed to the parliamentary line in the wake of the Kerala election. Chinese comments began to be heard in 1958 concerning the pernicious effect the Kerala Ministry was having on the militancy and Marxist orthodoxy of the CPI. At the same time the left wing of the Indian party led by the Andhra, West Bengal, and Punjab organizations, infuriated at the restrictions and inhibitions which were imposed upon the party as a whole by the need to preserve the Kerala government in power, became more and more inclined to regard the long-respected Chinese party as a source of inspiration more congenial to its interests than Moscow.
At the end of 1958 there was a momentary hardening of the Soviet line toward Nehru, occasioned primarily by the campaign being conducted by the Congress Party and other forces in Kerala to oust the Communist government. This firmer Soviet attitude was exemplified by an article by Yudin in Problems of Peace and Socialism rebutting Nehru's attack on Communists as addicted to violence; Yudin's article placed the onus for any possible violence on bourgeois resistance to a peaceful transfer of power to the Communist party.
This Soviet shift in emphasis proved to be temporary, however, and in 1959 the polarization of the CPI between a moderate pro-Soviet wing and a militant pro-Chinese wing was to increase greatly. In 1959 the CPI for the first time became gravely affected by the growing differences between the Soviet and Chinese postures toward the "imperialist" world', their attitudes toward the ruling national bourgeoisie of underdeveloped countries, and their views on the most appropriate means of Communist assumption of power. The gap between the CPSU and the CCP on each of these issues, which had been alternately expanding and contracting in previous years, suddenly widened greatly. This was partly the result of events over which neither party had control: the Tibetan revolt, Nehru's decision to oust the Communist government in Kerala, Washington's decision to invite Khrushchev to the United States. It was also, however, the result of a conscious turning to the right by the CPSU and to the left by the CCP. On Moscow's side, there was an apparent decision taken in January 1959 to abandon the stronger tone used toward Nehru in the fall of 1958 and to bear with this bourgeois nationalist leader for a considerable distance. This resulted first in peremptory CPSU restraint of the CPI upon the occasion of Nehru's ouster of the Kerala government, and later in the Soviet adoption of a publicly neutral posture toward the Sino-Indian border dispute (a posture bitterly resented by the CCP), as well as in vigorous Soviet efforts to convince Nehru of Soviet friendship as the border dispute developed. On the Chinese side, there was instead a hardening of attitude toward Nehru at the very beginning of the year, which helped to determine Peiping's later response to events in Kerala and to the border dispute. At the same time, Khrushchev in the fall of 1959 adopted the softest line toward the West generally he had ever publicly voiced in the aftermath of his visit to the United States, while Peiping grew increasingly shrill in its warnings against Western treachery and in contradiction of the Soviet line.
Against this background of increasingly divergent policies, the CCP in 1959 for the first time began to make aggressive efforts to promote its viewpoint among sympathetic sections of the CPI, particularly within the militant West Bengal provincial party organization. At the same time Ranadive and the other leftists in the party apparatus were drawn increasingly into an identification with and defense of Peiping's position in the border dispute, while right-faction leaders throughout the party became increasingly inclined to conciliate Indian nationalist opinion by supporting the Nehru government's stand and condemning Peiping.
