Nehru Faces Trojan Horse
BHARGAVA, G. S.
Nehru Faces Trojan Horse Indian Communists, favored by social misery, plan 'democratic front' with Congress party in hope of splitting 'progressives' from 'pro-imperialists' By G. S. Bhargava New...
...It stated flatly that "the foreign policy of the Government of India has undergone a welcome change in recent years," but maintained that "no such change has taken place in its internal policies...
...instead, it suffered a rout, which many felt was due to the party's frontal opposition to Nehru...
...These policies, on the contrary, continue to be...
...But when the Seventh Congress of the Comintern (1935) proclaimed a worldwide popular front, Indian Communists began to fraternize with other nationalists...
...In 1952, after the Communists had scrapped adventurism, they were openly hostile to Nehru, and especially to his foreign policy...
...Of these, P. C. Joshi's is the most important, for it will likely become the official line...
...The Communists assume that the "bourgeois" camp is split between "progressives" led by Nehru and "pro-imperialists" led by Commerce Minister Krishnamachari and West Bengal Chief Minister B. C. Roy...
...Communist confidence stems from several real facts, the first of which is the social condition of the Indian masses...
...Two demands will now spearhead Communist strategy: (1) a "triple alliance" between Russia, China and India, and (2) Indian withdrawal from the Commonwealth...
...As a result, the Third Congress of the CPI at Madurai last spring decided that Nehru's foreign policy was progressive and pledged "intelligent support" to it...
...It justifies the proposed "democratic front" with Nehru to old-line Communists with these words: "We will give confidence to our own comrades and put the bourgeois nationalists in their place by showing how our earlier criticism of Nehru's then foreign policy was justified and has been proved true by events and that his present much-admired policies are the ones our party alone has been consistently advocating within our country...
...free trade unionism and collective bargaining have disappeared...
...The lower strata of society have not benefited from India's economic development...
...Joshi sums up: "In no country outside the socialist camp is the objective situation so ripe and favorable as in our country...
...Italics supplied...
...Until 1936, they despised Gandhi and other Congress leaders, and had bitterly attacked other parties "sailing under the name of socialism"?e.g., the Indian Socialist party...
...The atmosphere, too, is congenial...
...It has given the French transport facilities to wage war against the people of Vietnam...
...One cannot...
...Economic injustice is grist for the Communist mill...
...The policy of insurrection, which the Communists followed from 1948 to 1950, has not been completely disowned...
...Angry citizens are asking the Health Minister, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, what would have happened to her counterpart in China had a similar lapse occurred there...
...The Communists moved even closer to Nehru after the Andhra elections...
...Meanwhile, the published draft of the Government's Second Five Year Plan revealed that the Communist principle of "physical planning" would govern India's economic development...
...It has curtailed trade with China...
...Nehru's Government tinkers occasionally with the economic system (it recently nationalized life insurance and earlier took over the Imperial Bank), but its measures merely breed uncertainty among private industrialists without attacking basic social problems...
...The Communists plan to exploit these weaknesses to the full...
...The PCI thought it would win power in Andhra...
...The Communists believe that "in no country outside the socialist camp is the objective situation so ripe and favorable" as in India...
...As the CPI organ, New Age, declared some time ago, more and more Congress party men are being won over to the "peace camp...
...in the main, reactionary and undemocratic...
...Quite the contrary: The Congress prevented the Socialists, who ran a minority government in Travancore-Cochin in 1954, from carrying out land reforms...
...With last June's resolution as a base, the various Communist factions have now prepared divergent "tactical lines" for adoption at the coming Party Congress...
...Quoting Liu Shaochi in support of a Communist alliance with "that section of the national bourgeoisie which is still opposing imperialism," Reddy says that such developments as "the establishment of the People's Republic of China, the imperialist defeats in Korea and Vietnam, and the emergence of the socialist world market have made such an alliance not only more possible but opened up prospects of a greater stability" to it...
...To make things worse, the Government is a party to propagating the illusion that conditions are better in Communist China...
...This strategy was outlined in an open letter to Indian Communists by their British mentors, Rajni Palme Dutt, his less famous brother Clemens Dutt, and Ben Bradley...
...The PCI aims to widen the gulf between the two groups and to take Nehru under its wing...
...The main line of this letter should be noted now: "Every Indian patriot will recognize that the first need for the powerful advance of the Indian national struggle, the key need of the present situation, is the unity of the anti-imperialist people's front...
