An If of History-1

Referring to the communists’ collaboration with the British and the Muslim League throughout the decade of 1940s, HV Sheshadri calls it a “British-League-Communist Hook-up.” The early 1940s were crucial years for India and Indian communists came out in full support for Jinnah’s Pakistan scheme. Jinnah found, Seshadri writes, a “strange bed-fellow in the communists.” The communists, he points out, “had not stopped at supporting the Muslim League in their Partition demand. It had directed a large number of its Muslim members to join the Muslim League” so that it could provide the “intellectual muscle” to the two nation-theory. The communists went still further, Seshadri observes, “and began planting seeds for further dismemberment of the country by propagating that every linguistic group was a distinct national entity and had the right to secede.”

Seshadri refers to this as the “British-League-Communists gang-up to subvert the cause of India’s freedom and integrity.” Jinnah used communists for his propaganda but heaped derision on their politics. Addressing a Muslim League session in Lahore, Jinnah said that he found communists to be the “cleverest party” carrying on propaganda but that he was also suspicious of them. “They have got so many flags, and I think they consider that there is safety in numbers. They have got the Red flag; they have got the Russian flag, they have got the Soviet flag, they have got the Congress flag. And now they have been good enough to introduce our flag also…Well when a man has too many flags, I get suspicious.”

On the one hand Indian communists amplified Jinnah’s Pakistan demand and on the other they opposed the “Quit India Movement” and played ball with the British in crushing it. P Govinda Pillai, Marxist ideologue, once chief editor of the CPIM mouthpiece Deshabhimani, and a close associate of EMS Namboodiripad, describes his first meeting, “I was a student when I met EMS for the first time. I still recall how logically he defended the CPI’s stand not to join the Quit India struggle, launched on August 9 1942.” As a Quit India activist, Pillai was “not entirely convinced then” by EMS’s arguments, but they considerably shook him. He eventually joined the communist party and EMS. Communists were high on persuasive power and their propaganda, sustained by British resources, had a power and effect of its own.

Comrade SS Batlivala, a former member of the CPI’s central committee, whom we had referred to in our previous discussion, had spilled the beans on communist-British collaboration, in a public statement he had made in 1946. In his short history of the Communist Party of India, Minoo Masani records comrade Batlivala’s statements and confession. Against the national upsurge that followed the Quit India declaration, Indian communists, Masani observes, “battled on the side of the British. The underground resistance leaders were condemned as "fifth columnists” and the Party members “often considered it their duty to spy on them and get them arrested wherever possible” earning thus the “odium attached everywhere to traitors and police informers.” Comrade Batlivala became “thoroughly convinced” that he could not “trust the bona fides” of his “comrades or rely on them to work honestly in the movement for the achievement of Indian freedom.”

Batlivala went on to expose the CPI’s top leadership and their collusion with the British in crushing the Quit India movement. Exposing PC Joshi, general secretary of the CPI, Batlivala charged that Joshi had “detailed certain Party members to be in touch with the Army Intelligence Department and supplied the CID chiefs with such information as they would require against nationalist workers who were connected with the 1942 struggle or against persons who had come to India on behalf of the Azad Hind Government of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.”

In a letter he wrote to a columnist of the Bombay Chronicle weekly, published on 17 March 1946, Batlivala made a damning expose of PC Joshi. Masani records that the “most serious charge made by Batlivala in his letter was that Joshi had, as General Secretary of the Party, written a letter in which he offered ‘unconditional help’ to the then Government of India and the Army GHQ to fight the 1942 underground workers and the Azad Hind Fauj (Indian National Army) of Subhas Chandra Bose, even to the point of getting them arrested.” On the industrial front, Masani tells us, that the communists, exercising their control over the trade union body, the AITUC, “exerted their utmost to keep the workers out of the national unrest” and also asked the peasants to “shelve all their grievances and grow more food and surrender it all to feed the armies.”

The subversive role of Indian communists during the Quit India movement is a vast field of study. Large segments of it remain unexplored offering immense scope for unearthing the truth of one of the most infamous chapters of subversion and betrayal in the history of India’s freedom struggle.

Let us look at the meeting that could never take place between Doctorji and Subhas Chandra Bose. It is one of those great “ifs” of history. Had Doctorji and Subhas met, what course would have events taken? What would be the conversation or the plan? How would have both discussed the way ahead to the goal – the liberation of India?

By 1939, Doctorji was down with an illness that led to his life gradually ebbing away. To friends and well-wishers who worried about him and advised rest, he wrote that he should have given his body some rest but that one “engaged in Sangh work can hardly afford to do that.” Nana Palkar describes the peculiar symptoms of Doctorji’s illness and of how he endured extreme pain and fever. Tests could not reveal the exact nature of his illness.

It was when he was struck down with double pneumonia and recuperating in Deolali, enduring extreme physical exhaustion and pain that the first message arrived from Subhas Bose for a meeting. Subhas wanted to meet Doctorji to discuss the possibilities of exploiting the situation that had arisen from the War situation and organise a revolt against the British. Even here, not Balaji Huddar, but one doctor, Vasant Ramrao Sanzgiri seemed to have been the principal interlocutor when they met around 8 or 9 July 1939.

Nana Palkar describes the meeting. Dr Sanzgiri conveyed Subhas Bose’s desire to meet Doctor ji and “discuss the state of emergency that had been created by the onset of the Second World War, and how they could exploit these charged circumstances to launch an uprising against the British.” Doctor ji’s response came from a precise assessment of the situation. He agreed that the conditions around were favourable, but the moot question was “are we ready to fight for our independence? To start with, we must be at least fifty percent ready.” What strength and number did Subhas Bose command, “if we are not at least partially prepared, we cannot depend on the support of others.”

Doctor ji invited them to come to Nagpur, where “we can discuss this matter without disturbances.” That meeting could never take place.

The writer is a member of the National Executive Committee (NEC), BJP, and the Chairman of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation. Views expressed are personal