In 1960 the Soviet and Chinese parties came into open and repeated conflict, and this conflict was transformed into an organizational struggle within the world Communist movement in which both sides eventually found themselves appealing to the loyalties of the key leaders of each of the principal Communist parties of the world. Although the CPSU, because of its fears of precipitating a formal schism in the Indian party, for a long time left the CPI out of its efforts to mobilize foreign Communist support against Peiping — and even attempted to continue to deny to the CPI the reality of the Sino-Soviet dispute — the Indian party eventually had to be drawn into that dispute if only because bloc policy toward India was one of the key matters at issue between Moscow and Peiping. CPI representatives took part in the Sino-Soviet confrontations which took place in Peiping and Bucharest in June, in Hanoi in September, and in Moscow in October and November. The Indian party was formally apprised of the Soviet position in a CPSU letter to the party center in August, and was given a Chinese reply more indirectly through West Bengal channels the next month. Under the impact of these events, the rightist CPI leaders pressed an offensive against leftist-faction positions, which they were anxious to identify clearly with CCP resistance to CPSU authority; the leftists in the central party machinery, for their part, were anxious to deny their own estrangement from the CPSU by denying as long as they could the reality of Sino-Soviet differences. When a clearcut choice was finally posed in September, vacillating and opportunistic CPI leaders (the majority) swung to the rightist side identified with the CPSU, and the CPI passed a secret resolution attacking Peiping and supporting Moscow. Passage of this resolution was resisted by the leftist CPI national leaders, however, and was bitterly denounced by left-faction representatives in the provinces throughout India. One important provincial party organization, in West Bengal, went so far as to pass a counter-resolution directly attacking the conduct of the CPSU and Khrushchev by name and supporting Peiping — the only such resolution definitely known to have been passed in any Communist party in the world. While the delegation led by Ghosh to Moscow supported Khrushchev on most issues during the November conference of Communist parties, it did not support his demand for a condemnation of factionalism within the Communist movement (implicitly, Chinese factionalism) because of the grave danger that such action would split the CPI. Khrushchev's eventual retreat at that conference on this crucial issue of discipline within the international movement — together with the inclusion of many Chinese positions in the ambiguous document produced by the conference — served to encourage the CPI leftists generally and to leave those of them who had openly defied the CPSU unrebuked and more firmly entrenched than before.
The year 1960 ended with the left faction of the CPI continuing to report to the Chinese party and to receive guidance from it, while gathering strength throughout India for an assault on the central party machinery in 1961. There was a gradual increase in leftist strength and assertiveness throughout the Indian party before the party congress met in April 1961, and Suslov, the CPSU delegate to that congress, was obliged to counsel Ghosh to make substantial concessions to the leftists on the wording of the party's political resolution — in order to preserve Ghosh in office as general secretary and to prevent a threatened open split in the party (which nevertheless came very near to materializing). There is good evidence, however, that the CPSU and Ghosh themselves favored a balanced line including both support and criticism of aspects of Nehru's foreign and domestic policies, and a long-term strategy of building a national democratic front through cooperation with "progressive" Congress Party leaders to achieve limited nonsocialist reforms as a prelude to the gradual Communist assumption of power. Suslov did not have to contend with direct Chinese competition at the CPI Congress, the prospective CCP representatives having been ordered to leave India beforehand by the New Delhi government.
While the new National Council elected by the Congress had a reduced rightist majority — because of the leftists' threat to break up the party unless their wishes were acceded to— the rightists subsequently used this National Council majority to reverse leftist control of the Central Executive Committee and the Central Secretariat, the two top party organs charged with running the party. When Ghosh led a balanced CPI delegation to the 22nd CPSU Congress in October, however, even moderates who were normally staunch CPSU supporters were shaken by the open attacks there on the Albanian leaders and the renewed assault on Stalin. Ghosh indicated his reservations about Khrushchev's course of action by declining to attack Albania in his speech to the CPSU Congress — like a number of other normally pro-CPSU foreign delegates — although two months later, again like the leaders of some other parties, he belatedly added mild public disapproval of the Albanians. Greater turmoil resulted within the CPI as a consequence of this CPSU Congress than had ever existed before, both because of the new CPSU offensive against Albania and the CCP and because of the attacks on Stalin and the displacement of Stalin's body. There were widespread attacks on Moscow and Khrushchev over these actions within all factions of the CPI, and one provincial party organization — that of Andhra Pradesh — passed a resolution condemning the CPSU, the second such resolution to be passed within the CPI in little more than a year. Ghosh eventually published an article publicly regretting the manner in which Moscow had again embarked on deStalinization, and declaring that the CPSU had forfeited its claim to infallibility.
