Communism and Communalism in the 1920S. Notes on a Neglected Nexus

Südasien-Chronik - South Asia Chronicle 5/2015, S. 258-286 © Südasien-Seminar der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin ISBN: 978-3-86004-316-5 Communism and Communalism in the 1920s. Notes on a Neglected Nexus PATRICK HESSE [email protected] Upon first glance, the relation between Marxism and what has come to be labelled ‘communalism’ seems sufficiently outlined by the tag ‘antagonistic’. Neither is expected to share an appreciable swath of common ground with the other. On the contrary, there has been no dearth of unequivocal rejection particularly from the communist side. Both academic and political Marxism—most notably: the Communist Party of India (CPI) and its major splinter products—have ever under- taken to voice relentless opposition to politicised religion and commu- 259 nity politics. This seems self-evident. Categories, social notions, and the political trajectories of communalist outfits contradict the funda- mentals of Marxist policy formulation. Most obviously, they posit not ‘classes’ but mystified ‘religious communities’ as the main actor in political and social processes. Still, the antagonism of both also thrives on a degree of closeness. In a South Asian context for once, the target audiences and the patronising approaches of both to them exhibit substantial overlap. And if Marxists and other leftists have time and again denounced communalism as an elite project of ideologues essentially alien to the ‘masses’, the same is true for their own camp, at least from a sociological perspective. — Nevertheless, with political competition thus reinforcing programmatic divides both currents appear as principally and virtually naturally opposed. This is despite the damage done to their reputation as staunch proponents of secularism by the partly less than impressive post-independence track record of communist parties on the communal terrain. On the one hand, they remain among the least commu- nalised political formation—no small feat in an environment where avowed secularism often eerily coexists with communal clientelism. On the other, the championing of Muslim group demands, particularly in FORUM Kerala and North India, and notably the repeated political alignment with right-wing Hindu outfits such as the Jan Sangh and Janata Party have led some to argue that communist commitment to the cause of secularism was lukewarm at best (Raychaudhuri 2010: 41-57; Engineer 1986: 18). However, most criticisms levelled at the communists’ lacklustre anti- communal commitment respect the basic dichotomy of progressive secular programs and manifestos and unpleasant realities in the political business. Considerations of political gain or mere necessity hence figure as detrimental (yet ultimately determining) pulls on an other- wise firm and clear-minded agenda. In this vein, Thomas Nossiter (1985: 232-3) asserts that in the post-independent political theatre communist parties were “torn between the expediency of supporting [their] notionally backward constituency and […] doctrinal purity”—a conflict of mounting difficulty given the ever-increasing gap between class and caste concerns. Accordingly, it is hardly surprising that the undivided CPI’s early history in colonial times is viewed somewhat differently. Radical functionalists apart there is a consensus that a mixture of zealous enthusiasm of the communist pioneers and a lack of unpleasant politi- 260 cal necessities concomitant with electoral imperatives—occasioned by both the party’s long-time illegality and the scarcity of elections—had enabled the CPI to pursue its anti-communal commitments much more consequently. For example, Irfan Habib (1998: 3) deems the communists’ vigorous struggle against communalism —especially in the closing days of the British Raj—an “epic chapter” of their colonial period. However, little light has so far been shed on possible structural, that is, programmatic as against politically induced common ground between communism and communalism. The CPI’s ill-reputed support for the Pakistan demand in the mid-1940s forms the lone exception. Yet, (self-) criticism has largely bracketed out the episode from the party’s history, opting for its de-contextualisation as a situational aberration rather than looking for links to the programmatic foundations and traditions of the party. This line of criticism is not to pull into doubt either the communists’ secular merits or their sincerity in engaging communalism. It does, however, look for the conditions of the possi- bility of common alignment long before (and topically independent from) the lurid pro-Pakistan period. Central to the understanding of such an alignment are the communist notions of what constitutes ‘revolution’ and ‘emancipation’ as against ‘reactionary’ religiousness FORUM and—perhaps most importantly—their approach to the proletariat and the ‘masses’. A proper situation of these enables one to grasp the contradictory and even downright ambivalent relationship of communism and communalism already in the colonial period. After tracing the problem down to the Marxist foundations of the party, I will demon- strate this relationship on the CPI’s general theoretical meditations on the matter and two case examples: the 1926 Calcutta riots and the 1929 riots among the Bombay workforce. Communist Responses: Theoretical Modalities How and on what grounds, then, did the Communist Party of India take up position towards the phenomenon of communalism? In order to approximate an answer, three fundamental circumstances have to be considered. First, the CPI was founded in Tashkent in 1920, and it took the party until the mid-1920s to establish cells in a number of locations in British India—mostly urban centres such as Bombay and Calcutta where factory workers were concentrated. Even beyond this point much of the party work continued to be done by communist émigrés in Europe, particularly Manabendra Nath Roy, founder of the CPI and its leading theorist. Hence, the communists were late-comers 261 to the political theatre presented with the reality of more or less assertive communalism; and for the most part they lacked the organizational clout to stage effective interventions. Rather, they were reduced to the role of critical onlookers. Second, behind the rigid doctrinal and idiomatic corset governing communist analyses the CPI was not a Marxist retort child, nor could it be. Its cadres, notably the first generation, without exception looked back on some sort of political activity or ideological imprint from before their turn to communism. Although their newly awoken enthusiasm for Marxism was sincere, they carried over various elements from their earlier political socialization. Roughly speaking, in the case of the early communists this socialization had taken place in one of three scena- rios: The extremist wing of the swadeshi campaigns and concomitant underground terrorism, both with a marked Hindu tinge; some strand of Islamic anti-imperialism and related identity politics, especially the Khilafat Movement; and the Ghadr revolutionary nationalists who, while avowedly non-communal, exhibited few reservations towards mobilization on religious grounds. These heritages heavily influenced the individual communists', and hence the CPI’s responses to the communal problem. FORUM And third, in contrast to the more acute matters on the communist agenda—independence from British rule and organization of workers and peasants for militant class struggle ‘from below’—, there was very little theoretical or practical input from the mentors of Marxism on the matter of communalism. Neither Marx nor Engels nor Lenin had committed appreciable analytical energy beyond the more general matter of religion, nor did the supreme guiding body of international communist parties, the Moscow -based Communist International (Comintern). Therefore, the CPI found itself in the unfamiliar position of having to analyse this aspect of its environment on its own and apply Marxism accordingly. It had to develop its stances out of writings only indirectly related to communalism —meditations on religion and consciousness on the one hand, and the possible limits of class mobilization on the other. Both decisively moulded the CPI’s approach to communalism in terms of the low incidence of the communalist complex in the party’s publications and their analytical thrust alike. As far as Marxist philosophy is concerned, it thoroughly downgraded religion and related matters to secondary importance. However, right from his famous aphorisms in the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right characterising religion as the “opium of the people” Marx 262 didn’t simply brush aside religion as irrelevant. Rather, there was a reason for its being an integral part of society. Marx considered this reason to be the fundamental invertedness, or false configuration of social relations. Religion, their “general theory”, their “logic in popular form”, was rooted in this invertedness and at the same time pointed to it: Religion “is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering” (Marx [1844] 1961: 378). Therefore, it was a wrong, because illusionary response; but it contained a grain of historical truth in that it pointed to real problems, namely oppression and economic misery. Subsequent Marxist thought emphasised notably the illusionary character of religion. In his crudish, but immensely popular division of society into “base” (production relations) and “superstructure” (every- thing else), Engels

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