...In rural areas, the Government's Taxation Inquiry Commission found, rich peasants and landlords are both becoming opulent and escaping taxation, while poor peasants and tenant farmers are no better off than before...
...It has shipped arms to the aid of the reactionary Thakin Nu Government against the Burmese people...
...Nehru's Congress party has made no move toward large-scale redistribution of land, which could solve this problem...
...The situation can be uplifted only by forcing a breach between the collaborationist bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie, by allying with the national bourgeoisie while simultaneously struggling to dislodge it from leadership and achieve proletarian hegemony...
...Communist MP and "hero" of the abortive Telengana uprising of 1948, this proposed alliance with the "national bourgeoisie' will serve as the transition to "people's democracy...
...Corporate income figures aggravate this regressive pattern...
...The National Congress can play a great part and a foremost part in the work of realizing the anti-imperialist people's front...
...And, when Nehru toured Russia last June, the party Central Committee met in Delhi to frame a new approach...
...According to a party document prepared by P. C. Joshi, leader of the "pro-Nehru" faction in the Communist party of India, the time is now ripe for a "democratic front" with Nehru...
...It is even possible that the National Congress, by the further transformation of its organization and program, may become the form of realization of the anti-imperialist peoples front, for it is the reality that matters, not the name...
...Ravi Narayan Reddy is even more explicit...
...Ever since the Congress party formed its own trade-union front in 1948...
...The Indonesian Columnnists' successful collaboration with the Nationalists furnishes a good precedent...
...This is the second major "popular-front" period for Indian Communists...
...It has given direct support to the British imperialists in Malaya by permitting them to recruit Gurkha troops...
...In the last four years, all the Government policies attacked in the 1952 Communist statement have un, dergone some change...
...Between 1932 and 1951, incomes below 25,000 rupees ($5,500) fell from 81.9 to 65 per cent of the total taxable income, while incomes over a lakh of rupees (about $23,000) rose from 3 to 12.9 per cent of the total...
...He also notes that Nehru's leadership helps keep "reactionaries" in check...
...after two decades of twists and turns, the Communists will again make common cause with the Congress to facilitate "the further transformation of its organization and program...
...their representatives are sometimes members of management boards, as at Sindri and Jamshedpur...
...It adds that India's Government has shifted from "collaboration" with the Anglo-American bloc to "opposition...
...Nehru Faces Trojan Horse Indian Communists, favored by social misery, plan 'democratic front' with Congress party in hope of splitting 'progressives' from 'pro-imperialists' By G. S. Bhargava New Delhi No sooner had Bulganin and Khrushchev left India than the local Communist party began to map India's smooth transition to "people's democracy...
...It has sided with the Anglo-American imperialists on most issues in the UN, including the sanctioning of American aggression in Korea...
...The Government has failed to enact the desperately-needed income ceilings, radical land reform, clear demarcation of private and public sectors of industry, and association of workers and consumers in the management of nationalized industry...
...Company unions are the order of the day...
...Reddy says that last year's "wrong notions" of forming an anti-Congress united front should be abandoned...
...A consistent peace policy cannot be pursued by any bourgeois government that retains its links with imperialism...
...And, according to Ravi Narayan Reddy...
...Their election manifesto declared, under the heading "Government's Foreign Policy?Not a Policy of Peace": "Can anyone say that the Nehru Government has carried out a policy which is in conformity with the desires of our people...
...It was this wrong concept," he adds, "that made the party seek out alliances with groups and parties such as the [Socialists], which have anti-Soviet, anti-peace planks for their international policy...
...India's Communists also profit from the fact that, on a day-to-day basis, the Government does not set much store by democracy...
...Communists and Congress leaders are rubbing elbows in many front organizations...
...It expressed its 'humanitarianism' by sending an ambulance corps to the murderers of the Korean people...
...The removal of Nehru would gravely weaken the position of the national bourgeoisie," and thus would strengthen Congress "pro-imperialists...
...For example, Delhi is now suffering a severe epidemic of jaundice caused by pollution of drinking water...
...Joshi's paper underscores the assertion that "India's foreign policy, in the main, opposes the war drive of imperialism...
...The allusion was to her own high praise of the way the Chinese had exterminated flies...
...The "triple alliance," in Communist thinking, should provide India with the strength to sustain her break with "imperialism...
...It has not condemned the indiscriminate bombing of Korean cities and villages...
...In the last two decades, the rich became richer and the poor poorer...
...Now...
...It has not developed extensive trade with democratic countries like the Soviet Union and the people's democracies...
Vol. 39 • February 1956 • No. 6