These internal difficulties of the CPI were greatly augmented by the simultaneous rekindling of the Sino-Indian border dispute, a statement by Ghosh strongly attacking the CPR, and a subsequent People's Daily editorial condemning both Nehru and Ghosh. At the close of 1961, both leftist and rightist CPI leaders were warning of the likelihood of an open split in the Indian party after the elections of February 1962. While it seemed likely that the CPSU would make every effort again to prevent such a split, Moscow's long-term chances of success in this effort were dependent on such factors as the future course of Sino-Soviet relations, the fortunes of the "peaceful coexistence" line, and the number of concessions Moscow was willing to make again to the CPI leftists. The Soviet problem was further complicated by the death of Ghosh in January 1962, and the lack of a suitable successor combining loyalty to the CPSU with acceptability to both wings of the Indian party.
I. PROLOGUE: CPI STRUGGLE OVER THE FOUR-CLASS ALLIANCE (1947-1951)
The gradual growth of Peiping's influence and prestige within large sections of the Indian Communist party as a guide secondary to the CPSU has apparently been known and tolerated by the Soviet party for the better part of the last decade. It was this long-term Chinese "presence" in the CPI which in 1959 and 1960 — when Peiping began openly to challenge Soviet authority within the Communist movement on a world-wide scale — was to combine with the factionalism and astonishing indiscipline of the Indian party to produce a threat to CPSU primacy which endures to this day.
Both factors — the legitimization of a degree of permanent Chinese influence, and the growth of factionalism and regional disregard for central authority to a point seen in hardly any other Communist party — had their origin [1] in the internal party struggle between 1947 and 1951 over the methods of struggle the party should follow, the immediate goal it should pursue, and the classes it should admit into its alliance. Many of the positions espoused at that time by individual CPI leaders — not to mention the CPSU and the CCP — have since been altered or even reversed. But there have been lasting effects from certain developments of that time: that the central CPI authority attempted to apply a certain line, in conformity with what it thought was CPSU policy; that this line proved disastrous for the Indian party; that other leaders openly proposed another line, which they specifically acknowledged to have been derived from Chinese teachings rather than from Moscow; that the central leadership reacted with violent denunciations of heresy, with suppression, expulsions, and similar methods to enforce its line on the party; that the central leadership also published a direct attack on the Chinese party as the source of this Indian heresy; that rebel CPI leaders in the center and in one important provincial organization nevertheless continued to defy the leadership; that Moscow eventually accepted certain elements of the Peiping line and forced them upon the Indian party; and that the old CPI leadership was removed and temporarily disgraced. While this was not the entire story (Moscow first and the CPI later concluded that the "Chinese path" was not entirely applicable to India, and the discredited CPI leaders were eventually readmitted to a central leadership coalition of all factions), nevertheless two effects have persevered: on the one hand, considerable respect for the wisdom and authority of the Chinese party were implanted permanently within the CPI; and on the other hand, the authority of the central CPI machinery was so weakened in relation to the provincial party organizations that never again has the central party leadership made a serious attempt to enforce a uniform, rigid line upon the often defiant provinces.
A. Soviet Shift to Militant Line (1947)
These events were set in motion for the CPI by the Soviet decision in 1947 to discard the rightist, united front-from-above line enjoining support for bourgeois governments which the CPSU had required of the world Communist movement after the USSR's entry into World War II. The CPSU now ordered a general shift to a militant strategy of violent opposition to bourgeois governments, general strikes, demonstrations, armed resistance, and, in colonial areas, "wars of liberation." The first authoritative signal for this shift was given in Zhdanov's report to the founding meeting of the Cominform in September 1947; but because Zhdanov dealt explicitly only with Europe, nowhere in this report did he indicate clearly whether or not the alliance which was to carry out the armed struggle in colonial countries against imperialist rulers could include sections of the native bourgeoisie which might be anti-imperialist (the "national bourgeoisie") or sections of the native peasantry which were not impoverished but which might be anti-feudal (the "middle" and "rich" peasantry). That Stalin in 1947 had not made up his mind on this question was indicated by the conflicting interpretations provided by authoritative Soviet speakers at the proceedings of a meeting of the Soviet Academy of Sciences on India in June 1947 which anticipated the Soviet switch to the militant line, and in articles by the same experts in December amplifying Zhdanov's thesis. [2]
The Chinese Communist Party, on the other hand, adopted a clear position on these ambiguous Soviet statements. On 25 December 1947 Mao Tse-tung delivered a report to the CCP central committee setting forth a line which was principally intended for the contemporary Chinese scene but which was also implied to be valid for other Asian parties. Mao condemned "ultra-left" policies toward the petty and "middle" bourgeoisie, explicitly set forth the immediate aims of his "New Democratic" revolution as the elimination of feudalism and monopoly capitalism rather than capitalism in general, and then added a call for "all anti-imperialist forces" of the various Eastern countries to unite to oppose imperialism and the reactionaries as he had defined them — by implication, therefore, to aim at a two-stage revolution (first anti-imperialist and democratic, and only later socialist), and to use a four-class alliance (proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie, and national bourgeoisie) against imperialism and the pro-imperialist sections of the bourgeoisie.
