ESAU XVI-62 THE INDIAN COMMUNIST PARTY AND THE SINO-SOVIET DISPUTE

• Document Type: FOIA
• Collection: FOIA Collection
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 00600337
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 187
• Document Creation Date: July 13, 2023
• Document Release Date: December 19, 2022
• Case Number: F-2022-01518
• Publication Date: February 7, 1962

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7 February 1962
OCI No. 0697/62
Copy No.
12,3
THE INDIAN COMMUNIST PARTY AND TEE SINO-SOVIET DISPUTE
(Reference Title: ESAU XVI-62)
Office of Current Intelligence
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
411110,
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THIS MATERIAL CONTAINS INFORMATION AFFECT-
ING THE NATIONAL DEFENSE OF THE UNITED STATES
WITHIN THE MEANING OF THE ESPIONAGE LAWS,
TITLE 18, USC, SECTIONS 793 AND 794, THE TRANSMIS-
SION OR REVELATION OF WHICH IN ANY MANNER TO
AN UNAUTHORIZED PERSON IS PROHIBITED BY LAW.
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V4a1IPT
THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA AND THE SINO-SOVIET DISPUTE
This is a working paper, the second in a series of ESAU
studies assessing the effects of the Sino-Soviet dispute on
certain key Communist parties. The paper tries to show how
the development of a broad Sino-Soviet conflict in recent
years has fostered pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese factionalism
which now threatens to split the Indian party.
The preparation of this paper has been greatly aided by
the cooperation and assistance of several other analysts,
especially of the Asian-African Division of the
Free World Area of OCI, Allen Whiting of the Special Studies
Group of the Department of State, and .the analysts of the
Radio Propaganda Branch of FBIS. The first two chapters of
the paper also reflect a debt to the work of Kautsky (Moscow
and the Communist Party of India, New York, 1956). Overstreet
and Windmiller (Communism in India, Berkeley, 1959), and
Masani (The Communist Party of India, New York, 1954). We
alone, however, bear responsibility for the conclusions
reached in this paper.
The Sino-Soviet Studies Group would welcome comment on
this paper, addressed to Harry Gelman, who wrote the paper,
at
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THE INDIAN COMMUNIST PARTY AND THE SINO-SOVIET DISPUTE
SUMMARY
I. PROLOGUE: CPI STRUGGLE OVER THE FOUR-CLASS ALLIANCE
(1947-1951) 1
A. Soviet Shift to Militant Line (1947) 2
B. Ranadive Rise to Power in CPI 4
C. CPSU Shift Toward Broad Alliances, Away From Armed
Struggle 10
II. THE CPI AND THE CHANGING SOVIET LINE TOWARD NEHRU
(1951-1955) 17
III.
A. Evolution of Soviet Line Before Stalin's Death 18
B. Death of Stalin and Third (Madurai) CPI Congress, 20
C. The CPI and the Development of the Bandung Line 22
CONSEQUENCES OF THE 20TH CPSU CONGRESS (1956-1958). . . 30
A. The Effects of DeStalinization 31
B. The Effects of the Line on Peaceful Transition
to Socialism 35
C. Formation of the Kerala Government and Its
Aftermath 40
IV.
MOSCOW-PEIPING POLARIZATION OF CPI BEGINS: 1959
47
A.
The 21st CPSU Congress
47
B.
The Fall of the Kerala Government (January-July
1959)
51
C.
The Tibetan Revolt
55
D.
The Border Dispute
58
E.
The October Anniversary Talks
69
F.
Increasing Leftist Ties with Peiping
74
V.
THE CPI AND THE SINO-SOVIET POLEMIC: 1960
79
A.
Soviet Moves in Early 1960
80
B.
Peiping's Lenin Anniversary Articles
83
C.
The WFTU Clash in Peiping
88
(continued)
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D.
The Bucharest Conference and Its Aftermath
90
E.
The CPSU's August Letter and Its Consequences
99
F.
The Hanoi Confrontation and the CCP's September
Letter
104
G.
The Moscow Conference (November)
107
VI.
THE INDIAN PARTY APPROACHES A SPLIT: 1961
111
A.
Left-Faction Resurgence Before the April
Congress
112
B.
Soviet and Chinese Policy Toward India Before
the Congress
125
C.
The Indian Party Congress, April
131
D.
The CPI Between Its Congress and the 22nd CPSU
Congress
153
E.
The 22nd CPSU Congress and Its Aftermath
159
F.
Prospects for the Indian Communket Party
168
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THE INDIAN COMMUNIST PARTY AND THE SINO-SOVIET DISPUTE
Summary
By January 1962 the Communist Party of India (CPI) had
reached a point at which an open schism in the party in the
coming year had become a serious possibility. The renewal
of the Sino-Soviet conflict at the 22nd CPSU Congress had
greatly worsened an already tense situation within the In-
dian party, and strengthened forces which for many years
had been working toward a split in the CPI: the growth of
unprecedented factionalism and indiscipline, the weakening
of the authority of the party center at the hands of defiant
provincial party committees, the slow decline in the authority
of the CPSU for many reasons and the growth of Chinese party
prestige in the eyes of many CPI members, and the steady pol-
arization of leftist and rightist Indian party factions along
pro-Chinese and pro-Soviet lines.
This process had received its initial impetus during the
internal CPI battle between 1947 and 1951 over the methods
of struggle the party should follow, the immediate goal it
should pursue, and the classes it should admit into its alli-
ance. At that time the left-faction leader Ranadive took
control of the CPI as general secretary, and in conformity
with what he thought was CPSU policy he led the Indian party
in the application of violent insurrectionary tactics against
the Nehru government. Modeling his efforts on the Russian
revolution, Ranadive gave primary emphasis to the struggle in
the cities rather than in the countryside; and he called for
a one-stage revolution to overthrow both the imperialist
enemy and the Indian bourgeoisie simultaneously and bring
about immediate Communist party rule in India. Ranadive's
tactics failed dismally, and were disastrous for the party.
Opposition to Ranadive rose throughout the CPI, and he at-
tempted to suppress it ruthlessly, increasing the chaos with-
in the party.
The leaders of the Andhra provincial party committee
then came forward and attacked Ranadive's line; citing a
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relatively successful peasant revolt which had been going on
for some time in the Telengana district of south India, they
called for the party to abandon insurrection in the cities
and to rely instead upon armed struggle in the countryside.
They also demanded that the CPI ally itself for this purpose
with anti-feudal sections of the well-to-do peasantry, as
well as with anti-imperialist sections of the urban bourgeoisie
(the "national bourgeoisie"). Therefore they wished the party
to aim at a two-stage revolution in which efforts would be
directed first at ousting from power the agents of imperialism
and feudalism, and only later at securing firm Communist con-
trol of the Indian government. The Andhra leaders explicitly
stated that the Chinese revolution rather than the Russian
revolution was their model, and they fervently hailed Mao Tse-
tung as their inspiration and guide.
Ranadive responded with public attacks not only upon the
Andhra leadership but also upon Mao; Ranadive attempted to
portray Mao's advocacy of alliance with the national bourgeoisie
as an anti-Marxist betrayal of the revolution and an attempt
to restore capitalism. There is evidence, suggesting that
Ranadive- was encouraged to do this by signs of serious strain
between Mao and Stalin at the time the CCP was coming to power
in 1948 and 1949. Eventually, however, the CPSU accepted
the desirability of the alliance with the national bourgeoisie
and the two-stage revolution, and Ranadive fell from power
in the CPI, to be replaced by the Andhra leadership. The
Andhra leaders publicly apologized to Mao for Ranadive's at-
tacks, and attempted to apply the line they had advocated.
Peasant revolt, however, proved no more successful than urban
insurrection, and armed'struggle was finally abandoned alto-
gether, with the Andhra group in turn replaced by a new lead-
ership headed by Ajoy Ghosh as general secretary.
Two lasing results flowed from these events. First, al-
though the "Chinese path" had not proven entirely applicable
to India, a degree of Chinese influence was implanted and per-
manently legitimized within the CPI as a source of inspiration
and guidance second only to the CPSU. Secondly, the faction-
alism, blatant indiscipline, and regional disregard for central
authority which had grown during the struggle against Ranadive
became permanent features of CPI life, to a degree seen in
hardly any other Communist party. The authority of the central
CPI machinery was henceforth so weakened in relation to the
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1,04,1laretrir
provincial party organizations that never again did the central
party leadership make a serious attempt to enforce a uniform,
rigid line upon the often defiant provinces.
� The most important feature of the next few years (1951-
55) for the CPI was the gradually softening Soviet attitude
toward Nehru. By slow degreethe Indian party was forced to
follow the evolution of Soviet policy in agreeing first that
there were some positive aspects to Nehru's generally black
foreign policy, then that Nehru's foreign policy was generally
good but that his domestic policy was bad, and finally that
there were favorable features of his domestic policy as well.
The CPI had to be bludgeoned by Moscow and its agents in the
central CPI leadership into taking each painful step along
this path, usually with a considerable time lag behind the
development of Soviet policy; each such gradual modification
of line toward Nehru was accomplished only over the strenuous
objections of a large section of the Indian party which did
not wish what it regarded as opportunities--to advance the
cause of Communis-i in India by opposing Nehru--to be sacrificed
for the sake of Soviet foreign policy interests. Such CPI
recalcitrance was reflected in the party program adopted in
1951, and then was strongly manifested at the Third CPI Con-
gress at Madurai in December 1953. However, the Soviet move-
ment away from hostility to Nehru, begun cautiously three
years before Stalin's death, accelerated greatly thereafter
in the Bandung period of 1954 and 1955, when Nehru exchanged
visits with the Soviet and Chinese leaders and the USSR began
a program of economic assistance to India. Under the impact
of these events, the CPI became increasingly bound to a moder-
ate policy involving reliance upon parliamentary elections.
This trend was to receive its greatest development after the
20th CPSU Congress in 1956.
By the time of Stalin's death, any serious divergence
between Chinese and Soviet policy toward the "national libera-
tion movement" would seem to have disappeared, and Moscow and
Peiping appear to have acted in close coordination in foster-
ing warmer relations with Nehru in 1954 and 1955. However,
the relative importance of the Chinese party and the Chinese
revolution as a guide to Asia--which the CCP had stubbornly
upheld during Stalin's lifetime--was inevitably increased as
a result of his death, a fact reflected during this period in
statements byboth Soviet and Chinese leaders.
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The 20th Congress of the CPSU in February 1956 and the
events which flowed from it administered a series of funda-
mental shocks to the CPI with results which were to affect
greatly the relationship of the Indian party to Moscow and
to Peiping down to the present day. The first and most im-
portant of these shocks was that of deStalinization, which
on the one hand greatly intensified the spirit of cynicism,
the internal disorganization, and the personal indiscipline
already widespread because of the party's previous history,
and on the other hand greatly accelerated the long-term de-
cline in the authority and prestige of the CPSU which had be-
gun with the death of Stalin, while simultaneously enhancing
the appeal of the CCP to those sections of the Indian party
sympathetic to Peiping's viewpoint. This development was
followed by the Soviet.suppression of the Hungarian Revolution
and the subsequent execution of Nagy, which weakened the CPSU's
position among rightist sections of the party. A third dif-
ficulty was meanwhile occasioned by the 20th Congress line on
peaceful transition to socialism, and particularly by the
extreme interpretation of that line as applied to India pro-
vided by an authoritative Soviet article in the summer of
1956 which implied that Nehru, and not the CPI, would lead
India into the socialist system. This viewpoint was directly
challenged in public by general secretary Ghosh, and the CPSU
soon retreated to a more orthodox position--which, however,
still enjoined CPI support for Nehru and CPI reliance primarily
upon parliamentary tactics. Forces in the Indian party favor-
ing the parliamentary path were strengthened by the party's
accession to power through elections in the state of Kerala
in April 1957; and the CPI moved from the April 1956 line of
the Palghat party congress (where the party cautiously acknowl-
edged the possibility of peaceful transition to socialism
through parliamentary means backed by mass movements, and an-
nounced its intention to explore this possibility by conduct-
ing itself as a parliamentary opposition) to the April 1958
line of the Amritsar Congress (which exuded confidence that
the parliamentary takeover in Kerala could be repeated in other
Indian states and eventually even in the center).
eanwhile, by the fall of 1956 the first indications be-
gan to appear of growing divergence between the Chinese and
Soviet parties over how far the soft line toward the national
bourgeoisie of Asian countries should be pursued. Chinese
objections on this score, originally suggested at the time of
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the Eighth CCP Congress in September 1956, were reinforced as
the Indian Communist party became increasingly committed to
the parliamentary line in the wake of the Kerala election.
Chinese comments began to be heard in 1958 concerning the
pernicious effect the Kerala Ministry was having on the mili-
tancy and Marxist orthodoxy of the CPI. At the same time
the left wing of the Indian party led by the Andhra, West
Bengal,Iand Punjab organizations, infuriated at the restric-
tions and inhibitions which were imposed upon the party as
a whole by the need to preserve the Kerala government in power,
became more and more inclined to regard the long-respected
Chinese party as a source of inspiration more congenial to its
interests than Moscow.
At the end of 1958 there was a momentary hardening of the
Soviet line toward Nehru, occasioned primarily by the campaign
being conducted by the Congress Party and other forces in
Kerala to oust the Communist government. This firmer Soviet
attitude was exemplified by an article by Yudin in Problems
of Peace and Socialism rebutting Nehru's attack on Communists
as addicted to violence; Yudin's article placed the onus for
any possible violence on bourgeois resistance to a peaceful
transfer of power to the Communist party.
This Soviet shift in emphasis proved to be temporary, how-
ever, and in 1959 the polarization of the CPI between a moder-
ate pro-Soviet wing and a militant pro-Chinese wing was to in-
crease greatly. In 1959 the CPI for the first time became
gravely affected by the growing differences between the Soviet
and Chinese postures toward the "imperialist" world', their at-
titudes toward the ruling national bourgeoisie of underdeveloped
countries, and their views on the most appropriate means of
Communist assumption of power. The gap between the CPSU and
the CCP on each of these issues, which had been alternately
expanding and contracting in previous years, suddenly widened
greatly. This was partly the result of events over which
neither party had control: the Tibetan revolt, Nehru's deci-
sion to oust the Communist government in Kerala, Washington's
decision to invite Khrushchev to the United States. It was
also, however, the result of a conscious turning to the right
by the CPSU and to the left by the CCP. On Moscow's side,
there was an apparent decision taken in January 1959 to abandon
the stronger tone used toward Nehru in the fall of 1958 and
to bear with this bourgeois nationalist leader for a consider-
able distance. This resulted first in peremptory CPSU restraint
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of the CPI upon the occasion of Nehru's ouster of the Kerala
government, and later in the Soviet adoption of a publicly
neutral posture toward the Sino-Indian border dispute (a
posture bitterly resented by the CC?), as well as in vigorous
Soviet efforts to convince Nehru of Soviet friendship as the
border dispute developed. On the Chinese side, there was in-
stead a hardening of attitude toward Nehru at the very beginning
of the year, which helped to determine Peiping's later response
to events in Kerala and to the border dispute. At the same
time, Khrushchev in the fall of 1959 adopted the softest line
toward the West generally he had ever publicly voiced in the
aftermath of his visit to the United States, while Peiping
grew increasingly shrill in its warnings against Western treach-
ery and in contradiction of the Soviet line.
Against this background of increasingly divergent policies,
the CC? in 1959 for the first time began to make aggressive
efforts to promote its viewpoint among sympathetic sections
of the CPI, particularly within the militant West Bengal pro-
vincial party organization. At the same time Ranadive and the
other leftists in the party apparatus were drawn increasingly
into an identification with and defense of Peiping's position
in the border dispute, while right-faction leaders throughout
the party became increasingly inclined to conciliate Indian
nationalist opinion by supporting the Nehru government's stand
and condemning Peiping.
In 1960 the Soviet and Chinese parties came into open and
repeated conflict, and this conflict was transformed into an
organizational struggle within the world Communist movement
in which both sides eventually found themselves appealing to
the loyalties of the key leaders of each of the principal Com-
munist parties of the world. Although the CPSU, because of
its fears of precipitating a formal schism in the Indian party,
for a long time left the CPI out of its efforts to mobilize
foreign Communist support against Peiping--and even attempted
to continue to deny to the CPI the reality of the Sino-Soviet
dispute--the Indian party eventually had to be drawn into that
dispute if only because bloc policy toward India was one of
the key matters at issue between Moscow and Peiping. CPI rep-
resentatives took part in the Sino-Soviet confrontations which
took place in Peiping and Bucharest in June, in Hanoi in Septem-
ber, and in Moscow in October and November. The Indian party
was formally apprised of the Soviet position in a CPSU letter
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to the party center in August, and was given a Chinese reply
more indirectly through West Bengal channels the next month.
Under the impact of these events, the rightist CPI leaders
pressed an offensive against leftist-faction positions, which
they were anxious to idelltify clearly with CCP resistance to
CPSU authority; the leftists in the central party machinery,
for their part, were anxious to deny their own estrangement
from the CPSU by denying as long as they could the reality of
Sino-Soviet differences. When a clearcut choice was finally
posed in September, vacillating and opportunistic CPI leaders
(the majority) swung to the rightist side identified with the
CPSU, and the CPI passed a secret resolution attacking Peiping
and supporting Moscow. Passage of this resolution was resisted
by the leftist CPI national leaders, however, and was bitterly
denounced by left-faction representatives in the provinces
throughout India. One important provincial party organization,
in West Bengal, went so far as to pass a counter-resolution
directly attacking the conduct of the CPSU and Khrushchev by
name and supporting Peiping--the only such resolution definitely
known to have been passed in any Communist party in the world.
While the delegation led by Ghosh to Moscow supported Khrushchev
on most issues during the November conference of Communist
parties, it did not support his demand for a condemnation of
factionalism within the Communist movement (implicitly, Chinese
factionalism) because of the grave danger that such action
would split the CPI. Khrushchev's eventual retreat at that
conference on this crucial issue of discipline within the in-
ternational movement--together with the inclusion of many Chi-
nese positions in the ambiguous document produced by the con-
ference--served to encourage the CPI leftists generally and
to leave those of them who had openly defied the CPSU unrebuked
and more firmly entrenched than before.
The year 1960 ended with the left faction of the CPI con-
tinuing to report to the Chinese party and to receive guidance
from it, while gathering strength throughout India for an as-
sault on the central party machinery in 1961. There was a
gradual increase in leftist strength and assertiveness through-
out the Indian party before the party congress met in April
1961, and Suslov, the CPSU delegate to that congress, was obliged
to counsel Ghosh to make substantial concessions to the left-
ists on the wording of the party's political resolution--in
order to preserve Ghosh in office as general secretary and to
prevent a threatened open split in the party (which nevertheless
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came
came very near to materializing). There is good evidence, how-
ever, that the CPSU and Ghosh themselves favored a balanced
line including both support and criticism of aspects of Nehru's
foreign and domestic policies, and a long-term strategy of
building a national democratic front through cooperation with
"progressive" Congress Party leaders to achieve limited non-
socialist reforms as a prelude to the gradual Communist as-
sumption of power. Suslov did not have to contend with direct
Chinese competition at the CPI Congress, the prospective CCP
representatives having been ordered to leave India beforehand
by the New Delhi government.
While the new National Council elected by the Congress
had a reduced rightist majority--because of the leftists'
threat to break up the party unless their wishes were acceded
to--the rightists subsequently used this National Council
majority to reverse leftist control of the Central Executive
Committee and the Central Secretariat, the two top party organs
charged with running the party. When Ghosh led a balanced
CPI delegation to the 22nd CPSU Congress in October, however,
even moderates who were normally staunch CPSU supporters were
shaken by the open attacks there on the Albanian leaders and
the renewed assault on Stalin. Ghosh indicated his reserva-
tions about Khrushchev's course of action by declining to at-
tack Albania in his speech to the CPSU Congress--like a number
of other normally pro-CPSU foreign delegates--although two
months later, again like the leaders of some other parties,
he belatedly added- mild public disapproval of the Albanians.
Greater turmoil resulted within the CPI as a consequence of
this CPSU Congress than had ever existed before, both because
of the new CPSU offensive against Albania and the CCP and be-
cause of the attacks on Stalin and the displacement of Stalin's
body. There were widespread attacks on Moscow and Khrushchev
over these actions within all factions of the CPI, and one pro-
vincial party organization--that of Andhra Pradesh--passed a
resolution condemning the CPSU, the second such resolution to
be passed within the CPI in little more than a year. Ghosh
eventually published an article publicly regretting the manner
in which Moscow had again embarked on deStalinization, and de-
claring that the CPSU had forfeited its claim to infallibility.
These internal difficulties of the CPI were greatly aug-
mented by the simultaneous rekindling of the Sino-Indian bor-
der dispute, a statement by Ghosh strongly attacking the CPR,
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and a subsequent People's Daily editorial condemning both Nehru
and Ghosh. At the close of 1961, both leftist and rightist CPI
leaders were warning of the likelihood of an open split in the
Indian party after the. elections of February 1962. While it
seemed likely that the CPSU would make every effort again to
prevent such a split, Moscow's long-term chances of success
in this effort were dependent on such factors as the future
course of Sino-Soviet relations, the fortunes of the "peaceful
coexistence" line, and..the number of concessions Moscow was
willing to make again to the CPI leftists. The Soviet problem
was further complicated by the death of Ghosh in January 1962,
and the lack of a suitable successor combining loyalty to the
CPSU with acceptability to both wings of the Indian party.
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efitlEET
I. PROLOGUE: CPI STRUGGLE OVER THE FOUR-CLASS
ALLIANCE (1947-1951)
The gradual growth of Peiping's influence and prestige
within large sections of the Indian Communist party as a
guide secondary to the CPSU has apparently been known and
tolerated by the Soviet party for the better part of the
last decade. It was this long-term Chinese "presence" in
the CPI which in 1959 and 1960--when Peiping began openly
to challenge Soviet authority within the Communist move-
ment on a world-wide scale--was to combine with the faction-
alism and astonishing indiscipline of the Indian party to
produce a threat to CPSU primacy which endures to this day.
Both factors--the legitimization of a degree of perma-
nent Chinese influence, and the growth of factionalism and
regional disregard for central authority to a point seen in
hardly any other Communist party--had their origin* in the
internal party struggle between 1947 and 1951 over the
methods of struggle the party should follow, the immediate
goal it should pursue, and the classes it should admit into
its alliance. Many of the positions espoused at that time
by individual CPI leaders--not to mention the CPSU and the
CCP--have since been altered or even reversed. But there
have been lasting effects from certain developmerits of that
time: that the central CPI authority attempted to apply a
certain line, in conformity with what it thought was CPSU
policy; that this line proved disastrous for the Indian
party; that other leaders openly proposed another line,
which they specifically acknowledged to have been derived
from Chinese teachings rather than from Moscow; that the
central leadership reacted with violent denunciations of
heresy, with suppression, expulsions, and similar methods
*This is not to say that factional strife and respect for
the Chinese party had not existed in the CPI before this period,
but only that an enormous qualitative change occured on both
counts after this time, which Indian Communists have themselves
remarked on.
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to enforce its line on the party; that the central leadership
also published a direct attack on the Chinese party as the
source of this Indian heresy; that rebel CPI leaders in the
center and in one important provincial organization neverthe-
less continued to defy the leadership; that Moscow eventually
accepted certain elements of the Peiping line and forced them
upon the Indian party; and that the old CPI leadership was re-
moved and temporarily disgraced. While this was not the en-
tire story (Moscow first and the CPI later concluded that the
"Chinese path" was not entirely applicable to India, and the
discredited CPI leaders were eventually readmitted to a cen-
tral leadership coalition of all factions), nevertheless two
effects have persevered: on the one hand, considerable respect
for the wisdom and authority of the Chinese party were im-
planted permanently within the CPI; and on the other hand, the
authority of the central CPI machinery was so weakened in re-
lation to the provincial party organizations that never again
has the central party leadership made a serious attempt to en-
force a uniform, rigid line upon the often defiant provinces.
A. Soviet Shift to Militant Line (1947)
These events were set in motion for the CPI by the Soviet
decision in 1947 to discard the rightist, united front-from-
above line enjoining support for bourgeois governments which
the CPSU had required of the world Communist movement after
the USSR's entry into World War II. The CPSU now ordered a
general shift to a militant strategy of violent opposition to
bourgeois governments, general strikes, demonstrations, armed
resistance, and, in colonial areas, "wars of liberation." The
first authoritative signal for this shift was given in Zhdanov's
report to the founding meeting of the Cominform in September
1947; but because Zhdanov dealt explicitly only with Europe,
nowhere in this report did he indicate clearly whether or not
the alliance which was to carry out the armed struggle in
colonial countries against imperialist ::rulers could include
sections of the native bourgeoisie which might be anti-imperi-
alist (the "national bourgeoisie") or sections of the native
peasantry which were not impoverished but which might be anti-
feudal (the "middle" and "rich" peasantry). That Stalin in
1947 had not made up his mind on this question was indicated
by the conflicting interpretations provided by authoritative
Soviet speakers at the proceedings of a meeting of the Soviet
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Academy of Sciences on India in June 1947 which anticipated
the Soviet switch to the militant line, and in articles by
the same experts in December amplifying Zhdanov's thesis.*
The Chinese Communist Party, on the other hand, adopted
a clear position on these ambiguous Soviet statements. On
25 December 1947 Mao Tse-tung delivered a report to the CCP
central committee setting forth a line which was principally
intended for the contemporary Chinese scene but which was
also implied to be valid for other Agian parties. Mao con-
demned "ultra-left" policies toward the petty and "middle"
bourgeoisie, explicitly setforth the immediate aims of his
"New Democratic" revolution as the elimination of feudalism
and monopoly capitalism rather than capitalism in general,
and then added a call for "all anti-imperialist forces" of
the various Eastern countries to unite to oppose imperialism
and the reactionaries as he had defined them--by implication,
therefore, to aim at a two-stage revolution (first anti-imperi-
alist and democratic, and only later socialist), and to use
a four-class alliance (proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie,
and national bourgeoisie) against imperialism and the pro-
imperialist sections of the bourgeoisie.
Although the Cominform organ For A Lasting Peace, For A
People's Democracy published a summary of this Mao report, it
omitted all mention of Mao's demand for the initial retention
of capitalism and the alliance with the middle bourgeoisie,
thus effectively obscuring Mao's central point. The CCP line
on this issue was restated more forcefully and explicitly,
however, the following year, in a passage in Liu Shao-chi's
article "Nationalism and Internationalism," written in con-
nection with the bloc break with-Yugoslavia. While warning
the Communists of colonial and semi-colonial countries--in-
cluding India--to beware of "national betrayal by the reac-
tionary section of the bourgeoisie" which had already surrend-
ered to imperialism, Liu insisted that the Communists "should
enter into an anti-imperialist alliance with%that section of
*For the details of these articles, see the discussions.by
Kautsky (Moscow and the Communist Party of India, New York,
1956) and Overstreet and Windmiller (Communism in India,
Berkeley, 1959).
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the national bourgeoisie which is still opposing imperialism."
He added that "should the Communists fail to do so in earnest,
should they on the contrary oppose or reject such an alliance",
this would be a "serious mistake." Although this article was
written in November 1948, it was not published in Soviet media
until the following June, when the CPSU showed many signs of
having finally accepted the line of an alliance with the national
bourgeoisie. In the meantime, throughout 1948 authoritative
Soviet writers had continued to take ambivalent or contradic-
tory positions on this issue, and it seems likely that this
CPSU indecision was one of the reasons for Moscow's long delay
in publishing Liu's article.*
B. Ranadive Rise to Power in CPI
Meanwhile, even as Mao spoke in December 1947 a shift
was occuring within the Indian Communist party which was bring-
ing into control a faction which interpreted Zhdanov's September
directive simplistically, not only assuming it to be a call
for armed struggle against the Nehru government but also seeing
it as a demand for a limited worker-peasant alliance against
all sections of the Indian bourgeoisie to bring about a one-
stage revolution overthrowing capitalism and ushering in so-
cialism. This shift took place at a December 1947 CPI central
committee meeting in which the balance of power within the
party swung away from P. C. Joshi--the old CPI general secretary
who had led the party since the middle thirties, and who had
advocated support for the new Nehru government--toward B. T.
Ranadive, who has since to this day remained at least the
titular leader of the CPI leftist faction. The central commit-
tee adopted a resolution making no distinction between sections
of the Indian bourgeoisie, and lumping all of the bourgeoisie
with imperialism and feudalism as the enemy to be fought now.
This line was confirmed and developed three months later
at the Second Congress of the CPI in February 1948, when Ranadive
*Another reason, presumably, was Liu's insufficiently harsh
attitude toward Tito.
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formally replaced Joshi as general secretary. The Political
Thesis adopted by this congress identified the entire world
bourgeoisie with the imperialist camp as the common enemy in
every country; explicitly rejected the notion of significant
differences among the bourgeoisie; called for a united front
from below (to entice away the proletarian following of the
Congress party) rather than a united front from above (which
would have meant the Joshi line of alliances with and support
for Congress party leaders); held'that-a revolutionary situa-
tion now existed in India, and called for a violent effort to
bring about a one-stage revolution. This party congress was
held in Calcutta immediately upon the conclusion of an inter-
national youth congress there sponsored jointly by the World
Federation of Democratic Youth and the International UniOn of
Students which is believed to have given the signal for the
armed Communist uprisings which soon afterward began in a
number of other Asian countries.
Following the Second Congress, Ranadive proceeded to apply
insurrectionary tactics against the Nehru government; in so'
doing he sought to adhere to the model of the Russian revolu-
tion and to rely primarily upon struggle in the cities rather
than in the countryside. There were attempts at massive
paralyzing strikes, violent demonstrations, acid-throwings,
and so on, and many party leaders went underground. The Nehru
government responded with a vigorous crackdown against the
party which effectively anticipated and countered these meas-
ures and placed much of the party's top leadership in prison.
Meanwhile, the CPI's violent tactics steadily reduced the num-
ber of effective party members, decimated the fronts, and
rapidly eliminated the party's influence over the masses; calls
for strikes were heeded less and less, and eventually, as Rana-
dive's opponents later charged, the party was reduced to spon-
soring acts of "individual terrorism" by tiny groups of die-
hard militants.
Andhra Citation of Mao as Guide: While this was going
on, Communist leaders in the Telegnana district of the south-
ern Indian princely state of Hyderabad (which had not yet been
incorporated into India) had for three years been leading a
relatively successful revolt among the local peasantry by rely-
ing upon a radical program of land reform. The contrast between
the success of this effort and the failure of Ranadives tac-
tics encouraged the Andhra provincial committee--to which the
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Telengana party leaders were subordinated--to circulate with-
in the party in June 1948 a document challenging Ranadive's
line and calling for a line combining agrarian revolt with
Communist alliance with the national bourgeoisie and all
strata of the peasantry. The Andhra leaders explicitly ac-
knowledged that they were inspired to adopt this line by the
experience of the Chinese revolution, and not by what they
termed "classical Russian revolution." They declared that
"Mao, the leader of the historic Chinese liberation struggle,
from his unique and rich experience and study, has formulated
a theory of new democracy" which was a "new form of revolu-
tionary struggle to advance toward socialism in colonies and
semi-colonies" and which was something "distinct from the
dictatorship of the proletariat." An essential aspect of this
Maoist line which the Indian party should copy, they felt, was
the limitation of the struggle in the present stage to one
against imperialism and feudalism, and the consequent forma-
tion of a broad alliance with the anti-imperialist "middle
bourgeoisie" of the cities, as well as the "middle peasantry"
and (if possible) even the "rich peasantry" of the country-
side. The Andhra party committee cited as the justification
for this line a statement by Mao on 24 April 1945 to the 7th
CCP Congress, in which Mao complained that "some people cannot
understand why the Communist Party of China, far from being
unsympathetic to capitalism, actually promotes its develop-
ment," and explained that "what China does not want is
foreign imperialism and native feudalism and not native capi-
talism which is too weak."
Ranadive Attack on Mao: While neither Mao nor the Andhra
Communists had in mind either the indefinite retention of
capitalism or the abdication of Communist leadership, and while
there is no good evidence that the Andhra party in hailing Mao
as a model consciously intended to reject CPSU authority,
Ranadive for polemical purposes chose to profess these conclu-
sions in the counteroffensive he made to the Andhra document.
In his first response, in the CPI journal Communist of January
1949, Ranadive contented himself with defending his line of
a single revolution leading directly to socialism, led by the
proletariat in firm allinace only with the poor peasantry and
the rural proletariat, and with suggesting that the battle
against the Indian bourgeoisie was even more important than
the struggle against foreign imperialism. In July 1949, how-
ever, he wrote an article in the same journal which directly
assailed not only the Andhra document but its ideological
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inspiration, Mao Tse-tung. In this article Ranadive emphasized
that the CPI accepted only Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin as
authoritative sources of Marxism, and not Mao, whom he impli-
citly compared with Tito and Browder. He delcared that "some
of Mao's formulations are such that no Communist party can ac-
cept them; they are in contradiction to the world understand-
ing of the Communist parties." Citing the 1945 Mao quotation
from the Andhra document, he termed the formulation aboUt the
CCP promoting the development of capitalism "horrifying,"
"reactionary," and "counterrevolutionary," and in hypocritical
fashion interpreted Mao literally, asking: "Are we to under-
stand that while Communists in Europe, the USSR, and India
fight world capitalism, the CCP proposes to rebuild it in
China?"
