Socialist Movements in India

Beginnings of Socialist Movements

• The influence of the Left-wing in the Indian National Congress and consequently on the struggle for independence was felt in a significant manner from the late 1920s.
• Inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917 the Communist Party of India (CPI) was founded Tashkent, Uzbekistan at in October 1920.
• Founding members – M.N. Roy, Abani Mukherjee, M.P.T. Acharya Mohammad Ali and Mohammad Shafiq.
• The first batch of radicals reached Peshawar on 3 June 1921 and they were arrested immediately under the charges of being Bolshevik (Russian communist agents).
• A series of five conspiracy cases were instituted against them between the years 1922 and 1927.

Foundation of Communist Party

• All India Communist Conference was held at Kanpur in 1925. 
• The Presidential Address – “Singaravelar.” 
• the CPI was formally founded on Indian soil in 1925 in Bombay
• The establishment of the All India Workers’ and Peasants’ Party in 1928. 
• The progress in this direction was halted with the Meerut Conspiracy Case in 1929. 
• Muzaffar Ahamed, S.A. Dange, S.V. Ghate, G. Adhikari, P.C. Joshi, S.S.Mirajkar, Shaukat Usmani, Philip Stratt and twenty-three others were arrested for organising a railway strike.

Kanpur Conspiracy Case, 1924

• The Kanpur Conspiracy case of 1924 was a move to suppress the development of communism in India
• Those charged with the conspiracy were communists and trade unionists.
• The charge on them was “to deprive the King Emperor of his sovereignty of British India, by complete separation of India from imperialistic Britain.”
• The case came before Sessions Judge H.E. Holmes who had earned notoriety while serving as Sessions Judge of Gorakhpur for awarding death sentence to 172 peasants for their involvement in the Chauri Chaura case. 
• In the Kanpur Conspiracy case, Muzaffar Ahmed, Shaukat Usmani, Nalini Gupta and S. A. Dange were sent to jail, for four years of rigorous imprisonment.
• The trial and the imprisonment, meanwhile, led to some awareness about the communist activities in India. 
• 8 persons were charge-sheeted: M.N. Roy, Muzaffar Ahmad, S.A. Dange, Nalini Gupta, Ghulam Hussain, Singaravelu, Shaukat Usmani, and R.L. Sharma. (Ghulam Hussain turned an approver. M.N. Roy and KL. Sharma were charged in absentia as they were in Germany and Pondicherry (a French Territory) respectively. 
• Singaravelu was released on bail due to his ill health.

Kakori Conspiracy Case, 1925

• The youths who were disillusioned with the sudden withdrawal of the Non Cooperation Movement by Gandhi took to violence. 
• In 1924 Hindustan Republican Army (HRA) was formed in Kanpur.
• In 1925 Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqulla Khan and others held up a train carrying government money and looted in Kakori, a village near Lucknow. 
• They were arrested and tried in the Kakori Conspiracy Case.
• Four of them were sentenced to death while the others were sentenced to imprisonment.

Meerut Conspiracy Case, 1929

• The Meerut Conspiracy Case was the most famous of all the communist conspiracy cases instituted by the British Government. 
• The late 1920s witnessed a number of labour upsurges and this period of unrest extended into the decade of the Great Depression (1929-1939). 
• Trade unionism spread over to many urban centres and organised labour strikes. 
• The communists played a prominent role in organising the working class throughout this period.

1. The Kharagpur Railway workshop strikes – 1927, 
2. The Liluah Rail workshop strike – 1928, 
3. The Calcutta scavengers‘ strike – 1928, 
4. Jute mills strikes in Bengal – 1929, 
5. The Golden Rock workshop of the South Indian Railway strike, Tiruchirappalli, – 1928, 
6. The textile workers’ strike in Bombay – 1928.

The British Government brought two draconian Acts 

1. The Trade Disputes Act, 1928 
2. The Public Safety Bill, 1928. 

• These Acts armed the government with powers to curtail civil liberties in general and suppress the trade union activities in particular. 
• They arrested 32 leading activists of the Communist Party, from different parts of British India.
• Most of them were trade union activists and eight of them belonged to the Indian National Congress.

The arrested also included three British communists

1. Philip Spratt  
2. Ban Bradley 
3. Lester Hutchinson  

• They were charged under Section 121A of the Indian Penal Code. 
• Meanwhile, a National Meerut Prisoners’ Defence Committee was formed to coordinate defence in the case. 
• Famous Indian lawyers like K.F. Nariman and M.C. Chagla appeared in the court on behalf of the accused and national leaders like Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru visited the accused in jail.
• Most importantly, even Romain Rolland and Albert Einstein raised their voice in support “of the convicted.
• During the trial, the Communists made use of their defence as a platform for propaganda by making political statements.
• The Sessions Court in Meerut awarded stringent sentences on 16 January 1933, four years after the arrests in 1929 but under the international pressure the sentences considerably reduced in 1933.