Although the Cominform organ For A Lasting Peace, For A People's Democracy published a summary of this Mao report, it omitted all mention of Mao's demand for the initial retention of capitalism and the alliance with the middle bourgeoisie, thus effectively obscuring Mao's central point. The CCP line on this issue was restated more forcefully and explicitly, however, the following year, in a passage in Liu Shao-chi's article "Nationalism and Internationalism," written in connection with the bloc break with Yugoslavia. While warning the Communists of colonial and semi-colonial countries — including India — to beware of "national betrayal by the reactionary section of the bourgeoisie" which had already surrendered to imperialism, Liu insisted that the Communists "should enter into an anti-imperialist alliance with that section of the national bourgeoisie which is still opposing imperialism." He added that "should the Communists fail to do so in earnest, should they on the contrary oppose or reject such an alliance", this would be a "serious mistake." Although this article was written in November 1948, it was not published in Soviet media until the following June, when the CPSU showed many signs of having finally accepted the line of an alliance with the national bourgeoisie. In the meantime, throughout 1948 authoritative Soviet writers had continued to take ambivalent or contradictory positions on this issue, and it seems likely that this CPSU indecision was one of the reasons for Moscow's long delay in publishing Liu's article. [3]
B. Ranadive Rise to Power in CPI
Meanwhile, even as Mao spoke in December 1947 a shift was occurring within the Indian Communist party which was bringing into control a faction which interpreted Zhdanov's September directive simplistically, not only assuming it to be a call for armed struggle against the Nehru government but also seeing it as a demand for a limited worker-peasant alliance against all sections of the Indian bourgeoisie to bring about a one-stage revolution overthrowing capitalism and ushering in socialism. This shift took place at a December 1947 CPI central committee meeting in which the balance of power within the party swung away from P. C. Joshi — the old CPI general secretary who had led the party since the middle thirties, and who had advocated support for the new Nehru government — toward B.T. Ranadive, who has since to this day remained at least the titular leader of the CPI leftist faction. The central committee adopted a resolution making no distinction between sections of the Indian bourgeoisie, and lumping all of the bourgeoisie with imperialism and feudalism as the enemy to be fought now.
This line was confirmed and developed three months later at the Second Congress of the CPI in February 1948, when Ranadive formally replaced Joshi as general secretary. The Political Thesis adopted by this congress identified the entire world bourgeoisie with the imperialist camp as the common enemy in every country; explicitly rejected the notion of significant differences among the bourgeoisie; called for a united front from below (to entice away the proletarian following of the Congress party) rather than a united front from above (which would have meant the Joshi line of alliances with and support for Congress party leaders); held that "a revolutionary situation now existed in India, and called for a violent effort to bring about a one-stage revolution. This party congress was held in Calcutta immediately upon the conclusion of an international youth congress there sponsored jointly by the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the International Union of Students which is believed to have given the signal for the armed Communist uprisings which soon afterward began in a number of other Asian countries.