Joshi subsequently claimed that eighteen months before
Ranadive expressed these views publicly he had disseminated
them in private oral discussions within the CPI on the eve of
the February 1948 CPI Congress. Ranadive at that time had
reportedly declared that Mao's "New Democracy" was reeking
with reformism and that the Chinese revolution would not be
consolidated and directed towards socialism until its leader-
ship revised its views or was made to revise them. Ranadive
was also said to have predicted that a "whole pack of reform-
ists" who had got control of certain other Communist parties
after the wartime dissolution of the Cominform would soon be
ousted. In a February 1949 article in Communist, Ranadive
indeed made public similar vague charges of revisionism
against the leaderships of unspecified European Communist
parties.
For Ranadive to pass from these private charges of vague
public allusions to his direct public attack on Mao in July
1949, however, was a remarkable act, particularly in view of
the fact that the CCP at that moment was in the process of
consolidating its conquest of mainland China, while the CPI
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was a tiny and hopelessly defeated remnant of a party. De-
spite Ranadive's undoubted personal fanaticism and irrespon-
sibility, it seems likely that he must have had what he con-
sidered good evidence of strong friction between Stalin and
the CCP to justify his action.*
There are two known items of evidence dating from late
1948 and early 1949 which do suggest that at the very time
when the CCP was coming to power in China, Stalin was experi-
encing particular difficulty in adjusting himself to the
heightened status of Mao and the Chinese party within the in-
ternational movement which was the inevitable consequence of
this event. First, the British Communist Palme Dutt, in a
report to a Conference on the Crisis of British Imperialism
on 2 October 1948, listed five new features of the post-World
War II "national liberation movement". According to the ver-
sion of Dutt's report published in Britain, the second of
these points declared: "The advance of democratic China rep-
resents a powerful force in the world situation which exer-
cises a profound influence on the development of the libera-
tion struggle of the colonial peoples throughout Asia." The
version published in the Cominform journal on 15 October, how-
ever, listed only four features; the point about China was
omitted.
Anna Louise Strong Book: A more dramatic piece of evi-
dence--and a reason why the CPSU at this time may have been
unwilling to publish the seemingly innocuous statement above,
which in subsequent years has been repeated many times by
Moscow--was provided by the case of Anna Louise Strong and
her book, "Tomorrow's China." This book, based on a year's
*Although it is barely possible that Ranadive waS given
direct instructions by the CPSU to attack Mao, this ,seems un-
likely, if only because--as will be seen--by the time Rana-
dive wrote in July 1949 the CPSU had already accepted the
particular Maoist doctrine which was the central object of
Ranadive's assault. It appears more likely that Ranadive
used earlier broad indications of Sino-Soviet difficulties
as justification for attack on the authority cited by his
internal party opponents.
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stay in China from July 1946 to July 1947 and on repeated
conversations with the top CCP leaders, was published by the
Communist press of many countries late in 1948 and early in
1949. In India, it was published by the CPI's People's Pub-
lishing House of Bombay in the fall of 1948 under the title
"Dawn Out of China." In this work Miss Strong paid repeated
tribute to the experience and authority of the Chinese Com-
munist party and Mao and the particular and unique relevance
of Mao's teachings to the revolutions of Asia. She even went
so far as to state explicitly that "it is to Mao Tse-tung and
to Communist China much more than to present-day Moscow that
the nationalist revolutions of Indonesia, Indo-China, Burma,
look for their latest, most practical ideas," and that Mao's
strategy was made to fit such peoples because China's problems
are similar to theirs. Mao's analysis of China's revolution,
she said, "is studied eagerly in the colonial lands of South-
east Asia;" and she thought that "Marxists all over the world
agree that in order to understand the modern problems of Asia,
it is necessary to study Mao's thought," since Mao was the
"first Marxist in Asia" to succeed in applying Marxist prin-
ciples to new conditions and in giving those principles a new
development.
One aspect of the Maoist teachings thus lauded by this
book is the "New Democracy" line calling for an alliance With
the middle bourgeoisie and preservation of some native capi-
talism for the sake of the common struggle against imperial-
ism and its adherents. In a later private conversation, Anna
Louise Strong stated that in her last interview with Mao in
1947, she declared her intention to bring this Maoist line for
the anti-imperialist struggle to the attention of other Asian
Communist parties; thereupon, according to her account, Mao
interrupted her to urge that she bring it to the attention of
the Russians as well. In fact, after her book had already
been published by a number of Communist parties, she did visit
the Soviet Union in an effort to get the work published there,
and appears to have been naively surprised at the insistence
of the Moscow publishing house that drastic changes be made
in the text. Finally, she was arrested in Moscow in February
in 1949, charged with espionage, and subsequently expelled
from the country. Her old friend Borodin, who had attempted
to help her in dealing with the Moscow publishers, was also
arrested and later died in prison.
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The fact of Anna Louise Strong's arrest by the Soviet
authorities a few months after the appearance of her book
hailing Mao was likely to have been seized on by Ranadive as
evidence. of Stalin's attitude toward both Mao's pretensions
and Maoist policy. Thus encouraged, Ranadive and his lieu-
tenants in the party center persisted in leading the party on
in its violent course despite the disastrous effects this was
having, and despite the growing opposition to the Ranadive
line not only from the Andhra committee but also from the
party trade union leaders led by S. A. Dange. Too deeply com-
mitted to his line to draw back, Ranadive attempted to apply
Stalinist methods of suppression within the CPI, arbitrarily
dissolving rebellious local party committees and expelling
dissidents on a wide scale, and thereby compounding the chaos
throughout the party.
C. CPSU Shift Toward Broad Alliance�, Away from Armed Struggle
One of Ranadive's opponents who was first suspended from
the party and then, in December 1949, expelled, was the former
CPI general secretary P. C. Joshi. Joshi responded pugnacious-
ly to his explusion by launching a one-man campaign against
Ranadive, sending a long letter to Stalin and to other foreign
parties documenting Ranadive's departure from Soviet intentions,
and publishing these and other documents in a journal founded
specially for the purpose. Joshi was aided in this effort by
the fact that CPSU policy doubts had apparently been resolved
by mid-summer 1949 in favor of the line of the four-class al-
liance and the two-stage revolution. In early June Pravda fir.
nallypublished the text of Liu Shao-chi's "Internationalism
and Nationalism"; this fact was cited by Joshi* as having been
*Joshi's writings in this period were replete with polemical
defenses of the Chinese leaders against Ranadive's attacks;
and Joshi in subsequent years became known as the CPI leader
most closely identified with Peiping. Joshi's adherence to
the alliance with the Indian national bourgeoisie, however,
outlived the eventual passing of Peiping's fondness for this
line; and Joshi was finally forced, most reluctantly, to sup-
port the CPSU against the CCP when the Sino-Soviet conflict
surfaced in 1960.
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ignored by Ranadive when publishing his attack on Mao. Also
in June 1949, reports delivered at an important meeting held
by the USSR Academy of Sciences upheld both armed peasant
struggles and the participation of the national bourgeoisie
in the anti-imperialist alliance in colonial countries; and
the same line was taken in a collection of papers published
by the Soviet Pacific Institute later in 1949.
Soviet Subordination of Chinese Experience: In addition,
one of the latter papers published by the Pacific Institute
now described the Chinese revolution as having profited "from
the tremendous experience of the CPSU", as having "creatively
applied the teachings of Lenin and Stalin" under conditions
of a semi-colonial country, and as constituting for this rea-
son "a vast treasury of revolutionary experience itself" for
colonial peoples of the East to draw upon. This attempt to
subordinate the significance of Mao's thinking was reiterated
in a Soviet message on the founding of the CPR published in
Pravda on 6 October 1949, in which the CCP was depicted as
having won its victory by "basing itself" on Stalin's "analysis
of the...conditions for a victory of an anti-imperialist and
anti-feudal revolution." It thus seems that the CPSU, finally
convinced of the expediency of Mao's four-class strategy for
the revolutions of Asian parties--and also confronted by Mao's
victory with the necessity of defining the CCP's relation to
those revolutibns--attempted to resolve both problems by adopt-
ing this Maoist line and depicting it, and all Chinese experi-
ence, as derived from Stalinist teachings.
The CCP seems never to have accepted this distinctly sub-
ordinate niche for Mao, although Mao in March and July 1949
did perform the ritual of acknowledging Chinese successes to
have been made possible by the Soviet victories in World War
II. At the November 1949 WFTU Peiping Conference of Asian and
Australasian Countries which formally ratified the Maoist
strategy as suitable for the Asian parties, Liu Shao-chi de-
clared, without any obeisance to Soviet experience or teach-
ings, that "the path taken by the Chinese people...is the path
that should be taken by the peoples of the various /NCNA Eng-
lish/ colonial and semi-colonial countries in their fight for
national independence and people's democracy."* (Emphasis sup-
plied.)
*NCNA English version of 23 November 1949. The Soviet Union was
mentioned only in passing in this speech; and Liu alluded to
the European satellites as "the new democracies."
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The Question of the Suitability of Armed Struggle: This
"Chinese path" was defined by Liu as a broad united front, in-
cluding the national bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie but
based on the worker-peasant alliance and resolutely dominated
by the Communist party--plus a national army led by the party
waging armed struggles from bases in the countryside while con-
ducting only "legal and illegal mass struggles" in the cities.*
(Emphasis supplied.) Although LiTraid insert certain qualifi-
cations�declaring that this "way of Mao Tse-tung" should be
followed in other countries "where similar conditions prevail,"
that an army should be set up "wherever and whenever possible,"
and that armed struggle is the main form of struggle of, "many"
colonies and semi-colonies--the main thrust of his argument
was in the opposite direction, implying that the Chinese felt
that armed struggle on their model was indeed well-nigh uni-
versally suitable in Asia.
The CPSU has since intimated that at the time it was not
in complete agreement with the CCP on this point, implying that
the Soviet party, while finally accepting Mao's doctrine of
a four-class alliance in colonial countries, may also have
been just beginning to consider abandoning armed struggles in
certain countries where they had proven inexpedient, and that
the CPSU may therefore have been reluctant to commit all the
Asian WFTU organizations to a line suggesting that violent
tactics were still generally suitable. While there is no
conclusive evidence, certain of Liu's statements have .a highly
polemical flavor which lends some credence to this. He said
*Li Li-san, a former CCP leader who in 1930 had been in-
strumental in applying Stalin's disastrous advice to the
Chinese party to concentrate on armed struggles in the cities
rather than in the countryside, was also brought out at this
WFTU meeting to testify to the "historical lesson" taught by
his mistake and to the proven correctness of Mao's line of
relying on armed struggle in the countryside whikessentially
"lying low" in the cities. Li's statements were probably
directed in large part at Ranadive, who was now repeating
Li's old policy; they were probably also intended as a re-
minder to the Asian parties of the fallibility of CPSU ad-
vice.
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that "if "if the people of the colonies and semi-colonies have no
armed forces to defend themselves, they will lose everything,"
that the existence and development of the working class' organi-
zation and the united front depends on armed struggle, and
that armed struggle is the "inevitable" course for colonial
peoples. He emphasized that "the fighters of the national-
liberation wars of Vietnam, Burma, Indonesia, Malaya, and the
Philippines have acted entirely correctly"*--as if someone had
questioned this. He declared that it is "impossible" to over-
throw imperialism and establish a people's democracy "by tak-
ing any other easier way" than that of armed struggle, and
warned that "if anybody attempts to do so, it would be a mis-
take.** Ultimately, however, the WFTU Conference--presumably
in deference to Soviet views--in one of its resolutions urged
the colonial and semi-colonial countries to take into account
"local conditions and national characteristics" in choosing
"the appropriate methods" to build a united front and defeat
*Earlier, in his speech, he had also hailed India as one
of the countries where armed struggles were taking place; the
Manifesto issued by the Peiping WFTU Conference did not do so,
suggesting--as does subsequent evidence--that the question of
the suitability of India for armed struggle may have been one
of the points at issue.
**Liu here added unusually vigorous and lengthy warnings
about the untrustworthiness and vacillations even of those
sections of the bourgeoisie which participated in the anti-
imperialist alliance (the national bourgeoisie), and their
incapacity to lead the national liberation movement or accom-
plish the democratic revolution. This danger of the Commun-
ists losing control of the alliance to the national bourgeoisie
would naturally come to the fore with the abandonment of Com-
munist-led armed struggle against a clearly-defined imperi-
alist and reactionary enemy; in such cases, there would be
an increased possibility that some Communists would classify
native governments such as Nehru's as national bourgeois, and
hence worthy of being supported against a common imperialist
enemy rather than fought. Something like this, in fact,
eventually happened in India in response to changes in Soviet
policy which Peiping at first accepted but finally again came
to denounce.
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the imperialists, suggesting that armed struggle was now far
from generally obligatory. All in all, the evidence suggests
that while both Moscow and Peiping still endorsed armed strug-
gle for many Asian countries, and both admitted the need for
some present exceptions, the CPSU now saw the necessity for
more exceptions from this policy than the CCP was yet willing
to admit.
January Cominform Editorial and Fall of Ranadive: This
interpretation is given some support by an editorial publish-
ed in the Cominform journal on 27 January 1950 which reiterat-
ed Liu's main points but in such a fashion as to suggest more
vigorously that there were some Asian countries where armed
struggle could not now usefully be employed, and that India
was one such country. This editorial also quoted Liu's state-
ment that the Chinese path should be taken by the people of
the various colonial countries, but changed NCNA's "The various"
to "many," possibly meaning to indicate that the CPSU saw
exceptions to the applicability of armed struggle and to
limit the stature of the Chinese party and its experience.
The same function was served by the editorial's specific in-
junction to the Indian Communist party to be guided by "the
experience of the national-liberation movement in China and
other countries." (Emphasis added.) In addition, the edi-
torial now instructed the CPI to unite with "all classes,
parties, groups and organizations" willing to join it in a
battle against imperialism, feudalism, and "the reactionary
big bourgeoisie."
The initial reaction of the Indian party to this signal
was to heed the second instruction--to reject Ranadive's nar-
row approach and form a four-class alliance--but to misinter-
pret the more indirect suggestion that armed struggle itself
be ended. In May 1950, a central committee meeting ousted
Ranadive as general secretary and installed in control the
Andhra leaders, headed by Rajeswar Rao. The triumphant Andhra
group proceeded publicly to withdraw and apologize for the
Ranadive attacks on Mao Tse-tung, and then to attempt to put
into effect the Chinese formula of armed struggle in the
countryside combined with "legal tactics" in the cities. This,
however, proved no more successful than the Ranadive line.
The party's "liberation war" lost support among the Telengana
peasantry after the Indian government occupied Hyderabad and
applied strong military pressure on the revolt; and efforts
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to open agrarian rebellions in other areas were largely un-
availing. At the same time, it proved impossible to obtain
from the Nehru government the legal status in cities neces-
sary to build a united front there so long as the party was
using violence in the countryside. The process of disorgani-
zation within the party accelerated,* and a campaign of op-
position to the line of the new leadership was resumed by
Joshi and by the trade union leaders under Dange, who chal-
lenged Rajeswar Rao's contention that a revolutionary situa-
tion now existed in India. Another center of open opposi-
tion came into being when dissident party leaders working in
the central apparatus banded together to form the so-called
"Party Headquarters Unit;" these rebels even went 8o far as
to found a journal for thelpublication of material opposing
the line of the party leadership.
Toward the close of 1950, the CPI received a series of
guidance materials from the British Communist party support-
ing the views of the party opposition, accusing the Rao lead-
ership of having misunderstood the January 1950 Cominform
journal editorial, denying that a revolutionary situation
suitable for armed struggle ftoW existed in India, and urging
concentration on the building of a broad united front and the
application of all legal tactics, including participation in
elections. Early in 1951, similar instructions were report-
edly given to the CPI directly by the CPSU when a delegation
of CPI leaders of all factions is said to have visited Moscow.
A document entitled the "Tactical Line" said to be based upon
this Soviet guidance was circulated secretly within the party
at this time, and subsequently published in slightly sanitized
form as a party draft Policy Statement in May 1951. The
"Tactical Line" stated, and the Policy Statement implied,
that the final objective of the CPI was still an armed revolution
*Afterwards the CPI Politburo testified that in the course
of this joint "inner-Party struggle" and battle against the
government the functioning of every party unit had received
"the rudest shock;" that at the end of the struggle in 1951
there was "very little of Party organization;" that local,
district, and provincial committees had to be set up all over
again; and that the party's fronts had become "virtually
non-functioning."
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to overthrow the Nehru government; but both documents denied
that this was now feasible. These documents condemned both
Ranadive's insistence on seeking revolution primarily through
general strikes of industrial workers, on the Soviet pattern,
and Rajeswar Rao's preoccupation with partisan warfare among
the peasantry, on the Chinese pattern. It was pointed out
that the latter policy had been unsuccessful partly because
the Indian party, unlike the CCP, did not enjoy the advantage
of a firm and contiguous base across the border--in the Chi-
nese case, the Soviet Union. (This point became important
eight years later, when the PLA appeared on the Indian-Tibetan
border in force during the suppression of the Tibetan revolt,
and CPI leftists then began to argue that the party now had
its contiguous base and could revive insurrectionary tactics.)
The "Tactical Line" called on the CPI to learn from both the
CPSU and the CCP and to prepare for the time when both methods
could be used in conjunction; in the meantime, the party was
to content itself with building the "revolutionary unity" of
"all discontented sections and classes".
In reality, the subsequent history of the Indian Communist
party has been wholly occupied with the party's efforts to
build this "revolutionary unity," and the revolution itself
has become an increasingly remote (and more complex) goal as
the policies of the CPI and the CPSU have evolved. As Ajoy
Ghosh replaced Rajeswar Rao as the CPI leader to apply the
new line in April 1951, the Indian party had come almost full
circle since 1947; but the party had now changed considerably.
While it was now accepted that the simple "Chinese path" was
not immediately suitable to India, it was also driven home in
the minds of all that the Chinese Communist party and Mao were
mentors whose views should be respectfully studied after those
of the CPSU. The rigid, arbitrary Bolshevik discipline which
Ranadive had attempted to wield within the party was now gone
forever; moreover, as the secret organizational report deliver-
ed to the Sixth CPI Congress in 1961 noted, elementary Com-
munist discipline was itself permanently discredited by the
misuse Ranadive had made of it, and the extraordinary public
factional defiance of central authority which had originally
been justified as the only means to dethrone first Ranadive
and then Rao was from now on implanted as a regular feature
of party life. The new CPI general secretary, Ajoy Ghosh,
was caught up immediately in such contention of opposing fac-
tions, over the line the party should adopt toward the Nehru
government.
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THE CPI AND THE CHANGING SOVIET LINE
TOWARD NEHRU (1951-1955)
The most important feature of the next few years for the
CPI was the gradually softening Soviet attitude toward Nehru.
By degrees the Indian party was forced to follow the evolution
of Soviet policy in agreeing first that there were some posi-
tive aspects to Nehru's generally black foreign policy, then
that Nehru's foreign policy was generally good but that his
domestic policy was bad, and finally that there were favorable
features of his domestic policy as well. The CPI had to be
bludgeoned by Moscow and its agents in'the central CPI leader-
ship into taking each painful step along this path, usually
with a considerable time lag behind the development of Soviet
policy; each such gradual modification of line toward Nehru
was accomplished only over the strenuous objections of a large
section of the Indian party which did not wish what it regard-
ed as opportunities--to advance the cause of Communism in
India by opposing Nehru--to be sacrificed for the sake of So-
viet foreign policy interests. Such CPI recalcitrance was
reflected in the party program adopted in 1951, and then was
strongly felt at the Third CPI Congress at Madurai in December
1953. However, the Soviet movement away from hostility to
Nehru, begun cautiously three years before Stalin's death, ac-
celerated greatly thereafter in the Bandung period of 1954
and 1955, when Nehru exchanged visits with the Soviet and Chi-
nese leaders and the USSR began a program of economic assist-
ance to India. Under the impact of these events, the CPI be-
came increasingly bound to a moderate policy involving reliance
upon parliamentary elections. This trend to receive its great-
est development after the 20th CPSU Congress in 1956.
By the time of Stalin's death, any serious divergence
between Chinese and Soviet policy toward the national libera-
tion movement would seem to have disappeared, and Moscow and
Peiping appear to have acted in close coordination in foster-
ing warmer relations with Nehru in 1954 and 1955. However,
the relative importance of the Chinese party and the Chinese
revolution as a guide to Asia--which the CCP had stubbornly
upheld during Stalin's lifetime--was inevitably increased as
a result of his death, a fact reflected during this period in
statements by both Soviet and Chinese leaders.
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A. Evolution of Soviet Line Before Stalin's Death
Until July 1950, Soviet and Chinese propaganda had been
hostile to the Nehru government since its inception. The New
Delhi regime was described as a lackey of the British and Ameri-
can imperialists which aided them in turning India into an
advance base from which to 'combat the national liberation move-
ment of Asia. The government, the Congress party, and the
Praja Socialist Party were alike labeled reactionary "flunkies"
of the Anglo-American warmongers. Izvestiya in October 1949
called Nehru's neutrality hypocritical; a Chinese writer in
April 1950 said that he was at the "beck and call of the im-
perialists;" and the Soviet New Times in June 1950 said that
the ruling circles of India were standing aloof from political
entanglements only because they were afraid of exposing them-
selves in the eyes of the masses.
Shoftly after the opening of the Korean war, however,
there came a change. On 1 July 1950 the Indian Ambassador to
Peiping tentatively suggested to the CPR that a solution to
the Korean problem could be reached by referring it to the
UN Security Council, with the CPR being admitted to her "legiti-
mate place" there and the Soviets consequently giving up the
boycott of the Council they were then maintaining. When this
suggestion received a favorable response from Peiping, Nehru
on 13 July sent identical letters to Stalin and Acheson with
a formal proposal along these lines, which was promptly accept-
ed by the USSR and rejected by the United States. This event
was warmly welcomed and publicized by Moscow and Peiping, with
People's Daily hailing "the world-wide support for the peace-
ful proposals of J. Nehru and the reply of J. V. Stalin." From
this time on, both Communist states appear to have been motivat-
ed by a growing awareness of the uses to be made of Indian
foreign policy. In the propaganda, statements by New Delhi
unfavorable to the Communist position on Korea tended to be
downplayed or ignored, while favorable statements or actions
were emphasized and exaggerated. Although praise for Nehru
personally continued to be almost wholly absent, the Indian
government as such was often referred to in amicable terms.
Mild criticism of the government, largely regarding domestic
policy, reappeared in Soviet media about two months after the
Nehru-Stalin exchange and persisted sporadically until Stalin's
death.
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In December 1950, R. Palme Dutt, a leading British Com-
munist who had often in the past served as an agent for the
transmission of CPSU policy changes to the CPI, attempted to
persuade the Indian party to modify its line in response to
this new element in the bloc attitude toward Nehru. In a
pamphlet published by the CPI in Bombay in which Dutt purport-
ed to answer questions addressed to him by the CPI, he held
that the signs of a change in Indian foreign policy exemplifi-
ed by Nehru's stand on the issues of Korea and Peiping's ad-
mission to the UN amounted to "a very important development."
Although this was only "a beginning" and although Nehru did
not yet have "a consistent peace policy," yet he was showing
at least "hesitant and limited" opposition to imperialism,
which it was the duty of the CPI to encourage. It was also
the duty of the CPI to bring maximum popular pressure upon
the Indian government when it vacillated in order to defeat
the designs of that wing of the Indian bourgeoisie which fa-
void imperialism and to strengthen the hand of that bourgeois
wing led by Nehru which diverged from imperialist aims.
The Indian party, however, was not yet ready to accept
even this partial reappraisal of Nehru. The party Program
and Statement of Policy drafted by the politburo and central
committee in the spring of 1951 and formally approved by an
All-Indian Party Conference the following October both took
a negative view of Nehru's foreign policy. The Program de-
clared that the government "essentiall:y carries out the for-
eign policy of British imperialism" and insisted that Nehru's
policy on the issue of peace was "spurious" and hypocritical.
A decade later, Pravda was to print an article by CPI general
secretary Ghosh which retroactively condemned these statements
of the 1951 CPI program as erroneous.
As Soviet foreign policy continued to explore further the
advantages to be gained from Indian "neutrality", it simulta-
neously continued to push forward the "peace" line exemplified
by the Stockholm Peace Appeal of March 1950, which had as its
central aim the mobilization of the broadest possible public
opposition--on a non-class basis--to the foreign policies of
the "imperialist" powers, particularly the United States. The
CPI was placed under increasing pressure by Moscow to devote
central attention to this "peace" campaign against America,
and this in turn reinforced the pressure on the Indian party
to modify its line toward Nehru, who was viewed by Moscow as
facilitating this campaign in certain respects.
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In this context, the issue of the line to betaken toward
Nehru was fought out Within: the_..CPI" for: the next few years* in
terms of the question of whether British or American imperial-
ism was the chief enemy facing the Indian people. Those CPI
leaders who either out of obedience to Moscow or because of
their own less militant inclinations wished to take a softer
line toward Nehru held that the struggle against the main in-
ternational enemy--the United States�was paramount in India
as well, and that all other considerations ought to be subor-
dinated to the cause of attracting the maximum possible Indian
support, including Nehru if possible, to the peace campaign.
An opposing CPI faction was led by the chieftains of the Andhra
provincial party, Rasjeswar Rao and Sundarayya, with increas-
ingly significant support now also from West Bengal and the
Punjab, which were traditionally centers of Indian terrorism.
This faction tended to pay obeisance to the world fight against
American imperialism and to the peace campaign, but to emphasize
that the primary enemy of the Indian Communist...Party remained
British imperialism, which still controlled India as a semi-
colony through its economic investments and through its politi-
cal instrument, the Nehru government. Implicit in this line
was the demand to carry on mass struggles (if, for the time
being, no longer violent uprisings) against the New Delhi re-
gime, and not to compromise these struggles for the sake of
the broader interests of Soviet foreign policy.
B. Death of Stalin and Third (Madurai) CPI Congress
Throughout 1952 and 1953 the second, or militant faction
remained the stronger of the two within the Indian party, with
the central party leadership led by Ghosh striving to bridge
the gap between the increasingly divergent views of Moscow and
the Andhra militants. While an extended party plenum at the
close of 1952 criticized the CPI's neglect of the peace move-
ment and promised to make this the central task of the party,
a central committee resolution the following March continued
to identify Great Britain as the chief enemy and to describe
the Nehru government as a collaborator with imperialism. Al-
though Moscow is reported to have sent a directive to the CPI
a few months later urging it to stop criticizing Nehru on this
score in the interests of winning him over tb,the "peace camp,"
strong opposition to this line persisted within the party.
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A major showdown on this issue took place at the Third
CPI Congress, which was held in the south India city of
Madurai from 27 December.1953 to 4 January 1954. The draft
political resolution presented to this congress by the lead-
ership of Ghosh and Dange on the whole took the position de-
sired by Moscow, with some concessions to the party militants.
The resolution devoted somewhat more attention to the needs
of the struggle against American imperialism than to the fight
against Britain, but attempted to finesse the question of which
was more important by depicting the two as compatible, since
"the question of defeating the war plans of American imperi-
alists, the defense of India's freedom from the American threat"
was "closely linked with the question of India's winning free-
dom, liquidating feudalism" and of accomplishing "a break with
the British Empire" and the removal of the "British strangle-
hold on India's economy." A similar compromise stand was taken
on Nehru. The resolution said that the Indian government's
role on a number of international issues had been "appreciated
by the peace-loving masses", and enumerated New Delhi's "denun-
ciation of the atom bomb, its help in ending the hostilities
in Korea, its condemnation of the tactics of Syngman Rhee,"
its opposition to U.S. military aid to Pakistan, and its con-
clusion of cultural and trade agreements with the USSR and
China. The resolution warned, however, that this did not mean
that "democratic forces should uncritically and unconditionally
give general overall support to the government policies even
in the international sphere," since those policies "do not
follow consistently a policy of peace and democracy;" and the
resolution went on to list actions by New Delhi which had
helped imperialism. The conclusion reached was that "while
supporting all the positive measures," the party should "inten-
sify pressure on the Indian government in order to make it
pursue a consistent policy of peace." (At the same time, the
party was called on to build a broad united front in such a
manner that Communist policies and freedom of action were not
restricted in any way, while yet gathering support to replace
the Congress Party government with a "government of democratic
unity" of the CPI and its allies.)
All this was not satisfactory to the Andhra militants,
who submitted a document to the party congress known as the
"Andhra Thesis" which did not specifically argue the question
of policy toward Nehru, but which deplored "general talk of
fighting Anglo-American imperialism" and insisted that the
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long-term need to oppose America as the "international enemy"
should not be allowed to obscure the immediate and primary
"concrete task" of the CPI, which was to fight British imperi-
alism and its agents in India. Despite the presence at the
congress of Soviet embassy representatives, as well as British
party general secretary Harry Pollit--who emphasized the antl-
American line in his speeches--delegates from Andhra, Punjab,
and West Bengal reportedly tried and failed to amend the politi-
cal resolution in accordance with their views. When the reso-
lution was finally passed, one leftist Andhra leader, Basavapun-
niah, is said to have formally announced the abstention of
nearly one-third the delegates present. The leadership attempt-
ed to appease the militant opposition by granting them strong
representation on the new central committee, which was balanced
to include members of all factions.
Although the CPSU had had difficulties a number of times
before in getting the CPI to amend its line in response to a
shift in Soviet foreign policy, it is likely that the obstruc-
tion it encountered at this CPI Congress--and on several oc-
casions again in the next few years--was due at least in part
to the beginning of a gradual erosion of CPSU authority re-
sulting from the death of Stalin. With the demise of the So-
viet vozhd in March 1953 the Soviet party lost an irreplacable
asset in its dealings with foreign Communist parties, since
the awe inspired by the man who had dominated the movement for
three decades was found to be not transferrable. The difficulties
this caused for the CPSU within the CPI were eventually to be
greatly increased, first by the process of deStalinization and
then by the gradual rise of Chinese opposition to Soviet policies.
C. The CPI and the Development of the Bandung Line
After the Madurai Congress, Indian-American relations de-
clined for a variety of reasons in the spring of 1954, and the
evolution of a Chinese and Soviet policy concilatory to Nehru
was accelerated. In June 1954, Chou En-lai visited New Delhi
for talks with Nehru, following which a communique was issued
enunciating the Five Principles (Panch Shila) of peaceful co-
existence. A few days after Chou-r-iFrival, CPI general sec-
retary Ajoy Ghosh departed for an extended stay in Moscow,
ostensibly for medical reasons but in fact primarily for
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lengthy conversations on the new course of CPI policy. The
party was meanwhile plunged again into violent controversy
shortly after Chou's departure from India. On 18 July, the
editor of the party weekly New Age,. the Politburo member P.
)Ramamurthi,wrote an article in which he d'eclaredi that the
Nehru-Chou talks had wrought a "change in the relationship of
forces in Asia;" welcomed "warmly and enthusastically" the
development of "cooperation and friendship" between New Delhi
and the bloc; and advanced the slogan of a "national platform
for peace and freedom." This slogan was immediately attacked
strongly by militants from all sections of the party as imply-
ing that the CPI should now conclude an alliance with Nehru
and the Congress party organization, and in early September
1954 a coalition of leftists from various provinces actually
succeeded in getting a central committee plenum to condemn
the party politburo for having committed a "reformist" mis-
take in authorizing the publication of Ramamurthi's article.
This action by the central committee was extremely reveal-
ing in its demonstration of the extent to which authority with-
in the party had been dispersed among the provinces since Rana-
dive's time. A later party document commented that after the
central committee had registered its rebuke, "even this criti-
cism...was not considered enough by certain Provincial Commit-
tees who thought that the Politburo had not been dealt with
adequately." This document analyzed the motivation of the
central committee leftists as follows:
The central committee had to evolve a tactical line
in a changing situation, and for that it had to try
to understand the changes themselves. This was com-
pletely lacking. Fear gripped the committees--fear
of committing reformist mistakes. Some comrades of
the central committee even went so far as to ascribe
the success of the congress in strengthening its
position to reformist mistakes committed by the party.
The "reformist mistakes" which the leftists felt the lead-
ership had committed may have included an instruction which
(a British service reported) had been sent out by CPI headquar-
tersto party workers in the spring of 1954, advising them to
go slow in their agitation against the government in view of
the "delicate nature of the international situation." In Par-
liament, during the spring and summer, CPI representatives had
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found themselves restricted by party policy to attacks upon
the West and to criticism of the government's domestic finan-
cial and economic policies; because Nehru had seized the
initiative in espousing an anti-Western position on a number
of foreign policy issues--e.g., colonialism, Korea, Indochina,
and U.S. military aid to Pakistan--Communist deputies were
forced to trail behind him with praise on each such issue.
Such "tailism" with respect to the national bourgeoisie was
most uncomfortable for the militant section of the Indian
party.