Left Movement in the 1930s

• By the 1930s the Communist Party of India had gained strength in view of the economic crisis caused by world-wide Great Depression.
• The effects of Depression were reflected in decline in trade returns and fall in agricultural prices.
• The governmental measures included forcible collection of land revenue which in real terms had increased two-fold.
• In this context, the Communist Party, fighting for the cause of peasants and industrial workers hit by loss of income and wage reduction, and problems of unemployment gained influence.
• As a result the Communist Party of India was banned in 1934. 
• In 1934 the Congress Socialist Party was formed by Jayaprakash Narayan, Acharya Narendra Dev and Minoo Masani. 
• They believed that nationalism was the path to socialism and that they would work within the Congress. They worked to make Congress pro-peasant and pro-worker.

Lahore Conspiracy Case & Bomb Throwing Case

• • Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and their comrades reorganized the HRA in Punjab.
  • Influenced by socialist ideas they renamed it as Hindustan Socialist Republican Association in 1928.
  • Saunders, a British police officer responsible for the lathi charge that led to Lala Lajpat Rai’s death was assassinated by Bagat Singh and Chandrasekar Azad and it is called as Lahore Conspiracy Case 
  • Bhagat Singh along with B.K. Dutt threw a smoke bomb inside the Central Legislative Assembly in 1929.
  • They threw pamphlets and shouted ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ and ‘Long Live the Proletariat’.
  • During the Gandhi-Irwin negotiations there was wide-spread demand to include the case of Bhagat Singh and Rajguru but the Viceroy was not willing to commute the death sentence.
  • Bhagat Singh along with Rajguru, Sukhdev, Jatindra Nath Das and 21 others were arrested and tried for the murder of Saunders (the case was known as the Second Lahore Conspiracy Case).
  • Jatindra Nath Das died in the jail after 64 days of hunger strike against the discriminatory practices and poor conditions in jail.
  • The verdict in the bomb throwing case had been suspended until the trial of Lahore Conspiracy trials was over.

• It was in this case that Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were sentenced to death on 7 October 1930.

• The days of capitalism and imperialism are numbered. The war neither began with us nor is going to end with our lives… According to the verdict of your court we had waged a war and we are therefore war prisoners. And we claim to be treated as such i.e., we claim to be shot dead instead of being hanged” a letter by prisoners to Punjab Governor. 
• Symbolically, they also shouted Inquilab Zindabad after this defence statement of his in the court.
• Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were hanged early in the morning of March 23, 1931 in the Lahore Jail. 
• They faced the gallows with courage, shouting Inquilab Zindabad and Down with British Imperialism until their last breath.

Role of Socialists during Quit India Movement

• With Gandhi and other prominent leaders of the Congress in jail, the Socialists provided the leadership for the movement. 
• Jayaprakash Narayan and Ramanand Misra escaped from prison and organised an underground movement. 
• Women activists like Aruna Asaf Ali played a heroic role. 
• Usha Mehta established Congress Radio underground which successfully functioned till November 1942. British used all its might to suppress the revolt. 

Kalpana Dutt

• In the late 1920s a young woman, Kalpana Dutt (known as Kalpana Joshi after her marriage to the communist leader P.C. Joshi), fired the patriotic imagination of young people by her daring raid of the Chittagong armoury.
• Kalpana Dutt’s active participation in the revolutionary Chittagong movement led to her arrest.
• The charge was “waging war against the King Emperor.” 
• Tried along with Surya Sen, Kalpana was sentenced to transportation for life. 
• Kalpana Dutt’s autobiography is “Chittagong Armoury Raiders’ Reminiscences.”
• Kalpana Dutt recalls in her book Chittagong Armoury Raiders Reminiscences the revolutionary youth of Chittagong wanted “to inspire self-confidence by demonstrating that even without outside help it was possible to fight the Government.

Chittagong Armoury Raid

• As Surya Sen, the revolutionary leader of Chittagong armoury raid, told Ananda Gupta, “a dedicated band of youth must show the path of organised armed struggle in place of individual action. Most of us will have to die in the process but our sacrifice for such noble cause will not go in vain.” 
• Surya Sen’s revolutionary group, the Indian Republican Army, was named after the Irish Republican Army. 
• The Chittagong armouries were raided on the night of 18 April 1930 and Kalpana Dutt was among those who participated in the raids.
• The revolutionaries hoisted the national flag and symbolically shouted slogans such as Bande Matram and Inquilab Zindabad.
• Villages and the villagers, gave food and shelter to the revolutionaries and suffered greatly at the hands of police for this. 
• It took three years to arrest Surya Sen, in February 1933, and eleven months before he was sent to the gallows on 12 January 1934.