Following the Second Congress, Ranadive proceeded to apply insurrectionary tactics against the Nehru government; in so doing he sought to adhere to the model of the Russian revolution and to rely primarily upon struggle in the cities rather than in the countryside. There were attempts at massive paralyzing strikes, violent demonstrations, acid-throwings, and so on, and many party leaders went underground. The Nehru government responded with a vigorous crackdown against the party which effectively anticipated and countered these measures and placed much of the party's top leadership in prison. Meanwhile, the CPI's violent tactics steadily reduced the number of effective party members, decimated the fronts, and rapidly eliminated the party's influence over the masses; calls for strikes were heeded less and less, and eventually, as Ranadive's opponents later charged, the party was reduced to sponsoring acts of "individual terrorism" by tiny groups of die-hard militants.
Andhra Citation of Mao as Guide
While this was going on, Communist leaders in the Telegnana district of the southern Indian princely state of Hyderabad (which had not yet been incorporated into India) had for three years been leading a relatively successful revolt among the local peasantry by relying upon a radical program of land reform. The contrast between the success of this effort and the failure of Ranadive's tactics encouraged the Andhra provincial committee — to which the Telengana party leaders were subordinated — to circulate within the party in June 1948 a document challenging Ranadive's line and calling for a line combining agrarian revolt with Communist alliance with the national bourgeoisie and all strata of the peasantry. The Andhra leaders explicitly acknowledged that they were inspired to adopt this line by the experience of the Chinese revolution, and not by what they termed "classical Russian revolution." They declared that "Mao, the leader of the historic Chinese liberation struggle, from his unique and rich experience and study, has formulated a theory of new democracy" which was a "new form of revolutionary struggle to advance toward socialism in colonies and semi-colonies" and which was something "distinct from the dictatorship of the proletariat." An essential aspect of this Maoist line which the Indian party should copy, they felt, was the limitation of the struggle in the present stage to one against imperialism and feudalism, and the consequent formation of a broad alliance with the anti-imperialist "middle bourgeoisie" of the cities, as well as the "middle peasantry" and (if possible) even the "rich peasantry" of the countryside. The Andhra party committee cited as the justification for this line a statement by Mao on 24 April 1945 to the 7th CCP Congress, in which Mao complained that "some people cannot understand why the Communist Party of China, far from being unsympathetic to capitalism, actually promotes its development," and explained that "what China does not want is foreign imperialism and native feudalism and not native capitalism which is too weak."
Ranadive Attack on Mao
While neither Mao nor the Andhra Communists had in mind either the indefinite retention of capitalism or the abdication of Communist leadership, and while there is no good evidence that the Andhra party in hailing Mao as a model consciously intended to reject CPSU authority, Ranadive for polemical purposes chose to profess these conclusions in the counteroffensive he made to the Andhra document. In his first response, in the CPI journal Communist of January 1949, Ranadive contented himself with defending his line of a single revolution leading directly to socialism, led by the proletariat in firm alliance only with the poor peasantry and the rural proletariat, and with suggesting that the battle against the Indian bourgeoisie was even more important than the struggle against foreign imperialism. In July 1949, however, he wrote an article in the same journal which directly assailed not only the Andhra document but its ideological inspiration, Mao Tse-tung. In this article Ranadive emphasized that the CPI accepted only Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin as authoritative sources of Marxism, and not Mao, whom he implicitly compared with Tito and Browder. He declared that "some of Mao's formulations are such that no Communist party can accept them; they are in contradiction to the world understanding of the Communist parties." Citing the 1945 Mao quotation from the Andhra document, he termed the formulation about the CCP promoting the development of capitalism "horrifying," "reactionary," and "counterrevolutionary," and in hypocritical fashion interpreted Mao literally, asking: "Are we to understand that while Communists in Europe, the USSR, and India fight world capitalism, the CCP proposes to rebuild it in China?"
Joshi subsequently claimed that eighteen months before Ranadive expressed these views publicly he had disseminated them in private oral discussions within the CPI on the eve of the February 1948 CPI Congress. Ranadive at that time had reportedly declared that Mao's "New Democracy" was reeking with reformism and that the Chinese revolution would not be consolidated and directed towards socialism until its leadership revised its views or was made to revise them. Ranadive was also said to have predicted that a "whole pack of reformists" who had got control of certain other Communist parties after the wartime dissolution of the Cominform would soon be ousted. In a February 1949 article in Communist, Ranadive indeed made public similar vague charges of revisionism against the leaderships of unspecified European Communist parties.
