NATIONAL REVOLUTIONISM TO MARXISM – A NARRATIVE OF ORIGINS OF SOCIALIST UNITY CENTRE OF INDIA Dr. Bikash Ranjan Deb Associate Professor of Political Science Surya Sen Mahavidyalaya Siliguri, West Bengal, India
[email protected] INTRODUCTION: The national revolutionary movement, one of the early trends of ‘Swadeshi Movement’, constituted a significant aspect in the history of the Indian freedom movement. The colonial rulers, however, preferred the term ‘terrorism’1 to denigrate the movement. For the purpose of the present study, let us confine the term ‘national revolutionism’ following Gopal Halder, ‘to describe a pattern of activity pursued for a prolonged period of thirty years, from 1904 to 1934’. (Halder, 2002: 195; Habib, S. Irfan, 2017: 2)2 Imbued with the spirit of unrelenting fight against British imperial power in India, the national revolutionaries tried to set before the people of the country a bright example of personal courage and heroic self-sacrifice, and thereby wanted to instill a mood of defiance in the minds of the people in the face of colonial repression. The national revolutionaries represented the uncompromising trend of Indian freedom movement in terms of both their willingness and their activities for complete national freedom and people’s liberation from colonial exploitation, by arousing revolutionary upsurge. But this was not the dominant trend of the national freedom struggle. The reformist and compromising section of the Indian National Congress (INC) playing the role of ‘reformist oppositional’ was the