FOR VARIOUS REASONS only four of the accused Communists were actually brought to trial and convicted in the Cawnpore conspiracy case. Their removal hit the movement hard, for leaders were rare in those days.
M. N. Roy was still at work abroad, having found a place in the Executive Committee of the Communist International. It soon became clear that the Cawnpore setback was only temporary.
In July 1924 (before the case had actually been concluded) the Communist International decided to adopt Roy's suggestion that a new Indian Communist Party should be formed as a branch of the Communist International.
Three months later, a correspondent to a Calcutta newspaper announced that “in the Cawnpore Bolshevik Conspiracy Case it has been settled that to have faith in Communism in itself is no offence. Thus the fear of the law against Communism has been removed.”
Another newspaper announced the open formation of an Indian Communist Party with branches at Madras, Bombay, and Cawnpore, and added that “an all-India Communist conference will be held in three months time.” This, the first conference of its kind, was duly held in the last week of December 1925.
So, too, in November 1924, Roy wrote of the Cawnpore case that it had had good effects as well as bad: “People have got used to hearing things which simply terrified them before. We must reap the benefit of this situation... We must prepare to begin the struggle for the legalization of our party.”
The events of the next few years were to make it very clear that Communism had come to stay and that nothing short of the collapse of the Soviet system itself would ever eradicate manifestations of sympathy for that system in the urban areas of India.
The most that the authorities could hope to do was to mitigate, by constant watchfulness and by judicious and timely action both within the narrow limits of the law and in the broader economic field, the evils and dangers of the preaching of class hatred to those who are ill-adapted to receive such doctrines with thought and discrimination.
There can hardly be a better exposition of the present Communist policy of turning every subversive movement to its own advantage than the history of Indian Communism in the years 1924 to 1928.
This period showed how utterly bankrupt M. N. Roy had been in the way of practical achievement. It would be quite erroneous, however, to suppose that Roy's singularly barren record can be taken to mean that Communism has obtained no footing whatever in India. For instance, many recent articles in Indian-edited papers could be cited to show that the Press is becoming increasingly alive to the immense power of mass action as a political weapon.
Communism, as expounded by Mr. Saklatvala [a Communist terrorist] earned appreciative comment in several quarters which could not all be dismissed as irresponsible.
It is hardly to be supposed that such papers accept the doctrines of Communism with their ultimate implications, but it is indisputable that the mass action idea has come to stay. There are many clear evidences also of a growing recognition on the part of the Indian National Congress of the need of organising the labouring masses in order to associate them with the general movement for the country's political advancement. Then there are the organisation of Workers' and Peasants' Parties and the growing intrusion into Labour movements of persons working for avowedly Communist purposes.
It was during this period that the Communist International began to realize and correct its previous errors and to place less reliance on M. N. Roy's omniscience and infallibility where Indian affairs were concerned.
From 1924 onwards, new tactics became clearly discernible in Moscow's handling of the Indian situation. The Communist note in propaganda, where it was likely to offend the native populations was suppressed, and nationalism was exploited as an unconscious means of furthering Communist aims.
It was at this time, too, that the indifferent quality of Roy's Indian agents, practically all of them greedy opportunitsts lacking in scruples and principles and even in common honesty, began to attract attention at headquarters where demands were made for a greater return for the vast sums of money expended. Roy's reply to these demands was to lay the impudent claim to such outbreaks as the Moplah rising was the work of his agents.
But this did not convince Soviet Russia. Thus, Zinoviev demanded and obtained the adoption of a scheme “of direct contact between the Comintern and the proletarian organisations and parties of British India, ignoring the local Communist Party.
This saw the wane of Roy’s monopoly over Communist leadership in India. It also saw the dispatch to India the first of a series of British Communist agents in the form of Percy E. Glading, alias R. Cochrane, of the National Minority Movement. He was followed by George Allison, alias Donald Campbell, a prominent member of the British Communist Party, who arrived in Bombay in April 1926. Allison had visited Moscow in 1924 and had remained there till July 1925, and was sent to India ‘to develop the left wing inside the Trades Union Congress.’
Allison's place was taken by Philip Spratt, who arrived in India in December 1926.
To be continued
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