The following document was sent to Stalin and the Central Committee by V. Grigoryan, Chairman of the Foreign Commission of the CC of the CPSU (b). Such reports on developments in India were circulated regularly after India’s independence; several of them have been previously translated and published in this journal. This report is of particular value as it was penned shortly before the arrival of the CPI delegation to Moscow for discussions with the Soviet Party. It draws upon two large tomes of CPI documents and materials of the disparate sections of the party which were translated into Russian as an intrinsic part of the preparations which were made for the impending discussions.

This Report summarised and evaluated four trends of the CPI from 1943 to 1951: the P.C. Joshi tendency, the Ranadive group, the views of the Andhra Committee and those in the ‘Three Ps’ document. The CPSU (b) rejected the fundamentals of all these trends in February and March 1951 during the discussions in Moscow on the Programme and Tactical Line of the CPI.

The succinct evaluation of the Joshi tendency resulted from a consensus on the rightist character of the errors. Namely, the defeat of fascism would lead to the automatic collapse of imperialism. Under Joshi the Party had refused to fight against the British imperialists and their Indian supporters in the form of the princes and the landowners on the spurious grounds that it would weaken the military efforts of the allies. Under Joshi the party did not grasp the conciliatory attitude of the Congress Party under Gandhi and Nehru. The CPI even lagged behind the leadership of the Congress.

The Ranadive trend criticized the rightist errors of the Joshi leadership but inaugurated a new distinctive ‘leftist’ trend. The understanding of people’s democratic revolution was tantamount to the adoption of a socialist revolutionary stage which Stalin considered to be dangerous for India and which prompted the Cominform editorial of 27 January 1950 on the stage of the Indian revolution. The Ranadive line considered the entire bourgeoisie including the rich peasantry to be opponents of the democratic forces and treated survivals of feudalism and British imperialism as of minor importance.

The Andhra Committee, in support of bourgeois-democratic revolution, considered that only the big and not the middle bourgeoisie was collaborating with imperialism. Kulaks with no connections with feudalism were interested in the abolition of landlordism and ready to clear the way for capitalist agriculture. It was not sympathetic to the application of the experience of the Russian revolution in the manner of Ranadive but advocated learning from the experience of the Chinese revolution. The objective of the democratic revolution was to establish a democratic dictatorship of several classes under the hegemony of the working class.

The CPI Politburo under the leadership of Ranadive harshly criticized the views of the Andhra Committee as being right- opportunist. The broadside extended to an attack of the views of Mao on New Democracy. Only when the Cominform published its critical editorial of January 27, 1950 did the Ranadive group backtrack from its sectarian stands.

The Andhra Committee rejected the views of the Ranadive group as being adventurist and leftist. Inspired by its understanding of the Chinese revolution it supported armed struggle as the major form of struggle to liberate the countryside and later the Indian cities. On this basis this group of the party had already liberated some 3000 villages in the Telengana region.

When the leadership of the Andhra Committee secured leadership of the Communist Party they were not able to persuade the majority of the party leadership of the applicability of their tactical line for India as a whole. This paved the way for the consultations with CPSU (b).

A major critique of the Andhra trend came from Dange, Ghosh and Ghate (the Three ‘P’s). The three leaders argued that the new central committee continued sectarianism not based on a ’Russian’ path but on a ‘Chinese’ one. Neither central committee had analysed the situation in India. It was argued that the Indian revolution was a people’s democratic revolution in a colonial country which required to end the imperialist-feudal regime and establish a people’s democracy. Only the working class led by its party could carry this out through a lengthy armed struggle of the peasant masses against the prevalent land relations.

The dialogues in Moscow were focused on the validity or otherwise of the Andhra theses for the Indian revolution. The errors of the Ranadive tendency had been resolved in the previous one year.

The evaluation of the Andhra theses by Stalin and the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) had been given earlier when prefatory remarks were made on the second discussion of Stalin and the CPI leaders on 2nd March 1951. (RD Vol. XXVI, No. 1)

Stalin pointed out to the CPI that the Chinese example showed the importance of partisan warfare. The Indian case was different from China as the latter had a friendly rear in the form of the Soviet Union. The Soviet army had liberated northern China from Japan and thus provided shelter to the Chinese communists. Previously the CPC continually faced the problem of encirclement and destruction. In the new situation the CPC could regroup and march southwards to free the whole of China. India had no such advantages so it was compelled to invoke the armed activity of the working class.

Following from this Stalin and the central committee recommended a tactical line which suggested a joint activity of an armed working class with partisan warfare of the peasantry. The influence of this is evident in the Programme and Tactical Line of the CPI of 1951.

Similar considerations were upheld in the example of Indonesia as is evident in the correspondence of Stalin and D.N. Aidit in the course of exchanges on the elaboration of the programme of the Communist Party of Indonesia.

Vijay Singh.

2026