For Ranadive to pass from these private charges of vague public allusions to his direct public attack on Mao in July 1949, however, was a remarkable act, particularly in view of the fact that the CCP at that moment was in the process of consolidating its conquest of mainland China, while the CPI was a tiny and hopelessly defeated remnant of a party. Despite Ranadive's undoubted personal fanaticism and irresponsibility, it seems likely that he must have had what he considered good evidence of strong friction between Stalin and the CCP to justify his action. [4]
There are two known items of evidence dating from late 1948 and early 1949 which do suggest that at the very time when the CCP was coming to power in China, Stalin was experiencing particular difficulty in adjusting himself to the heightened status of Mao and the Chinese party within the international movement which was the inevitable consequence of this event. First, the British Communist Palme Dutt, in a report to a Conference on the Crisis of British Imperialism on 2 October 1948, listed five new features of the post-World War II "national liberation movement". According to the version of Dutt's report published in Britain, the second of these points declared: "The advance of democratic China represents a powerful force in the world situation which exercises a profound influence on the development of the liberation struggle of the colonial peoples throughout Asia." The version published in the Cominform journal on 15 October, however, listed only four features; the point about China was omitted.
When next the temper of Kashmiri politics boiled over, it was Freda rather than B.P.L. who was on the spot and propelled to prominence. In the spring of 1946, Sheikh Abdullah launched the Quit Kashmir movement. While the Congress's earlier Quit India campaign was directed against the British, Sheikh Abdullah was seeking the eviction of Kashmir's royal family and the establishment of representative government. The maharaja responded with repression. Protests were violently dispersed. Sheikh Abdullah was arrested in May 1946; hundreds of his supporters were also detained. Several of his key colleagues managed to reach Lahore. Some leaders of the National Conference, notably G.M. Karra, operated underground. Bedi was in Lahore and too well-known to make the journey to Srinagar without attracting immediate arrest. Freda, by chance, was in Kashmir on a camping holiday with her new baby, Kabir, then just four months old and still being breastfed. On Kabir's nineteenth birthday, Freda wrote him a long and intensely personal letter in which she dwelt on the political drama in which he was caught up.In summer, we went up to Kashmir as usual. Papa left me in Haji Brar, and went down to Lahore again, promising to return. Then the storm burst. Sheikh Abdullah started the 'Quit Kashmir' agitation. He was promptly jailed along with all his followers. I felt I must do something. What, I didn't know. Srinagar was a long way away and all the people I could discuss things with were behind bars. I came down to Srinagar. You were always with me like my skin, tucked up in your little Moses basket. I daren't leave you for a minute so wherever you + I had to go, we went together.
How can I put in words that painful summer? The police wanted me to leave Kashmir as they knew Papa and I were friends of the rebels. So they issued a notice to me to leave. I wrote on the back of the notice that I didn't accept it, as I didn't recognise the people who issued it. From then on they pursued me. C.I.D. watching, following. I was doing nothing, of course; just feeding you. Whoever I stayed with, the poor boatman, were called and harassed [sic] by the Police. It was so difficult: they wanted to protect me, but I was giving them trouble. Finally, to save the boat people, I took a room in a cheap Punjabi hotel in the city, with a Frontierman Manager, some Peshawari Hindu, I've forgotten his name, but he had a heart of gold. 'Just you sit here and feed that baby,' he said, 'and don't worry about anything.'
But the hotel food made me sick, + my milk began to suffer. It was then that that saintly old man, a Kashmiri Pandit, ... heard of my plight and sent me every morning and evening a tiffin box full of pure vegetarian food. That kept me going, and you too ....