Dutt Cominform Article: On 8 October 1954, however, the
Cominform journal published an article by A. Palme Dutt in
which this British Communist indirectly reaffirmed the Ramamurthi
thesis, this time from an authoritative forum. This article
is said by a subsequent party document to have thrown the polit-
buro "into a state of panic." Already "divided and demoraliz-
ed" by the central committee's accusation that it had backslid
into reformism, and without general secretary Ghosh who was
in Moscow, the politburo on 3 November hastily summoned an
emergency meeting of the central committee and there placed
before it a resolution rejecting the line taken in Dutt's Comin-
form article. During five ensuing days of debate in thec.ten-
tral committee, something like an abortive revolt against CPSU
authority appears to have taken place. The Andhra leaders are
reported to have revived their old argument about the superiority
of Chinese to Soviet experience as a model for CPI tactics,*
and other speakers are said to have declared that it was ob-
vious that Moscow l(and hence Dutt) could err; the recent Soviet
reversal of line toward Tito was cited as proof of this. In
the midst of the debate, however, a telegram is reported to
have arrived from Ghosh in Moscow urging the party not to be
hasty in rejecting Dutt's line; and finally the central commit-
tee did reject the politburo resolution and adopted instead
a resolution taking a noncommital attitude toward Dutt, declaring
that "more time and thought" were required to resolve the "im-
portant differences" within the central committee.
*There is no evidence that the CCP at this time encouraged
any CPI leaders to take this line, and it appears unlikely that
Peiping would have done so--both because of the relatively
harmonious Sino-Soviet relations existing in this period and
because Peiping's current line toward Nehru was not in fact
that of the CPI militants.
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A few weeks later, Ghosh returned from Moscow and imme-
diately beganto write articles and public statements suggest-
ing that he had shifted further to the right. His new line
was summarized by a statement on 7 December that "the internal
policy of the Nehru Government does not suit the interests of
the masses, while the foreign policy does." The task of im-
posing this line on the CPI was helped by the return visit
which Nehru had recently paid to the CPR that fall, but was
made more difficult by speeches which Nehru subsequently de-
livered in November praising the CPR but bitterly attacking
the Indian Communist party. While Ghosh attempted to keep
the CPI from responding with personal attacks, on Nehru, the
organ of the West Bengal party, Swadhinata, nevertheless did
publish an editorial assailing the Prime Minister; this was
the first known example of what was to prove a persistent
policy of defiance of the party center by Swadhinata which
continues to this day.
February 1955 Andhra Elections: The objections of the
CPI leftists to the trend of Soviet foreign policy were aug-
mented by certain Soviet statements made shortly before the
holding of important elections in Andhra province in February
1955. An editorial in Pravda on 26 January 1955--India's
Republic Day--not only praised the foreign policy of "the
outstanding statesman Jawaharlal Nehru" but went on to list
and praise the domestic accomplishments of the Nehru govern-
ment in the fields of agriculture, consumer goods' production,
education and public health. Incidental praise for New Delhi's
foreign policy was also contained in the 8 February 1955
speech delivered by Foreign Minister Molotov to the Supreme
Soviet, as well as in another Pravda editorial of 21 February.
Such statements--and especially the 26 January Pravda editorial--
were skillfully used in Congress Party propaganda against the
CPI in the Andhra election campaign; this had considerable ef-
fect, particularly in view of the fact that the Andhra party,
as the moderates in the party center later emphasized, applied
"sectarian tactics" during the campaign and "failed to recog-
nize the progressive orientation in the Government's foreign
policy." After the Andhra party had lost this election, some
party leftists accused Ghosh of having been secretly pleased
with this failure as constituting a blow to the conceit of the
Andhra provincial committee and to its independence of the
party center. Along with being indignant at Moscow for its
unprincipled actions in making these statements, the leftists
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were angry at Ghosh and the party leadership for having failed
either to print the January Pravda editorial and Molotov's
statements in New Age or to have issued a secret circular about
them, so that the Andhra leadership was not given guidance on
the Soviet line and was caught publicly contradicting it.
Throughout 1955 the USSR and the CPR continued to develop
the new policy toward Nehru. In April the Bandung conference
of Asian and African,leaders was held, and Chou En-lai showed
the Asian bourgeoisie a disarmingly moderate image of the CPR
and Chinese Communism. At about the same time a tentative
contract was signed based on an earlier offer of Soviet aid on
favorable terms in constructing a large steel mill in India.
In May, an editorial in the CPSU journal Kommunist gave the
first indication of a coming change in the previously hostile
Soviet appraisal of Gandhi. In June, Nehru paid an extended
visit to the Soviet Union.
While Nehru was touring the USSR� the CPI central commit-
tee held a month-long meeting heatedly debating these events;
at the close of this session �a new political resolution was
adopted representing a compromise between the opposing factions,
finally supporting Nehru's foreign policy while taking a con-
fused and contradictory but largely hostile line toward his
domestic policy. Instead of uniting the party, this CPI com-
promise, like so many others before and since, only exacerbated
the factional struggle. A-Aater politburo report declared that
three "more or less well-defined groups within'thpparty"-the
supporters of the resolution and its leftist and rightist
critics--now began an '"intense political struggle" which "be-
came the main feature of inner-party life from top to bottom,"
so that "even the current activity of the party came to a
standstill in most provinces." The rightists were at this
stage once more led by P. C. Joshi, who had staged a gradual
comiback.within the party since 1951 and was now again writing
for New Age. Josiliwas strongly influenced not only by the new
bloc line toward Nehru, but also by Nehru's avowals of fpro-
gressive" and "socialist" goals;* in July 1955, in a private
*In December 1954 the Indian government had introduced a
resolution into Parliament declaring the goal of government
policy to.be':the creation of a socialist pattern of society.
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conversation with a follower, he expressed great admiration
for *hat he termed Nehru's great contribution to Asian social-
ism, called the Prime Minister a great mass leader and genuine
progressive, and said that it would be suicidal for the CPI
to continue a policy of opposition to him. Joshi now wanted
the party to support Nehru all along the line and work toward
a coalition government with his wing of the Congress party.
At the other extreme, the leftists of Andhra and the Punjab
were angry even at those kind things which the party had said
about Nehru's foreign policy, and blamed Ghosh for rendering
tacit support to what they felt was Joshi's "appease Nehru"
line.
These opposing views were disseminated by their respective
politburo champions within the provincial committees where
each leader had his strength, and were even published in the
internal central committee organ Forum. During this period
the politburo itself, by its own subsequent testimony, had
virtually ceased to meet. With the roots of their political
and party strength in the provinces or in specialized fields
of activity such as the trade unions, hardly any of the polit-
buro members wished to or did devote attention to the weak
patty .center. This indifference--and its corollary, the con-
tinued failure of the provincial organizations to keep the
center informed of what was going on throughout the party--
had come to be a more or less permanent feature of CPI life,
and was lamented by organizational reports delivered to cen-
tral committee meetings and Party congresses in 1951, 1954,
1956, and again'in 1961.
On 7 July 1955, soon after the conclusion of the central
committee meeting, Ghosh suffered a recurrence of his annual
illness and ere he remained until 6 September.
he carried back with him a CPSU
n en edfOtion to foreign Communist parties
providing some advance information on the line on "peaceful
transition to socialism" that was to be promulgated at the
20th CPSU Congress the next spring. It is not known whether
this document was discussed at the central committee meeting
held in September after Ghosh's return; this meeting was re-
ported to have reached substantial agreement in support of
Nehru's foreign policy "in the main," but to have displayed
continued great differencesrover the line toward his domestic
role. A central committee resolution now reversed previous
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CPI opposition to the government's Second Five-Year Plan, and
proclaimed a dual policy toward Nehru of supporting him where
he was correct and opposing him where he was reactionary.
Meanwhile, amendments to the party program were prepared for
ratification by the next CPI Congress, watering down the 1951
statements defining Nehru's government as an appendage of
imperialism.
Khrushchev-Bulganin Visit: In mid-November 1955 the CPSU
completed this phrase in the shift in policy toward Nehru when
Khrushchev and Bulganin visited India, offered a long-term pro-
gram of technical assistance to India's industrialization, and
paid several tributes to Gandhi, to Nehru, and to Nehru's "pro-
gressive" statements favoring socialism. Aware of the divisive
effect these statements and actions were bound to have on the
already divided CPI, the Soviet party reportedly attempted to
offset this in advance with a letter sent to the CPI politburo
in October. This letter is said to have declared ambiguously
that the Indian party should not be discouraged by anything
the Soviet government said in public but should carry on in
good spirit, building up the party until such time when a more
active line could be taken. Several weeks later, a member of
the visiting Soviet delegation is said to. have conveyed similar
advice to the CPI leaders, urging the party not to become
"panicky" because of the Bulganin-Khrushchev speeches of praise
for Nehru, and declaring that Soviet long-term aims were the
reduction of Indian dependence on and ties to the United States
and Britain and the infiltration of the Indian economy through
the supplying of basic industrial aid.
Rise in Chinese Stature: This period of 1954 and 1955,
when the CPR was working in close harmony with the USSR in pro-
moting the soft line toward the bourgeoisie of India and other
Asian countries, was to prove the all-time high point both for
Sino-Soviet cooperation generally and for the degree of recogni-
tion given by Moscow to the stature of the Chinese party. Even
two years before Stalin's death, he had given some implicit
recognition to Chinese claims by allowing to be printed in the
Cominform journal an article by Lu Ting-i stating that Mao's
theory of the Chinese revolution was a "new development of
Marxism-Leninism in the revolution of the colonial and semi-
colonial countries" and a "new contribution to the treasury
of Marxism-Leninism." Lu went on to say that while the "clas�
sic type of revolution for the imperialist countries is the
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October Revolution," the classic type for the colonial and
semi-colonial countries was the Chinese revolution. In March
1954, a year after Stalin's death, CCP politburo member Chen
Yun publicly reiterated this claim, asserting that the Chinese
revolution was "the major sector" of, and inspiration, for
the revolution in the East. For a variety of reasons, some
possibly related to internal CPSU politics, the Soviet party
not only made no effort after Stalin's death to counter these
Chinese claims, but made gestures specially intended to placate
Peiping. On 8 February 1955 Molotov publicly referred to the
CPR as co-leader of the'bloc with the: Soviet Union; although
Peiping never itself picked up this formula, it was reiterated
for a time by Moscow and a number of foreign Communist parties,
including the CPI. .An equally striking gesture was Pravda's
formal announcement, in a special communique on 3 March 1955,
that the accusations of espionage and subversion brought
against Anna Louise Strong at the time of her arrest and ex-
pulsion in February 1949 had been completely groundless; just
as her treatment by Stalin had been meant as a reproof to Mao's
pretensions, this statement by Stalin's heirs was very probably
intended as an indirect apology to Mao.
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III. CONSEQUENCES OF THE 20TH CPSU CONGRESS (1956-1958)
The 20th Congress of the CPSU in February 1956 and the
events which flowed from it administered a series of funda-
mental shocks to the CPI with results which were to effect
greatly the relationship of the Indian party to Moscow and
to Peiping down to the present day. The first and most im-
portant of these shocks was that of deStalinization, which
on the one hand greatly intensified the spirit of cynisism,
the internal disorganization, and the personal indiscipline
already widespread because of the party's previous history,
and on the other hand greatly accelerated the long-term de-
cline in the authority and prestige of the CPSU which had
begun with the death of Stalin, while simultaneously enhanc-
ing the appeal of the CCP to those sections of the Indian
party sympathetic to Peiping's viewpoint. This development
was followed by the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revo-
lution and the subsequent execution of Nagy, which weakened
the CPSU's position among rightist sections of the party. A
third difficulty was meanwhile occasioned by the 20th Congress
line on peaceful transition to: socialism, qnd particularly by
the extreme interpretation of that line in application to India
provided by an authoritative Soviet article in the summer of
1956 which implied that Nehru, and not the CPI, would lead
India into the socialism system. This viewpoint was directly
challenged in public by Ghosh, and the CPSU soon retreated to
a more orthodox position which still enjoined CPI support for
Nehru and CPI reliance primarily upon parliamentary tactics.
Forces in the Indian party favoring the parliamentary
path were strengthened by the party's accession to power
through elections in the state of Kerala in April 1957; and
the CPI moved from the April 1956 line of the Palghat party
congress (where the party cautiously acknowledged the possi-
bility of peaceful transition to socialism through parliamen-
tary means backed by mass movements, and announced its inten-
tion to explore this possibility by conducting itself as a
parliamentary opposition) to the April 1958 line of the Amritsar
Congress (which exuded confidence that the parliamentary take-
over in Kerala could be repeated in other Indian states and
eventually even in the center).
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Meanwhile, by the fall of 1956 the first indications
began to appear of growing divergence between the Chinese
and Soviet parties over how far the soft line toward the
national bourgeoisie of Asian countries should be pursued.
Chinese objections on this score, originally suggested at
the time of the Eighth CCP Congress in September 1956, were
reinforced as the Indian Communist party became increasingly
committed to the parliamentary line in the wake of the
Kerala election, and Chinese comments began to be heard in
1958 concerning the pernicious effect the Kerala Ministry
was having on the militance and Marxist orthodoxy of the CPI.
At the same time the left wing of the Indian party led by
the Andhra, West Bengal, and Punjab organizations, infuriated
at the restrictions and inhibitions which were imposed upon
the party as a whole by the need to preserve the Kerala gov-
ernment in power, became more and more inclined to regard the
long-respectOiChinese party as a source of inspiration more
congenial to 'its interests than Moscow.
At the end of 1958 there was a momentary hardening of
the Soviet line toward Nehru, occasioned primarily by the
campaign being conducted by the Congress Party and other:forces
in Kerala to oust the Communist government. This firmer So-
viet attitude was exemplified by an article by Yudin in Prob-
lems of Peace and Socialism rebutting Nehru's attack on Com-
munists as addicted to violence, and placing the onus for any
possible violence on bourgeois resistance to a peaceful trans-
fer of power to the Communist party. The Soviet shift in em-
phasis proved to be temporary, however, and in 1959 the polari-
zation of the CPI between a moderate pro-Soviet wing and a
militant pro-Chinese wing was to increase greatly.
A. The Effects of DeStalinization
At the fourth CPI Congress, held in Palghat from 19 to
26 April 1956, the question of the attacks on Stalin made at
the 20th CPSU Congress two months before was a central issue.
Although there is no direct evidence, certain passages in the
speech made by Ghosh to the Indian congress suggested that
some of his audience might have been already aware not only
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of the public criticism of Stalin made at the 20th Congress,
but also of at least the gist of Khrushchev's secret indict-
ment of the former dictator.* Ghosh in his speech alluded
to the consternation spreading throughout the CPI, acknow-
ledging that "some of our comrades say that the whole moral
basis on which they stood is shaken and there is nothing on
which to stand." He strove to counter this feeling by offer-
ing a mixed appraisal of Stalin as an outstanding leader who
had made certain mistakes toward the end of his life, and by
defending Stalin's past role as "the international leader of
the Communist movement" and the CPSU's role as "the party
which has acted as a model" for the movement. He indicated
his own dismay at the way deStalinization was being handled
by saying that "many of us may be critical of the way in which
certain things were done,"** but pleaded that the party not
to give way to "cynicism" regarding the USSR and the CPSU,
insisting that the Soviet party "remains the leading party"
of the international Communist movement. But. Ghosh cited
questions he said were being asked within the CPI regarding
what other Soviet leaders were doing during "all these days"
of the cult of the personality, and what made it possible
"for such things to continue for such a long time;" further-
more, Ghosh acknowledged that he had no satisfactory answers
to give to these questions, and that "what replies have been
given have not satisfied me." Similar dissatisfaction with
Soviet actions and answers was to be expressed publicly by
Ghosh in December 1961 in the wake of the public Soviet at-
tacks on Stalin at the 22nd CPSU Congress.
Subsequent reports have suggested that the Soviet attacks
on Stalin were particularly devastating for Indian Communists
who were old-timers in the party, and who had become adept at
rationalizing Stalin's shortcomings and the repeated Soviet
*The text of the secret speech was not released by the U.S.
State Department until 4 June.
**A subsequent CPI Central Committee resolution in July 1956
warned that a wholly negative, "one-sided appraisal" of Stalin's
role "causes bewilderment among the masses and can be utilized
by enemies of Communism to confuse them."
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betrayals of CPI interests for Soviet foreign policy interests.
The elaborate rationalizations established through the decades
of Stalin's tenure were now destroyed. The organizational re-
port submitted to the Sixth CPI Congress in 1961 testified that
the Soviet deStalinization campaign of 1956 created a "big
shock" within the "entire party," and "undermined the faith
of a large number of party members in the international Commun-
ist movement." As a result, "ideas of questioning" what had
been accepted as "unquestionable truths became the order of
the day;" these newly-questioned truths included "the need for
the unity of the party, discipline, democratic centralism, and..
the solidarity of the international movement." While this was
a phenomenon which took place in many Communist parties in
1956, it was particularly marked in the CPI because .of the
party's previous history and because, as the 1961 organizational
report noted, disregard for discipline had Already become a
widespread fact in the Indian party before 1956. Reports in
the summer of 1956 now spoke of "anarchy in the party;" hardly
anything was kept secret any more, and faction leaders in party
headquarters disseminated a constant flow of rumors and propa-
ganda among their followers to discredit the factional opposi-
tion or to inform their supporters of discussions at the top.
This CPI internal propaganda war was to be of great importance
during the Sino-Soviet polemic of 1960.
Simultaneously, the prestige of the Chinese party began
to grow throughout the CPI as that of the CPSU fell. For a
time, this was even the case with such a normally loyal Soviet
adherent as Ghosh. In his speech to the Palghat Congress,
Ghosh pointedly referred to Peiping's comment on deStaliniza-
tion, the People's Daily article "On the Historical Experie--Ice
of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat." (While rendering a
generally favorable judgment on Stalin's virtues and shortcom-
ings, this article explicitly referred to the errors in policy
into which Stalin had led the CCP from 1927 to 1936.) Ghosh
declared that this article dealt with the question "in a more
satisfactory and a more elaborate way than I have seen so far
anywhere," and recommended that all party members read the ver-
sion of the article reprinted in New Age. A resolution of the
Palghat Congress subsequently called on the Central Committee
to make sure that all party organizations had this People's
Daily article for guidance when discussing the 20th Congress.
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Hungarian Revolution and Nagy Execution: Within the right
wing of the Indian party, disenchantment with the CPSU was
furthered by the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution
in November 1956. In an open letter published in New Age on
18 November responding to a socialist challenge to the CPI on
this issue, Ghosh defended the Soviet action apologetically
but admitted that the party had been wrong in the past in
"idealizing the USSR" and in not having paid more attention
to other people's criticism of the Soviet Union,. Prior to a
December 1956 meeting of the central committee, one staff unit
in CPI headquarters submitted a memorandum to the party condemn-
ing Soviet policy in Hungary, and a clash on the subject of
Hungary reportedly occurred at the central committee meeting.
The December 1956 issue of the CPI monthly journal contained
an article strongly suggesting disallusionment with party
methods and attitudes toward truth stemming from the Hungarian
events, 'and the following August a "nihilist group" of second-
level party leaders with a similar point of view was said to
be preparing a rebellious report on the "implications of Hun-
gary" for circulation within the party.
Following the execution of Imre Nagy in the summer of
1958 there was a similar stir of discontent, particularly with-
in provincial party organizations which were peculiarly sensi-
tive to Indian public opinion. In Bombay, where the CPI had
an important alliance with non-Communist parties to protect,
the trade union leader Dange made a public statement critical
of the executions; and a similar statement was issued on 30
June by the Kerala party, which was by then seeking to preserve
its rule in therprthrince. In general, while CPI objections
to the Hungarian and Nagy incidents tended to be concentrated
among sections of the party which opposed the leftist point
of view--and which therefore could not ultimately gravitate
toward the CCP as Peiping became increasingly militant--these
contributions to anti-Soviet feeling within the party never-
theless did add to the general erosion of CPSU prestige which
began with Stalin's death and was hastened by the deStaliniza-
tion campaign.
Besides the statements already cited, there is consider-
able evidence to document this overall decline of CPSU stature
and the gradual compensatory rise in Chinese prestige during
1957 and 1958; until late in this period, the phemomenon was
general through all factions of the party, and did not yet
represent a polarization of purely leftist CPI opinion along
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anti-CPSU and pro-CCP lines. In April 1957 a meeting of the
West Bengal provincial committee reportedly ignored a letter
from a CPI politburo member stressing the leading role of the
Soviet party, and resolved to "interpret and apply" Marxism-
Leninism according to local conditions and to follow Soviet
policies only as a general ideological beacon. In June 1958,
a group of West Bengal CPI members submitted a letter to party
headquarters bitterly complaining of CPI subservience to the
CPSU as demonstrated both by the party's failure to condemn
the Nagy execution and the CPI's abrupt withdrawal of friendly
greetings to Yugoslavia after the second bloc break with that
country. In July 1957, the politburo member Z. A. Ahmad de-
clared to friends that "the USSR is no model now," and that
the CPR was such a model, if not a completely satisfactory one.
In August 1958, Mohit Sen, an important CPI central apparatus
functionary close to Ghosh, declared that Khrushchev did not
have a great personal grasp of the "iron laws of history,"
that Mao, on the other hand, did, and that this Maoist insight
was partly responsible for the success of the Communist move-
ment in China. In October 1957, a long series of speakers at
a closed meeting of the Bombay city party committee, led by
the Bombay party secretary, strongly attacked the USSR and the
CPSU and the CPI's subservience to the CPSU. And in August
1958, a veteran member of the Maharashtra provincial committee
claimed that many members of the CPI had become hostile to the
CPSU since the 20th CPSU Congress, that these members no long-
er considered the CPSU the leader of the international movement,
and that they felt Mao had been the real world leader since
Stalin's death; this view was said to derive partly from the
fact that the CCP, like the CPI, was Asian, and partly from
the fact that the Chinese leaders had committed fewer blunders
than those of the CPSU.
B. The Effects of the Line on Peaceful Transition to Socialism
The second major shock to the CPI flowing from the 20th
CPSU Congress was the Soviet formal enunciation of dicta on
the non-inevitability of war and the possibility of a peace-
ful transition to socialism, coupled with the intimation that
since it was vital to bloc interests to maintain India as a
member of the intermediate "peace zone" of neutral states,
India was one of the countries in which it was most urgent
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for the Communist party not to assault the ruling national
bourgeoisie directly, but rather to attempt to work for pow-
er peacefully,: and primarily through parliamentary methods.
This Soviet line does not appear to have been fully an-
ticipated by the CPI; in March, immediately after the CPSU
congress, all copies of documents previously distributed with-
in the party in preparation for the Indian congress were re-
portedly withdrawn from circulation, and the same month a
battle over a new resolution incorporating the new line to be
presented to the congress was fought at a central committee
meeting between Ghosh and the leftist forces of Sundarayya*
and Randdive. This battle was resumed at the April Palghat
Congress itself, where Ghosh cautiously explained and defend-
ed the new Soviet thesis at some length. Eventually the mod-
erates won, and the congress adopted a line calling for de-
fense and support of all government actions both foreign and
domestic which were deemed progressive, and criticism only of
those particular actions deemed reactionary. The CPI pro-
claimed itself now a parliamentary "Party of Opposition in
relation to the present Government" which had the duty of hold-
ing up to the people the prospect of an "alternative govern-
ment." In short,the Indian party formally set out to explore
the possibilities of the parliamentary road to socialism, with-
out committing itself explicitly to the view that this road
would necessarily prove successful and that all other paths
would be foresaken.
This much the CPSU was able to secure without an unusual
degree of difficulty; but when in the summer of 1956 the So-
viet party published a two-part article in a prominent propa-
ganda outlet, the journal New Times, intimating that Nehru
himself--given proper support by the CPI--would lead India to
socialism, all but the extreme right wing of the CPI rebelled.
The article, by Modeste Rubinstein, marked the greatest extent
*Sundarayya was a CPI militant who had shared authority in
the Andhra Provincial Committee with Rajeswar Rao during the
Telengana days; by 1956, Rao had changed his views and shifted
to the rightist faction in the party, so that henceforth he
and Sundarayya led two gropps contending for control in the
Andhra organization.
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to which the soft line toward the Asian national bourgeoisie
had ever been carried by the CPSU. Rubinstein cited without
contradiction and praised the significance of the various en-
dorsements of "socialism" for India by Nehru and the Congress
party; he hailed the growth of state capitalism in the Indian
economy as a �progressive" factor (unlike state capitalism in
the imperialist West), and added that the role of Indian state
capitalism differed from the role of state capitalism'inLthe
CPR only in that it was being used "consistently" to build so-
cialism by Peiping; he cited Lenin as saying that state capi-
talism is a step towards socialism, and suggested that other
necessary steps would come with the growth of the state sector
of the economy under Nehru's leadership; finally, he declared
that "given close cooperation by all the progressive forces
of the country, there is the possibility for India to develop
along socialist lines," and that although India's "advance
along the socialist path" would be slower than and would dif-
fer in many respects from that of "say, China," only dogmat-
ists would object to these peculiarities, which represented
one of the "multiplicity of forms of socialist development."
This essentially revisionist line was violently attacked
by Ghosh in an article in the October 1956 issue of the monthly
New Age, where Rubinstein's articles were also printed for
comparison. Ghosh took umbrage at the Soviet writer's flat
statement that the peaceful path to socialism "had been advo-
cated for many years by Jawaharlal Nehru," at his whitewashing
of all of the "reactionary" side of the Indian government's
policies, and particularly at Rubinstein's omission of all
indication that the proletariat and the Communist party must
lead the way to socialism.
While the CPSU thereupon retreated somewhat, and never
again espoused Rubinstein's rightist line quite so openly, it
continued to enjoin CPI support for Nehru's "progressive"
policies and CPI reliance primarily upon the peaceful and
parliamentary path to power. Moreover, to the present day So-
viet journals (unlike those of Peiping) have continued to
insist upon the "progressive" role of state capitalism in un-
derdeveloped countries such as India; and at least until the
Sino-Soviet polemic of 1960 forced Moscow to harden its line
somewhat to retain the support of the Communist movement, many
Soviet statements continued to suggest ambiguously that the
"socialist" inclinations of the national bourgeoisie of Asian
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countries--while certainly not Marxist--nevertheless should
be relied upon somehow to facilitate the gradual slide of
these countries into the bloc orbit.*
Growing Chinese Opposition: There is some evidence to
indicate that as the Soviet view of the national bourgeoisie
grew more sanguine in the months immediately following the
20th Party congress, Peiping objected, and that it was at
this point that Chinese and Soviet policy berran tn na + ^^.
pany.
1.1w wiinese party did
not tully accept the Soviet position on the methods to be
used in supporting the growth of Communism in the underde-
veloped areas.
That same month--on 17 September 1956--Anastas Mikoyan
addressed the Eighth Congress of the CCP in Peiping. In this
speech Mikoyan paid warm tribute to the Chinese party and to
"the distinguished Marxist-Leninist Mao Tse-tung" as having
made a "major contribution to Marxist-Leninist theory;- and
he declared that the Chinese had found "their own distinctive
new forms and methods of building socialism." The major
Marxist contribution and the distinctive new form which Mikoyan
actually cited, however, was the Chinese alliance with the
national bourgeoisie and the Chinese effort to move toward
socialism through state capitalism. Later in his speech,
Mikoyan dealt at length with Communist policy toward the un-
derdeveloped countries and their national bourgeois rulers;
he quoted Lenin on the "new transitional forms and ways"
these countries were seeking "to avoid the torments of capi-
talism," and he indicated in polemical language what those
forms should be. Mikoyan declared that "we must not over-
look the fact" that the capitalist world is not homogenous,
and the underdeveloped countries differ greatly, from the im-
perialist countries; and he insisted that "we must be able
to see" the difference between state capitalism in India and
*For a detailed discussion of these Soviet statements, see
pages 44-60 of the FBIS Radio Propaganda Report RS.47 of 28
April 1961, "Divergent Soviet and CPR Views on the 'National
Liberation Movement."
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state capitalism in the United States. He held that "Marxists
cannot but regard positively" the growth of state capitalism
in the newly independent countries, he suggested that this
was their "new transitional form" to avoid capitalism, and he
argued that this was a factor promoting growing sympathy for
"socialist ideas and slogans" in such countries.
In short, the evidence suggests that Mikoyan praised the
Chinese use of state capitalism and an alliance with the na-
tional bourgeoisie for the building of socialism under Commun-
ist control in China as justification for a sanguine Soviet
attitude toward the growth of state capitalism in underdevelop-
ed Asian countries where the national bourgeoisie and not the
Communist party was still in control. The evidence also sug-
gests that the Chinese objected to this distortion of their
doctrine and experience to bolster policies the c
dorse. This interpretation is supported
lby the content of the Rubinstein article
(which appeared a month before Mikoyan spoke), and by Chinese
articles much later which denounced people who thought that
under the leadership of the bourgeoisie one could "march into
the period of socialism by way of state capitalism."
Peng Chen at the Bucharest Conference in June 1960 "brought
up the matter of Mikoyan at the Eighth Congress of the CCP,
attacking Khrushchev," and that a heated exchange then fol-
lowed.
The Indian party was represented at the September 1956
Chinese party congress by the rightist Joshi,the Andhra left-
ist Sundarayya, and the Kerala moderate E.M.S. Namboodiripad.
After attending Lthe congress they went to Moscow in early
October, and late in the month returned to India to report to
a politburo meeting on their travels. Information is gener-
ally lacking on what they were told regarding policy toward
Nehru by the CCP and the CPSU, although one report does state
that Chinese leaders at the party congress warned the Indian
delegation that they must increase their efforts to organize
the peasantry to avoid electoral losses, since Communist strength
among urban groups was unreliable.
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C. Formation of the Kerala Government and Its Aftermath
The right-wing faction of the CPI favoring parliamentary
tactics and a moderate approach to Nehru received a major wind-
fall in April 1957 when the Communist party was victorious in
the elections in Kerala and proceeded to form a government in
that state--the first time in the history of the world Commun-
ist movement that a Communist party had achieved even this
limited degree of power through a parliamentary election.
This event swung the controlling weight of opiniomVithin the
CPI toward the moderates and kept it there for the next three
years. The Kerala election also caused a wide stir in the
international Communist movement, and in July 1957 a reliable
report stated that Namboodiripad, the new Communist chief
minister in Kerala, had been asked by the CPSU to forward a
full report to Moscow on the methods used to attain power un-
der a bourgeois parliament.
While the following of the CPI left faction was for the
time being reduced by the Communist advent to power in Kerala,
the consequences of this event only further infuriated the
diehard party militants. Reports throughout 1957 told of the
difficulties Namboodiripad was having in attempting to recon-
cile the demands of the party extremists with the need to keep
up a "democratic" facade in Kerala; the militants wished him
to put through radical party measures regardless of the con-
sequences, whereas Namboodiripad was concerned with the need
to convince Nehru in New Delhi that the Kerala regime would
not overstep certain moderate limits and therefore should not
be pushed out of office. (Thus in October 1957 the party left-
ists in control of the Kerala peasant federation rejected a
series of measures on land reform approved by the Communist
ministry, in each case demanding that more radical steps be
taken.) Even outside Kerala, the CPI found itself under un-
accustomej new restrictions, since it now could not agitate
any issue which might undermine the Kerala government in its
restrained course. The party could not, for example, demand
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nationalization of industries without compensation, expropria-
tion of foreign assets, or other steps which the Kerala govern-
ment itself was unwilling to take.*
November 1957 Moscow Meeting: The tensions created in
the party by this situation were manifested at politburo and
central committee meetings held' in October in preparation for
the international Communist gathering in Moscow the following
month. The central committee considered a document presented
by Namboodiripad which alearly reflected the rightist influ-
ences brought to bear on him by the responsibilities of office.
He espoused a "democratic and socialist" path to socialism--a
policy "national in character and socialist in content." He
advocated mild criticism of the Nehru government combined with
full Communist cooperation with the government's Five-Year Plan
programs He urged Communist trade unionsto cooperate with
employers to find ways of increasing factory productivity, and
even suggested that workers' wages should be increased only
to a limited extent "so as to keep the wage bill below total
output so that the savings thus effected could be diverted to
finance the Plan."** The leftists, led by the West Bengali
Bhupesh Gupta, of course objected to this strenuously; they
attacked the concept of the "democratic path to socialism,"
and argued that the parliamentary road was essentially a non-
Marxist one which could be followed only under extraordinarily
favorable conditions. The central committee reached no deci-
sion, and a delegation representing all factions was chosen
to go to the 40th anniversary celebrations in Moscow.
*The Communist regime in Kerala, in its anxiety to build
up the state as an Indian showcase of Communist accomplish-
ments, actually was offering substantial inducements to some
of the largest and most conservative Indian industrialists to
bring capital into the state.
**A similar proposal was incorporated in the rightist draft
political resolution submitted to the Sixth CPI Congress in
Arpil 1961, but was defeated by the leftist opposition at that
congress.
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At the Moscow meeting, the CPSU reportedly advised the
CPI and other parties that they were now in a position to win
elections, and should promote the progress of socialism through
parliamentary means. At the same time, the Soviet party is
said to have urged that each party build up a_strong under-
ground apparatus capable of waging armed struggle should this
ever become necessary. Ghosh and at least some other_ members
of his delegation are believed to have rejected this demand
as unsuitable for the CPI, citing as reasons the failure of
armed struggle in Telengana, the fact that the CPI had now com-
mitted itself to building a mass party, the difficulty of
maintaining secrecy in such a party under Indian conditions,
and the fact that party cadres were needed for parliamentary
or mass work. The CPI delegation finally agreed to build
direct contacts within the Indian army first, and then to
consider the advisability of seeking a standby apparatus
against the possibility of the need for armed struggle.
