Tomorrow is Ours The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon 1935-48
Charles Wesley Ervin
Social Scientists' Associati...
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Tomorrow is Ours The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon 1935-48
Charles Wesley Ervin
Social Scientists' Association
2006
© Charles Wesley Ervin 2006
ISBN 955-9102-83-4
Published by Social Scientists' Association No. 12, Sulaiman Terrace Colombo 05, Sri Lanka.
Printed by Karunaratne & Sons Ltd 67, UDA Industrial Estate Katuwana Road, Homagama, Sri Lanka.
Contents Preface ............................................................................................ . Introduction by Hector Abhayavardhana ............ .......... ...................
VB
List of Illustrations ..................... ........ ...... ............... ........................
XB
1.
.Background ........................................•....................................
1
2.
The Pioneers ............................................................................ 48
3.
The Formation of an Indo-Ceylonese Party........................ 94
4.
The Quit India Revolt ............................................................ 113
5.
The Interlude ..........................................•............................... 131
6.
Rifts in the Party .................................................................... 154
7.
Ballots, Barricades, and Bloodshed ...................................... 173
8.
A Race Against Time .............................................................. 192
9.
The Breakthrough .................................................................. 208
10. Independence .......................................................................... 218 11. Demise and Regeneration ...................................................... 232
Appendix A: Biographical Notes ................................................... 250 Appendix B: Program of the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India (1942) .................................................................................... 278 Bibliography ................................................................................... 335 Index ............................................................................................... 356
Preface Many books of this genre grow out of a PhD thesis. In this case that is only half tme. My interest in the Trotskyist movements of India and Ceylon did begin while I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the early 1970s. But I was studying Indian art history, not political science. My involvement with Trotskyism was purely extracurricular. For a while I pursued both with equal passion. But the extracurricular got the upper hand. I ended up abandoning my academic career. Yet I never lost interest in my "Indian Trotskyism project." It remained a hobby that I pursued, on and off, as circumstances permitted, for the last thirty years. This book is the result. In 1935 a group of bright young Ceylonese socialists, led by the firebrand Trotskyist, Philip Gunawardena, launched the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP). The young radicals rattled the British colonial government and complacent Ceylonese plantocracy with their populist message of freedom and equality. The LSSP grew rapidly. Yet the Ceylonese Trotskyists, following the doctrine of their hero, didn't think that socialism could be built in one country, certainly not a little island with hardly any industry. In their view India was where the British Raj would be defeated. The LSSP formed fraternal links with the Congress Socialist Party and sent delegations to the annual sessions of the Indian National Congress. It was through these connections that they met likeminded socialists in India. When WWIl started, the Ceylonese government clobbered the LSSP for its anti-war propaganda. Many cadres, including four leaders, were jailed. The LSSP was forced underground. In early 1942 the party rescued their imprisoned leaders in a daring jailbreak that became legendary. With the police hot on their trail, many of the Ceylonese Trotskyists escaped to India, where they joined with their Indian co-thinkers to form the Bolshevik Leninist Party of India and Ceylon (BLPI).
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
That pretty much summarizes what I had been able to discover from the sources available to me in the early 'seventies. I I wanted to know more. Who were these Indian Trotskyists? And what became of this ambitious venture to form an Indo-Ceylonese party? In 1973 I went -to India for a year to complete my PhD research. Shortly after I arrived, I made a bee line to one of the veteran Trotskyists in Bombay. He had joined the first Trotskyist group in the late 'thirties and remained faithful to the cause for the next four decades. As I sat scribbling notes, he recounted the history of the movement from the very beginning. It was fascinating. He gave me names and addresses of others to interview. I now had a trail to follow. As I travelled all over India, visiting the art museums and photographing old monuments, I looked up more "old timers" in my spare time. Each interview gave me more pieces of the puzzle. I discovered that in the turbulent years after WWII the Trotskyists made impressive headway on the labor front in several areas. In Madras the Trotskyists captured the largest and oldest union in India, and in 1947 led a huge lOO-day strike, much to the chagrin of the Communist Party. I felt that I was uncovering a buried chapter in history that deserved to be documented. In 1988 I wrote the first part of what I hoped would be a three-part article on Indian Trotskyism for the Britishjoumal, Revolutionary History. 2 In that article I covered the origins of the Indian Trotskyist groups in the late 'thrities and the struggle of the BLPI during WWII.