Once, the 'underground' Kashmiri nationalists wanted to meet me, and I was given a 'burqua' (you were tucked away under it, close to my heart) and slipped out of a house I was visiting by the back door, + so reached a room in the centre of the old city.14
In this intimate letter written many years after the events described, Freda downplayed both the bravery and the political significance of her actions. The state authorities' issuing of an 'externment' or deportation order against Freda in June 1946 was widely reported -- so too was her refusal to comply. This was a political trial of will, and Freda could not be sure that if the maharaja's police moved in, she would be gently treated. The British communist Rajani Palme Dutt -- in Kashmir in late July as a public show of support for Sheikh Abdullah -- complained of the 'reign of terror' let loose by the maharaja and his police. He met Bedi in Lahore, noting that he was 'large' and 'robust'. Bedi, in turn, helped to organise meetings for Palme Dutt in Srinagar, including with Freda. 'I saw armed sentries posted on all the bridges and strategic points,' he wrote in Labour Monthly. 'An Indian journalist who accompanied me to Srinagar was subjected to a police raid at night by ten C.I.D. men, who made a complete search of his room, as well as of the room of Freda Bedi in the same hotel. The driver of the car which I had used in Srinagar was ... arrested and beaten up to extract from him information as to my movements.'
Freda's secret meeting was to pass on messages between the National Conference leaders -- presumably those in Lahore -- and those such as G.M. Karra who were operating undercover in Srinagar. In the absence of much of the male leadership of the National Conference, women activists stepped into the breach. At the behest of some of these women, Freda dressed up in clothes which would have disguised her European appearance but hardly made her inconspicuous. '"People wouldn't put me in an old muddy burka," said Freda. "They wanted to dress me in the best they had, and they would go to the bride's chest." In ballooning garments encrusted with embroidery, and with daintily crocheted inserts just big enough for her blue English eyes to peer through, Freda moved about, relaying directives ... Her temporary retreat into purdah had been an experience for her. "It's a strange sensation it gives you," she said. "You're behind a bridge. You have this queer knowledge that you can observe everybody and no one can see you. It's a peculiar mentality that must develop among Muslim women."' Sajida Zameer Ahmed recalls escorting Freda, disguised in a burqa, on a horse-drawn buggy around Srinagar to meet underground activists. She also took on another invaluable role for Freda -- babysitting Kabir so that his mother could devote herself more fully to the political role she had taken on.
-- The Lives of Freda: The Political, Spiritual and Personal Journeys of Freda Bedi, by Andrew Whitehead
Anna Louise Strong Book
A more dramatic piece of evidence — and a reason why the CPSU at this time may have been unwilling to publish the seemingly innocuous statement above, which in subsequent years has been repeated many times by Moscow — was provided by the case of Anna Louise Strong and her book, "Tomorrow's China." This book, based on a year's stay in China from July 1946 to July 1947 and on repeated conversations with the top CCP leaders, was published by the Communist press of many countries late in 1948 and early in 1949. In India, it was published by the CPI's People's Publishing House of Bombay in the fall of 1948 under the title "Dawn Out of China." In this work Miss Strong paid repeated tribute to the experience and authority of the Chinese Communist party and Mao and the particular and unique relevance of Mao's teachings to the revolutions of Asia. She even went so far as to state explicitly that "it is to Mao Tse-tung and to Communist China much more than to present-day Moscow that the nationalist revolutions of Indonesia, Indo-China, Burma, look for their latest, most practical ideas," and that Mao's strategy was made to fit such peoples because China's problems are similar to theirs. Mao's analysis of China's revolution, she said, "is studied eagerly in the colonial lands of Southeast Asia;" and she thought that "Marxists all over the world agree that in order to understand the modern problems of Asia, it is necessary to study Mao's thought," since Mao was the "first Marxist in Asia" to succeed in applying Marxist principles to new conditions and in giving those principles a new development.