In February 1958, an official of the Soviet Embassy in
New Delhi is reported to have contacted CPI leaders to renew
the request that the Indian party consider establishing an
underground organization. Ghosh reportedly again refused,
but the leftist leaders Sundarayya and Basavapunniah of Andhra
and Surjit of the Punjab privately decided that Ghosh was
taking a complacent and reformist line, and resolved to try
to contact the CPSU again out of party channels. Sundarayya
went to Moscow for a month in April to try to promote the
cause Of the underground apparatus, but because of Ghosh's
opposition, the leftist efforts were apparently blocked for
some time. On the other hand, the CPI did apparently proceed
to intensify the recruitment of a secret organization within
the Indian armed forces.
The CPI Amritsar Congress: What had apparently happened
was that the CPSU by dint of continuous pressure upon the CPI
over a period of several years, had finally induced the Indian
party to accomplish a ponderous turnover in its thinking--a
shift from actual armed struggle against the Nehru government,
first to an attitude of militant hostility preparing for an
imminent resumption of armed uprising, then to grudging partial
support of Nehru and cautious testing of parliamentary tactics,
and then to support of Nehru on many issues and broad reliance
on parliamentary elections. Having wrought this massive change,
it was not so easy for Moscow to get the CPI soon to introduce
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into the new line an element firmly associated in the minds
of the Indian leadership with their mistaken old line.
This was particularly true since Moscow was far from
wishing the CPI to abandon parliamentary tactics or the mod-
erate line toward Nehru generally. In late March 1958 Ilya
Ehrenburg, in New Delhi for a World Peace Council meeting,
was reported to have conveyed Soviet advice to the Indian
party to continue to seek an alliance with and conciliation
of the national bourgeoisie, and to refrain from posing
excessive demands to them now which might tend to drive them
into the Anglo-American camp. At the Fifth CPI Congress held
at Amritsar a few weeks later, Ghosh took such a position,
proposing that the CPI ally itself with democratic forces with-
in the Congress party to isolate and force the ouster from
positions of power of the reactionary elements in that party.
Several reports indicate that Ghosh was opposed at the Amritsar
Congress again by a coalition of leftist forces headed by the
West Bengal and Punjab organizations, and led personally once
more by Ranadive, who had been readmitted to the central com-
mittee in 1956. In his speech to the congress, Ranadive is
said to have opposed Ghosh's line toward the national bour-
geoisie and to have warned that "when the struggle enters the
final stage the imperialists and the national bourgeoisie will
unite to fight against our party." In the political resolution
adopted by the congress,* Ghosh's line of cooperation with pro-
gressive forces within the Congress party (meaning principally
*Aside from the passing of this resolution, one other event
of some significance occurred at the Amritsar congress: the
party adopted a new constitution in which the old Bolshevik
names for party organs were replaced by names somewhat more
congenial to the Indian scene. Thus the politburo became the
central secretariat, and the central committee became the cen-
tral executive committee; in addition, a new large party organ
--the national council--was established at a level between the
central executive committee and the party congress. These and
other changes formalized and further encouraged a decentraliza-
tion of authority in the party which had long existed in prac-
tice because of the strength of the provincial committees and
the weakness of the party center.
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Nehru) was accepted; the CPI made it clear, meanwhile, that
it would continue to fight the reactionary sections of the
Congress party in their strongholds in the Indian provinces.
The CPI also made its most optimistic forecast to date on
the chances of its coming to power by peaceful means; although
it still did not explicitly disavow violence, and termed the
success of the parliamentary road only a "possibility," the
tone of the political resolution strongly suggested that this
was an excellent possibility. The influence of the Kerala suc-
cess was strongly felt here: the resolution said that "the
process begun in Kerala can be carried forward toward the
establishment of alternative democratic governments in some
other States," and that the Kerala victory had given the people
"confidence" that the Congress party could eventually be de-
feated and replaced also in the center. This was the famous
"Amritsar line," which was to be bitterly debated within the
party in 1959 and 1960.
Leftist Opposition Begins Turn Toward CCP: Throughout
the latter half of 1958 left-faction opposition to the Amritsar
line continued to grow. In a speech before a meeting of the
Maharashtra Provincial Council in October 1958, Ranadive criti-
cized the Amritsar thesis as revisionist, referred to the pos-
sibility of world war, and visualized an "end to democracy"
in India after Nehru's retirement or death, when the Indian
Army, he thought, would take over the administration of the
country. At about the same time, Indian journalists working
for TASS in New Delhi reported that Chinese embassy officials
there were most unhappy about the "basic leadership of the
CPI and had grave doubts of the fidelity to Marxism of the
Indian party; these Chinese officials were said to be parti-
cularly unhappy about the Kerala experiment and its influence
on the CPI, and reportedly saw "no hope in the Nehru regime."
These views were to be reiterated to CPI general secretary
Ghosh by Mao and Chou personally during Ghosh's visit to Pei-
ping four months later after the 21st CPSU Congress. In view
of this trend of thought among the Chinese leadership, CPI
leftists who had long since become disillusioned with the CPSU
and who had long deeply respected the CCP now began to turn
toward Peiping for support in opposing the Amritsar line. In
mid-November 1958, the Andhra leftist Basavapunniah was said
to have commented to a colleague that he was "fed up" with the
Soviets, and that he believed, even more strongly than he had
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for some time, that the real source of inspiration for the
CPI now was Communist China. Basavapunniah announced his
intention to visit the CPR immediately after attending the
21st CPSU Congress in January, and he planned to talk to
Chinese leaders "as a disciple talks to his teacher."*
Temporary Hardening of Soviet Line Toward Nehru: At about
the same time, in the last quarter of 1958, there also occurred
a temporary shift in emphasis in the Soviet line toward Nehru.
This was apparently directly related to events in Kerala, where
the Communist government had come into increasing difficulties,
partly as the result of its own imprudent actions (such as
the use of its police to fire on hostile demonstrators), and
partly as the result of a continuing campaign which the Con-
gress party and its Kerala allies were waging to unseat the
Communists. In early October the CPI central executive com-
mittee and national council for ten days seriously debated
whether the Kerala government should be ordered to resign in
order to extricate the party as a whole from its dilemilla.
In the midst of these meetings, however, an obscure Moscow
publication--the newspaper Vodnyy Transport (Water Transport)--
broke the total Soviet press silence of Kerala to run an
"Observer" editorial discussing the campaign of "provocations"
against the Kerala regime. This editorial ended by declaring
that "in spite of all the tricks and slander, reaction in
Kerala has not succeeded in causing the Communists to give up
the course of selfless service to the people which they have
set for themselves; the struggle in Kerala has not yet ended."
It is difficult to think of any reason for a newspaper of this
type to be alone in publishing an editorial such as this except
as a discreet signal to the Indian party not to resign in
Kerala; and in fact the CPI national council so decided.
The difficulties of the Kerala government continued, how-
ever, and in mid-October Soviet officials in New Delhi, who
reportedly had been very happy when the Kerala regime was form-
ed, were said to be becoming increasingly pessimistic on its
*In fact, Basavapunniah was unable to attend the Soviet
Congress as a CPI delegate, and is not believed to have visited
China with Ghosh in February. This hardly affected his views,
however.
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prospects. At the end of October a junior-level Soviet embassy
official was reported to be inquiring whether the Kerala gov-
ernment was becoming unpopular as a result of the police shoot-
ings there.
In mid-December, the speaker at a Moscow public lecture
referred to a drift to the right and a loss of popular sup-
port by Nehru and the Congress party; he alluded to certain
mistaken Indian votes at the UN and to certain Indian govern-
ment "differences with the socialist countries," and he
chastised the non-scientific notion of socialism Nehru had
demonstrated in a recent article in the Indian Economic Re-
view. The speaker spoke of the CPI as a "large, open Commun-
ist party of growing strength," and stated that "in Kerala,
where the Communists are in power, they are doing well."
That same month an article in the international Communist
journal Problems of Peace and Socialism by Pavel Yudin, the
Soviet ambassador to the CPR, took Nehru to task for the state-
ments in his Economic Review article attacking the Communists
as devotees of violence; Yudin made it clear that the Indian
bourgeoisie would be responsible for any Communist resort to
violence if it refused to allow power to pass peacefully into
Communist hands. While this article may have been partly in-
tended to put pressure on the Nehru government to prevent it
from swinging more decisively toward the West, its primary
design seems to have been to attempt to induce Nehru not to
dismiss the Kerala Ministry, while informing the CPI that it
was permitted to build up mass struggles against the Nehru
government to bolster its bargaining position. At the same
time, Yudin intimated that the CPI should support Nehru 's
"bourgeois state" against imperialism and feudalism, and thus
indicated that no permanent change in line was intended.
Within the CPI, the Yudin article was circulated among
party units as a basis for discussion. Ranadive and his fol-
lowers immediately seized upon it triumphantly as justifica-
tion for their position, while such moderates as Dange, Joshi,
and Namboodiripad criticized it (Namboodiripad did so publicly).
Unlike the CCP's hardening of line toward Nehru, however, this
CPSU shift at the close of 1958 was to prove most transitory,
and by early the next year Moscow and Peiping were again taking
increasingly divergent lines toward Nehru, with serious con-
sequences for the Indian party.
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IV. MOSCOW-PEIPING POLARIZATION OF CPI BEGINS: 1959
In 1959 the CPI for the first time became gravely af-
fected by the growing differences between the Soviet and
ChineSe,postures.toward the "imperialist" world, their at-
titudes toward the ruling national bourgeoisie of under-
developed countries, and their views on the most appropriate
means of Communist assumption of power. The gap between
the CPSU and the CCP on each of these issues, which had
been alternately expanding and contracting in previous
years, suddenly widened greatly. This was partly the re-
sult of events over which neither party had control: the
Tibetan revolt, Nehru's decision to oust the Communist
government in Kerala, Washington's decision to invite Khru-
shchev to the United States. It was also, however, the
result of a conscious turning to the right by. the CPSU and
to the left by the CCP. On Moscow's side, there was an
apparent decision taken in January 1959 to abandon the strong-
er tone used toward Nehru in the fall of 1958 and to bear
with this bourgeois nationalist leader for' a considerable
distance: this resulted first in peremptory CPSU retraint
of the CPI with respect to Nehru's ouster ,of the Kerala gov-
ernment, and later in the earnest Soviet effort to convince
Nehru of.Soviet.friendship during the Sino-Indian border
dispute. On the Chinese side, there was instead a harden-
ing of attitude toward Nehru at the very beginning of the
year, which helped to determine Peiping's later response
to events in Kerala and to the border dispute. Khrushchev
in the fall of 1959 adopted the softest line toward the
West generally he had eVer'ipUblicly Voiced, in the after-
math of his visit to the United States, while Peiping grew
increasingly shrill in its warnings against Western treach-
ery and in contradiction of the Soviet line. Against this
background of increasingly divergent policies, the CCP in
1959 for the first time began to take a more aggressive at-
titude toward promoting its viewpoint among sympathetic
sections of the CPI.
A. The 21st CPSU Congress
Ajoy Ghosh led a four-man, predominantly moderate CPI
delegation to the 21st CPSU Congress in late January; two
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other CPI leaders--Ranadive and the West Bengali Joly Kaul--
had been scheduled to go to Moscow, but were denied pass-
ports by the government of India, presumably because New
Delhi was anxious to prevent the left wing of the CPI from
making direct contact with high-ranking Soviet leaders.
While in Moscow, Ghosh had private conversations on CPI
policy with Suslov and possibly other Soviet leaders,
while Kerala Chief Minister Namboodiripad, another member
of the delegation, had prolonged talks With Mikoyan on pos-
sibilities for the expansion of Indian trade ties with the
bloc. On 9 February, upon the close of the congress, Ghosh
went to Peiping, where he is reported to have had talks with
Mao and Chou.
In subsequent conversations with other CPI leaders, and
in his report to the Central Executive Committee in late
February, Ghosh depicted the Soviets and the Chinese as hav-
ing given him similar advice on two points. Both were said
to be concerned with the increasing danger of right-wing
military coups in the Middle East and Asia, and with the
possibility of such a coup taking place in India; both
parties were said to have insisted that to meet this threat
the CPI must develop a standby apparatus capable of armed
resistance, or at least the cadre of an underground party,
while intensifying efforts to penetrate the Indian military
forces. Suslov is also reported to have questioned the
ambiguous CPI agrarian policy; while conceding that the
Indian party could not now take a line advocating collec-
tive and state farms, he suggested thatit emphasize volun-
tary cooperative farming. Mao: and Chou were said to have
later concurred.
On one central point, however--the line to be taken to-
ward Nehru--a sharp divergence between the Soviet and the
Chinese positions was reported by Ghosh. He found the So-
viets in early February almost apologetic about the Yudin
article of December 1958--which had implied a firm attitude
toward Nehru--and unwilling now to endorse the article as a
guide to CPI policy. Instead, the CPSU leaders were said
to have suggested vaguely that the CPI should take a public
position agreeing with Nehru whenever it could and opposing
him only when it must--in other words, that the CPI should
emphasize areas of agreement with Nehru and minimize areas
of disagreement. The Chinese, on the other hand, were said
to have expressed emphatic approval of the line taken in the
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Yudin article, and to have urged that it be vigorously fol-
lowed up by the CPI, that the Indian party stop mollycoddl-
ing Nehru. The CCP leaders were reported to have condemned
the "revisionism" they found rampant in the CPI, exemplified
by the opposition within the party to the establishment of
a strong underground apparatus for armed action. Peiping
is also said to have told Ghosh that the influence of the
Kerala CP--and the parliamentary line identified with it--
was "far too strong" upon the Indian party as a whole.
The positions here attributed to the Soviet and Chinese
parties in February 1959 are completely consistent with the
way each reacted to events later in the year. Moreover, good
evidence exists on the Soviet side to confirm a modification
in the Soviet line on Nehru at the beginning of 1959. On 20
February, two weeks after the close of the CPSU congress, in
a public lecture on the CPI in Moscow the speaker severely
condemned the leftist mistakes made by the Indian party in
the insurrectionary Ranadive period; warmly praised the gradu-
alist program of the Amritsar Congress at great length, hail-
ing Ghosh and Namboodiripad as the architects of that program;
declared that it was only "since the Amritsar Congress" that
the CPI had become a "truly mass party;" and expressed the
�view that CPI parliamentary majorities similar to that in
Kerala were soon to be expected in West Bengal and Andhra.
Most notably, the lecturer was evasive and noncommital in
responding to a question from the floor on the significance
of the Yudin article--in contrast to the forthright criticism
of Nehru expressed in a similar Moscow lecture in mid-December
1958. Since these lectures are organized by a "society"
supervised closely (and particularly so in Moscow) by a
section of the CPSU Central Committee, it is likely that the
differences between them reflected a real shift in party
policy.
One result of this divergence between the Soviet and Chi-
nese lines on Nehru in early 1959 was to intensify factional
differences within the CPI and while not yet jeopardizing
CPSU control of the CPI, to make some of the left-faction
leaders increasingly aware that Peiping was a more reliable
bulwark for their position than Moscow. One report in March
stated that the party leftists, overjoyed at the original
appearance of the Yudin article, were continuing to rely on
it as vindication for their stand against the Amritsar thesis,
whereas the moderates led by Ghosh were opposed to the line
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taken by Yudin in part because they knew that Yudin's formu-
lations "did not enjoy the decisive blessings of Moscow."
The leftist Basavapundah, who had in the past already shown
signs of private disenchantment with the CPSU and enthusiasm
for the CCP, complained to a friend in mid-February that the
compliments paid Nehru in the published speeches at the 21st
CPSU Congress were "ill-advised and unfortunate," because
these "gratuitous compliments" would undo much of the good
Basavapunfflah thought had been done by the Yudin article.
(BasavapundAh was here alluding to the speech of Khrushchev,
who hailed Nehru and his government in connection with the
completion of the Bhilai steel plant, and particularly to
that of Mukhitdinov, who gave the "progressive forces of
India"--the Communist party--only secondary credit for India's
economic and foreign policy achievements, giving primary
credit to "the farsighted policy of the outstanding states-
man of the East, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.")
Basavapuntah went on to regret that during Ghosh's visit to
Peiping the Chinese had been unable to talk him out of his
soft policy toward Nehru, and lamented that "perhaps it is
too much to hope for" � that the Chinese could "put some
sense into Ghosh's head."
Although there is little evidence to determine why Mos-
cow softened its line on Nehru once more in January 1959, it
is possible that this decision was connected with the deci-
sions of the Nagpur meeting of the Indian Congress Party in
that month, when the left wing of the party backed by Nehru
pushed through a strongly worded resolution supporting land
reform. (Basavapuntah in February expressed the fear that
the results of this Congress Party meeting would induce
Ghosh to swing to the right.) It also appears possible, how-
ever, that the decision to relax pressure on Nehru was in
some way related to a broader CPSU decision taken at this
time to pursue more actively the "peaceful coexistence"
strategy against the Western world; the first concrete mani-
festation of such a broad decision was Mikoyan's self-in-
vited exploratory trip to the United States in early January,
and the second was Khrushchev's enunciation, at the end of
that month, of the 21st Congress thesis that wars, besides
not being inevitable, could even be eliminated from the life
of society while capitalism remains.
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B. The Fall of the Kerala Government (January-July 1959)
The unsuccessful efforts said to have been made by the
CCP leaders in February to dissuade Ghosh from following the
moderate line furnished him in Moscow constitute the first
example of such direct Chinese interference in Soviet direction
of the Indian party ever reported.* It is credible that
Peiping should have begun such efforts at this time, since
it was precisely in this period following the 21st CPSU Con-
gress that the CCP is known to have begun strenuous attempts
to strengthen its influence throughout the world Communist
movement. In addition to the Indians, party leaders from
Latin America, Japan, Indonesia, and even Italy are known to
have consulted with the CCP in Peiping in the spring of 1959.
The Italians--the first delegation of Italian Communists
ever to come specifically for an exchange of views with the
Chinese party--arrived in Peiping in April and remained for
May Day; according to one unconfirmed report, they were told
by Mao Tse-tung of his determination to win Moscow's recogni-
tion of a special role for China in gpiding the "struggle" of
the Asian peoples. As has been noted, the Soviets were reli-
ably reported to have ascribed such intentions to Mao as early
as September 1956; and a third report was to depict Mao as
hinting at the same point to Ghosh in October 1959.
It should be noted, however, that there is no available
evidence that as of the spring of 1959 the CCP had yet at-
tempted to bypass the CPI central, pro-Soviet Ghosh leader-
ship and to establish direct links with left-faction elements
sympathetic to Peiping's viewpoint. This was to happen in
the fall of 1959, as the result of a continued polarization
of the CPI and a growing estrangement between the Ghosh lead-
ership and Peiping.
*There is no evidence that the Andhra party's citation of
Chinese authority in preference to Soviet authority in its
battle against Ranadive in 1948 was prompted by direct con-
tacts with the CCP; and the advice which the CCP did give to
CPI leaders at the Chinese Eighth Party Congress in 1956 was
not in open conflict with a known Soviet line.
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In the the meantime, left-faction Indian Communist leaders
had begun to pursue more aggressively policies independent
of Chinese guidance but parallel to Chinese attitudes. As
the Communist position in Kerala grew more precarious in the
first months of 1959, Ranadive took the offensive: at a
CPI Central Secretariat meeting in New Delhi before the 21st
CPSU Congress, he urged a radical review of CPI policy, argu-
ing that a Communist government in an isolated province such
as Kerala would always be in trouble unless the party left
the defensive and adopted an aggressive program of action
throughout the country sabotaging the working of the Congress
government. No decision was taken by the Secretariat, and
Ranadive's line was apparently rejected in the Moscow consul-
tations. On 12 March, Ranadive wrote a letter to Ghosh
reiterating his views; he warned that Kerala would be the
graveyard of the CPI unless the needs of the party were given
priority over the desire of the parliamentary government in
Kerala to remain in office, and recommended that if the
Kerala regime were threatened with ouster by an opposition
combination, the party should retaliate by posing a nation-
wide threat of upheaval. This line was again advanced by
Ranadive and other leftists at a Central Executive Committee
in May, where the left faction severely attacked the report
on Kerala delivered by Namboodiripad.
As the campaign of the Kerala opposition to oust the
Communist government grew stronger in June and July, and it
began to appear more likely that Nehru would eventually yield
to entreaties to suspend the Kerala government, recrimina-
tions began to multiply within the cpr, With leftistt-posJtions
gaining as the situation worsened. In early July, Namboodiripad
and Kerala party secretary Nair held negotiations with Nehru
over a Kerala settlement; the Indian Prime Minister demanded
new elections and Communist acceptance of a coalition caretaker
government with the opposition included until the elections
were held. A draft agreement along these lines was submitted
by Namboodiripad to a National Council meeting in mid-July,
which rejected it, in part because Nair maintained that the
CPI probably could not win new elections at this time in
Kerala, and would be better off exploiting the martyrdom of
outright removal by the central government. Having killed
Namboodiripad's agreement with Nehru; the National Council
gave consideration to the tactics to be adopted in the likely
event of the dismissal of the Kerala government. According
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to one report, while no one openly demanded the explicit
public repudiation of the Amritsar thesis, many of the
speakers--and not only the leftists--thought the party
would have to consider seriously whether it could continue
to rely upon parliamentary tactics. The leftist Sundarayya
said that the party had been drifting to the right since
the Palghat Congress and should never have committed itself
to any one definite method of seeking power. Other leftists
at this time reacted even more strongly; at a West Bengal
party meeting late in July, one leader gloomily predicted
the quick advent of fascism,rmilitary despotism, and at-
tempted suppression of the CPI. Rightist CPI leaders as-
sociated with'Ahe conciliation of Nehru were somewhat more
cautious in their reaction. At the mid-July National Council
meeting, the rightists Ahmed, Joshi and Dange thought the
Congress Party was killing "democracy" in Kerala, but never-
theless felt it would be good tactics for the party to con-
tinue to repeat publicly the slogan of peaceful, parliamentary
transition to socialism. A similar moderate qualification
was reported to have been inserted by Ghosh into a speech he
gave to Party Headquarters Unit in New Delhi on 27 July; this
private talk nevertheless marked the furthest swing to the
left by Ghosh in several years. Ghosh was reported to have
acknowledged that the parliamentary line and the Amritsar
thesis were errors, and had been proved so by Kerala; he
admitted that revisionism and reformism had made grave in-
roads into the party, and that he himself had fallen prey to
them; nevertheless, he said, the party must still avoid the
danger of left adventurism, of taking up arms and thereby
losing the support of sympathetic "democratic" elements.
Therefore, he proposed that the CPI continue to state "out-
wardly" that the Amritsar thesis still applied, while in
fact returning to its earlier attitude of refusing to place
firm reliance on parliamentary tactics.
At this point, with the CPI in turmoil and extreme re-
actions to the Kerala events by some of the more militant
provincial party organizations a good possibility, a CPI
leader returned to New Delhi from Moscow on 28 July with
a CPSU letter for Ghosh. The letter was reported to urge
that the CPI should not break the law, that it should take
no action which could result in the spreading of "fascism,"
that it should not be provoked into violence "but should
follow democratic means and come to power throughout India
state by state." The letter added, somewhat defensively,
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that the CPSU "expects that the CPI will not differ from the
CPSU's opinion when it judges the Indian political situation
/1-5-oth7 objectively and subjectively." That same evening a
ipecial Secretariat meeting was called to discuss the letter,
and decided that the CPI would not abandon the Amritsar
thesis (at least publicly), would not launch a violent anti-
government movement, and would not boycott future elections.
On 31 July, three days later, the Indian government removed
the Kerala Communist regime. The next day, West Bengal
secretary Jyoti Basu, having returned to Calcutta from the
New Delhi meeting, called a special meeting of the West Bengal
Provincial Committee to halt preparations for a general
strike which had been planned as retaliation for the expected
Kerala government ouster. This response from the stronghold
of the CPI militants--in contrast to the disobedient stand
taken by the West Bengal party the following year--demonstrated
that in mid-1959 the CPSU still retained the capacity to
exert operational control over all sections of the Indian
party when necessary.
From 6 to 8 August the Central Executive Committee met
to consider the new CPI strategy in the light of the latest
Soviet instructions. The leftists Sundarayya, Basavapunniab,
Bhupesh Gupta and Ranadive urged a review and change of party
policy; Gupta also proposed a revival of the CPI illegal ap-
paratus to be run from the party secretariat, completely in-
sulated from the overt party. Ghosh was reported to have
pleaded for patience and the deferring of Gupta's proposal
until after the Kerala elections scheduled for the fall. At
this time, the Ranadive group was said to have resolved pri-
vately to attempt to dislodge the moderates from control of
the CPI and to secure full abandonmentof'the Amritsar line
if the CPI should be defeated in the Kerala elections; mean-
while, mo overt attempt was to be made to displace Ghosh,
since the leftists realized that Moscow's endorsement of
their program was a prerequisite which could not be immediately
secured. Accordingly, following the line taken by Ghosh in
a public statement on 2 August (when he stated that he would
not draw the general inference from Kerala that Nehru had
ceased to be a progressive force), the rentral Executive Com-
mittee meeting agreed not to attack Nehru publicly except on
the specific issue of Kerala, lest speculation that the
Amritsar thesis had been abandoned be encouraged. A fairly
moderate public resolution on the Kerala ouster was adopted,
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and the meeting decided to send Ghosh to Moscow later in the
month to appraise Khrushchev of the details of the interven-
tion in Kerala.
One of the primary goals sought by the CPI after the
July 1959 events was the cultivation of sympathy over the
Kerala events from both the public generally and the left
wing of the Congress Party in particular. Ghosh placed
hope in the considerable group of influential Congressmen
who did not approve of the Government's intervention in
Kerala; this group was counted on to bring pressure on
Nehru to soften his hostility toward the Communist party.
In several of his subsequent complaints against the CCP,
Ghosh was to claim that this CPI strategy was working well--
that a wave of popular sympathy was attracting mass sup-
port for the party, splitting the Congress Party, and turn-
ing the Kerala events into a pyrrhic victory for the reac-
tionaries and a strategic gain for the Communists--when
suddenly all this was ruined and the tide of popular opinion
turned against the party by the outbreak of the Sino-Indian
border dispute. While much of this argument is polemical
exaggeration and rationalization on Ghosh's part, it does
seem likely that the CPI would have emerged from the Kerala
crisis with comparatively little damage to its national base
of popular support had the border conflict not intervened.
C. The Tibetan Revolt
There is considerable evidence to indicate that just as
the surfacing of the Sino-Indian border dispute in the fall
of 1959 had its origin in events connected with the Tibetan
revolt in the spring, so also the emergence of public Sino-
Soviet differences in line over the border issue in the fall
was preceded by more subtle differences over the Tibetan
issue months before.
In the beginning, this was not so: the two bloc partners
made an apparently coordinated initial announcement of the
Tibetan revolt on 28 March, and Moscow twice in early April
repeated in radio commentaries Peiping's claims that Kalimpong,
in northern West Bengal, had been used as a base for the
Tibetan rebels, despite Nehru's public denial of this charge
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on 30 March. Subsequently, however, the USSR suppressed from
its public coverage all such charges against India, and excised
hostile references to India from reports on CPR articles or
speeches carried in Soviet media. Moscow limited the blame
for the uprising to Tibetan reactionaries, Western imperial-
ism, and Chiang Kai-shek. Peiping, on the other hand, continued
to repeat its statements about Kalimpong, together with public
attacks against Indian "reactionaries" and "expansionists"
for their sympathy and alleged aid to the rebels. By late
April, after strong criticism of the CPR had been voiced by
the Indian press and in the Indian Parliament, Peiping ex-
panded its attacks into a concerted mass campaign in which
the Indian Government was repeatedly implicated in the revolt
and in the "abduction" of the Dalai Lama. Personal denuncia-
tions of Nehru at nationwide mass meetings in early May cul-
minated in a 6 May People's Daily editorial article reprov-
ing Nehru's attitude toward Tibet, renewing charges of Indian
interference there, and suggesting that Nehru, while often
differing with the "imperialists," nevertheless was also some-
times strongly influenced in his policies by the Indian "big
bourgeoisie" tied to imperialism. This article did, however,
signal a momentary end to CPR polemics on the issue,
The CPI throughout this period adopted a public attitude
strongly defending Peiping, but not usually going beyond the
limits of the Soviet treatment of Nehru. On 5 April--when the
Soviet line blacking out all references to Kalimpong had not
yet been clearly established--the weekly CPI organ New Age
ran an article urging an investigation of activities in this
border town, as well as a CPI Secretariat resolution suggesting
the same point. The same issue carried the text of the let-
ters released by Peiping to prove that the Dalai Lama had
been taken to India under duress, as well as several other
articles strongly backing the PLA action in Tibet and denounc-
ing Western imperialism's attempt to split India and China.
After this--in line with the Soviet example--charges about
Kalimpong are not known to have been featured in CPI media,
but Indian party organs and spokesmen continued to defend
Peiping, and their statements were regularly picked up by
NCNA. The closest approach to direct criticism of Nehru in
these statements appeared in an article by Ghosh in early
May, where Ghosh complained that some of the Prime Minister's
statements were "heavily biased in favor of the rebels," and
denied that all of India's conduct during the rebellion had
been unimpeachable or that "all the blame lies with the Chinese."
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Along with this rather mixed defense of Peiping, Ghosh express-
ed pleasure that Nehru had "indignantly rejected" the crude
attempts of the imperialists to change India's independent
foreign policy. The CPI secretary showed great defensiveness
over Nehru's reaction to the Chinese charge of "expansionism,"
professing to believe that this charge had not been intended
against Nehru or the Indian government, but only against "cer-
tain reactionary circles in India." In later communications
and contacts with Chinese leaders both in 1959 and in 1960,
Ghosh is known to have repeatedly protested against the un-
wisdom of these Chinese intimations that the Indian govern-
ment was "expansionist" and against the harm this brought
to the Communist cause in India.
Details are available on only one reported meeting between
representatives of the CPI and the CCP during this period of
the Tibetan uprising. (b)(1)
early in April CPR ambassador to New Delhi Pan Tzu-li. request- (b)(3)
ed a meeting with Ranadive to receive information on the at-
titude toward the Tibetan situation being taken by both the
government of India and the CPI. On receiving this request,
the CPI Central Secretariat authorized Ranadive to meet Pan,
although the CPI had previously designated Joshi as the liai-
son man with the Chinese Embassy. Peiping was thus not yet
attempting to bypass central Indian party channels, as it was
to do later in contacting left-faction leaders. Ranadive in
his talk 7 with Pan is reported to have offered him the CPI's
support on Tibet, but to have kept within the bounds of So-
viet policy on this issue, advising Pan not to attack Nehru
directly but to concentrate fire on the leading rightist anti-
Chinese leaders in India. Although Ranadive the following
month was to write an article implying that the Indian govern-
ment was intervening in Chinese affairs by allowing the Dalai
Lama to operate in India, his line toward Nehru was neverthe-
less fairly restrained and did mot notably depart from that
used by other CPI leaders in this period; the CPI leftists
generally did not publicly take a line sharply differentiated
from that of other party leaders on relations with China un-
til Soviet differences with Peiping on the border issue came
into the open in September.
(b)(3)
Although it has been reported that Ranadive's meeting with
Pan was the only CPI contact with the CCP until August, there
is some reason to suspect that this was not so, that the CPI
leadership was in communication with Chinese representatives
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some time in May or June�perhaps again orally via the Chinese
Embassy--and that the CPI at this time urged Peiping to pro-
pose a meeting between Nehru and Chou En-lai to smooth over
Sino-Indian differences over the Tibetan events. While there
was no hint in Soviet or CPI white propaganda media during
this period that the CPSU was then anxious for a Nehru-Chou
meeting, this was hardly surprising in View of the exceed-
ingly delicate nature of the matter, since the CPR public
position was that events in Tibet were of no concern what-
ever to India. Indirect confirmation of such a Soviet de-
sire was, however, available from another source: the con-
duct of the Indian weekly tabloid Blitz, which is not con-
trolled by the CPI (and has, indeed, criticized the Indian
party on occasion), but which is thought'to be partly subsidiied
by Soviet intelligence and which has many times shown itselt
to be more intimately responsive to Soviet foreign policy aims
and maneuvers than Communist party organs. Blitz began its
coverage of the Tibetan revolt, like the ComErhirit New Age,
with an almost identical article complaining about the anti-
Chinese intrigues' in Kalimpong, and similarly soft-pedalled
this point thereafter (though it did not drop it completely)
as the Soviet press fell silent about Kalimpong. Blitz there-
upon carried articles supporting Sino-Indian friendship and
denouncing U.S. attempts to exploit the Tibetan revolt to
undermine Nehru's "independent" foreign policy; these articles
were regularly cited by NCNA, the Chinese News Agency. On 25
April, however, Blitz also published an open letter to Chou
En-lai urging the convening of a tripartite conference of
India, China and Tibet on an informal basis to assure the
"continued friendship between India and China". Although an
NCNA dispatch the next day termed this a "nonsensical sug-
gestion," Blitz reiterated it a week later, noting that "the
Chinese would not like a meeting between India and China over
Tibet" since Peiping does not "consider Tibet an independent
state," but nevertheless insisting that "there are all-com-
pelling reasons for a meeting between India and China."
