How Indian Communists Helped the Muslim League to Carve out Pakistan

Introduction

AT LEAST TWO GENERATIONS of Indians have grown up with zero idea of Communism in theory and practice. These generations found it strange to read the news of political leaders mourning the death of someone named Sitaram Yechury. But the generations that fought and triumphed in the decadal battles against this evil ideology know better.     

Communism kept India economically impoverished. Communism generationally bred Sarkari rent-seekers and kleptocrats. Communism fuelled the lucrative careers of third-rated, anti-Hindu plagiarists like Salim and Javed. Communism  transformed India into a quasi-satellite state of the erstwhile USSR. Communism created five generations of traitors. Communism denied Hindus their birthright to reclaim the Sri Rama Janmabhoomi.

But what is lesser-known is the story of how Communists had supplied intellectual and other arsenal to the Muslim League, thereby enabling it to carve out Pakistan. 

In his brilliant Perversion of India’s Political Parlance, Sri Sita Ram Goel narrates this story in his typical no-holds-barred style. It begins with the slow and deliberate infilitration of Communist agents into the Indian National Congress in the 1930s. The order for this infiltration came directly from the Soviet Union.  

The rest of the story is narrated in Sita Ram Goel’s own words. Emphases have been added.

Split in the National Movement

THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA was instructed to join the Indian National Congress via the newly formed Congress Socialist Party and to push the national organisation towards another mass movement.

That is how the Congress Socialists ceased to be "petit-bourgeois Left-reformists" and became "the revolutionary Left-wing of the Indian National Congress." The Congress itself ceased to be a "class organisation of capitalists" and became a "broad national front of all patriotic people." The language of Communist imperialism was employing no end of casuistry to prove that a "Popular Front government in London was the best guarantee for a early dawn of freedom and democracy in India." 

The Congress Socialists themselves were worshippers of the Soviet Union as a proletarian paradise. They swallowed this language, hook, line and sinker. The language of Communist imperialism was fast getting transformed into the language of Leftism.

The Congress leadership had, in the meanwhile, moved in an opposite direction. It was toying with idea of trying the experiment in provincial self-government envisaged in the Government of India Act 1935. The language of Leftism immediately launched a campaign against the "Rightist leadership" which was "trying to compromise with British imperialism in the interests of feudal and capitalist elements and against the interests of the toiling masses." Simultaneously, it claimed that the "Left wing of the Congress was working for a democratisation of the national organisation by bringing into its fold the peasantry and the working class so that this organisation could play a revolutionary role at home and an anti-fascist role in international affairs."

The chief patron of this Leftist language inside the Congress leadership was Pandit Nehru. Formally, he kept aloof from the communist-Socialist combine. But he used it surreptitiously to hurl all sorts of insinuations, innuendos and invectives on Sardar Patel whom he considered to be his main contempt for the Leftist language. But he was a man of few words and deemed it below his dignity to descend to the level of Leftism. The Leftist campaign, therefore, succeeded to large extent in pillorying the Sardar as an "arch reactionary in alliance with the Birlas," and as a "fascist out to suppress all democratic, progressive, revolutionary and socialist elements in the Congress." Quite a few other members of the High Command who were supporters of the Sardar got tarred with the same brush…

For the first time… the Congress stood split by slogans imported from abroad and in the interests of a foreign power which had its own scores to settle in the power politics of Europe. The issues on which the Leftists were generating so much heat had little relevance to the Indian situation.

A section of sterling patriots had to leave the Congress to form the Forward Bloc. In due course, the Leftist pressure inside the Congress became ministries, soon after the Second World War broke out. The field was thus left clear for the Muslim League to spread its tentacles and mount its campaign for Pakistan.

…the so-called Congress Left had quite a few people who were living in luxury on incomes derived from landed estates or from shares held in capitalist companies. But they were now strutting around as democrats, progressives, revolutionaries and socialists merely by mouthing certain slogans and without the least change in their life style. Most of them used the opportunity to make the best of both the worlds.

Nationalism Named as Hindu Communalism

The language of Islamic imperialism as also that of British imperialism had been saying for a long time that Congress nationalism was nothing but Hindu communalism. The Congress had tried its best to disprove the accusation by making more and more concessions to the Muslims. Its participation in the Khilafat agitation was a generous gesture to move Muslim hearts. But all had gone in vain. Muslims had not only remained unreconciled but had become increasingly prone to frequent violence and vile vituperations. Fanaticism inherent in Islam had turned them into a frenzied mob.

There were many freedom fighters inside as well as outside the Congress fold, who were not happy with the pro-Muslim politics of the Congress. They held the very correct view that Hindu society constituted the nation in the ancient Hindu homeland. That is why Hindus alone had manned the fight for freedom and had made all the sacrifices for the motherland. 

Muslims, on the other hand, had either played the British game or stood aloof or come forward only to share the concessions which Hindu freedom fighters had wrested from the British from time to time. And this state of things was likely to last till Muslims could cure themselves of the illusion that they were a race of conquerors and that they could get almost anything by committing violence.

