Letters: Downfall of the CPI

Allow me to make some observations about Vikram Gopal's review of the book, The Communist Party of India and the Indian Emergency by David Lockwood (March 31). The policies adopted by the Communist Party of India (CPI), when it was undivided as well post split, were totally Soviet Union-centric. This caused the downfall of the party.

Since inception, the CPI's standard policy had been to seek guidance from the erstwhile Soviet Union. Nothing wrong with that, as several well-meaning politicians the world over thought that Lenin and subsequently, Stalin were messiahs. These politicians believed that by following their dicta and doing their bidding, the goal of socialism would be achieved.

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The Imperialist War, which started in 1939, was termed the People's War in 1941 at the behest of the then Communist International (Comintern), the policy-making body of the Communist world. The Comintern gave this dictum, as Adolf Hitler opened the Eastern Front on June 22, 1941, and attacked the Soviet Union. The CPI started cooperating with the colonial British government in India.

That's not all. When British imperialists, under Lord Clement Attlee, the then prime minister, decided to grant India and Pakistan independence, Comintern thought the rulers of the two new nations would just be stooges of the West. Hence, Comintern instructed the CPI to call this independence, "yeh azaadi jhuti hai".

In the early 1950s, P C Mahalanobis, a Cambridge-educated statistician, drafted the first Five-Year Plan in consultation with Stalin's advisers. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru swallowed the concept of the Five-Year plan. The post-Stalin leadership in the Soviet Union became confident that Nehru was not a stooge of the West. To win over Nehru, the new leaders of Kremlin, Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin, visited India in 1955. The CPI was directed not to oppose Nehru and the party followed the dictum.

Indira Gandhi was not friendly with the West; she knew they had their axes to grind. She adopted a strong Non-Aligned Policy though its tilt was towards the left. The decisive moment came when the US Sixth Fleet, during the Bangladesh War, made a threatening visit to the Bay of Bengal in 1971. Gandhi aligned with the Soviet Bloc; the CPI toed Gandhi's line. So when she declared Emergency, the Soviet Union advised the CPI not to oppose her. But people hated the Emergency and the CPI paid the price for toeing her line.

The umbilical cord was snapped in 1989 when the Soviet Union collapsed during the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev. The CPI went into the wilderness.

Nirupam Haldar Jamshedpur

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