D. The Border Dispute
If the Soviet Union did indeed try to recommend a Sino-
Indian meeting to Peiping--however cautiously and indirectly--
this is likely only to have increased CCP resentment and sub-
sequent Chinese intransigence. In the light of the almost
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simultaneous events in Tibet and Kerala, Soviet policy appeared
to Peiping to be growing increasingly concilatory toward Nehru
as the latter swung ever further toward the right; the USSR
seemed to be attempting to buy off Nehru, at the expense of
fundamental Communist interests and Chinese national interests.
This Soviet line of unprincipled conciliation--in Chinese
eyes--was subsequently seen to be extended to the imperialist
world as a whole when Klerushchev's visit to the United States
was announced in August and accomplished in September and as
Soviet emphasis upon the need for "mutual concessions" mount-
ed in the early fall. Chinese propaganda was to grow Increas-
ingly shrill throughout the fall in denunciation of such
naive acceptance of imperial/Mc "peace gestures." Therefore,
while the initial border clashes with Indian troops may well
have been unpremediated in Peiping and the result of actions
for which New Delhi was partly responsible, subsequent CCP
policy toward the border dispute--and equally toward the CPI--
was certainly strongly conditioned by the growing dispute
with the CPSU over world-wide policy, as well as by Peiping's
rigid conception of its national interest and its hardening
attitude toward Nehru.
The juxtaposition of significant Chinese and Indian forces
on the border in many places for the first time seems to have
resulted directly from the Tibetan revolt. On the Chinese side,
there was a determination to seal off the Tibetan-Indian bor-
der, both to prevent the further escape of Tibetan rebels and
to cut off that aid to the rebels which Peiping believed was
being furnished from the Indian side of the border. On the
Indian side, the alarm felt at the entry of much larger PLA
forces into Tibet generally and at the Chinese effort to
establish a much stronger presence than ever before in bor-
der areas which had long been in dispute seem to have prompt-
ed New Delhi to attempt to build up an appropriate counter-
presence along the border. Clashes began to occur both at
the eastern and western ends of the frontier in late July and�
early August, in each case as the result of Chinese offensive
action to enforce their concept of the border. While the
Indian government continued to withhold confirmation of these
clashes until late in August, rumors earlier began to appear
in the Indian press, and the border problem became an object
of anxious concern at the CPI Central Executive Committee meet-
ing held from 6 to 8 August.
the CEC then decided to address a letter to the Chinese party
on the whole question of Sino-Indian relations. Said to have
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been drafted jointly by Ghosh and Ranadive, the letter was
delivered to the Chinese Embassy during the second week of
August. The letter reportedly described the emotions aroused
among the Indian populatipn over the Tibetan issue and over
the undemarcated Sino-Indian border, particularly in view
of the Chinese refusal to clarify their stand on older Chi-
nese maps claiming areas regarded by India as belonging to
her. (Nehru had alluded to these maps in a press conference
in the first week of August.) The letter is said to have
deprecated the Chinese indiscriminate use of the terms
"Indian imperialists" and "Indian expansionists", and to
have urged that only specific groups such as the Praja So-
cialist and Jan Sangh parties be singled out for attack (as
Ranadive had suggested to Ambassador Pan in April). The
letter regretted the Chinese attitude shown toward certain
Indian front meetings in recent months, such as the All-
Indian Conference for Afro-Asian Solidarity in Calcutta in
April (when the Chinese walked out from a discussion of
Tibet) and the 28 June Panch_ Sheel celebrations sponsored
by the All-Indian Peace Council and attended by many inter-
national representatives (the invitation to which was ignored
by Peiping). Finally, the letter urged the CCP to contact
the Indian Ambassador in Peiping to arrange a meeting between
Nehru and Chou to settle Sino-Indian differences.
This letter was never answered by the CCP. It is pos-
sible that it was from this point on that Peiping began to
classify Ghosh among the hopelessly lost souls along with
Nehru,and began to concentrate efforts on promoting its
point of view among sympathetic provincial CPI organizations
such as that in West Bengal. Reports of such Chinese efforts
began to appear during the following months.
In the meantime, rightist-inclined provincial party
organizations, such as the one in Maharagitra, had begun their
long swing in the other direction; the first sign of this
occurred on 23 August, when Dange told the Maharashtra Pro-
vincial Executive Committee in Bombay that the CPI should
state openly that the MacMahon line is the valid border in
the east.
On 26 August, Ghosh departed on his visit to the USSR.
On that day and the day before, Chinese troops had made two
additional attacks on Indian posts in the eastern border area
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(the Northeast Frontier Agency). On the 28th, Nehru for the
first time made a statement in Parliament substantiating the
press reports of such Chinese incursions and armed clashes.
This statement inflamed Indian public opinion; according to
a private comment that day by the chief of the Communist
Indian Press Agency, it confused and staggered the CPI. Dur-
ing the next two days the CPI Central Secretariat, minus
Ghosh, held an emergency meeting on the problem, following
which the party issued the first in what was to be a long and
varied series of statements on the border, a vague declara-
tion glossing over the question of border violations, hold-
ing (as the Chinese were to do) that the entire border has
never been defined, making no mention of the MacMahon line,
and urgently calling for negotiations. The CPI subsequently
came under wide public attack as a result of its failure in
this statement to take a clear-cut stand supporting the In-
dian government position.
September Talks in Moscow and Peiping: On 30 August,
the Indian Government is reported to have asked its ambassa-
dor in Moscow to present India's case to Khrushchev personal-
ly. By early September there were therefore two sets of In-
dians in Moscow trying, for different reasons, to get the
Soviets to apply pressure on Peiping: the Indian Embassy,
and CPI representative Ghosh. There is every indication that
the CPSU leaders, seriously disturbed for several reasons by
the effects of the Indian border crisis, were prepared to
apply such pressure through a variety of channels. According
to one unconfirmed report, a Polish Deputy Premier told Yugo-
slav representatives in Belgrade in late August that the Chi-
nese action on the border had been neither initiated nor
supported by Moscow, and added that Moscow was aware that
splits long latent in the CPI were being aggravated as a re-
sult of the Chinese attitude. Moscow, claimed the Polish
official, had informed the CPI that it entirely disapproved
of Peiping's actions, and this CPSU comment was itself further
intensifying CPI factionalism. While it is barely possible
that such a message could have been delivered to CPI head-
quarters late in August, there is no confirmation of it from
the Indian side; more important, it is doubtful from subsequ-
ent CPSU conduct that it would have risked further exacerba-
tion of CPI factionalism in this way. On the other hand, there
is little doubt that the CPSU told its trusted man Ghosh some-
thing of this sort in Moscow. On 3 September Ghosh, apparently
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after consultation with CPSU leaders, sent to Peiping from
Moscow another CPI letter asking the Chinese party again to
initiate high-level negotiations with India, and to shape
its policy with a view to keeping India out of the imperial-
ist camp. This letter also went unanswered. That same day
a note from Peiping to the Indian government accused India
of "aggression" along the border and demanded withdrawal of
Indian troops from the disputed areas. On the 6th, in a
banquet speech before a visiting Afghan official in Peiping,
Chou En-lai hinted at a possible link between Khrushchev's
impending visit to the United States and Chinese policy to-
ward India. While "reiterating the Chinese people's welcome"
to the forthcoming Khrushchev-Eisenhower exchange of visits,
Chou added that "however, we cannot but note that the im-
perialists are stepping up the creation of tension in the
Far East and sowing discord in relations among the Asian and
African countries," and concluded that this required "the
governments and peoples of all Asian and African countries"
to continue to manifest "sharp vigilance"--in other words,
to maintain an undiminished militant posture. (Emphasis added.)
On the morning of 6 September, Ghosh flew to the Crimea,
where Khrushchev was preparing for his trip to the United
States, and remained there in consultation with Khrushchev
for three days. at one time during (W(1)
this period Ghosh attended a joint meeting with Khrushchev (b)(3)
and some Chinese representative, at which Khrushchev expressed
his unhappiness over the course of events on the Indian bor-
der and warned of the harmful effects this could have upon
Asian nationalism generally. While this is unconfirmed, it
is entirely likely that the CPSU was in direct communication
with the CCP over the border situation at this time; if so,
the results for Moscow were unsatisfactory. On 8 September,
Chou En-lai dispatched another letter to Nehru, professing
willingness to have the border dispute subjected to negotia-
tions, but making no specific proposal for a meeting with
Nehru. Chou reiterated all Chinese claims to disputed ter-
ritory, and specifically rejected the validity of the MacMahon
line in the east. He also charged that Indian troops were
guilty of "armed attacks" on Chinese frontier outposts. That
same evening, Ghosh returned to Moscow, and the next day the
Soviet government issued a special TASS announcement deplor-
ing the clashes on the Sino-Indian border, urging a negotiated
settlement, and taking a conspicuously neutral stand on the
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merits of the conflicting claims. It seems likely that this
announcement was decided on during the Khrushchev-Ghosh talks,
and was finally triggered by the unyielding stand taken by
Chou in his 8 September letter.
There is abundant subsequent evidence that the 9 Septem-
ber TASS statement was deeply resented by the CC?, was re-
garded (despite its air of neutrality) as humiliating "open
criticism" of the Chinese party by a paternalistic CPSU, and
was thought to be a Soviet betrayal of an obligation to sup-
port another bloc party for the sake of further unprincipled
conciliation of the Indian bourgeoisie. This event undoubt-
edly added to the already strong Chinese objections to the
line now being taken by the CPSU toward the West in general,
and contributed to the eventual Chinese decision to launch
an open world-wide offensive against that line in April 1960.
During the period surrounding the issuance of the TASS
statement Moscow took further strong measures to impress upon
the Indian government and public Soviet dissociation from the
Chinese position. All available means were adopted, includ-
ing repeated use of diplomatic channels in Moscow and New
,Delhi, of the satellite governments, and of leaks to the In-
dian press; one Indian diplomat spoke of the "almost obsequious"
Soviet attitude. On 12 September, shortly before Khrushchev's
departure for the United States, he reportedly spoke with the
Indian Ambassador, reiterating earlier proposals for a visit
by him to India. That same day, a Khrushchev letter was de-
livered to Nehru in New Delhi by Ambassador Benediktov, re-
portedly attempting to minimize the significance of the bor-
der dispute, urging that it be settled by mutual discussions,
and intimating that Khrushchev would attempt to use his per-
sonal influence to aid in a settlement.
Meanwhile, before he flew to the Crimea, Ghosh in Moscow
had received a message from the CPI Central Secretariat urging
him to visit China after "consulting with the Soviet comrades,"
to see Mao and Liu, to impress upon them the dire consequences
that would follow for the CPI if the border donflict were not
solved quickly, and to urge them to take the initiative per-
sonally in seeking a peaceful settlement. This proposal must
have received Khrushchev's approval, since on 9 September,
on the morning after Ghosh's arrival back in Moscow, Ghosh
departed again for Peiping. He remained there four days, re-
turning on the 13th once more to Moscow to report to the CPSU.
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Reports differ as to whether Ghosh was seen by Mao, Liu, Chou,
or Teng Hsiao-ping; most accounts agree, however, as to the
essentials of Peiping's position. The CCP told Ghosh that
the Indian public was being given false information by their
government, that the border conflict was caused entirely by
Indian armed provocations, that the border had never been de-
marcated, and that the culture of the peoples of the border
areas was like that of the Tibetans, not the Indians. At the
same time, the Chinese Communist leaders made it clear that
their response in the dispute was being strongly conditioned
by their view of the Indian political scene. They felt that
reactionaries supported by the United States were gaining
power in India and were steadily drawing Nehru into the right-
ist camp; according to one report, Ghosh was even told that
Nehru was now the "running dog of the American imperialists"
who had at last "lifted his mask". The CCP leaders indicated
that they had been driven toward this view of Nehru by the
Tibetan affair and had been reinforced in their conviction
by the Kerala disaster. They warned Ghosh that if the CPI
continued to support Nehru, the CPI right wing would be
totally absorbed by reactionary forces; the CPI, they said,
must be prepared to exist on its own strength. For their
part, the CCP leaders felt that it was because Nehru had swung
toward the reactionaries that the CPR could not afford to
yield a single inch of its territory in Tibet, and had to
strengthen its position on the border "inch by inch." They
apparently refused to take the initiative in seeking a Nehru-
Chou meeting. When Ghosh pointed out that the CPI was being
badly hurt by the continuation of the dispute, the Chinese
leaders are said to have listened carefully but t0 have made
no commitment or clear statement of their intentions. Ghosh
was given the impression, however, that Peiping wanted the
dispute to be settled peacefully, and was told that the CPR
at present was contemplating no overt action against the In-
dian frontiers.
Much of this information on the CCP position was report-
ed by Ghosh to a CPI Central Executive Committee meeting in
Calcutta in late September, which Ghosh hastened back from
Moscow just in time to attend.* At the same time, Ghosh gave
*The militants in the CPI central apparatus, hoping to
push through a leftward change in CPI policy in Ghosh's ab-
sence, reportedly had written to Ghosh in Moscow advising him
not to hurry back for the Central Executive Committee meeting.
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the Indian party leaders some inkling of the differences grow-
ing between the Chinese and Soviet lines. The Soviet leaders
had also been very disturbed about Nehru's action in Kerala,
and worried that Nehru might be changing his policy and draw-
ing nearer the United States. On 5 or 6 September Ghosh was
said to have addressed and answered questions before a lengthy
meeting of CPSU Central Committee officials devoted entirely
to Kerala. Eventually, however, the Soviets again decided to
maintain the current policy. When Ghosh returned to Moscow
from Peiping in mid-September and there reported the advice
he had been given, the CPSU apparently directly contradicted
the CCP; Ghosh reportedly was told that the Indian national
bourgeoisie was not about to fall under the control of the
Western imperialist countries, that the CPI should continue
to follow the Amritsar line, and that the CPI should above
all avoid actions which might tend to precipitate a civil war
in India.
This advice was in line with statements already made by
Khrushchev to Ghosh the week before in the Crimea, according
to a note later circulated by Ghosh to the Indian CEC meeting.
Khrushchev was said to have told Ghosh that the CPI and Com-
munist parties in other non-bloc countries should avoid up-
risings and other "warlike situations" since their effect
would now hinder rather than aid the growth of Communism; that
such uprisings would lead to the suppression of Communist
movements by reactionary forces; that Communist party tactics
now should be different from those used in the past since
"now Communism cannot be established with the aid of an out-
side force;" and that the avoidance of war for three or four
years would enable bloc military strength to surpass that of
the West.
This Soviet advice was used by Ghosh at the September
Central Executive Committee meeting in arguing against an
increasing tendency of the left-faction leaders to welcome
the Chinese pressure on the Indian border as justifying a
.new militant line for the CPI. In abandoning insurrectionary
tactics in 1951, the Indian partylad cited, as one of the rea-
sons why such tactics had been erroneous, the absence in
India of a firm and contiguous revolutionary base across the
border such as the CCP had had in the USSR. The CPI left-
ists now argued that this was no longer true, that with the
PLA now present in force on the Tibetan border the Indian
party had both a channel of support for armed operations and
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a potential liberator in the event of mass uprisings. Repeti-
tions of this argument by the leftists throughout 1960 have
since been reported on many occasions by several different
sources; it was first heard at a 13 September 1959 meeting of
the CPI parliamentary fraction, where it was voiced by
Basavapuratiah� Ranadive, and the head of the CPI secret ap-
paratus Jaipal Singh. In opposing arguments for this thesis
at the subsequent September Central Executive Committee
meeting Ghosh not only evoked Khrushchev's authority, but
warned that the Amritsar thesis, as a fundamental tenet of
the CPI, could only be altered "when changes in the interna-
tional situation coincide with internal political changes"
--that is, when a change in the CPI line would serve the cur-
rent overall interests of Soviet foreign policy. Neverthe-
less, the leftists are reported to have been able to force
through the meeting a compromise whereby the CEC requested
Indian provincial party secretariats to prepare for central
party consideration their suggestions for possible amend-
ments to the Amritsar Thesis.
On the border question, the leftists circulated at the
CEC meeting a document upholding the Chinese case entirely,
and claiming that the dispute was linked both with a shift
in Indian foreign policy and Nehru's reactionary domestic
tendency recently shown in Kerala. This document said that
the government was using the dispute to distract the Indian
people from the real issues and to create a situation where
the CPI could be isolated and outlawed. It called on the
party to "expose this game of the Nehru government". Ghosh,
however, is reported to have proposed a "middle way" suggested
to him in Moscow, whereby the CPI would state that acceptance
of neither the MacMahon line nor the line shown on Chinese
maps should be made a precondition for Sino-Indian negotia-
tions. This formula, plus a statement of the CPI's conviction
that socialist China could never commit aggression, formed
the core of the CEC resolution eventually adopted on this
subject and published on 25 September. This second CPI reso-
lution on the border dispute aroused a great public uproar;
the CPI's failure to place any blame upon China or to support
any aspect of the Indian government's position was widely
denounced as virtually treasonable.
This reaction from all sections of the non-Communist
public was to place severe pressure upon those provincial
party organizations heavily dependent on electoral alliances
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with other parties; as a result of the indiscipline prevalent
in the CPI, certain rightist-inclined provincial organizations
were to succumb to this pressure and oppose the central party
line. The center of this opposition was Maharashtra on the
west coast, and its leader was Dange. In mid-September Dange
reiterated privately to a Maharashtra State Council meeting
his August position that the MacMahon line should be taken
as the basis for negotiation. After the Calcutta Central
Executive Committee meeting, on 7 October, the multi-party
alliance to which the CPI belonged in Bombay met and issued
a public statement upholding the MacMahon line and accusing
the CPR of "forcible occupation" of Indian territory; Dange,
who headed the Communist representatives present, concurred
in this statement. This action is said to have infuriated
the CCP leaders, who communicated their anger to Ghosh, then
in Peiping for the Chinese tenth anniversary celebrations;
Ghosh on 9 October sent a message to the CPI Central Secre-
tariat via the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi demanding that
no further statements be made on the border situation by; any
CPI members. Dange issued a public statement slightly soft-
ening the strong stand taken by the multi-party alliance,
and the Central Secretariat applied pressure upon the Maharashtra
CP; but on 14 October the Maharashtra Provincial Committee
defied the party center by passing a resolution supporting
the multi-party resolution and endorsing the action of the
Communist representatives there.
A number of other prominent CPI leaders took positions
in late September and early October opposing the "unpatriotic"
stand taken in the CPI's 24 September Calcutta resolution.
In particular, an influential section of the Kerala party
was reported becoming vociferously anti-Chinese because the
CPR's attitude on the border was hurting the party's chances
in the Kerala elections scheduled for February 1960. Four
Kerala leaders were reported to have sent a memorandum to
the Calcutta meeting explaining the difficulties the border
issue was causing them, and recommending that the Central
Executive Committee state openly that the CPR had made mis-
takes and committed aggression. On 3 October, former Kerala
Chief Minister Namboodiripad told newsmen that "the refusal
of the Communist party to denounce China is costing it the
goodwill of a large section of its sympathizers in India."
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It was against this background that the CPI prepared to
celebrate the CPR's tenth anniversary in early October 1959.
The central party leadership made a vigorous effort to counter
the tide of anti-Chinese sentiment within the party in a 4
October special issue of the weekly New Age devoted to the
anniversary. New Age--edited by P. C. JEgEi, who was not a
leftist but who nevertheless had long been the most fervent
admirer of the CCP among the Indian party leaders--on this
occasion went far beyond a mere defense of Sino-Indian friend-
ship, and took positions which demonstrated how little com-
prehension many CPI leaders who later proved to be loyal to
the CPSU still had of Moscow's sensitivity to certain Chinese
policies and ideological claims, and how lightly the CPSU was
still treading in communicating its position on these issues
to the CPI.* This issue contained one article hailing the
policies of the Chinese "leap forward"; another article hail-
ing the practical and ideological advantages of the communes**
and terming them the "morning sun rising above the broad
horizen of east Asia;" another calling Mao Tse-tung a "great
Marxist-Leninist" whose theory of combined unity and struggle
with the bourgeoisie was "one of the very decisive contribu-
tions of the Chinese Communists to the general theory of the
world liberation struggle;" and still another citing and en-
dorsing Mao's "paper tiger" thesis. The CPSU by October 1959
had long been in conflict with Peiping on each of these topics,
and no such sweeping endorsement of all of the CCP's policies
was ever made again by New Age.
*As will be seen later, despite the contradictory lines on
India already being taken by Moscow and Peiping, the CPSU con-
tinued to attempt to hide the essence of its general foreign-
policy dispute with the CCP from all except a very few Indian
party leaders until well after the dispute had broken out into
the open in the spring of 1960. Joshi apparently stubbornly
refused to believe that Moscow could be in serious disagree-
ment with Peiping and consequently was a vehement supporter
of the CCP's line on the border issue and other topics until
the CPSU's position was finally made clear to him in mid-1960--
whereupon he abruptly switched sides.
**There is no good evidence to indicate that reverberations
of the Sino-Soviet dispute over the communes had ever been very
widely felt within the CPI, although Ghosh in a private talk
with Andhra leaders in December 1958 did indicate that he had
been informed by the Soviets of their dissatisfaction with the
"inner party situation in Communist China" because of the com-
mune issue, among other things.
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E. The October Anniversary Talks
The CPI leadership meanwhile prepared for another round
of talks with the Chinese and Soviets in connection with the
CPR anniversary. Ghosh headed a five-man delegation to Peip-
ing in early October; on the tenth: he again visited Moscow
to report on his discussions with the Chinese, and on the
18th he returned home. While in Peiping, Ghosh is reported
to have had at least one joint meeting with the Soviets,
Chinese, and representatives of other Asian parties, plus one
or two separate talks with Khrushchev and Suslov and several
private talks with Mao and Liu.
in these talks with the Chinese
Ghosh reiterated his earlier plaints about the harmful ef-
fects the dispute was having upon the CPI, only to be told
that the Indian Government and Nehru were now thorough
reactionaries, that the CPI was getting panicky over noth-
ing, and that China was being isolated not from the people
of India, but only from the Indian reactionaries. Several
other earlier reports indicated that the Chinese again em-
phasized that their determination to take a firm stand on
the border had its roots in the Indian conduct during the
Tibetan revolt and the Dalai Lama's activities in India.
Peiping reiterated its claim of Indian responsibility for
the border clashes, but professed a readiness to negotiate,
and reportedly hinted at willingness to trade Chinese recogni-
tion of the MacMahon line in the east for Indian reco�ni-
tion of the Chinese claim to Ladakh in the west.
the Chinese leaders, while angr over e
stand taken by right-wing leaders such as Dange, expressed
appreciation of the manner in which the central CPI leader-
ship had thus far resisted nationalist pressures, and ac-
knowledged that the CPI could not take a stand openly support-
ing the CPR.
Mao and Liu apparently once more refused, however, to
commit themselves to initiate a request for a Nehru-Chou
meeting, and even rebuked the CPI for having failed to under-
stand how such a Chinese initiative would play into Nehru's
hands. Repeating their pessimistic view of Nehru--and at-
tributing his hostile stand on Tibet and the border to the
fears of the Indian bourgeoisie of the effect of the example
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of socialist China on the Indian masses--the CCP leaders
nevertheless recognized the need for the CPI to do every-
thing possible to keep Nehru from moving still further to
the right. Liu is reported to have warned the CPI to be-
ware of Nehru as "the most clever interpreter of the 160.11:cy
of British imperialism in 4Asia." This evaluation was re-
inforced by an article published in the Chinese journal
World Knowledge on 5 October--in the midst of the Peiping
talks�Which provided the most hostile CPR public allusion
to the Indian government since the Tibetan revolt the pre-
vious spring. The article admitted that the bourgeois
leaders of some newly independent countries have "certain
contradictions with the imperialists," but insisted that
"at the same time they maintain such intricate relations
with the imperialists as lead themtto manifest an expansion-
ist ambition." Under the pressure of the imperialists and
domestic reactionaries, said World Knowledge, "such double-
faced 'neutralists' often show vacillations." The context
made it clear that "the leaders in India," through their
actions toward Tibet and the Chinese border, had shown them-
selves to be such double-faced neutralists.
There is abundant indication, both from the. public So-
viet statements in Peiping and from subsequent events
that the Soviet delegation made a serious and un-
successful effort at this time to overcome Chinese opposi-
tion to the entire course of Soviet foreign policy. Al-
though there is no conclusive evidence, it also seems likely
that Khrushchev made some effort ID persuade the Chinese to
modify their posture on the border issue, at least to the
extent of initiating a proposal for negotiations between
Nehru and Chou; if so, it appears from Mao's subsequent re-
marks to the CPI delegation that Peiping continued for some
time to resist and resent this suggestion. Later, after
Chou En-lai had finally proposed such talks in his 7 Novem-
ber letter to Nehru, the Indian Ambassador in Moscow is
reliably reported to have told his government that this of-
fer, even though hedged in by qualifications,had been sent
under Soviet pressure; and the same assertion was made to
the Indian Government on 16 November by a Soviet embassy
official in New Delhi. The Soviet official added that his
government regretted that the offer of negotiations had not
been made at least a month earlier, but that Chinese policy
was not flexible. There is little doubt that the USSR was
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making every effort to exaggerate the extent of its pressure
on Peiping in the eyes of the Indian government and public;
thus on 10 October a lurid account in Blitz depicted Khru-
shchev as having sternly upbraided Chou for the Chinese stand
and as having ordered him to reply politely to Nehru's mes-
sage of congratulations on the CPR anniversary (which Chou
in fact did). Nevertheless, it seems to have been clearly
the desire of the USSR throughout this period to have negotia-
tions begun and tension reduced between China and India as
rapidly as possible, and it is equally clear that Peiping
was dragging its feet.
When Ghosh visited Moscow after his October stay in
Peiping, he is reported to have been given a briefing on the
Soviet peaceful coexistence strategy similar to that furnish-
ed him by Khrushchev the month before. Soviet party leaders
told Ghosh that the aim of the peaceful coexistence line was
to prevent war for a number of years sufficient to give the
bloc decisive command of the balance of power, so that the
rest of the world could subsequently be enabled to gravitate
toward Communism without fear of "imperialist" intervention.
According to another report, Suslov is Said tohavetold Ghosh
that the CPI must at all costs not allow itself to become
isolated from the Inlian people, even if this required the
party to take actions not in the immediate interests of the
socialist countries.
Thus armed with Soviet permission to take whatever steps
might prove necessary to conciliate Indian nationalist opinion,
Ghosh returned to New Delhi, and on 18 October held a press
conference in which he emphasized at great length Mao's assur-
ances to him of Peiping's peaceful intentions and sincere
desire for a peaceful settlement with India. These remarks
by Ghosh were given extensive coverage in New Age of 25
October; in the meantime, however, a new crigh had occurred
between Chinese Communist troops and Indian border guards in
the Ladakh area, Indians were killed and Indian prisoners
taken by the Chinese, and Peiping had officially protested
that the clash was the result of provocation by the Indian
side. Ghosh was thus placed in a ridiculous position, and
reacted sharply in the light of the Soviet guidance he had
received. An emergency meeting of the CPI Central Secre-
tariat was held on 24 October, following which a public
statement was issued calling the Ladakh clash a "tragic event"
and saying that there was "no justification whatever" for
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the firing. The Secretariat also sent a note to the Chinese
Embassy outlining the feelings of the Indian people about
this event, declaring that the Chinese government should have
expressed regret instead of making a protest, and saying that
Peiping should be the first to take the initiative in start-
ing negotiations, since "there is no problem of prestige" in
doing this (presumably, an allusion to Mao's indication to
Ghosh that this was indeed a matter of prestige). This note
was sent to the CPR Ambassador on 24 October with the request
that it be forwarded to Peiping;
In the last week of October, CPI leaders were reported
to have contacted the heads of several bloc diplomatic mis-
sions in New Delhi to ask that the CPI stand on the border
issue not be misunderstood, and that any future apparent dis-
agreement with the CCP be regarded as a tactical move by the
CPI. These warnings were apparently initiated by Ghosh as
a preliminary to a move on his part to promote a somewhat
more nationalistic posture for the CPI. At the subsequent
meetings in early and mid-November in Meerut of the Central
Executive Committee and the National Council, Ghosh did in-
deed support some of the demands of the right faction of the
party led by Dange. After intense resistance by the left
faction, the Meerut meetings eventually produced a new com-
promise party resolution which, while still ambivalent, was
several degrees closer to the nationalist position. The In-
dian government's claims for the MacMahon line in the eastern
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half of the border were for the first time explicitly endorsed
and the Chinese claims rejected; but the western border in
Ladakh was declared to be undetermined, and Chou En-lai's pro-
posal for a meeting with Nehru was welcomed without mention
of the prior condition of a Chinese troop pullback which the
Indian government placed upon such a meeting.
While the CPI was moving in this direction, the CPSU was
taking an increasingly contradictory position on the Indian
border dispute: while in public growing more and more critical
of the Chinese line, Moscow in private was attempting to re-
strain CPI factionalism by denying any differences with Peiping.
In Khrushchev's 31 October speech to the Supreme Soviet
(which marked the high-water point of the conciliatory peace-
ful coexistence line toward the West generally) the Soviet
Premier expressed deep regret over the Ladakh incident of the
week before, said that "nothing can compensate" the relatives
of the casualties, and appealed for friendly negotiations "to
the mutual satisfaction of both sides." On 2 November a CPSU
letter was reported to have been received by the CPI which
insisted that the stand taken by Khrushchev was designed to
influence the Indian government, which denied that any rift
could exist between Moscow and Peiping, and which vaguely
warned the CPI to move cautiously and misunderstand neither
the CPSU nor the CCP. But on 15 November, the CPI weekly New
Age published an interview between its Moscow correspondent
and Khrushchev at a Kremlin reception on the evening of 7
.November. The New Age correspondent quoted Khrushchev as
calling the border dispute "a sad and stupid story," as argu-
ing that the area in dispute was uninhabited and without
strategic significance, and as citing the example of the USSR's
cession of territory to Iran as a model of amicable settle-
ment of such differences. Khrushchev was said to have declared,
"we gave up more than we gained; what were i fe* Illonieters for
a country like the Soviet Union." While these statements
could have been intended also to affect Indian government
policy, their immediate effect can only have been upon CPI
rank-and-file membership, and must have suggested to party
members the reality of the Sino-Soviet differences the 2 No-
vember CPSU letter had just sought to deny. While Soviet
media never published this Khrushchev interview, portions of
it were reported by a New York Times correspondent present,
and it is in any case most unlikely that New Age would have
invented statements of this type attribute-a�to Khrushchev.
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The CCP is reliably known to have bitterly resented both this
statement and the one contained in Khrushchev's 31 October
speech, and to have viewed them as stages in a mounting So-
viet public attack on Chinese policy.
F. Increasing CPI Leftist Ties With Peiping
It is possible that Khrushchev's insertion of these anti-
Chinese hints in the central CPI organ in mid-November repre-
sented one of the first rather feeble Soviet attempts to
counter the increasing Chinese effort in the fall of 1959 to
create an area within the CPI subject to CCP guidance and re-
moved from CPSU tutelage. Ghosh
told the Central Secretariat after his visit to China that
Mao had hinted to him that the CCP wanted to exert a greater
degree of leadership over the Asian parties--and particularly
over the CPI. The most vigorous of Peiping's efforts in this
direction were concentrated in West Bengal. There the left-
ist party leadership--with CCP encouragement--came to take
an increasingly strong line throughout the fall in opposing
conciliation of Nehru and of rightist tendencies in the CPI,
and in openly fighting actions of the central party leader-
ship sanctioned by the CPSU but harmful to the interests of
Peiping.
On 8 October, the West Bengal party sent a resolution to
the Central Secretariat emphasizing that "some reformist and
anti-party elements have come into the CPI and the first job
of the CPI should be to expel them." In late October, the
West Bengal State Council heard with approval the leftist
Bhupesh Gupta report--along the line taken by the CCP in the
Peiping talks with the CPI leadership--that the Indian govern-
ment was seeking a convenient excuse to stir up anti-Chinese
and anti-Communist feelings so that the sympathies of the
Indian masses could be retained while India was dragged into
the imperialist camp. A lone rightist speaker, who accused
the CCP of "left-sectarian mistakes" and of initiating the
border troubles to harm the Khrushchev peace offensive, was
overwhelmingly voted down. In mid-November, the West Bengal
party leadership was reported by several sources to be ex-
tremely hostile to the border resolution of the Meerut National
Council offering gestures of conciliation to Indian nationalism;
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this resolution was called self-contradictory, and the central
party leaders were accused of toeing the line of "bourgeois
Nehru." The editorial staff of the Calcutta party organ
Swadhinata determined not to publicize this party resolution
or to slant its news reports in accordance with it. There is
evidence that rightist CPI leaders made an abortive attempt
to have the party Control Commission investigate the line
_taken by Swadhinata. At a West Bengal Provincial Executive
Committee meeting in early December, it was formally decided
to oppose the results of the Meerut meeting, and subsequent
reports told of gains made by pro-Chinese left-faction ele-
ments within the party organizations of Assam and Tripura--
neighbors of West Bengal--thanks to the missionary influence
of the West Bengali leaders.
