A FEW DAYS AGO, Home Minister Amit Shah publicly announced the deadline for exterminating the Maoist menace by 31 March, 2026. We have to laud him in the famous Hindi proverb, aap ke moonh mein ghee-shakkar. As a political force, Communism - Naxalism - Maoism has caused damage equal to or surpassing that of the periodic eruptions of Jihad on the streets of Bharatavarsha over the last century. In fact, Communists have done much worse. No other ideological formation in independent India has managed to raise a pan Indian militia with the express purpose of supplanting our democracy.
Thankfully, Communism as a political force is all but extinct today. It survives with gasping breaths only in Kerala. But in its heydays, the sort of multi-pronged terror that it had inflicted throughout the country alarmed even the colonial British, who kept a tight vigil over Communist activities. With their patented meticulousness and attention to detail, the British compiled elaborate dossiers and minutes over every Communist ideologue and activist. In fact, the Intelligence Bureau of the Home Department had a dedicated wing to track their doings and published summaries and briefs and reports and monographs from time to time.
One such compilation gives a biographical summary of M.N. Roy, popularly regarded as the father of Indian Communism. I regard him as India’s first political terrorist. This summary was first published in 1933 and revised in 1935. The following are some excerpts from the same. Some formatting changes have been made.
Happy reading!
THE HISTORY OF Indian Communism reached back to the very early days of the Bolshevik regime in Russia… In December 1918, the wireless stations of the Soviet Government broadcast a report of a memorandum handed to the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet by an "Indian delegation", in the name of the "Peoples ol India". The “memorandum” called upon the Soviet for assistance and ended with an expression of confidence that the days of England were numbered and that free Russia would stretch out a fraternal hand to oppressed Indians…
On the 9th February 1924, Moscow turned eyes more directly on India, and speaking through Chicherin, proclaimed that, ‘‘Future India must stand at the head of the free Eastern Republics."
There is evidence also to show that they are no chance expressions of a vague intention, but rather the deliberate avowal of an abiding purpose—the calculated statement of a policy which is steadily and remorselessly being put into execution.
It was in 1920 that Manabendra Nath Roy, the father of Indian Communism, made his first appearance in Russia. After a hurried departure from India in 1915, when, as Narendra Nath Bhattacharji, he absconded from bail in a case of terrorist dacoity.
Roy made a protracted tour of the Far East and eventually found his way to America where he was indicted in the San Francisco conspiracy case. He again absconded and crossed the border into Mexico, whence he departed in 1920 for Europe and for Moscow,the scene of his greatest revolutionary achievements.
Amongst other missions on which his masters in the Comintern dispatched him were one for Afghanistan during the hijrat movement in 1920 and another to China during the disturbances there in 1926-27.
On each of these occasions the task allotted to him consisted of corrupting, by means of subversive propaganda, and otherwise, loyal Indians (Muslims in the former case and Sikhs in the latter) and assisting in the plots of those who were already disaffected. He was helped in this work by his wife, Evelyn, nee Trent, an American lady whose views on Communism were similar to his own.
Roy was also placed in charge of a propaganda school at Tashkent, and was compelled to seek refuge in France in 1923 after the anti-Bolshevik coup in Germany, where he was working at the time. He was expelled from France also early in 1925.
Wherever he has gone Roy has left behind him a trail of anti-British conspiracy and intrigue and his capture and imprisonment in 1931 is an achievement which the police in India may well regard as important.
Arriving in Europe, Roy quickly placed himself at the head of a small but extremely virile group of other malcontents, who, like himself, found the atmosphere of post-war Berlin and neo-revolutionary Moscow more congenial than that of their native India.
The inevitable rivalries, of course, occurred even at this early stage in the proceedings, Virendra Nath Chattopadhyaya (Chattarji), who had appeared on the scene several years earlier being Roy's chief opponent. Roy overcame all opposition however, and succeeded in securing his own recognition by the Moscow leaders as the spokesman of “Indian nationalists.”
Ambitious, energetic and unscrupulous, Roy managed to retain the confidence of the Soviet to an extraordinary degree and apparently succeeded in so magnifying his achievements that he was regarded as having gone a long way towards the promotion of Communism in India.
It was when the first of Roy's and Chattopadhyaya's following began to drift back to India, the finished products of Moscow's infant Oriental Academy, that Communism first came to India.
In the vanguard were Nalini Gupta and Abani Mukharji, who returned to India, the one on Roy's behalf in 1921 and the other in 1923 as an agent of Chattopadhyaya.
Both had been members of terrorist organisations in Bengal prior to their departure abroad and both were sent back as Communist emissaries to renew their old acquaintances and to seek from amongst them recruits to the new "ideology".
Slow to take root in a country where the feudal spirit and hereditary principles are so ingrained as in India, the Bolshevik movement grew no less surely on that account. By 1924 its menace to India’s peace and prosperity had become sufficiently serious to necessitate the first important Communist conspiracy case.
In February of that year, a formal plaint was lodged at Cawnpore against a selection of eight (including the absent Roy) of 168 Indian Communists whose names the “brief” of the case contained, the charge being that of conspiring to deprive the King-Emperor of the sovereignty of British India.
To be continued
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