The Meerut Class

The impending communist isolation was intensified by developments back home. About 20 March 1929, the police carried out raids throughout British India and rounded up 33 CPI members and trade unionists on charges of conspiring to violently overthrow British rule on the subcontinent, and brought them to court in Meerut.

However, trying them ultimately not only failed to eliminate communism, but also backfired in a number of ways. Even though the CPI went through a virtual eclipse during the proceedings, which lasted until 1934, the effect remained temporal. At the same time, the main purpose—delegitimizing communism in public—materialized in its opposite: Extensive media coverage of the trial popularized the accused and put them in the spotlight of public interest far beyond the subcontinent.523 _{There was overwhelming sympathy for the}

political prisoners, who in turn used the trial as a stage to popularize their ideas. Observers with a penchant for radicalism were encouraged: Spratt boasted that “on the whole, the

521 _{CPI(M), History of the Communist, 146.}

522 _{See the rich account of his downfall in chapters 1–5 in Ray, In Freedom’s Quest, vol. 3.1, Against the}

Current (1928–39) (Kolkata: Renaissance Publishers 2005).

523 _{For example, the Manchester street theatre group “Red Megaphones” staged the play Meerut in 1932}

demanding the release of the prisoners: See http://www.wcml.org.uk/contents/international/india/meerut--the- workers-theatre-movement-play/?keyword1=Meerut&keyword2= (last checked 12 December 2014).

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revelation of our secret methods caused people to admire us: we had done what most young men wanted to do.”524 _{A new generation of communist activists—among others, Ranadive,}

S. V. Deshpande, and R. D. Bharadwaj—appeared on the scene to fill the gap.

Notwithstanding lack of evidence, the accused were sentenced to various terms of transportation, which were substantially reduced on appeal. Ahmad received the highest term—three years—and along with Dange and Usmani remained imprisoned, but all other accused were free by early 1934.525

Apart from the increase in popularity, the trial at Meerut also turned out beneficial for the communist detainees in that it provided them with an opportunity many of them had not had had so far. As the accusations were partly based on the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, the under-trials had to be granted access to the ‘evidence’ in order to prepare their defense. Accordingly, they dug into Marxism and not only fortified their own theoretical position, but prepared elaborate statements to justify (and sermonize) their political activity. Dange’s statement alone went over 90 hours, and took three months to be read out.

Langford James, the first chief prosecutor, directed his efforts towards isolating the communists from the values of subcontinental politics and society alike. He attacked communism for its anti-religiousness: Not only had the Bolsheviks no god; their propaganda aimed at the destruction of the belief in god, and they were calling for the murder of priests and the desecration of churches: “You are anti-country, you are anti-God, you are anti- family.”526

This was a potent charge pointedly pinning down the ideological and cultural dimension of emancipation as envisaged by Marx. The latter had denounced the “traditions of all dead generations” weighing “like a nightmare on the brains of the living” in the 18th

Brumaire.527 _{However, the communists had to refute Langford James’s charges: Their}

envisioned revolution was primarily about the ‘masses’ and only indirectly about emancipation from tradition and custom. Accordingly, the communists among the Meerut accused had to—as (Western) Marxists—confirm and at the same time—as (Eastern)

524 _{Spratt, Blowing up India, 47–59, 51–2 (quote); see also Barooah, Chatto. The Life and Times, 260–1, and}

Pyotr Kutsobin, Ajoy Kumar Ghosh and Communist Movement in India (Delhi: Sterling Publishers 1987), 16– 17.

525 _{Detailed in Ranadive, “The Role Played by Communists,” 52–3; Namboodiripad, A History of Indian, 301–}

2. Usmani had been arrested on his way back from the VI congress and brought to Meerut belatedly; see Usmani (interviewee), 58.

526 _{Mitra, Indian Annual Register, vol. 11/1, 1929 (Sibpur: Annual Register Office 1929), 69 (quote). See also}

Barooah, Chatto. The Life and Times, 260–1.

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revolutionaries—refute the suspicion of confronting the subcontinent’s vestiges of tradition.528

In their statement, the under-trials dutifully reiterated Marx’s positions, only to put their implications at arm’s length from the agenda of revolution. For example, patriarchy and exploitation of women and children, both desirable aims, would end only with the advent of socialism and therefore didn’t warrant specific criticism. Similarly, while communists advocated the emancipation of women and demanded the abolition of “institutions as the ‘purdah’,” this would be possible only after the socialist transformation. To address matters of family in its institutional form or even to abolish it likewise was not on the communist agenda.529 _{Little wonder, then, that despite numerous interactions with women, their}

inclusion in socialist and communist organizations remained a low-priority item. Rather, they remained all-male groups.