There is good evidence of Chinese encouragement of this
evolution of the West Bengal party toward open defiance of the
party center. According to one report originating with the
West Bengal police, a new CPR consul in Calcutta, shortly
after his arrival in September, held several meetings with
prominent members of the West Bengal party to appraise them
of current Chinese policy on the border dispute and to sug-
gest the line that they should take in countering anti-Chinese
propaganda. A West Bengal government intelligence report
in November claimed that four powerful radio sets had been
installed in the office of the China Review in Calcutta to
listen to broadcasts from Peiping, and that handouts were
being quietly given to Swadhinata for propaganda work on the
basis of these broadcasts. Chinese propaganda then in turn
played back the line furnished in SuTdhinata: in a conver-
sation the next year,. Ghosh
complained that the Chinese had published nothing about the
November 1959 CPI National Council meeting, but did fully
publicize the subsequent meeting of the West Bengal party and
the writings in Swadhinata ion, the West Bengal
party was reported to have organized a
special class, sche u es o �egin in mid-December, for lead-
ing party members: this class was designed "to explain the
differences between the attitude of Communist China and the
Soviet Union, with special emphasis on the Chinese concept
of 'permanent revolution!" Finally, it was from about this
period of the late fall of 1959 that indications of Chinese
financial subsidies to sections of the Indian party--and
particularly to left-faction strongholds such as West Bengal--
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began to increase. By the following spring, the new and un-
accustomed affluence of the West Bengal party leaders, and
the heightened assertiveness which accompanied it, were being
remarked on bitterly by CPI rightists.
At the same time, the left-faction members of the CPI
Central Secretariat--Ranadive, Bhupesh Gupta, and particularly
Basavapunniah--became increasingly active late in 1959 in
promoting the line given them in Peiping throughout the CPI.
In mid-November, Basavapunniah was reported by two sources
to have repeated, to a meeting of CPI leaders concerned with
creating an underground organization, his belief that the CPI
lack ofacontiguous foreign supply base during the Telengana
revolt had: now been remedied with the Chinese occupation of
Tibet and other frontier areas. In late December he was said
to have reiterated to a meeting of the Maharashtra State Coun-
cil Mao's statement to Ghosh that Tibet, Sikkim, Bhutan, and
the Northwest Frontier Agency are provinces peopled by the
same. race, that China had a historic right to these terri-
tories, that the MacMahon line was not valid, and that the
Indian government's raising of "the bogey of Chinese aggres-
sion" had resulted from its realization that Nepal, Sikkim,
Bhutan and. India would be deeply affected by the social and
economic revolution in Tibet.
A more remarkable indication of the lengths to which the
left faction in the CPI center was willing to go to advance
the CCP viewpoint within the Indian party--and to promote
the notion that the CPSU endorsed that viewpoint--was furnished
by the reports they circulated within the party at the en
1959 of a su -Khrushchev meeting.
these reports were firs initi-
aTea 'ay Hanadive on 12 December, when he claimed, with much
circumstantial detail, that the party center had received a
letter from the CPSU reporting that Mao and Khrushchev had
met in Northeast China on 24 November to discuss and reach
agreement on a wide range of world topics, including the bor-
der dispute. Subsequently, a text of this purported letter
became available in CPI archives, diverging from Ranadive!s
oral account in some details, but claiming unanimity between
the CCP and CPSU on the border dispute as well as on the com-
ing summit conference.
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The alleged CPSU letter is not credible for several
reasons; firstly, the alleged meeting itself is not credible.
Further, while it is not impossible (in view of past and
subsequent CPSU attempts to deny differences with Peiping
to the CPI) that the CPSU could have deliberately misin-
formed the Indian party about the alleged meeting, the So-
viet party would not have made some of the statements found
in the text of its purported letter: for example, the state-
ment that Mao and Khrushchev had agreed that the West de-
sired a summit meeting "because they wanted to take time to
make their 'position of strength' stable and stronger;"
just such a claim that Western "peace _gestures" were a
"smokescreen" behind which the West was being allowed to
redress the military balance of power while disarming and
demoralizing revolutionary forces was the central theme in-
troduced into Peiping's propaganda attacks on the Soviet
peaceful coexistence line in the late fall of 1959. The
most likely explanation appears to be that these oral re-
ports and the purported text of a Soviet letter were manu-
factured by Ranadive, Bhupesh Gupta and Basavapunniah--the
three chief leftists within the Central Secretariat--for
use within the Indian party. It is probably significant
that the first version of this CPSU letter was reported by
Ranadive four days after General Secretary Ajoy Ghosh was
stricken with a heart attack and hospitalized on 8 December;
Ghosh was out of the way until February, during which time
Basavapunniah is believed to have acted in his place. Ac-
cording to one report, Basavapunniah, Ranadive, and Bhupesh
Gupta in late December were employing this supposed letter
not only as evidence that the CPSU and CCP were working
closely together, but as a means of pressuring provincial
party units against taking a strongly nationalist line on
the border issue. It is known that Basavapunniah attended
a meeting of the rightist-dominated Maharashtra State Coun-
cil in the third week of December and attacked the Indian
government over the border issue; it is possible, though
.there is no direct confirmation, that he cited the purported
CPSU letter at this meeting.
If this interpretation is correct, the falsification
of the CPSU position indulged in by the CPI leftists on this
occasion was a prelude to the more openly anti-CPSU campaign
of falsification they launched after the 1960 Moscow Confer-
ence, when they flooded the Indian party with reports of a
humiliating defeat for Khrushchev by the CCP And of CPSU sur-
render of guidance over the CPI to Peiping.
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Change in Line Over Eisenhower Visit: It is also pos-
sible that Ghosh's removal from the scene and the temporary
leftist assumption of control of the central party machinery
in December 1959 played a role in the drastic CPI reversal
of line toward President Eisenhower's visit to India in that
month. On 5 December, a full meeting of the CPI secretariat
was held to decide the party's policy toward that visit; a
fight among the leaders was reported to have occurred similar
to that at the Meerut National Council meeting two weeks
before, with Ghosh's interpretation of the earlier guidance
given him in Moscow again proving decisive. On 7 December,
the secretariat issued a statement (published in New Age a
week later) welcoming the President warmly and hallar4-1iis
visit as an "event of great importance." Subsequently the
All-Indian Peace Council, a CPI front, sent Mr. Eisenhower
an effusive letter of welcome. On 9 December, however, So-
viet Ambassador Benediktov sent a note to the party secre-
tariat criticizing its judgment in issuing its statement, and
saying that if such a decision actually was their best tacti-
cal line, the announcement should have been made by an execu-
tive body lower than the secretariat to avoid:confusing the
party rank and file. Benediktov was reported irritated over
press reports comparing the welcome accorded Khrushchev on
his last visit unfavorably with that given President Eisen-
hower now. There is no evidence, however, that he suggested
that the CPI publicly reverse its appraisal of the motives
of the Eisenhower visit. On 15 December however, a CCP
"analysis" of the Eisenhower journey was reported received
by the Central Secretariat; it was said to emphasize that
the President's "peace talk" was false and that the real pur-
pose of his trip was to discuss military and defense matters
with his allies, as exemplified by his talks in Pakistan.
The next day the secretariat met--this time without Ghosh,
who was now in the hospital--reviewed the matter, and issued
a public statement denouncing the Eisenhower visit along
lines similar to those said to have been contained in the
Chinese. analysis. This CPI statement was published in the
20 December New Age, together with another long article at-
tacking the PresiTent as the "Voice of Big Business." Also
in this issue of New Age--and once again testifying to the
growing pro-CCP orientation of the leftist Central Secre-
tariat members--was an editorial on the 80th anniversary of
Stalin's birthday taking a basically pro-Stalin line much
closer to that of the commentary published in People's Daily
on this occasion than-to that of the fairly critical editorial
published in Pravda.
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V. THE CPI AND THE SINO-SOVIET POLEMIC: 1960
In 1960 the Soviet and Chinese parties came into open
and repeated conflict, and this conflict was transformed
into an organizational struggle within the world Communist
movement in which both Sides eventually found themselves ap-
pealing to the loyalties of the key leaders of each of the
principal Communist parties of the world. Although the CPSU,
because of its fears of precipitating a formal schism in the
Indian party, for a long time left the CPI out of its efforts
to mobilize foreign Communist support against Peiping--and
even attempted to continue to deny to the CPI the reality of
the Sino-Soviet dispute--the Indian party eventually had to
be drawn into that dispute, if only because bloc policy to-
ward India was one of the key matters at issue between Moscow
and Peiping. CPI representatives took part in the Sino-Soviet
confrontations which took place in Peiping and Bucharest in
June, in Hanoi in September, and in Moscow in October and No-
vember. The Indian party was formally appraised of the Soviet
position in a CPSU letter to the party center in August, and
was given a Chinese reply more indirectly through West Bengal
channels the next month. Under the impact of these events,
the rightist CPI leaders pressed an offensive against leftist-
faction positions, which they were anxious to identify clearly
with CCP resistance to CPSU authority; the leftists in the
central party machinery, for their part, were anxious to deny
their own estrangement from the CPSU by denying as long as
they could the reality of Sino-Soviet differences. When a
clearcut choice was finally posed in September, vacillating
and opportunistic CPI leaders (the majority) swung to the
rightist side identified with the CPSU, and the CPI passed a
secret resolution attacking Peiping and supporting Moscow.
Passage of this resolution was resisted by the leftist CPI
national leaders, however, and was bitterly denounced by
left-faction representatives in the provinces throughout In-
dia. One important provincial party organization, in West
Bengal, went so far as to pass a counter-resolution directly
attacking the conduct of the CPSU and Khrushchev by name and
supporting Peiping--the only such resolution definitely known
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to have been passed in any Communist party in the world.*
While the delegation led by Ghosh to Moscow supported
Khrushchev on most issues during the November conference
of Communist parties, Khrushchev's eventual retreat at
that conference on the crucial issue of discipline within
the international movement--together with the inclusion of
many Chinese positions in the ambiguous document produced
by the conference--served to encourage the CPI leftists
generally and to leave those of them who had openly defied
the CPSU unrebuked and more firmly entrenched than before.
A. Soviet Moves in Earlyl 1960
In the months immediately preceding the outbreak of open
Sino-Soviet polemics in April 1960, the CPSU appears to have
made further efforts to impress its position on the CPI and
to maintain the good will of the Indian government. Accord-
ing to one report the CPI on 12
January received a letter from the Soviet party attempting
at some length to justify Soviet economic aid to India on the
grounds that Nehru was a liberal democrat whose foreign policy
up to now had been progressive; Soviet economic assistance
was depicted as helping him to maintain his "progressive"
neutrality as far as possible, and the maintenance of this
neutrality, said the CPSU, "will be a major factor for build-
ing the strength of the socialist forces in India."
Whether or not this report is accurate, it seems likely
from the conduct of the CPI leadership after the Kerala elec-
tions in early February that the CPSU had been in some form
of contact with the CPI in January to exercise a restraining
influence once more. In those elections, the Communist party
was defeated in its bid to return to office by an anti-Com-
munist alliance, yet increased its popular vote and its per-
centage of the total vote. The CPI was reported divided as
to how to interpret this, with the leftists apparently again
seeking to deny the usefulness of the parliamentary approach.
Before the elections, in a private conversation on 26 January,
*It is quite possible, of course, that such secret resolu-
tions were passed by the Chinese, Albanian, and perhaps also
the Malayan and Burmese parties.
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Basavapunniah had predicted a Kerala election defeat and had
asserted that such a defeat would be salutary for the CPI in
that it might teach the party a lesson regarding the "illusion"
of parliamentary democracy. Yet on 5 February, when the final
results became known, the CPI Central Secretariat issued a
public statement saying that the party had "no hesitation in
accepting the results of the elections in a truly democratic
spirit," while the secretariat of the Kerala party declared
that the CPI in Kerala would "play its role as a constructive
and responsible opposition." The adoption of this posture
indicates that the moderates had been able to predominate at
this point, presumably with CPSU assistance. The rancor of
the leftists, however, was made evident in a March article
on the elections by Ranadive in the monthly New Age. Ranadive
noted that the party, "taking the realities -61--tE�situation
into consideration," had stated that it would work as a con-
structive opposition party, but at the same time was at pains
to link Nehru personally with all the most nefarious and
reactionary activities of the Kerala anti-Communist alliance
which enabled that alliance to defeat the CPI.
Warsaw Pact Meeting and Khrushchev Visit: At about the
same time that the CPI was thus reacting to its defeat in
Kerala in early February, Khrushchev was reportedly launching
a fairly strong attack on Peiping's policy toward India in a
speech before a Warsaw Pact meeting in Moscow.
Khrushchev
charged that the Chinese actions on the Indian border had
created tension during a period of international detente, and
that as a result a great deal of support for the Communist
cause in the neutralist countries of Asia had been forfeited.
This indictment is known to have been greatly elaborated by
the CPSU in confrontations with the CCP later in the year.
It was at this February Warsaw Pact meeting that the CPR
representative, Kang Sheng, is believed to have had the first
of the Chinese personal altercations with Khrushchev in 1960
over differences on foreign policy; moreover, Peiping sub-
sequently took the unprecedented step of publishing a sanitized
version of Kang's speech revealing its dissenting view of dis-
armament, reduction of tensions, and other questions.
A week after this meeting, Khrushchev visited India, pre-
ceded by further Soviet-inspired reports intimating his anxiety
to heal Sino-Indian differences. (Thus the Soviet home service
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and press two days before Khrushchev's arrival picked up an
open letter to him published in Blitz appealing to the Soviet
premier to play the role of peacemaker during his visit.)
Reports agree, however, that during his meeting with Nehru,
Khrushchev did not offer to mediate the dispute, but merely
expressed his anxiety for an early settlement and was given
a copy of Nehru's invitation to Chou to visit India in
Khrushchev also
reiterated to Nehru his disapproval of Peiping's border policy.
This was apparently not mentioned, however, in the account
of the meeting Gromkyo passed to the Chinese Ambassador that
same day, according to the version the ambassador subsequently
furnished CPI leftist leaders. This version instead stressed
that Khrushchev told Nehru the Chinese felt they were misun-
derstood in India, and that he attempted to disabuse Nehru of
the notion that the USSR could exert significant influence on
Peiping (a notion which the Soviet government and Blitz had
been eager to promote the year before). It is possible that
both versions were correct, and that Khrushchev, while deplor-
ing the Chinese actions, now denied any capability to change
Peiping's stand and attempted to persuade Nehru to accept the
CPR offer to trade recognition of the MacMahon line for the
acceptance of some Chinese claims in Ladakh.
That the CPR was intent on maintaining this stand--and
may have been apprised in advance of the position Khrushchev
intended to take with Nehru--was indicated by a note the CPI
secretariat received from the Chinese party on the eve of
Khrushchev's visit, urging the CPI once more to prepare the
Indian public for a settlement along the lines advocated by
Peiping. On 27 February, after Khrushchev had left, the CPI
secretariat received another note through the Chinese embassy
with a copy of Chou's reply to Nehru accepting the invitation
to India. When Chou actually visited New Delhi in late April,
however, the concessions by Nehru which the CPR may have antici-
pated did not materialize, and the CPI was advised by the Chi-
nese delegation that Nehru was under such great pressure from
rightist leaders that he could not act independently.
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B. Peiping' t Lenin Anniversary Articles
In April 1960 the CCP opened a massive public offensive
against the CPSU foreign policy line through four key state-
ments tied to the anniversary of Lenin's birth: an article
in the 1 April Red Flag signed by Yu Chao-li (a pseudonym),
another in the Eia-11-5171-1 Red Flag signed by the journal's
editorial department, a People's Daily article on 22 April,
and a speech by propaganda department director Lu Ting-i the
same day. Central to the many implicit indictments leveled
at Soviet policy in these statements was the theme that the
peaceful coexistence line as enunciated by Khrushchev was
dampening the militancy of revolutionary forces throughout
the world.
The publication of these statements had an electrifying
effect on all factions of the Indian party. In Bombay, all
issues of the April Peking Review containing the first Red '
Flag article were reported quickly bought up by CPI funEfion-
Tires; the article was termed a "bombshell" for the CPI. Its
effect within the rightist-dominated CPI Maharashtra Provin-
cial Council was reportedly to weaken the position of the
leftist faction still further, since the article was recognized
to be a "thinly-veiled attack" on Khrushchev's peaceful co-
existence line. On the other hand, among the leftists in the
party Central Secretariat--Ranadive, Basavapunniah, and Bhupesh
Gupta--the article was warmly welcomed; this group was said
to have immediately decided to use the Red Flag arguments to
support efforts to modify a draft politicalresolution to be
considered by the CPI National Council in May. The influence
of this article seemed to be reflected in an article Ranadive
wrote in the 24 April New Age on the Lenin anniversary:
Ranadive put his emphasis on Lenin's call for militant and
"irreconcilable" struggle and Lenin's fight against "reform-
ist and revisionist distortion of Marxism," and failed to
mention Khrushchev's name. In contrast, an article by Ghosh
on the same subject in the same issue of New Age paid repeated
tribute to Khrushchev, to Khrushchev's visit to India, to the
spirit of Camp David and the need for negotiations.
Basavapunniah, however, seems to have reacted rather
naively to the Chinese offensive, assuming, on the basis of
the first Red Flag article, that it meant not that the CCP was
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attacking the CPSU but rather that Peiping and Moscow were
together beginning another campaign against revisionism. He
was encouraged in this view by Moscow's continued reluctance
to worsen CPI factionalism by admitting the existence of a
Moscow-Peiping struggle, despite the fact that this struggle
had now come out into the open. During the third week of
April Basavapunniah was reported to have made the rounds of
bloc embassies in New Delhi appealing for support for his
faction. On the 24th, he was said to have had a joint meet-
ing with Soviet embassy counselor Romanovskiy and Chinese
embassy first secretary Ma Mu-ming. He reportedly told these
gentlemen that he was very happy with the 1 April Red Flag
article as it would help the CPI in its fight agaiEgf revi-
sionism, and appealed for more such intervention by the So-
viet and Chinese parties in aid of his faction. According
to the version of the interview Basavapunniah later repeated,
both Romanovskiy and Ma "welcomed this suggestion," and
Romanovskiy offered innocuous reasons to explain the apparent
slight differences between the Soviet and Chinese approach
in Asia.*
Later in April, after the second Red Flag article en-
titled "Long Live Leninism" had become available to. him,
Basavapunniah noted in a private conversation the confusion
which he thought existed in the CPI on the subject of this
article; many Indian Communists, he said, had drawn the con-
clusion that there was a deep ideological controversy between
the CCP and the CPSU. Basavapunniah declared his intention
to "explain" at the forthcoming National Council meeting that
there was no controversy but only "a difference in approach
and in their attitude toward judging situations." He also
disclosed, however, his intention to distribute to the Nation-
al Council members copies of the "Long Live Leninism" article
which he had had made.
� *While it would have been quite in character for Basavapun-
niah to have invented this interview, its credibility is en-
hanced by the fact that the CPSU apparently advised Ghosh and
other non-leftist CPI leaders during this period to continue
to deny to the party the reality of Sino-Soviet differences.
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In addition to producing a galvanizing effect on the CPI
left-faction leaders through the publication of the April
documents, the CCP appears to have offered direct covert gui-
dance to those leaders during the same period. On 25 April,
Ranadive was reported to have had a half-hour meeting with
Chen Yi, who was in New Delhi as part of the Chou mission;
this was said to have been the only contact between the CPI
and the Chinese delegation. Ranadive at this meeting was
reportedly given a document containing Peiping's assessment
of the political scene in India and in Asia generally. This
document apparently reiterated CCP warnings on the growth of
"right reaction" in India and stressed that Nehru was under
constant pressure from the rightist group inside the Congress
party, and that he was not the same man he was a few years
ago and could_no longer make an independent decision. Other
information on this document is lacking.
The May CPI Meetings: The CPI Central Executive Commit-
tee met in Calcutta from 3 to 6 May, and the National Council
the following week. In the midst of their deliberations, the
party leaders were confronted by the spectacle of the 8 May
New Age weekly, which carried without comment lengthy extracts
from�Eth (a) the 22 April Lu Ting-yi Lenin Day speech in
Peiping and (b) the Kuusinen address in Moscow on the same
day providing the first major Soviet public response to the
CCP. The decision to publish both speeches was reportedly
made by New Age underlings in New Delhi who had been placed
in a quandry in the absence of the party leaders. However,
when delegates at the Calcutta meeting in their speeches cited
this and other evidence to demonstrate the existence of a
Sino-Soviet conflict, they were reportedly rebuked by Ghosh,
who characterized such insinuations as inspired propaganda.
This Ghosh line was in accord with instructions passed by
Soviet Embassy Counselor Yefimov on 4 May to Nikhil Chakravarthy,
manager of the Communist Indian Press Agency: Yefimov was
said to have declared that the theme of Sino-Soviet differ-
ences was being exploited by people who hoped to create con-
fusion in the minds of CPI members, that the IPA should in-
crease its propaganda against this confusion tactic and that
he would supply propaganda material for this purpose from
the Soviet embassy.
While in early May the CPSU and the CPI leaders obedient
to it were thus exercising remarkable ntthisrasnQt
th'
true of the left faction.
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the leftists had become much more aggressive in pushing their
point of view and much more tightly organized as a faction.
(This factional discipline was to become increasingly apparent
in subsequent provincial party meetings; thus at a meeting in
Maharashtra a month later it was reported that the leftists
had met beforehand to agree on their line and tactics and to
decide who would speak on each question.) The increase in
leftist sentiment at the Calcutta meetings was in part at-
tributable to fortuitous events which had aided the leftist
anti-Nehru attitude: Nehru's failure to yield to Chou during
the New Delhi border talks, the statements strongly critical
of China which Nehru had made at a subsequent visit to London,
and the announcement of a U.S.-Indian grain deal. But in large
measure the increase in leftist aggressiveness must be attri-
buted to the strong open and covert ideological support the
extremist CPI faction had just received from the Chinese party.
As one result, the May National Council meeting was un-
able to resolve the running dispute in the party over the line
to be taken toward Nehru and the Amritsar thesis; moveover,
the meeting was unable to accept the ambiguous but largely
rightist draft political resolution prepared by the Central
Executive Committee the month before. The question of this
resolution was put off, with opposing views circulated for
general discussion by all party members, and was not to be
decided until the party congress the following April.
Meanwhile Ghosh, who had resumed the post of general sec-
retary in February, was again given leave for three months by
the party because of illness, and was temporarily replaced by
Namboodiripad. Ghosh, who had in the past often used his ill-
nesses as cover for trips'for "treatment" to the USSR, was re-
ported planning such a trip in the near future. Other reports
indicated that the CPI was planning to send a small delegation
to the USSR inconspicuously for guidance, and Ghosh may have
undertaken such a trip in late May.
May Contact With Chinese Embassy: On 21 May, two weeks
after the National Council meeting, Ranadive sent an inter-
mediary to meet with the Counselor of the Chinese Embassy,
Yeh Cheng-chang, at the latter's request. Among other things,
Yeh was reported to have inquired as to the Indian public's
reaction to the failure of the summit meeting, and was told
that the public was blaming both the United States and Khru-
shchev. Yeh remarked that the U-2 incident had proved the
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Chinese Communist thesis that Leninism would never be outmoded
so long as imperialism remained in the world, and added that
the Chinese knew that there would never be a successful summit.
The Chinese representative asked Ranadive's intermediary for
his reaction to the "Long Live Leninism" article, and was told
that the article provided a good warning against the revision-
ist trends "developing in some Communist parties." Following
the line taken by the Chinese leaders in their discussions
with Ghosh in Peiping in October 1959, Yeh told Ranadive's
man that Nehru was the best representative the Asian national
bourgeoisie could have found to implement Ghandi's ideology,
which'Ayehsaid:was primarily designed to help check the spread
of Communism in Asia. Turning to the border issue, Yeh repeat-
ed the CCP line that a "little bunch of people" in India were
trying to exploit the Sino-Indian conflict to divert atten-
tion from the domestic economic crisis. Citing, significantly,
West Bengal as his example, he claimed that a recent Calcutta
parliamentary by-election which had been won by a Communist
had shown how little the border .issue had affected the Indian
public; in West Bengal, Yeh said, the people were "hungry for
bread" and cared for little else.
The impact of Chinese views upon the West Bengal party
hinted at by Yeh was once again demonstrated a few days after
the Yeh interview, during an informal gathering of provincial
party leaders in Calcutta. West Bengal CP Secretary Jyoti
Basu, commenting on the failure of the summit conference, was
said to have declared that events had shown that the Chinese
party had been correct all along in its line toward the United
States. Basu reportedly added that the CPI had made a great
mistake in not actively opposing Eisenhower's December visit
to India, and pointed to the good political capital being made
by the Japanese party in fighting now against a similar Eisen-
hower visit to Japan. Joly Kaul, another prominent leftist,
stated at the same meeting that he agreed that the Chinese
Communist Party had shown much political acumen and that Chi-
nese theoreticians had emerged as the real leaders of inter-
national Communism. Kaul was said to have urged that every
important West Bengal party leader be required to study care-
fully the recent writings and speeches of the Chinese leaders--
referring, presumably, to the "Long Live Leninism" documents.
It is not known whether or not this suggestion was carried out,
but it will be recalled that preparation of a similar program
to impartthe wisdom of the CCP to West Bengal cadres had been
reported in December 1959.
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In addition to the May meeting with Yeh Cheng-chang, to
Ranadive's interview with ChenYi the month before, and to the
two CCP notes to the CPI in February on the Chou visit, at
least two other communications between the Indian and Chinese
parties in the first five months of 1960 have been reported.
On 10 April, left-faction leaders were said to have furnished
to both the Soviet and Chinese embassies texts of the CPI's
predominantly rightist draft political resolution with ap-
propriate unspecified "explanations;" and in early May, Rana-
dive reportedly forwarded to Peiping and Moscow copies of a
state-by-state survey of the composition of the CPI which
the Chinese party had apparently been the first to request,
the previous year. There is thus good evidence of a steadily
improving Chinese "presence" in the central CPI apparatus as
second authoritative center to which to report and from which
to receive guidance.
C. The WFTU Clash in Peiping
The second major event in the 1960 struggle between the
CPSU and the CCP took place at the WFTU meeting in Peiping in
the first week of June, where the Chinese party broke Commun-
ist discipline by openly lobbying among both party and non-
party foreign delegates in an attempt to get WFTU to abandon
the Soviet line on disarmament, war, and the nature of imperi-
alism. This Peiping effort to impose its line on WFTU ap-
parently won varying degrees of support from a considerable
number of the delegates, but was eventually substantially de-
feated as a result of the opposition of the CPSU delegation
led by trade union chief Grishin--only, however, after a
furious battle among the delegates in which all the CPSU's
latent strength within WFTU was called into play.
There is reason to believe that the current leader of the
right-wing faction within the CPI, S. A. Dange, played an im-
portant part in this CPSU counterattack. Dange--who had as-
sailed the CPR over the border issue before party meetings
and in public during the fall of 1959, and who had reportedly
refused to go to Peiping with the CPI delegation for the October
1959 Chinese anniversary celebration--came to Peiping in June
1960 in his dual capacity as leader of the Communist-dominated
Indian trade union federation and vice-president of WFTU.
While Peiping published a highly edited version of the WFTU
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proceedings stressing those speeches (and portions of speeches)
which had supported the Chinese line, the NCNA accounts severely
cut the speeches of delegates (such as the Italians and Poles)
who are known to have backed the CPSU--and furnished no hint
of a speech by Dange at all. This is likely to have been both
because Dange was personally obnoxious to the CCP and because
there was little in his speech that could be published in a
sanitized version; it is almost certain that he did speak.
Vitbria Foa, an Italian delegate, reported in Avanti on 14
June that "the Indians" were among those delegates who had
lined up solidly with the Soviets against the Chinese, helping
to "fight with great energy...not only in the public debate,
but also in the commissions." It has also been reported that
Dange personally led a Soviet-sponsored campaign to have dele-
gates boycott a banquet given by Chou En-lai to proselytize
the CCP viewpoint; also, that Dange charged at the WFTU meet-
ing that Liu Ning-i was turning the meeting into a political
forum. (Liu, the head of the CPR trade union organization,
had warned in his 7 June public speech to the meeting that
"in the struggle to safeguard peace the international working
class movement should take care that its activities help and
do not hinder the struggle," adding that "no trade union or-
ganizations truly representing the interests of the working
class would allow so-called 'aid' by imperialism to be con-
fused with the unconditioned, sincere, and friendly assistance
of the socialist countries." This barb was probably directed
primarily at certain past Khrushchev hints that Western aid
to underdeveloped countries under some conditions could play
a useful role, but it may also have been aimed partly at Dange
and his organization. In the secret resolution passed by the
CPI in September criticizing China--which Dange was instrumen-
tal in pushing through--Liu was attacked by name for having
violated "the principle of the nonparty character of mass
organs.")
On 11 June, shortly after the close of the WFTU meeting,
Basavapunniah passed to the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi a
written report on Dange which the CCP had evidently requested
from the CPI leftists in the course of its battle with him.
The report outlined positions alleged to have been taken by
Dange at the May National Council meeting in Calcutta, protray-
ing him as having urged tolerance toward capitalist investments
in India and cooperation with the Indian bourgeoisie, as hav-
ing emphasized differences between the CPSU and the CCP on
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questions of of war and peace, and as having again condemned the
CCP stand on the border issue. While it is likely that some
of Dange's positions were deliberately distorted by Basavapun-
niah for his own purposes, the mere request for this report
was indicative of the Chinese party's attitude toward both
Dange and Basavapunniah.
The Chinese action in bringing their quarrel with the
CPSU before a forum at which non-party people were represented
not only further exacerbated that quarrel but furnished the
Soviet party with a charge against the CCP--violation of party
discipline--which could be used to some effect in appealing
for the support of the world movement. The CCP's behavior at
the WFTU meeting was denounced (without naming China) in an
article Grishin wrote in Trud after his return from Peiping,
in a Bulgarian article in August, and in Mukhitdinov's speech
in Hanoi in September. It was also assailed directly in the
CPSU circular letters attacking the CCP during the summer,
and finally at the Moscow conference in November, where Dange
was reportedly pressed into service as an eyewitness to pre-
pare a memorandum documenting the CPSU charges about the WFTU
events.
D. The Bucharest Conference and Its Aftermath
While the WFTU battle was going on in Peiping in early
June, the CPSU appears to have taken initial steps in a coun-
teroffensive against the Chinese party. According to a sub-
sequent Chinese account to CPI representatives, the CPSU sent
two letters to the CCP on 2 and 7 June attempting to secure
Chinese participation in an international meeting to discuss
out differences at the Rumanian p ar ty con ress lat e
that month.
'the CPSU
also at some time before the Bucharest meeting sent a strongly
worded letter to the CCP attacking Chinese conduct and policy
over a wide range of issues; it is possible that this message
was identical with one of the two CPSU letters of early June.
Dange, who is known to have visited Moscow in late May before
going to Peiping for the WFTU meeting, subsequently reported
that he was told by a CPSU secretariat member of the Soviet
intention to send such a letter. Judging from reports of a
version of this Soviet letter which the Chinese delegation at
Bucharest apparently distributed to the delegates there in an
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effort to fix Soviet responsibility for the deterioration of
relations between the parties, the CPSU message contained,
among other things, very sharp charges of CCP errors in foreign
policy toward India, together with complaints that Peiping's
policy was arousing suspicions of the Communist movement among
Afro-Asian bourgeois leaders and evoking doubts as to Communist
desires for peace. These reported private charges against the
CCP dovetail well with the public attacks on contemporary
"]ft-wing deviationists" made in the Soviet press at about the
same time (10 June), and correspond still more closely with
the charges made two months later in an article by the leading
Soviet oriental expert Ye. Zhukov in Pravda on 26 August.
While it seems possible that Dange was telling the truth
when he claimed to have been informed in Moscow of the Soviet
intention to send a strong letter to Peiping, it is less clear
whether any CPI leaders were told in advance of Soviet pur-
poses at the Rumanian party congress. Although Dange also
subsequently claimed that he and Ghosh had been privately told
in late May of Moscow's intention to attack the CCP before an
international gathering at Bucharest, this seems doubtful, if
only because the Bucharest events in late June showed signs
of last-minute Soviet preparation. In any case, it is certain
that theSoviet party made no attempt in June to enlist the
formal support of the CPI organization against the CCP, while
it did make such efforts to gain the backing of other parties.
According to one report, the CPSU even sent a short note to
the CPI Central Secretariat shortly after the WFTU meeting ad-
mitting that differences existed between the Chinese and So-
viet parties on the subjects of war and peaceful coexistence
but minimizing those differences and urging the Indian party
not to take them seriously. In contrast, officials of the
CPSU central committee are known to have discussed the Sino-
Soviet dispute at length on 13 June with a group of European
and African delegates to the WFTU meeting, and to have asked
at least one of these representatives to have a plenum of his
party's central committee convened after his return home to
discuss the WFTU meeting and to condemn Peiping.