One aspect of the Maoist teachings thus lauded by this book is the "New Democracy" line calling for an alliance with the middle bourgeoisie and preservation of some native capitalism for the sake of the common struggle against imperialism and its adherents. In a later private conversation, Anna Louise Strong stated that in her last interview with Mao in 1947, she declared her intention to bring this Maoist line for the anti-imperialist struggle to the attention of other Asian Communist parties; thereupon, according to her account, Mao interrupted her to urge that she bring it to the attention of the Russians as well. In fact, after her book had already been published by a number of Communist parties, she did visit the Soviet Union in an effort to get the work published there, and appears to have been naively surprised at the insistence of the Moscow publishing house that drastic changes be made in the text. Finally, she was arrested in Moscow in February in 1949, charged with espionage, and subsequently expelled from the country. Her old friend Borodin, who had attempted to help her in dealing with the Moscow publishers, was also arrested and later died in prison.
The fact of Anna Louise Strong's arrest by the Soviet authorities a few months after the appearance of her book hailing Mao was likely to have been seized on by Ranadive as evidence of Stalin's attitude toward both Mao's pretensions and Maoist policy. Thus encouraged, Ranadive and his lieutenants in the party center persisted in leading the party on in its violent course despite the disastrous effects this was having, and despite the growing opposition to the Ranadive line not only from the Andhra committee but also from the party trade union leaders led by S.A. Dange. Too deeply committed to his line to draw back, Ranadive attempted to apply Stalinist methods of suppression within the CPI, arbitrarily dissolving rebellious local party committees and expelling dissidents on a wide scale, and thereby compounding the chaos throughout the party.
C. CPSU Shift Toward Broad Alliances, Away from Armed Struggle
One of Ranadive's opponents who was first suspended from the party and then, in December 1949, expelled, was the former CPI general secretary P.C. [Purand Chand] Joshi. Joshi responded pugnaciously to his expulsion by launching a one-man campaign against Ranadive, sending a long letter to Stalin and to other foreign parties documenting Ranadive's departure from Soviet intentions, and publishing these and other documents in a journal founded specially for the purpose. Joshi was aided in this effort by the fact that CPSU policy doubts had apparently been resolved by mid-summer 1949 in favor of the line of the four-class alliance and the two-stage revolution. In early June Pravda finally published the text of Liu Shao-chi's "Internationalism and Nationalism"; this fact was cited by Joshi [5] as having been ignored by Ranadive when publishing his attack on Mao. Also in June 1949, reports delivered at an important meeting held by the USSR Academy of Sciences upheld both armed peasant struggles and the participation of the national bourgeoisie in the anti-imperialist alliance in colonial countries; and the same line was taken in a collection of papers published by the Soviet Pacific Institute later in 1949.
Soviet Subordination of Chinese Experience
In addition, one of the latter papers published by the Pacific Institute now described the Chinese revolution as having profited "from the tremendous experience of the CPSU", as having "creatively applied the teachings of Lenin and Stalin" under conditions of a semi-colonial country, and as constituting for this reason "a vast treasury of revolutionary experience itself" for colonial peoples of the East to draw upon. This attempt to subordinate the significance of Mao's thinking was reiterated in a Soviet message on the founding of the CPR published in Pravda on 6 October 1949, in which the CCP was depicted as having won its victory by "basing itself" on Stalin's "analysis of the. . .conditions for a victory of an anti- imperialist and anti- feudal revolution." It thus seems that the CPSU, finally convinced of the expediency of Mao's four-class strategy for the revolutions of Asian parties — and also confronted by Mao's victory with the necessity of defining the CCP's relation to those revolutions — attempted to resolve both problems by adopting this Maoist line and depicting it, and all Chinese experience, as derived from Stalinist teachings.
The CCP seems never to have accepted this distinctly subordinate niche for Mao, although Mao in March and July 1949 did perform the ritual of acknowledging Chinese successes to have been made possible by the Soviet victories in World War II. At the November 1949 WFTU Peiping Conference of Asian and Australasian Countries which formally ratified the Maoist strategy as suitable for the Asian parties, Liu Shao-chi declared, without any obeisance to Soviet experience or teachings, that "the path taken by the Chinese people... is the path that should be taken by the peoples of the various [NCNA English] colonial and semi-colonial countries in their fight for national independence and people's democracy." [6] (Emphasis supplied.)