The discussions of February 1951 between the representatives of the CC of the CPI and the CC CPSU (b) have played a pivotal role in the history of the communist movement of India. They arose as a result of the virtual political, ideological, and organisational collapse of the CPI after the two successive leaderships of the party identified with the names of P.C. Joshi and B.T. Ranadive. The P.C. Joshi leadership was regarded as having succumbed to a right deviation for having inter alia welcomed the Mountbatten award of 1947, attempting to wind up the Telengana struggle and seeking to subordinate the party to the Nehru wing of the Congress Party. The Second Congress of the CPI held in 1948 rejected the right-wing P.C. Joshi leadership but under the direction of B.T. Ranadive embarked on a left-adventurist course far removed from the actual possibilities of working class and peasant activity. Ranadive (like Joshi) succumbed to ‘decolonisation’ theory by denying the continued grip of British imperialism in India, exaggerating the power of the Indian bourgeoisie and underplaying the prevalence of the survivals of feudalism in the country. These errors were complemented and augmented by the adoption of the theory of the intertwining of the democratic and socialist revolutions which effectively denied the appropriateness of the stage of people’s democratic revolution in India. The involvement of the Yugoslav delegation –the Yugoslav Communist Party was the author the theory of the intertwining of different stages of revolution in backward countries – in the Second Congress of the CPI has been accepted as having facilitated the adoption of the Ranadive line which was correctly characterised in the communist literature of the period as the Trotskyite and Titoite deviation. The existing collections of party documents obscure rather than illumine these developments.

The famous Cominform editorial was an attempt to guide the CPI on the error of attempting to intertwine the democratic and socialist revolutions and to indicate the necessity of the stage of people’s democratic revolution in India adapted to the requirements of a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country where the agrarian revolution would play a cardinal role. This was presented as the ‘Chinese path’. Then as now this was mistakenly understood in India to mean the adoption of the particular forms of struggle necessitated by the conditions of the Chinese revolution. The Cominform editorial did not resolve the differences between the different fractions of the CPI leadership who then felt driven to seek the advice of the leadership of the CPSU (B).

The meetings held on the 4th and 6th February took place with the participation of the high-powered delegation of Malenkov, Suslov and Yudin on the side of the CPSU (B) and Rajeshwar Rao, Dange, Ghosh and Basavapunnaiah from the CPI. The CPI leadership verbally presented an account of the problems which faced the party leadership and the CPSU (B) leaders in turn raised a number of questions on the current situation in the party and movement. The CPSU (B) leadership in addition had before them for reference purposes a hefty file of the key documents of the party, which had been especially translated into Russian for these discussions.

The CPI leaders one by one presented the evolution of the differing views of the CPI leaders in the post-1947 period on the characterisation of the Indian state; the stage of the Indian revolution; on the interpretation of the Chinese path of revolution; the role and particular forms of armed activity in the cities and the countryside; the relation of legal forms of struggle to the armed activity; the evaluation of the importance of the Telengana struggle; the attitude to be adopted to the Nehru government, to its peace policy and its Korea policy; the permissibility or otherwise of the party awarding the death penalty to party members suspected of disloyalty; the appropriateness of the expropriation of the property of landlords and traders prior to the creation of democratic organs of power. After each of the CPI leaders had presented their – contradictory – views the ensuing time on the second sitting was absorbed by a back and forth session in which the Soviet delegation put questions on a range of concerns: the alleged penetration of the Titoites in the party leadership; how the CPI integrated its general line of armed struggle with its support for Nehru’s foreign policy towards China; the basis of the reconstitution of the Central Committee and Politbureau in the Plenum of December 1950 when the party was so deeply divided in its views; whether or not the CPI had a Programme and Constitution in place; the factual details of the partisan struggle in Telengana and Andhra and the kinds of arms in the hands of the partisan fighters; and, finally, the extent of the political work being conducted by the party in the armed forces. From the discussions and responses of the CPI leaders a unique picture emerges of the situation of the communist movement at that time.

The two preliminary sittings of the Soviet and Indian delegations in conjunction with the documentary preparations set the ground for the meeting of the Indian delegation with J.V. Stalin on the 9th February, 1951. The Moscow meetings initiated the process for the preparation of the CPI programme which was to unite the Indian communists until the onset of modern revisionism.

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