This continued Soviet effort to insulate the fragile In-
dian party from the effects of the dispute apparently contri-
buted to the shock caused by the Bucharest proceedings to the
two leftists chosen to represent the CPI, Basavapunniah and
Bhupesh Gupta. In addition to attending the public sessions
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of the Rumanian party congress, where they heard Khrushchev
make a scarcely veiled attack on the Chinese leaders as
"children" who mechanically repeated what Lenin had said on
imperialism, the Indian delegates attended a series of pri-
vate interparty meetings. The first of these took place
early during the Congress, when Soviet functionaries gathered
the English-speaking foreign delegates* to show them a CPSU
letter dated 21 June, various versions of which were sub-
sequently circulated to certain parties. This letter was
distributed to the participating delegates and then taken back
immediately, with no note-taking permitted; Basavapunniah
later commented that he considered these security measures
humiliating. The 21 June letter contained a long, detailed
exposition of the Soviet version of the background of the
dispute, including complaints against Chinese conduct in the
international fronts and charges of CCP deviation from mutual-
ly agreed positions on war and peace, the nature of the pre-
sent era, and the forms of transition to socialism. According
to a reliable report, this letter also claimed that the CCP
had charged the CPSU with "abandoning class positions" by
"flirting with the national bourgeoisie," and had demanded
that the policy of giving aid to such countries as India be
revised "because the national bourgeoisie of these countries
are not capable of carrying on the struggle against imperi-
alism and are, in fact, becoming imperialists themselves."
The CPSU letter answered this purported Chinese statement
(which the CCP later claimed to be distorted) by insisting
that Soviet economic aid to these countries "objectively"
promotes peace and weakens imperialism, and by warning of
the need not to "skip stages in the revolution"--that is,
not to discard the alliance with the national bourgeoisie
before the time was ripe.
Following their perusal of this document at the private
CPSU briefing during the congress, Basavapunniah and Bhupesh
Gupta attended a closed meeting of some 50 Communist parties
held immediately after the conclusion of the congress of 25
*The CPSU organized at least one similar gathering, for
Spanish-speaking delegates, and possibly others.
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and 26 June. On the 25th, they heard representatives of some
20 parties speak in a general debate during which most of the
speakers supported the Soviet line and criticized Chinese
policies; on the same day, the Chinese representative made an
initial defense of the CCP position. During the debate on
the following day Khrushchev made a long and violent attack
on Peiping policies and on Mao personally, a significant
pontion of which concerned the Sino-Indian quarrel. Khru-
shchev accused the CCP of deliberately creating a conflict
with India in order to injure the CPSU peaceful coexistence
line,' of causing the Indian Communist party to become dis-
organized and to lose power in Kerala, and of. pushing Nehru
toward the imperialist camp. He declared that fora few
kilometers of insignificant territory China could easily have
reached a peaceful agreement with India as the USSR had in
the past with Iran (repeating more explicitly the argument
used in his November 1959 interview in New Age). Only the
fact that the Soviet Union did not suppUiT T11-6 CPR position,
he said, preserved good political relations with India and
avoided a deterioration of the situation in Aisa. This
speech was heatedly rebutted that same day by Peng Chen.
It was between the speeches of Khrushchev and Peng Chen
on the 26th that Bhupesh Gupta spoke on behalf of the CPI.
Taking his cue from the evasive stand adopted by a few other
Asian party representatives, Gupta attempted to remain vague
and neutral, attacking neither the CPSU nor the CCP. He in-
sisted that Nehru was primarily responsible for the border
conflict between China and India (contradicting Khrushchev),
and added that Nehru had done this to divert the attention
of the Indian masses from their own difficulties (echoing the
line repeatedly given to the CPI by Peiping). He made a
gesture toward Khrushchev by stating that the original posi-
tion of the CCP had not facilitated a rapid solution of the
problem, but immediately added that the Chinese party had
received a CPI delegation and had given careful consideration
to its suggestions on the border issue. Gupta concluded with
a fervent appeal for unity. The left faction of the CPI lead-
ership had thus refused to back the CPSU in a direct confronta-
tion with the CCP upon an occasion when such support was
surely desired and when, because of the secrecy of the meet-
ing, such support need not have come to the knowledge of the
CPI rank and file to harm internal party discipline.
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CCP Renews Claim to Asian Leadership: It is possible
that the line taken by Basavapunniah and Gupta at Bucharest
was influenced by the "private discussions" which they sub-
sequently disclosed having had with the Chinese delegates at
some time during the meetings. In a later conversation with
party cronies, Basavapunniah ascribed to the CCP one posi-
tion which was not known to have been overtly expressed in
any document or Chinese speech at Bucharest, and which was
likely to have been furnished him directly in these private
talks. The CCP was portrayed as believing that China must
now play the same role in Asia that the USSR had previously
played in Europe in bringing Communist regimes to power,
and that the CPR should therefore be given a free hand in
Asia.
The credibility of this report is enhanced by the fact
that similar statements had been reported by different sources
as having been made in Peiping to Ghosh in October 1959 and
to an Italian party delegation the previous April. Nor was
Basavapunniah's June 1960 claim to be the last such item of
evidence. in October 1960
stated that one of the
main causes Of the dispute was the political attitude of
China and the USSR toward Southeast Asia, and that the CPR (b)(1)
contended that as an Asian country she should have a free (b)(3)
hand in that area and she refused to be criticized about her
policies there. Similarly, among the positions reportedly
attributed to the CCP in a special CPSU memorandum on the
dispute discussed at a Polish party plenum in September was
the contention that the center for African and Asian parties
should be in China, just as the center for the European parties
is in Moscow. While it no doubt suited the polemical pur-
pose of the CPSU to stress this as evidence of the Chinese
promotion of disunity, it nevertheless is probable that the
CCP leadership has in fact long considered itself the logical
leader of the Asian parties and that it took steps to advance
this notion among those parties--including the CPI--as Sino-
Soviet relations worsened in 1959 and 1960.
Interview With Suslov: Following the Bucharest meetings
Basavapunniah and Bhupesh Gupta proceeded to Moscow, where
they remained for some time in late June and early July. The
two CPI leftists had originally planned to seek support in
Moscow for their faction against the position of Ghosh and
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Dange, but it is unlikely that they had much success in this
effort after their performance in Bucharest. In a reported
conversation with Suslov, however, they were given further
Soviet guidance on Nehru which did not substantially alter
the CPSU line. Suslov was said to have declared that the
Indian bourgeoisie was the greatest bargainer between East
and West, and that Nehru was coming under greater and greater
rightist pressure to move him toward the right and the West,
but that the USSR could not ignore him, and would in fact
continue to support him and wait for an opportunity to draw
him toward the socialist camp. Suslov added that Nehru was
establishing a "strong and stable capitalist base" in India
which would probably outweigh the public sector of the In-
dian economy. He advised the CPI to formulate a "clear line"
on Nehru on the basis of an examination of the Indian internal
situation, and to adopt a policy toward Nehru independent of
the USSR policy toward him. This is the ambiguous and some-
what hypocritical advice which Soviet leaders had been giving
the CPI for a number of years--ever since the USSR's hostile
posture toward the Indian government was abandoned, in fact--
and ignored the fact that the CPI could not successfully take
a public stand on Nehru that was seriously discordant with
the views on Nehru publicly expressed by the Soviet Union.
In line with his own inclinations, Basavapunniah subsequently
interpreted Suslov's remarks as meaning that-the CPI should
consistently oppose Nehru, although it is clear from Basavapun-
niah's own account that Suslov was at great pains to avoid
saying this.
CPI Meetings: Basavapunniah and Bhupesh Gupta had also
originally intended to visit Peiping after Moscow if they
had sufficient time, but it is not known whether they did so.
At any rate, it was not until 13 July that they returned to
India, and it was not until several weeks after that that they
reported to the party on the Bucharest events of late June.
In the meantime, Basavapunniah is believed to have consulted
with Sundarayya, his mentor in Andhra who is probably the most
extremist of all the important CPI leaders, on the line the
left faction should take at the forthcoming party meetings.
From 3 to 10 August, Gupta and Basavapunniah reported on Bucha-
rest to the Central Secretariat, and from 10 to 17 August, to
the Central Executive Committee. Certain portions of the
written report, however, were considered too sensitive for
presentation to the Central Executive Committee: for example,
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the more polemical portions of Khrushchev's closed-session
speech, and the exchanges between him and Peng Chen. Never-
theless, according to Basavapunniah, at least one right-wing
CEC member rebuked him and Gupta for not having supported
the CPSU at Bucharest, and the CEC split down the middle in
its discussion of the CPSU-CCP differences, with Ghosh and
the rightists supporting the CPSU, Namboodiripad and Ranadive
attempting to remain neutral, and most of the CPI's principal
leftists--including Basavapunniah, Gupta, Basu, Sundarayya,
Surjit, Bora, and Konar--supporting the Chinese position.
The CEC decided that its next meeting in early September would
discuss the national and international situation thoroughly
and prepare a resolution for the National Council.
Despite the secretariat's attempt to keep the most sensi-
tive facts about the Bucharest encounter from disseminating
through the lower echelons of the party, the nature of the
Sino-Soviet conflict seems to have become common knowledge
throughout the CPI in July and August, due largely to the ef-
forts of the right-faction leaders, who wished to use the
dispute as a weapon with which to discredit and isolate the
leftist leaders identified with the CCP in the eyes of the
party rank-and-file for whom the CPSU retained primary authority.
Conversely, the leftist faction had a vested interest in try-
ing to suppress knowledge of the dispute. This proved impos-
sible not merely because the non-Communist Indian press pub-
lished those details of the conflict known to the Western pub-
lic, but also, as the leftists subsequently charged, because
rightist leaders such as Dange leaked party information about
Bucharest to bourgeois organs such as Link. Ever since the
WFTU meeting, it was said, Dange had attempted to convey to
his followers in the CPI a strong anti-CCP bias, supposedly
assuring them that the Chinese party leadership would be over-
thrown by Khrushchev. After Bucharest, Ghosh was said to have
also conducted a whispering campaign within the party, saying
that Khrushchev had instructed him to expose the Trotskyite
tendency of the Chinese party. At a Maharashtra provincial
party meeting on 20 August, Dange thus referred openly to the
Bucharest events, defending the CPSU and characterizing the
Chinese position on the border issue as "totally wrong;" he
defended his frankness as justified because the party members
had read it. all in the newspapers anyway.
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The July Blitz Articles: This rightist faction effort
to keep the CPI rank-and-file informed was given involuntary
assistance by the simultaneous CPSU efforts to reap some
subsidiary benefit from its troubles with the CCP by impress-
ing on the Indian public and government that the USSR had
been defending peace and friendship with India against the
views of the warlike and hostile Chinese. On 30 July, Blitz
published an unsigned article on the general theme, "Is China
Going Trotskyite?" This article referred, among other things,
to details of the Sino-Soviet battle at the WFTU conference;
to statements made in Khrushchev's speech to the secret meet-
ing at Bucharest; to the manner in which the Chinese press
had obscured and distorted Khrushchev's Bucharest "speeches;"
to the details of a recent CPSU Central Committee resolution
attacking narrow nationalism and leftwing sectarianism; to
recent East German public rejection of the Chinese communes;
and to a recent resolution passed by the Trotskyite Fourth
International endorsing the Chinese line as the correct one.
A second long article, signed by Blitz's editor, Karanjia,
charged the Chinese with "gloating" over the failure of the
summit conference, said that Peiping had been responsible for
the 1959 abortive move against Kassim by the Iraqi CP; and
generally depicted Khrushchev and Nehru as twin angels of
peace fighting against the dogmatist, Trotskyite alliance of
Mao and Eisenhower.
(b)(3)
Despite the fact that the Soviet ambassador later denied
to CPI leftists having planted this material in Blitz to at-
tack the Chinese, official told the CPI (W(1)
that he had definite information that this was so, and Karanjia (b)(3)
himself has reported that the material had been sent to him
by "leaders of the Soviet faction in the CPI Central Secretariat"
at the behest of the Soviet embassy. Whether or not the
articles were channeled to Blitz through Ghosh, the details
and wide range of information cluded seem likely to have
originated in the CPSU. This Soviet effort to impress Nehru
was successful: Karanjia subsequently claimed that Nehru
had talked to him about the article and had written Khrushchev
for more data on the Bucharest clash; presumably Khrushchev
responded, since three months later Nehru told a cabinet meet-
ing that he had now come to know that at the Bucharest meet-
ing the Soviets had criticized the Chinese for their action
in Tibet and for their attitude toward India on the border
problem.
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Leftist Appeal to China for Revolutionary Aid: At about
the same time that this was going on, the most militant of
the CPI leaders were for the first time explicitly turning
to the Chinese party and away from reliance on the Soviet party
in their plans for a future revolution. In early August
these leaders are believed to have passed to the CCP written
proposals asking CCP collaboration in Indian underground
organization work aiming at eventual revolution, collabora-
tion whin would be expanded after the leftists had taken con-
trol of the CPI at next year's party congress, as they hoped
to do. It was explained that this request was addressed to
the Chinese because they "understand the problems of the mili-
tant wing of the CPI," and because the CPR and not USSR, has
a border with India, so that only China could provide the
supplies and arms necessary for an Indian revolution. A week
later the originators of this proposal were informed that it
had been forwarded to Peiping, that it was expected that Pei-
ping would approve the proposal and that active collaboration
would probably begin in a few months:
In the light of this left-faction initiative, the CPSU
appears to have acted naively in consenting to one more joint
effort with Peiping to minimize the impact of the Sino-Soviet
dispute upon the CPI. On 15 August Ghosh and Sundarayya,
representing the CPI
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E. The CPSU's August Letter and its Consequences
In the third week of August, a few days after the joint
Sino-Soviet meeting with Ghosh and Sundarayya, the CPI receiv-
ed from the Soviet Embassy a lengthy CPSU letter informing
the Indian party directly for the first time of Moseoles:Agriev-
ances against Peiping. This letter was said to reiterate
points made in Khrushchev's speech in Bucharest and in the
21 June circular letter distributed there; it was also said
to be based upon material provided by the July 1960 plenum
of the CPSU Central Committee, including the speech which
Khrushchev is known to have delivered at that plenum but which
was never published, a sanitized version of
this letter the letter ap-
pears to have been circulated widely among free world parties,
and some details of it are known. Among other things, the
CPSU circular message again emphasized the need to win the
uncommitted countries to the side of the bloc through pursuance
of a "peaceful coexistence" policy coupled with generous
economic help. The letter denied the Chinese charge that the
CPSU was thereby "strengthening reactionary regimes,"* accused
the CCP of being "obsessed" with the "so-called strength of
reaction" in the non-Communist world, and declared that Pei-
ping, by magnifying "minor issues"--for example, with India--
had hurt the Communist cause and impeded the work of local
Communist parties. The letter added that these and the other
charges it leveled at the Chinese were being provided to give
world Communist leaders a basis for their discussions so that
these matters could be resolved at a scheduled meeting in Mos-
cow in November.
*Khrushchev in August and September is known to have reite-
rated several times--particularly to the East European parties--
that the CCP had opposed the granting of economic aid to bour-
geois nationalist governments of underdeveloped countries, and
that Peiping was particularly incensed by Soviet assistance
to such men as Nehru and Nasser, assistance which Peiping claim-
ed was maintaining their regimes in power and hindering the
rise of the local Communist parties. This attitude had been
widespread in the CPI in 1954 and 1955 at the onset of the
new Soviet policy of assisting Indian industrialization.
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-(b)(3)
This letter was used by the rightist faction to force
the CPI into a direct attack on the Chinese par*. At a
Central Executive Committee meeting held from 4 to 7 September,
the rightists forced through by a small majority a secret
resolution condemning China which had been written by Ghosh
in consultation with Dange. An alternative leftist draft by
Basavapunniah was rejected. All the leftists on the CC lined
up in opposition to Ohosh's resolution; Dange afterward boasted
that he had forced Ranadive--who would have preferred to ab-
stain and to avoid taking a position opposing the CPSU--to
commit himself and vote against the resolution. �
This September secret resolution backed-the Soviet line
on the possibility of averting war, on the significance of the
20th CPSU Congress, on the increasing bloc deterence of im-
perialist aggression and the dogmatism of those who did not
think imperialism was so deterred, on the importance of the
struggle for disarmament, on the significance for the bloc of
the "peace zone" and of India above all, and on the increasing
possibilities for a peaceful transition to socialism in a
number of countries. The resolution blamed the Indian govern-
ment for giving succor to the Dalai Lama, but condemned the
CPR for having described Kalimpong as the command center of
the Tibetan revolt, for having said the Dalai Lama was brought
to India under duress, and for having used the phrase "Indian
expansionism." Peiping was accused of having made a mistaken
assessment of the Indian situation "without any effort to as-
certain the views of the Communist Party of India." The USSR,
on the other hand, was said to have taken a correct stand on
the border dispute as a "conflict between two countries of
the peace camp." Much detail was provided on the harmful ef-
fect the Chinese actions had had on the CPI. It was recognized
that there had been a change for the better in Peiping's line
alter the October 1959 visit of the CPI delegation, but it was
said that this had happened too late. The CCP errors were said
to have been the result of a new and mistaken assessment of
the role of the national bourgeoisie of India. The CPI reaf-
firmed its disagreement with this assessment, and its belief
in peaceful transition to socialism as the basis of Indian
party policy. Finally, the resolution expressed concern over
the open discussion of Sino-Soviet divergencies in the bloc
press, which, it said, "has done damage to the Communist move-
ment;" along the same line, it criticized the actions of Liu
Ning-i at the WFTU meeting in bringing party disputes openly
before non-party bodies.
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Along with this secret resolution, the Central Executive
Committee adopted a public resolution omitting any mention of
China but otherwise similarly supporting Soviet positions on
the averting of war, on policy toward India, on the non-violent
transition to socialism, and on the "creative" application, of
Marxism-Leninism truths. This resolution explicitly "reaf-
firmed" the positive assessment of the Indian Government's
foreign policy made by the Amritsar and Palghat party congresses.
The open resolution was. promptly summarized by TASS on 8
September and published in Pravda two days later.
The secret CEC resolution had been intended as the Indian
party's written contribution to the deliberations of a multi-
party international editorial commission (on which the CPI
was represented) which was to meet in Moscow in October':to at-
tempt to reconcile CPSU-CCP differences. Against the strenuous
opposition of the.CP1 leftists, the CEC also agreed to have
the document circulated to members of the CPI National Council
and to the various Provincial Committees of the party. Below
that level, the resolution was not to be shown but was to be
described orally to the rank-and-file with suitable omissions.
Dange's forces, however, were not content with this, and appear
to have been responsible for the subsequent leak of the gist
of the resolution to the mass-circulation Indian weekly Link--
an action which occasioned further bitter reciiminationIRG
the leftists.
The September resolution evoked, in fact, a violent and
unique reaction in the left-faction strongholds. On 7 October,
Ranadive was reported to have instructed an intermediary to
inform the Chinese Embassy that this resolution. had already
been formally opposed by the.provincial parties of West Bengal,
the Punjab, and Tamilnad. In fact, the West Bengal and Punjab
organizations had not yet done this, and there is no evidence
that the Tamilnad party ever did so. However, certain details
which.Ranadive told the Chinese embassy had been placed in these
leftist resolutions were eventually found in the secret.resolu-
tions subsequently passed by both West Bengal and the Punjab,
suggesting that a coordinated attack on the controversial CEC
resolution may have been organized in advance from the center.
On 21 October the West Bengal party passed three resolu-
tions containing the only explicit attacks on the CPSU and on
Khrushchev personally known with certainty to have been made
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by any Communist party organization in the world during the
1960 Sino-Soviet struggle. Although these resolutions were
supposed to be secret, at least one of them was promptly
leaked into the Indian bourgeois press, presumably in answer
to the earlier rightist-inspired leaks.
The first West Bengal resolution, on questions of the
international Communist movement, stressed the provision of
the 1957 Moscow Declaration that revisionism is the main
danger facing the movement, and found the views of the CPSU
difficult to reconcile with this. The 20th and 21st CPSU
Congresses and the statements of CPSU leaders were criticized
for ignoring the danger of revisionism. Khrushchev and other
Soviet leaders were attacked for having used language about
the imperialist leaders that had created confusion and illu-
sions among the people. The Chinese party was defended as
having always supported peaceful negotiations, although mild
regret was expressed that some of the recent CCP writings
could create the impression that the Chinese did not fully
appreciate the significance of such negotiations. The CCP
was lavishly praised for the active struggle it had carried
on regarding Algeria and colonialism generally; "in this
respect," said the West Bengal party, "the position of the
CPSU was not quite strong until recently." Many writings and
statements of CPSU leaders during the past year were said to
have failed to stress properly the importance of mass strug-
gles against imperialism, creating a "wrong understanding" in
other parties, particularly in the CPI. In particular, the
"writings, statements and speeches of CPSU comrades" were at-
tacked for having praised the results of the domestic policies
of the government of India "in such a way that difficulties
were created in the way of the development of class struggle
in our country." The West Bengal party also could not under-
stand why news of the heroic struggle it was carrying out
against the anti-people policies of the Indian government was
never published in the Soviet press. The resolution implied
that the CPSU, through its stress on peaceful transition to
socialism, was leading the CPI to rely solely on parliamentary
elections,"which is a reformist conception." The resolution
ended by terming both the CPSU and the CCP "the most mature,
experienced, and leading parties," and expressed the hope that
the CPSU would fulfill its responsibilities as leader "in a
more inspiring way."
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The second West Bengal resolution denounced the CEC action
itself as "wrong and harmful," because the CEC had spoken out
without having "acquainted itself with the views of the CCP."
The CEC was accused of having acted solely on the basis of So-
viet accusations, plus the evidence of "one or two Red Flag
articles and one or two speeches," while "convenienTTY -a-Tic-Tid-
ing to take into account a number of articles and speeches of
the Soviet leaders and some documents of the CPSU in the con-
text of which the Red Flag articles were written"--that is,
the Soviet provocafT6n-g�TwHich had obliged Peiping to speak
out. This resolution demanded that the Indian party take
particular care in its actions "because the divergencies of
opinion were primarily between two great Communist parties of
the world, both of whom have rich revolutionary experience,
have successfully applied Marxism-Leninism to concrete condi-
tions and have led great revolutions, and both of whom exert
great influence On the course of the world revolutionary move-
ment." (Emphasis supplied.)*
The third West Bengal resolution expressed "serious
anxiety and uneasiness" over the reported news of the with-
drawal of Soviet technicians from China and the closing of
two weeklies in Moscow and Peiping, but did not assign blame
to either party for these events.
The Punjab resolutions, passed on 24 October, echoed
most of the West Bengal strictures against the CEC resolution
and the revisionist errors of the CPI leadership, but did not
explicitly attack the CPSU. The resolutions of both provin-
cial organizations traced the growth of revisionist influences
in the CPI in some detail, touching on the pernicious effects
of deStalinization, the 1956 New Times Rubinstein article, the
reactions to the Hungarian revolution and the Nagy execution,
the Kerala parliamentary experiment, and the CPI's handling
of Eisenhower's 1959 visit.
*A resolution very similar to this is known to have been
placed before a meeting of the Andhra party in November by
forces led by the local left-faction leader Sundarayya; but
it was defeated.
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It is characteristic of the present relationship of the
CPSU to the Indian party that the authors of these resolu-
tions--and particularly of the West Bengal direct attack on
the CPSU--to this day are not known to have been reprimanded
or attacked by either the CPSU or the central CPI organs, but
on the contrary have been courted by the CPSU and have re-
mained in positions of authority within their provincial
organizations.
F. The Hanoi Confrontation and the CCWs September Letter
There is reason to believe that the Punjab and West Ben-
gal resolutions were prepared under the influence of guidance
which the leftist faction received from the Chinese party
shortly after the Third Vietnamese Party Congress of 5-15
September. The CPI was represented at this Hanoi Congress
by one man from each wing of the party: K. Damodaran, a
prominent Kerala rightist who had rebuked Basavapunniah and
Gupta at the August, CEC meeting for not having supported the
CPSU at Bucharest; and Hare7K�ishna_Konar,one-OrAhe--moSt
militant of the West Bengal leaders.
The Hanoi Congress was the apparent scene of intensive
lobbying among the Soviets, Chinese, and Vietnamese for the
support of the Vietnamese party; it was there also that So-
viet delegate Mukhitdinov made a public condemnation of "dog-
matists" who wanted to "force on the other side" their er-
roneous ideas. There is no evidence that the two Indian
delegates had any part in these negotiations, but it is
known that Konar and Damodaran did have at least one private
joint meeting with Soviet representatives during the congress.
At this meeting, Konar asked the Soviets a series of hostile
questions, covering points later touched on in the West Bengal
attack on the CPSU: he alluded to the harmful nature of Khru-
shchev's remark at the 20th CPSU Congress on the improvement
in Indian living conditions, he asked why there had been no
coverage of the Indian strikes and struggles in the Soviet
press, and he called attention to the confusion which had been
created by the Soviet action in calling Eisenhower a man of
peace, thereby "dulling the people's vigilance." The Soviets
replied to these points in a notably defensive manner, deny-
ing that they had dulled anyone's vigilance, denying that
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Khrushchev's 20th Congress remark had been harmful, and promis-
ing to improve Soviet press coverage of the Indian party's
anti-government struggles (a promise never kept). In their
turn, the Soviet representatives asked Konar and Damodaran
for their views on the Bucharest events; Damodaran replied in
support of the Soviet line, while Konar reportedly answered
"as at the /"August7 CEC meeting"--that is, in agreement with
the CCP. �
(b)(3)
At one point during the congress, Damodaran and Konar
appear to have also had an extended discussion of the Sino-
Indian border question with the Chinese delegation, during
which Damodaran reportedly asked why Peiping had not been
willing to give up land to settle the question as the Soviets
had done in the 1920s in the case of Turkey and Iran (repeat-
ing a point made in the August CPSU letter to the CPI). Fol-
lowing the congress, Li Fu-chun, the chief CCP delegate, ac-
companied the two CPI representatives to Peiping, where they
had discussions with Chou En-lai.* Chou evidently gave most
of his attention to the leftist Konar, and relatively little
time to Damodaran, who subsequently complained of the cold
treatment he had received in Peiping. During one joint meet-
ing with both Konar and Damodaran, however, Chou is said to
have taunted them with the news of the anti-Chinese September
Central Executive Committee resolution (which had reportedly
been passed to the CPR Consul General in Calcutta by West
Bengal leaders). the Chinese (W(1)
leaders at this meeting furiously attacked the resolution, (b)(3)
saying that the Indian party had wronglyaassessed the implica-
tions of the Sino-Soviet dispute and had shown that it harbored
*The Vietnamese Party Congress was not the only scene of
Chinese and Soviet proselytizing of Indian party representa-
tives abroad in September. At about the time that Konar and
Damodaran were flying from Hanoi to Peiping, the head of the
All-India Youth Federation (a CPI front) at a World Youth
Forum meeting in Moscow was being buttonholed by representa-
tives of the All-China Youth Federation and the Soviet Komsomol
in turn and harrangued with the two parties' opposing argu-
ments on disarmament and war.
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illusions about Nehru. The Chinese told Konar and Damodaran
that they had explained to Ghosh the reasons for their actions
in the border dispute and therefore did not know why he had
condemned them in the CEC resolution; they added that they
knew, however, that this resolution had not been unanimous.
The CCP also appears to have given Konar a separate
lengthy briefing which reiterated the overall Chinese posi-
tion on points in dispute with the CPSU. Judging from the
oral report which Konar subsequently gave to a West Bengal
party meeting in Calcutta, this briefing actually constituted
a summary of a letter which the CCP had sent to the CPSU on
10 September and was to present to the international editorial
commission in Moscow in October, defending Chinese conduct
against charges made in the 21 June CPSU letter and attacking
Soviet positions, on war, peaceful transition, and policy to-
ward the national bourgeoisie. According to the version of
this CCP letter eventually presented to the international
commission, Peiping inter alia denied that it had discarded
a policy of seeking to conciliate the neutral countries of
Asia and Africa, and denied that it had called the national
bourgeoisie of these countries "imperialist." The CCP heavily
emphasized, however, the contradictory and unreliable nature
of the national bourgeoisie, particularly in India, where the
bourgeoisie "shows an increasing internal anti-democratic
tendency and is gradually retreating from its external anti-
imperialist position," although it still retains a neutral
posture. It was for this reason, said the Chinese party,
"that the incidents with China occurred and that India resist-
ed reaching an accord." But the CPSU, said Peiping, supported
the Indian bourgeoisie; although Moscow appeared to agree
with the Chinese policy of "unity and struggle" toward them,
yet the CPSU "was opposed to the fight which we waged against
the governing classes of India when they attacked us."
Although it has been reported that Konar had several
private meetings with the CCP delegation in Hanoi, during
which he may have been given some of this information, it
seems probable that his principal briefing took place during
his lengthy interview with Chou in Peiping. According to one
report, it was in Chou's presence that Li Fu-chun read out to
Konar excerpts from the 10 September letter. At the same
time, the CCP reportedly told Konar that the full 150-page
letter would eventually be sent to the CPI--in Calcutta, and
only thereafter to New Delhi; the Chinese were said to be
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,determined to ensure that the letter came first into friendly
left-faction hands in West Bengal. There is no evidence, how-
ever, as to whether or not this promised full text was ever
received. On the other hand, the CPI leftists are believed
to have made extensive use of the summary of the letter which
Konar had obtained. Upon returning to India, Konar reported
on what he had been told to the Central Secretariat in late
September, and then to the Calcutta party organization on 5
October. Konar also seems to have circulated a document para-
phrasing the CCP letter within the West Bengal party, among
the leftists in the Central Secretariat, and possibly else-
where within the CPI; subsequently, the CPI rightists made
an abortive attempt to have him censured for this activity.
There is little doubt that the West Bengal anti-Soviet resolu-
tions of 21 October were strongly influenced by the Peiping
letter, and that it was to this Chinese answer which the West
Bengal party was alluding when it said that the Central Execu-
tive Committee should have waited to "acquaint itself with
the views of the CCP."
G. The Moscow Conference (November)
The Indian party delegation which attended the 81-party
conference in Moscow in November 1960 was a balanced one, in-
cluding, in addition to Ghosh, Dange, representing the right
wing, Namboodiripad afid Ramarurthi, representing the center,
and Bhupesh Gupta, representing the leftists. The delegation
was reportedly organized in this way because the CPSU, in sub-
mitting its formal invitation to the CPI to send five delegates,
had recommended that they include persons who had opposed the
September CEC resolution as well as some who had supported it.
This action by the Soviet party--which is consistent with the
subsequent attitude of the CPSU, and particularly with the
conduct of Suslov at the CPI congress the following April--
demonstrated that Moscow had no intention of abandoning
authority over the CPI leftists to Peiping and was determined
to try to prevent the further polarization of the Indian party
along pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese lines. While this Soviet
policy, coupled with the adoption of a line slightly more cri-
tical of Nehru, was eventually to improve the CPSU position
among some of the CPI leftists and fora time prevent further
anti-Soviet outbreaks such as the October 1960 West Bengal
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resolution, the long-run objective has not to date been
achieved: the ideological division of the party has per-
sisted and Chinese prestige within sections of the party
has continued to be very strong.
The first effect of this Soviet effort to regain ascedancy
over the leftists was to inhibit Ghosh somewhat in his sup-
port for the CPSU at the Moscow meetings. Both in the editorial
commission meetings in October (which prepared a draft of the
Moscow Statement) and the full 81-party meetings in November
(which fought over the draft and finally adopted the Statement)
Ghosh made vigorous indictments of the CPR's policy toward In-
dia during the Tibetan revolt and the growth of the border dis-
pute, along the lines of the September CPI resolution. In so
doing Ghosh backed the CPSU in what was one of the principal
points at issue in the Moscow debates between Teng Hsiao-ping
and the Soviet spokesmen: Communist policy toward Nehru and
other leaders of the national bourgeoisie. In certain other
respects, however, Ghosh showed a tendency to hedge. He
made several gestures calculated to propitiate admirers of
Peiping, and, most notably, did not support the CPSU on the
central question at stake in the conference--the question of
authority within the international movement, and whether or
not a condemnation of "factional activity" should be included
in the Statement -(*hich wouldrimply Chinese acceptance of the
rule of the Soviet majority). In the end, the Soviets were
forced to yield to Peiping on this point rather than accept
an open split in the world movement, and the final document
did not condemn factional activity.
According to an Italian party report on the conference
regarded as probably true, the Indian delegates, while sup-
porting most elements of the Soviet line, made it known that
they would not sign the document unless the Chinese agreed
to it, because the CPI would otherwise have split into pro-
Soviet and pro-Chinese segments. It is this concern to secure
the continued adherence of the CPI leftists which seems to
have restrained Ghosh's conduct. Bhupesh Gupta, the principal
leftist on the Indian delegation, had reportedly warned before
leaving India that he would not support the anti-Chinese line
of the September CPI resolution and might openly back Peiping;
yet after the conference, CPI spokesmen repeatedly emphasized
to party meetings that Ghosh's Moscow speech had been pre-
viously endorsed by all members of the CPI delegation. It is
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possible that the CPI delegation succeeded in persuading Gupta
not to object to Ghosh's line on the border issue on condition
that Ghodh deolined to support the CPSU on the question of
factionalism and discipline, a more vital matter both tb the
CCP and to its Indian adherents.