The language of Leftism launched a blistering attack on these nationalists. They were branded as "Hindu communalists who were bent upon breaking the broad national front against British imperialism by bringing in religious obscurantism and cultural chauvinism borrowed from the primitive Hindu past." The "Hindu communalists" were not only "provoking Muslim communalism" but also "serving feudalism, capitalism and imperialism by raising narrow and sectarian issues… which sabotaged the struggle of the toiling masses for a bit of bread and a piece of cloth." 

The nationalists were thus made suspect in the eyes of the Congress which could never get over its supine stance vis-a-vis Islam and the Muslims. The suspicion has deepened in subsequent years, so much so that all nationalists have been ostracised from the Congress fold.

In the second round, the language of Leftism accused the Congress itself of using far too many Hindu symbols and songs and ceremonies to give comfort to the "Muslim minority which was becoming increasingly conscious of its own religious and cultural identity." Vande Mataram, the national song which had been the soul of the freedom movement for several decades, was subjected to special criticism as an "anti-Muslim crusade." 

And an apologetic Congress was sent on a wild-goose chase after "a non-communal mode of functioning such as could satisfy the Muslim masses." The search has not yet ended.

Muslims Marched Towards Nationhood

The language of Communist imperialism had addressed itself to the communal problem quite early in its career in India. As early as 1922, M.N. Roy had appraised the Lucknow Pact of 1916 as a "coming together of the Hindu and the Muslim bourgeoisie in a common compact with British imperialism against the toiling masses." Later on, this language had characterised the Muslim League as a "close preserve of feudal interests in confronation with the capitalist Congress." Still later, the communal problem had been explained away as a "competition for jobs between the Hindu and the Muslim petit-bourgeoisie."

But all this looked like groping in the dark when the full light dawned some time later. The language of Leftism started presenting the Muslims as "poor peasantry and proletariat exploited and oppressed by Hindu landlords, moneylenders and capitalists." It was now proclaimed that the confrontation had an economic character. It was a class conflict.

The consequences were far reaching. Henceforward, Hindus were expected to hang their heads in shame. Quite a few of them did start showing a guilt-complex and indulging in breast-beating. 

On the other hand, Muslims became armed with an unprecendented degree of self-righteousness. In the new climate, it was a privlege to be known as peasantry and proletariat. The vocal section of Muslims, particularly their press, started becoming more and more aggressive. Their cause, they said was eminently just and it was upto Hindus to show some fair-play.

Meanwhile Aligarh professors and Muslim comrades in the Communist Party had come out with a new thesis about the progressive role of Islam in Indian history. Islam, in their opinion, had brought with it a message of equality and human brotherhood. The "caste-ridden and hierachical Hindu society" could not absorb that message and thus free itself from a moribund social system mainly because "the Brahmins saw in Islam a threat to their privileges and profits." M.N.Roy endorsed this thesis in 1939. 

[…]

The stage had thus been fully prepared for the climax which came in 1942-43. The Communist Party of India started quoting chapter and verse from the masters, Lenin and Stalin, in order to prove that India, like pre-revolutionary Russia, was seething with a number of submerged nationalities -- Andhras, Assamese, Bengalis, Gujaratis, Kashmiris, Malayalis, Marathas, Oriyas, Pathans, Punjabis, Sindhis and Tamils. Each of these had a right of its secede from the Indian federation and set up a sovereign state of its own. 

And as the people in Assam and Bengal in the east and Punjab, Sindh and North-West Frontier Province in the west were predominantly Muslim, they could set up a separate federation of their own and call it Pakistan. The Hindus and Sikhs in these provinces had to learn to love the Muslims with whom they shared a common culture.

… a number of Communist Scholars equipped the Muslim League with a lot of statistics and endless casuistry. So far, the League had been strong in bluster but weak in self-confidence while pleading its case for hurling at the Hindu communalists. The language of Leftism had worked a miracle. The Congress Socialists, Forward Blocists and some other Leftist groups and factions parted company with the Communists over the Quit India movement and the question of Pakistan. But they continued to share with the Communists the language of Leftism so far as Islam and Indian nationalism were concerned.

The spectre of “Hindu communalism” has never ceased to haunt them. Nor has their love for Islam and Muslims suffered any loss even after all Hindu Leftists have been hounded out of the Islamic state of Pakistan. The love for Islam and Muslims has been labelled as secularism in the post-independence period.

Postscript

AND THAT IS HOW the Communists aided and abetted the Muslim League, which successfully sliced a good part of undivided Bharatavarsha and called it Pakistan. 

The Communists have all but disappeared today in their original form. However, they have reorganised and morphed into hundreds of federated and interlinked groups working towards the same purpose — of Balkanizing what remains of India. And just as they had the support of the USSR and China back then, they today have powerful international sponsors such as George Soros.