At that point the most informative source was Leslie Goonewardene, A Short History of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Colombo, 1960). The section on the BLPI consists of only a few paragraphs. The American academic, George Jan Lerski, published an in-depth study of the LSSP in 196&. George Jan Lerski, Origins of Trotskyism in Ceylon (Stanford, 196&). However, he took the history only up to the onset ofWWIl. Charles Wesley Ervin, "Trotskyism in India: Origins through World War II (193545)," Revolutionary History, vol. 1, no. 4 (Winter 19&&-&9), pp. 22-34; translated and reprinted as "Le trotskysme en Inde pendant la guerre," Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no. 39 (September 19&9), pp. 77-111.
11
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
However, before I could produce the next installment, new sources of documentary information suddenly opened. In 1991 the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the US section of the Fourth International from the start, donated its vast collection of Trotskyist literature to the Hoover Archives at Stanford University. 3 Those archives contain the single largest collection of Indian and Ceylonese Trotskyist documents in the world. Energized by all this new material, I wrote my second installment on Indian Trotskyism for Revolutionary History in 1997. 4 In that article I concentrated on the activities of the BLPI in the crucial postwar period, from 1945 to 1948. In England another treasure trove was unlocked in the 'nineties. Thanks to the Public Records Act, the government had to finally de-
The SWP had been the official American section ofTrotsky's international movement since 1929, when its founding leaders were expelled from the Communist Party. In the 'thirties the American party played a key role in helping Trotsky, who was then in exile, cohere his followers, scattered all over the world, into the International Left Opposition, which in 1938 became the Fourth International. On the eve of WWII, the SWP established mail contact with the LSSP and Trotskyists in India. Once the war started, however, the mail was no longer reliable. The SWP secretly started a very risky operation to re-establish contact with the Trotskyist groups that had been forced underground throughout Europe and Asia. The SWP had its sailor members sign up for supply ships sailing to Asia. Setting ashore in Colombo or Calcutta, they would contact the underground Trotskyist groups, exchange letters and literature, and carry the contraband back to the US, where it was sent to SWP headquarters in New York City. As a result.ofthese heroic operations, the SWP amassed an archive of old Trotskyist newspapers, leaflets, internal bulletins, and other party documents available nowhere else. Unfortunately, the SWP kept these archives private. In the 1960s the SWP began to veer away from its Trotskyist heritage and in the 1980s openly repudiated Trotskyism. In 1991 the SWP literally jettisoned its past. It deposited its international files in the Hoover Archives and the domestic records in the Wisconsin Historical Society. The SWP archives at Hoover are divided into two collections, the Socialist Workers Party Records and the Library of Social History Collection. I abbreviate these in the footnotes as SWP Papers and LSH, respectively. In addition: a number of SWP leaders deposited their own archives at Hoover. Charles Wesley Ervin, "Trotskyism in India, 1942-48," in Al Richardson (ed.), Blows Against the Empire: Trotskyism in Ceylon (London, 1997), pp. 218-241.