The same ambiguity characterized the communists’ approach to religion. It was subject to the imperative to shield the ‘masses’ from the implications of radical criticism, which the party nevertheless entertained. Hence, the assessment that the subcontinent was in the “bounds of mediaeval superstition” had its culturally critical edge blunted by shifting the blame for this state of things onto imperialism. Even where the accused were clear that religion was not only a function of rule but also a problem in itself, an “intellectual obstacle to clear and scientific thinking. It obscures class differences. It enjoins obedience and submission to the oppressor in this world [.…] It is ‘the opium of the people’,” and “we cannot but oppose it. We do not disguise our opposition to all religions, and we cannot allow religious propaganda or the open observances of religious practices, by any Communist,”530

the consequences drawn from this radical stance effectively neutralized it:

We are not concerned primarily with religious propaganda though we do not [!] exclude it. We combat religion mainly by pointing out its reactionary role in political and social affairs, and its historical roots in exploitation and the subordination of class to class. We resist and expose the efforts of Imperialism to utilize both religious prejudices and religious institutions etc. for its own ends. […] We do not refuse co-operation with individuals who hold religious beliefs or even preach religion. We consider the economic and political struggle the important question, to which questions arising from religion must be subordinated.531

528 _{This balancing act was characteristic of much of communist practice. Even though subcontinental}

communism would not be averse to experimenting with alternative forms of cohabitation (the best-known example probably being the Bombay ‘commune’ of the 1940s of full-time party workers), this had to be strictly confined within the limits of traditional morality, meaning collective abstinence and celibacy.

529 _{“General Statement of the Meerut Accused,” in Documents 2:486–7 (quote); “Statement of S. A. Dange,”}

768–70.

530 _{All quotes in “General Statement,” 492–3.} 531 _{Ibid., 493.}

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Thus, the communists could assure the watchful Comintern, Langford James, and not least themselves of their sincerity by sharply criticizing religion, while simultaneously reassuring the ‘masses’ and, again, themselves that such radicalism did not in the least detract from accommodation of reactionary forms of social identity and motives of political mobilization—after all, the real culprit was imperialism. This was no innovation on the part of the CPI; rather, the above passage quoted Lenin almost verbatim. Yet, the direct application of his postulates under subcontinental conditions emphasized their culturally relativist thrust. Separation of state and religion (now including education) and a “campaign of enlightenment” for emancipation from religious prejudices were to solve the religious question. The Statement even felt compelled to reemphasize that “we shall not persecute religious beliefs.”532 _{Anyway, it was a side issue: Out of the Statement’s total of 425 pages}

(in the Documents’ enumeration), four-and-a-half, or slightly more than one per cent, were dedicated to it.

Accordingly, religion and communism interacted beneath grand policy. Mobilization efforts targeted not religion, but foreign rule and economic exploitation. Under capitalist auspices, notably the latter lost its erstwhile unmediated character through the gradual substitution of the contractual form for personal relations of exploitation, a development actively supported by communist organizers. To Dange, this even was a fait accompli: Since capitalist exploitation in itself was blind to differences of gender, caste, creed, or culture, subcontinental capitalists and workers had “the same social actions and reactions as those

of other countries. The only difference would lie in the degrees of development. Therefore,

the general form or method of our class struggle will be the same as in other countries.”533

(emphasis added)

Such epistemological idealism—as it was mainly in communist diction, notably the sort arrived at on the VI congress, that a world thoroughly unified on capitalist lines had emerged—points to a centerpiece of subcontinental communism’s meaning and highlights the trappings of a universal Western paradigm: The representation of society in categories whose empirical content corresponded only in a limited sense to their theoretical connotations created a semi-conscious illocutionary gap. The combination of concept and thing subsumed under it caused a degree of de-facto-autonomy not only of the categories against their communist appliers, but also of subcontinental communism as a whole against international communism. Under the rigid grate of Stalinization, the implementation of

532 _{Ibid., 494.}

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Bolshevik doctrines acquired a resistive life of its own precisely because Dange’s extreme view was inherently unable to acknowledge that the subcontinent’s proletariat could in any way be different from others.

Inversely, such monism laid the foundation for a communist “ignored knowledge” of the still strongly non-bourgeois character of social organization and accompanying ideology formation. Put pointedly, the CPI’s focus on bourgeois sociality tended to align itself with traditional, personal, non-institutional, and direct forms of social interaction empirically prevalent in the family, the community, and even the proletariat—against mediated, indirect, ‘modern,’ and at least partly juridified forms of oppression and exploitation: Unconditionally close to the ‘masses,’ whose ‘backwardness,’ while often deplored, was never properly realized, and hence itself became part of the revolutionary project.