iii
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
classify some of the official documents from the era of the Raj that had been kept under wraps in the India Office Library, including the Indian Political Intelligence Service files, which alone fill more than 700 boxes. 5 I made five trips to London, over a period of several years, to mine those records, which yielded precious nuggets of information. Given all this new material, I realized that I had to scale back my ambitious plan to write a book documenting the history of Indian Trotskyism from its origins to the present. I decided to limit this book to the colonial period. The year 1948 is an appropriate end point for two reasons. First, by 1948 both India and Ceylon had become independent. Second, the BLPI entered the Socialist Party of India in that year. This was an exercise in what Trotskyists call "entryism"-to merge into a sympathetic left party, build up a Trotskyist left wing, and exit stronger than before. By the time the Trotskyist movement got going in India, the Congress had been in existence for fifty years. Gandhi had already led two tumultuous mass movements. The sun was setting on the Raj. Stalin had become a Red dictator. A defeated but undaunted Trotsky formed the Fourth International. Europe had been through the Great War, the Depression, the victory of fascism in Italy and Germany, and the Spanish Civil War. There is no way a book like this can provide all that background. However, I thought some kind of introduction would be useful. The first chapter attempts to briefly summarize how the British conquered and transformed India, how the Indian nationalists responded, and how the Marxists ahalyzed and intervened in that long, complex, and fascinating process.
The IPI archives consists of surveillance reports and intercepts from MI6, MI5, and the Special Branch, as well as a large number of intelligence summaries and position papers. The collection consists of more than 57,800 pages in 767 files. For brevity in citations I refer to the Oriental and India Office Collections in the India Office Library as IOL. The files of Indian Political Intelligence (lPI) are part of the Public and Judicial Department (Separate) Files, 1913-1947. Following the convention used at the IOL, I abbreviate these files as LlPJ.
iv
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
I have provided brief biographical sketches of the leading Trotskyists in an appendix. Whenever a name in the text appears in bold type, that signifies that there is an entry in the appendix. Many people have contributed to this book. First and foremost, I must express my debt to Hector Abhayavardhana in Sri Lanka, one of the very few surviving links to the pre-war LSSP and BLPI. He has been a source of invaluable information over the years and was my guide and gracious host during my last visit to Sri Lanka in 1997. I also must give special mention to Kumari Jayawardena, the secretary of the Social Scientists' Association in Sri Lanka, who has encouraged me to see this project through to publication. She has produced pioneering studies of the origins of the left and labor movements in Ceylon. I thank the staff at the SSA, particularly Rasika Chandrasekera, for their careful preparation of this manuscript for printing and to Prarthana Gama Arachchi for meticulous editing. I thank all those veterans who gave me oral histories, old party documents, and answered my many letters over the last three decades: S. Amamath, S.C.C. Anthony Pillai, K. Appanraj, Sailen Banerji, Jagu Belani, Keshav Bhattacharyya, Tulsi Boda, Dulal Bose, Sudarshan Chatterji, Sitanshu Das, Lionel Dissanayake, Trevor Drieberg, Amaradasa Femando, Meryl Femando, Leslie Goonewardene, Osmund Jayaratne, Jagadish Jha, V. Karalasingham, Ramesh Karkal, Sitaram Kolpe, Minoo Masani, Hiranand Mishra, Basanta Dev Mukherji, Murlidhar Parija, Selina Perera, Senadhira Piyasena, Vinayak Purohit, S.R. Rao, T.R. Rao, Ajit and Annie Roy, Karuna Kant Roy, Purnangshu K. Roy, Edmund Samarakkody, Indra Sen, Onkarnath Shastri, Chandravadan Shukla, Tara Shukla, Mahendra Singh, N. Sivasambu, Regi Siriwardena, S.P. Udyawar, and Michael van der Poorten (aka Mike Banda). Several key leaders who figure prominently in these pages had already died by the time I started my research. I gratefully acknowledge the help I received from their families, in particular Dinesh, Lakmali, and Prasanna Gunawardena (children of Philip Gunawardena); Rupa Gunawardena (wife of Robert Gunawardena); and Gina Ismene Chitty (daughter of Doric de Souza). v
The Trotskyist Movement in India and Ceylon
I also acknowledge the input of prominent Trotskyists in other countries, including former leaders of the Fourth International, who had various connections with the Indian and Ceylonese parties: Marcel Bleibtreu, Pierre Brou