Private Meetings with CPSU and CCP: At the close of the
Moscow conference, the Indian delegation had several private
conversations with the Soviet leaders, while Gupta also appears
to have conferred with the CCP representatives, to whom he was
introduced by Peng Chen, whom he had met at Bucharest. Dange
also subsequently claimed that there had been a separate three-
way meeting of the CPI, CPSU, and CCP, at whichlhe and an un-
named Chinese delegate had a heated verbal exchange, calling
each other "revisionist" and "adventurist." According to
Dange, at this meeting the CCP finally agreed that it would
not create any more incidents on the Indian border before the
1962 elections, to avoid further injury to the CPI. While
there is nothing improbable in this--and while such a Chinese
commitment would be consistent with another commitment which
Peiping is reported to have made to Khrushchev to give him a
period of grace of undetermined length to test the intentions
of the new American administration--Dange's claim has not been
confirmed, and has been denied by certain of the CPI leftists.
The entire CPI delegation seems to have conferred with
Suslov at the beginning of December, while Ghosh alone had
another interview with Suslov and Ponomarev on the 9th, after
the rest of the Indian delegation had gone home. Only two
points emerge with any clarity from these private conferences.
First, the Soviets again declined to furnish the CPI with a
clear-cut line to take toward Nehru, again unhelpfully tell-
ing the Indian party to work out its own policy without regard
to the public Soviet attitude toward the Prime Minister.
Secondly, it seems to have been agreed between the So-
viets and the Indian leaders that a peaceful transition to
power would not be possible in India without the creation of
an armed revolutionary capability as a second string to the
party's bows to be held in reserve. The CPSU had been press-
ing the CPI off and on for several years to build up such a
subsidiary underground mechanism, and had sometimes encoun.:,
terdiconsiderable resistance to this suggestion from the ad-
herents of the parliamentary line, including Ghosh--resist-
ance about which the Indian militants and Peiping had both
bitterly complained. Following the National Council meeting
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in Meerut in November 1959, at a time when the CPI was seriously
expecting to be outlawed as a result of the Chinese border
crisis, the party had reportedly decided to reactivate its un-
derground apparatus. Organizational work along this line had
apparently beenIsuspended in the middle of 1960, however, as
a result of insecurity resulting from factional activity as-
sociated with the Sino-Soviet dispute. (In answer to a ques-
tion from a foreign Communist delegate at the Vietnamese Party
Congress in September, Konar had reportedly declared that the
CPI did not then have an underground organization functioning
on an all-India scale, but that such an organization existed
in West Bengal which could give shelter to party members in
times of crisis.)
The renewed Soviet effort in Moscow in December to have
the Indian party return to building an underground organiza-
tion was probably the result of three factors: first, a So-
viet estimatethat a possibility existed that right-wing mili-
tary dictatorship could evolve in India after Nehru's death;
second, the adoption of a somewhat more militant CPSU line
than heretofore toward the national liberation movement in
general (although this line was still considerably more cautious
than that of Peiping); and third, likely CPSU awareness that
the CPI leftists had begun to bypass Moscow in appealing to
Peiping for help in building an underground organization.
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VI. Tlit INDIAN PARTY APPROACHES A SPLIT: 1961
The year 1960 ended with the left faction of the CPI con-
tinuing to report to the Chinese party and to receive guidance
from it, while gathering strength throughout India for an as-
sault on the central party machinery in 1961. There was a
gradual increase in leftist strength and assertiveness through-
out the Indian party before the party congress met in April
1961, and Suslov, the CPSU delegate to that congress, was ob-
liged to counsel Ghosh to make substantial concessions to the
leftists on the wording of the party's political resolutiOh
to preserve Ghosh in office as general secretary and to pre-
vent a threatened open split in the party. There is good evi-
dence, nevertheless, that the CPSU and Ghosh themselves favor-
ed a balanced line including both support and criticism of as-
pects of Nehru's foreign and domestic policies, and a long-
term strategy of building a national democratic front through
cooperation with "progressive" Congress Party leaders to
achieve limited non-socialist reforms as a prelude to the
gradual Communist assumption of power. Suslov did not have
to contend with direct Chinese competition at the CPI Congress,
the prospective CCP representatives having been ordered to
leave India beforehand by the New Delhi government.
While the new National Council elected by the Congress
had a reduced rightist majority--because of the leftists'
threat to break up the party unless their wishes were acceded
to--the rightists subsequently used this National Council
majority to reverse leftist control of the Central Executive
Committee and the Central Secretariat, the two top party or-
gans charged with running the party. When Ghosh led a balanc-
ed CPI delegation to the 22nd CPSU Congress in October, how-
ever, even moderates who were normally staunch CPSU supporters
were shaken by the open attacks there on the Albanian leaders
and the renewed assault on Stalin. Ghosh indicated his reser-
vatiOns about Khrushchev's course of action by declining to
attack Albania in his speech to the CPSU Congress--like a num-
ber of other normally pro-CPSU foreign delegates--although two
months later, again like the leaders of some other parties,
he belatedly added his mild disapproval of the Albanians.
Greater turmoil resulted within the CPI as a consequence of
this CPSU Congress than had ever existed before, both because
of the new CPSU offensive against Albania and the CCP and
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because of the attacks on Stalin and the displacement of Stalin's
body. There were widespread attacks on Moscow and Khrushchev
over these actions within all factions of the CPI, and at least
one provincial party organization--that of Andhra Pradesh--passed
a resolution condemning the CPSU, the second such resolution to
be passed within the CPI in little more than a year. Ghosh even-
tually published an article publicly regretting the manner in
which Moscow had again embarked on deStalinization, and declar-
ing that the CPSU had forfeited its claim to infallibility.
These internal difficulties of the CPI were greatly aug-
mented by the simultaneous rekindling of the Sino-Indian bor-
der dispute, a statement by Ghosh strongly attacking the CPR
and a subsequent People's Daily editorial condemning both Nehru
and Ghosh. At the close of 1961, both leftist and rightist CPI
leaders were warning of the likelihood of an open split in the
Indian party after the elections of February 1962. While it
seemed likely that the CPSU would make every effort again to
prevent such a split, Moscow's chances of success in this ef-
fort were dependent on such factors as the future course of
Sino-Soviet relations, the fortunes of the "peaceful coexist-
ence" line, and the number of concessions Moscow was willing
to make again to the CPI leftists. The Soviet problem was
further complicated by the death of Ghosh in Jaunary 1962, and
the lack of a suitable successor combining loyalty to the CPSU
with acceptability to both wings of the Indian party.
A. Left-Faction Resurgence Before the April Congress
The long and defiant struggle of the Chinese party against
the CPSU in Moscow before the eyes of the entire movement, the
near-standoff between Chinese and Soviet positions in the final
Statement of the Moscow Conference, the Soviet surrender to Pei-
ping on the key issue of whether to condemn factionalism in the
Statement, and above all, the fact that both the CCP and the In-
dian party leftists stood unpunished and unchastened after their
direct attacks on the CPSU--all this had the effect of encourag-
ing the militant wing of the CPI, of emboldening these leftists
in their efforts to strengthen their position throughout the
party in preparation for the capture of control of the party at
the coming party congress.
The most immediate sign of this emboldened leftist atti-
tude was found in the blatantly anti-Khrushchev and anti-CPSU
whispering campaign about the Moscow conference which was con-
ducted within the party shortly after the conference by the
leftists in the party center--Basavapunniah, Bhupesh Gupta,
and particularly Ranadive. Disseminated in this way were the
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assertions that the CCP had been supported against Moscow
by all the Asian parties except India, by many Latin American
parties, and by Czechoslovakia as well as Albania; that the
Soviets had replied in a weak and unsatisfactory way to Teng
Hsiao-ping's powerful criticisms of Khrushchev and his policies,
and that the CPSU had eventually been forced to acknowledge
that it had made major mistakes; that the Soviets had specifii,-
caly admitted that their criticism of China on the border is-
sue had been wrong; that Moscow had agreed to support whatever
policy the CPR adopted in the future on the border dispute;
that Peiping had been given authority over all the Asian
parties, and particularly over the CPI,* and that Suslov had
sternly overcome Ghosh's objections to this; and finally,
that Moscow had agreed to supply Peiping with.the.technical
knowledge and all the assistance needed for the production
of atomic weapons. It is virtually certain that all of these
statements were false; but what was more significant was the
openly anti-Soviet attitude which the leftists now were will-
ing to convey through such fabrications.
This defiant leftist attitude was also demonstrated At
CPI provincial party meetings toward the close of the year..
In late November, a meeting of the West Bengal party by an
overwhelming vote formally reaffirmed the pro-Peiping and
anti-CPSU resolution adopted the previous month. Speaking at
this meeting, Konar reportedly stated that he and the West
Bengal Communist Party would never accept a "Moscow line that
did not correspond to the Indian realities." He added that
the day of abject CPI acceptance of Moscow policy was over,
that "policy made in Moscow" no longer carried much prestige.
He said that the West Bengal party would undertake a full pro-
gram of peasant and industrial agitation the next year which
would "further vindicate the West Bengal CP stand that con-
tinued social revolution as conceived by the Chinese party is
vital to the Indain Communist movement." Konar cited the
cases of Cuba, Algeria, and the Congo to support the claim
that social revolution, even using violent means, did not mean
an inevitable international war; he professed to believe that
China had extended support all the way to Cuba, and would
therefore have no difficulty in supporting the CPI. In short,
*This report recurred several times; it seems to be the
favorite wish-fantasy of the CPI left faction.
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he held that the Soviet thesis of peaceful coexistence had
been used merely as an excuse for inactivity by the Indian
party, and he refused to put up with this.
Left-faction assertiveness also was marked at meetings
of the Kerala and Andhra parties held in early December;
moderate leaders in both organizations were reported shocked
at the degree to which leftist sentiment had increased. In
Kerala, extremists were encouraged by the swing toward the
left of former chief minister Namboodiripad, who had grown
increasingly disallusioned with Ghosh's moderate line since
the ouster of the Kerala government in 1959. In 4ndhra, a
powerful leftist bloc led by Sundarayya now contraled nearly
half the strength of the provincial party; here the leftists
refused cooperation with the rightist leaders and were able
to prevent the election of new party organs : or the adoption
of a political report.
December National Council Meeting: This leftist offen-
sive was also marked at the tumultuous meetings of the Central
Executive Committee and the National Council Which met in
Bombay at the year's end to hear reports on the Moscow con-
ference. It was later claimed that the rightist leaders at
the CEC meeting cast doubt on the reality of the "unity"
achieved between the CPSU and the CCP at Moscow, for which
they were denounced by the leftists. Several accounts agree
that the National Council heard conflicting explanations of
the meaning of the ambiguous Moscow Statement from the oppos-
ing factions represented on the Moscow dalegatiOn.� with
Gupta and Namboodiripad reportedly providing. an interpreta-
tion "along the lines of the Chinese article Long Live Lenin-
ism," portraying the Statement as accepting tE-6-CCP
while Ghosh, Dange and Ramamurthi took the opposing line.
Much of the National Council debate apparently centered
on the concept of the "national democratic state", which the
CPSU had had inserted in the Moscow Statement to connote a
transitional phase between a former colony's achievement of
political independence and the assumption of direct Communist
control. The national democratic state was there defined as
one which had won complete economic independence from the im-
perialist world and assumed close economic ties with the bloc;
which had adopted an "anti-imperialist" foreign policy; in
which the state-owned sector had become predominant in the
economy; and in which a list of "democratic reforms" and
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"democratic freedoms" freedoms" had been achieved, two of the most im-
portant of which were land reform and freedom of activity for
the Communist party. The national democratic state would be
ruled by a broad united "anti-imperialist front" embracing
"all patriotic strata" of the country concerned, including
national bourgeoisie, peasantry, and proletariat. Although
it has been implied by Soviet articles that the proletariat
(the Communist Party) would have some importance in this coali-
tion, the minimum degree of Communist influence acceptable
in a national democratic front and the length of time the
Communist party should be willing to wait to secure firm con-
trol have never been spelled out by Moscow. Peiping, long
hostile to Soviet gradualistic and evolutionary notions on
the Communist assumption of power in underdeveloped countries,
has been suspicious lest the new concept be used to justify
a further indefinite delay in the achievement of Communist
hegemony. Unlike Moscow, Peiping has therefore never publicly
mentioned the national democratic state, and in fact was to
print a veiled attack on the concept in People's Daily on 10
October 1961, on the eve of the 22nd CPSU Congress.
Against the background of this fresh Sino-Soviet disagree-
ment over a concept just placed in the equivocal Moscow State-
ment, the Indian party leaders split into three groups at the
December National Council meeting in their application of the
concept to India. An extreme rightist group-considered India
already a national democratic state, thought the Indian bour-
geoisie was completing the democratic revolution in a consist-
ent manner, and wished to support Nehru on all major policies.
A centrist-moderate rightist group did not think India now a
national democracy, but thought it could become so; this group
wished to oppose the reactionary policies of the Congress gov-
ernment but to support the progressive ones, and to make Nehru's
progressive policies the basis for the establishment of a
national democratic front in which the national bourgeoisie
would in effect be allowed to remain temporarily in the lead.
The leftists, who were numerous, thought Nehru's government
was leaning more and more toward feudalism and imperialism,
and called for a national democratic front led by the workers
and peasantry which suitable bourgeois elements would be al-
lowed to join but not to lead; this front would lead a struggle
against the reactionary policies of the Nehru government. This
internal party debate, of central importance to CPI policy,
reached no conclusion at the December 1960 National Council
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meeting, and was to be resumed again at a similar meeting in
February 1961 and still again at the party congress in April.
A party commission was meanwhile set up to consider this is-
sue in preparing a political resolution for the February Na-
tional Council meeting. (A second commission was to write a
new draft constitution for the party, and a third to study
party policy toward the border dispute.)
While the leftists were thus stalemated on the question
of "national democracy," they were apparently successful in
imparting a more militant and revolutionary tone to the meet-
ing generally; in line with the earlier Soviet stipulation in
Moscow, the National Council members were reported to have
been generally agreed that a peaceful transition to power was
possible only if preparations for an armed capability were
made simultaneously. Ja4pal Singh, the head of the secret
CPI organization in the Indian armed forces, was subsequently
said to have been heartened by this new militant trend in the
party and to have decided to reactivate his organization in
May 1961 following an expected victory of the left faction
at the party congress.
Meanwhile, the leftists--aware that the cessation of
Sino-Soviet polemics as a result of the Moscow meeting had
left the September CEC resolution attacking China out of date--
moved to have the National Council formally repudiate the
resolution. While this effort narrowly failed, several sources
agree that the National Council tacitly decided to return to
the compromise line on the border dispute enunciated at Meerut
in November 1959, when the CPI had upheld the MacMahon line
in the east, termed the Ladakh border in the west undefined,
and refused to assign blame to either country for the dispute.
No public statement on the border issue was made, however.
CCP Guidance to Leftists (December-February): During the
months immediately following the Moscow Conference the left
faction of the CPI was further encouraged by a series of con-
tacts with Chinese embassy officials in which Ranadive and
his representatives furnished the CCP with a running account
of the current progress of the CPI factional battle as well
as an elaborate assessment of the history of that battle over
the past two years. In return, Peiping furnished the CPI
militants with repeated oral and written interpretations of
the 1960 Moscow Statement and guidance in the application of
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the provisions of that Statement to India. The essence of
the Chinese advice was to regard the Moscow Statement as
guidance to parties not in power to adopt a new and more
militant line for the attainment of power. This was said by
Peiping to pertain especially "to newly liberated countries
where the class struggle is not being carried on," specifi-
,cally including India, for whom the question of national
democracy did not apply. The CCP found in the Statement the
"implicit" assertion that peaceful coexistence between a Com-
munist nation and a newly-liberated capitalist country does
not require the Communist party of the latter country to give
up its struggle for Communism for the sake of good relations
between the two countries; this, said Peiping, "clarified"
the concept of peaceful coexistence which had confused some
parties in the past (meaning the CPI, among others) and had
led to a pacifist approach. While the CPSU would also main-
tain (and,had maintained for years) that the CPI should not
give up its struggle for Communism or adopt a "pacifist ap-
proach for the sake of Soviet-Indian relations, it is certain
that Moscow would not read into this very broad negative
generalization the authorization for a militant, across-the-
board offensive against the Indian government which Peiping
was trying to commend to the CPI leftists.
CPI-CCP Correspondence: In the midst of these dealings
with the CPI left-faction readers, Peiping at the end of Decem-
ber is believed to have sent a formal party letter to CPI head-
quarters--the only such message known to have been sent through
official party channels after the Moscow ronflamoni-*c,
petalis on this Chinese message
are sketchy, although it was concerned in
large part with the border issue.
the CCP expressed readiness to support any just struggles of
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the Indian people and expected the CPI to reciprocate on in-
ternational issues of concern to Peiping; the Indian party
was particularly expected to oppose and expose the Indian
bourgeoisie when the latter insti ated border diff'
(b)(1)
(b)(3)
Ghosh Circular Report: Meanwhile, in preparation for the
expected battle at the forthcoming National Council meeting
in February, soon after the close of the December National
Council session Ghosh, with the probable assistance of Dange,
drew up a circular report on the Moscow meeting for circulation
to all National Council members. This report was notable for
its polemical tone. It emphasized more than once that while
all parties had participated in preparing the Moscow Statement
and while all parties were equal, the CPSU had played the "lead-
ing and guiding role.. .in preparing the Draft and in convening
and steering the conference." Ghosh followed this up by
reiterating the Soviet line and attacking the CCP position on
the preventability and the consequences of war, warning (as
Ulbricht had done publicly in his report on the Moscow Confer-
ence to the East German Central Committee in December) that
it was "wrong" to want to conceal the destructiveness of
nuclear war from the people. Ghosh endorsed the Soviet claim
that their peaceful coexistence line was "the general line of
the foreign policy of the socialist countries"--a point which
is known to have been kept out of the Moscow Statement at Chi-
nese insistence. Ghosh denied that the demand for general
disarmament (a principal Soviet point) was a "bourgeois liber-
al" slogan, breeding "illusions about imperialism" (as the
CCP had repeatedly said it was). He said it was the task of
all Communist parties to approach the mobilization of the mas-
ses "through simple and clear slogans and a non-sectarian ap-
proach." He stated that it was one of the aims of peaceful
coexistence "to draw closer towards the socialist camp the
newly-liberated and peace-loving states, thus consolidating
and extending the peace zone." To this clear indication of
the approach the CPSU wished to be taken toward India Ghosh
affixed a strong endorsement of the need to create a national
democratic front to bring about a national democratic state.
Such a state, he emphasized, would not be the same as a peo-
ple's democracy, since it would be ruled by a coalition of
several classes "in which the working class and its party is
an important but not yet the leading force."
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On the other hand, Ghosh affirmed the need for the work-
ing class and the peasantry gradually to strive to "assume
increasingly the leading role" in the national democratic(_,
state. Moreover, Ghosh also picked up from the Moscow State-
ment the more militant positions now again espoused by the
CPSU, on the subject of just liberation wars (which he said
do not weaken peace but strengthen it); on theCCommunist need
to be prepared for violent as well as non-violent transition
to power (confirming the CPI decisions taken in Moscow in
December); on the need not to equate the peaceful path with
reliance solely on parliamentary elections without regard for
mass movements; and on the need to "unmask" demagogic bour-
geois efforts to use the slogan of socialism to deceive the
masses .(while yet "fully supporting all measures of the na-
tional government which weaken the position of imperialism
and feudalism.") Despite the concessions to militancy listed,
however, Ghosh's circular was on. the whole moderate in pro-
gram as well as vehemently pro-CPSU. Most notably, he im-
plied-considerable tolerance for the "progressive role" of
the Nehru government..
A couple of weeks after the dispatch of this circular
report, Ghosh courageously carried the battle into the strong-
hold of the opposition by appearing (unexpected and unwelcome,
as the leftists remarked) at a January conference of the West
Bengal party State Council. There he heard Jyoti Basu, the
West Bengal secretary, attack the central party leadership as
having failed in its responsibilities. Basu charged that the
leadership should have issued a self-critical report on re-
visionism in the CPI; he said the "so-called nationalist fac-
tion has forgotten Marxism and trailed behind the bourgeoisie;"
he denounced the rightists for having mouthed diatribes against
"China and international Communism;" and he found that the
central leadership had harbored illusions about parliamentary
politics, which had been used as a refuge from which to ignore
mass movements. A West Bengal speaker who subsequently at-
tempted to defend Ghosh's moderate program was almost shouted
down, and found himself generally isolated at the meeting.
Ghosh thereupon g9t up and pugnaciously defended himself,
the authority of the CPSU, and the moderate program he espous-
ed for the CPI. Ultimately, he said, it was the Soviet draft
enriched and enlarged by amendments and discussions that had
been adopted almost in its entirety by the Moscow Conference.
From this, fact,..
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it was proved beyond doubt that the Soviet party
was the leader of the World Communist movement--
both in theory and in practice. If this basic
fact were forgotten, the worst form of devia-
tAonism might creep into any national party giv-
ing rise to revisionism and chauvinism. It would
be childish to even attempt to challenge the lead-
ership of the Soviet Party or to think in that
line. It was quite a different thing to point out
mistakes or question certain formulations of the
Soviet Party, but to question its leadership was
altogether a foolish act. Even pointing out mis-
takes or suggesting possible rectification's should
not be done in a manner so as to undermine the So-
viet Party or to cast aspersions against it.
Unfortunately, Ghosh told the West Bengal leaders, in
many centers in India attempts had been made to undermine the
leadership of the Soviet party. Ghosh made a peculiar cita-
tion of authority to demonstrate the foolishness of such at-
tempts: the Chinese party, he claimed, however great its dif-
ferences with the CPSU on certain questions, had never tried
in its writings or statements to belittle or undermine the
Soviet leadership. (This would probably have been a good tack
to take with the West Bengal party chiefs if they had not had
abundant evidence to the contrary.) Ghosh also asserted that
one should not forget that democratic centralism means that
a strong center must guide all lower units--ignoring the fact
that the CCP at Moscow had specifically rejected the notion
that the discipline of democratic centralism applies in rela-
tions between parties of the international Communist movement.
In addition, Ghosh upheld the line he had marked out in
the circular report for a CPI transition to power without
civil war through utilization of the parliamentary method
bolstered by a united front of workers, peasants and progres-
sive bourgeoisie. The West Bengal party conference, however,
rejected this approach and adopted one emphasizing that Nehru
was not to be trusted, that there could be no unity "with any
section of the bourgeoisie who are allied with the ruling
class," that the worker-peasant alliance (in fact, the Communist
party) must lead and control the national democratic front
from the very beg4nning, and that a "fierce campaign" must be
launched against the "anti-people policy of the government."
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Jyoti Basu meanwhile retired as party leader to concentrate
on the forthcoming 1961 election campaign, but was replaced
by another prominent leftist and strong supporter of the CCP,
Promode Das Gupta. The leftists in control of the West Bengal
machine at the same time succeeded in purging the only right-
ist previously represented on the West Bengal Secretariat.
February National Council Meeting: A few weeks later,
the National Council met to decide on the draft political and
organizational reports to be-placed before the party congress
in April, as well as on a new draft program for the party to
replace the one adopted in 1951. The National Council was
also to decide on a new public resolution on the border dis-
pute to be issued by the party; this appeared to be necessitated
by the- Indian Government's publication in mid-February of
the findings of the Indian team that had been negotiating with
the CPR.
In most cases, the party commissions that had been pre-
paring the individual draft reports had split along familiar
lines into right and left segments, so that the National Coun-
cil was presented with two or more drafts on each subject.
For example, Ghosh and Ranadive each presented his version of
the long-awaited party political resolution. Ghosh's resolu-
tion set forth the aim of replacing the present "vacillating"
and "compromising" government with a government of a national
democratic front which in turn would facilitate the peaceful
transition to socialism. It called for a broad-based campaign
seeking the cooperation of "patriotic elements in every-party"
to establish this front and secure gradual changes in the gov-
ernment's policies. In addition to endorsing the usual "united
front from below" tactic of seeking to draw support from the
rank-and-file of the Congress and of such parties as the Paja
Socialists, Ghosh's resolution called for the employment of
"united front from above" tactics in some cases--for example,
the conclusion of direct alliances with local Congress com-
mittees or other local organizations "to which the peasants
who are not under our influence are politically attached."*
*It was just such a proposal by a minority right-wing West
Bengal party leader that had been angrily shouted down at the
January West Bengal provincial meeting Ghosh had addressed.
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Ghosh identified only the extreme right of the Congress party
and of the big bourgeoisie as the enemy of the national demo-
cratic front, and consequently declared that .the "democratic
forces must adopt a correct attitude towards the small and
medium industrialists" who are anti-imperialist, and that
Communist-controlled trade unions must even abate their de-
mands toward these industrialists in the interests Of "draw-
ing them closer to the democratic masses." While.criticizing
strongly the Indian government and Nehru for their policies
toward feudalism, Western loans, land reform, and the Com-
munist Kerala regime, this resolution several times praised
Nehru, particularly for his foreign policy and his support
for the public sector of the Indian economy.
In contrast, Ranadive's resolution took a much harsher
view of Nehru, did not support alliances with local Congress
committees, was not so eager to bring the bourgeoisie into
the democratic front, and was much stronger in its exposition
of the need to struggle against the policies of the Indian
government. While Ghosh's political resolution was approved
with minor amendments by the National Council, the leftists
secured the right to circulate Ranadive's draft with Ghosh's
and to have both considered by the party Congress in April.
A similar result followed the National Council battle
over the proposed versions of the new long-range party pro-
gram. Opposing drafts were submitted by Dange and Bhupesh
Gupta. Dange's draft program, among other things, reportedly
called for increased emphasis on the development of very
broad party front groups in which very diverse non-Communists
would be brought to the forefront; stressed that the CPI
should make every effort to win the support of progressive
members of the Congress Party throughout India; and proposed
that the CPI support Congressmen judged sympathetic to the CPI
in local and national elections. Gupta's draft attacked
Nehru's policies at great length, opposed the creation of more
broad-based front groups and particularly the use of Congress-
men in these organizations, and reportedly called for an in-
ternal purge of rightist tendencies in the CPI. While Dange's
draft was approved, Gupta also won the right to submit his
text to the party congress.
In the case of the organizational report, only one draft
was submitted--by Namboodiripad--supposedly because the minority
rightist faction on the commission preparing this report had
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refused to participate. Namboodiripad's report, in addition
to submitting a draft of a new party constitution, severely
chastised the indiscipline in the party as well as the re-
vionist and "Parliamentary" habits of thought he found wide-
spread. While this report met with opposition in the National
Council, it was finally decided without a formal vote to pre-
sent it to the party congress, where more severe trials await-
ed it.
Finally, a sharp battle was fought in the National Council
on the border issue, with inconclusive results. An effort
by some of the rightists to secure an open condemnation of
China was overwhelmingly defeated, and a subsequent attempt
to obtain endorsement of the Indian case on the basis of the
report of the Indian negotiating team was blunted. EventUally,
a resolution was adopted and published formally reiterating
the Meerut November 1959 formula (approval of the MacMahon
line in the'east and of an undefined 'traditional boundary"
in the west), blaming nobody, saying that the Indian people
think the Indian case is strong but that China also thinks
her case is strong, and fervently calling for more negotia-
tions. However, despite leftist protests, the resolution also
upheld Indies exclusive right to negotiate the boundaries of
Kashmir--of which Ladakh is a part--with China-(reproving
CPR feelers on this subject to Pakistan), and to carry on
frontier negotiations on behalf of Bhutan and Sikkim (reprov-
ing Chinese efforts to bypass New Delhi in contacting those
two Indian dependencies). The inclusion of these provisions
was a definite victory for the rightist faction.
On the whole, the National Council meeting seems to have
been a standoff, provisionally approving rightist positions
on some questions and leftist positions on others, evading
still other issues, and passing everything on to the party con-
gress for the decisive battles. The leftists tended to be
encouraged by this outcome; they kept the Chinese party inform-
ed of events, and passed on to Peiping their optimistic fore-
cast of victory in April. Dange's forces, on the other hand,.
were rather somber; Dange thought the rightists had won their
last victory (such as it was) on the border issue, and expect-
ed a very close division of forces at the party congress, with
the outcome in doubt.
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Continued Swing Toward Left in Provinces: Information
from a number of the CPI provincial organizations in the months
before the party congress confirmed both the leftist claim of
a swing in their direction and Dange's estimate of a very close
alignment of forces. Leftist assertiveness was particularly
noted on the border issue: in mid-February, while the right-
ists at the National Council meeting were vainly trying to.
get the party to endorse the report of the Indian negotiating
team, an organ of the Kerala party prominently published the
gist of the report issued by,Peiping's negotiators, under the
headline "Indian Documents Are the Products of British Imperi-
alism." In West Bengal, local party meetings were being told
that the West Bengal party organization fully accepted the
Chinese contention that the Indian government was keeping the
border issue alive in order to get aid from the West. One
West Bengal leader in late February not only publicly denied
that the CPR had committed aggression against India, but was
quoted by the press as declaring that "we should be ashamed
to criticlze China, the greatest socialist country, living in
the land of beggars." (Emphasis supplied:5-
An index of the changing balance of forces in the party
was furnished by the reception given the two drafts of the
political resolution--Ghosh's version which had been endorsed
by the National Council, and Ranadive's alternative--as they
circulated through the provincial organizations. West Bengal
party secretary Das Gupta told the leftists on the CPI Central
Secretariat in mid-March that he did not intend to publish the
National Council resolution in the West Bengal organ Swadhinata;
subsequently, the West Bengal State Council overwhelmingly
voted to reject the National Council draft and to accept Rana-
dive's resolution. Identical action was taken in the other
left-faction stronghold in the Punjab, despite a personal visit
and plea by Ghosh to try to stem the tide. Dange made a similar
appearance before the vacillating party organization of Tamilnad,
in south India, where the former rightist Ramamurthyhad been
reported inclining toward the left since the beginning of the
year because of the need to preserve his position in the face
of increasing left-faction sentiment; despite Dange's efforts,
Tamilnad also rejected the Ghosh draft and accepted Ranadive's
alternative. In Assam, neighboring the West Bengal organiza-
tion and often influenced by it, the party leader Phani Bora,
a Ghosh supporter, was obliged to trim his sails and avoid
submitting either resolution to a vote to avoid being unseated
by his leftist opposition.
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In certain other provincial organizations, however, the
Ghosh draft was endorsed; and in the right-faction stronghold
of Maharashtra, where Dange and Ranadive held a furious debate
in mid-March, the leaders laid plans to lobby among uncommitted
delegations at the party congress for the Ghosh political
resolution, as well as for a direct indictment of the CPR on
the border issue.
B. Soviet and Chinese Policy Toward India Before the Congress
These internal party struggles and maneuverings in pre-
paration for the party congress were inevitably influenced
by the very different policies being pursued toward India by
the Soviet Union and the CPR. The Soviet posture toward
India. was composed, in equal parts, of a limited amount of
pressure seeking specific foreign-policy objectives; a fair
amount of public flattering of India and of Nehru; and dis-
creet ambivalence on the question of the Sino-Indian border.
The Chinese attitude, on the other hand, was one of simple
and unremitting hostility, in which Peiping's energies were
chiefly devoted to documenting the charge that Nehru had be-
come an imperialist lackey of the United States whose every
move was inimical to the interests of the entire bloc.
Soviet Policy: Soviet pressure in early 1961 was chiefly
concerned with the question of Indian support for United Na-
tions operations in the Congo, support which Moscow sought
strenuously and unsuccessfully to have withdrawn. In this
fort the USSR appears to have worked in close coordination
with the central leadership of the Indian Communist party.
The December CPI National Council meeting, for example, is-
sued a resolution mildly criticizing the Indian government
for not having shown itself in "complete solidarity with the
leading African governments" by having recognized the Gizenga
regime in the Congo. Toward the end of January, an article
by Joshi in the Republic Day issue of New Age, while generally
praising Nehru's foreign policy, criticized his policy toward
colonialism, saying that New Delhi had "remained silent too
long before expressing Indian solidarity and on occasions was
not firm enough."
el-
In the third week of February, Nehru received letters from
Khrushchev asking him to support Soviet demands on the Congo,
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including the end of UN activities there. Bhupesh Gupta, a
parliamentary spokesman of the CPI, reportedly was briefed in
advance on these letters by the Soviet Embassy, and on 27
February raised a question in Parliament designed to obtain
public acknowledgement from Nehru that Khrushchev had request-
ed him not to accede to any demands from Hammarskjoldi to
send Indian troops to the Congo. Nehru at the time would
only acknowledge having received letters from Khrushchev, but
subsequently made his position clear by announcing that his
government would send a brigade of combat troops to support
UN operations in the Congo. Thereupon, a CPSU letter to the
CPI at the end of February reportedly requested, among other
things, criticism of the Indian government's foreign policy
shortcomings. An article in Izvestiya on 9 March asked, in
passing, if it was "so essential" for the Indian people to
support the "bankrupt" UN Secretary-General; and an article
in the CPI's weekly New Age three days later discreetly made
the same point. An artiae" by Ghosh published in Pravda on
5 April said that the Indian government had shown "unwarranted
vacillation" on the Congo issue by not having recognized
Gizenga or attacked Hammarskjoid;; this was repeated in
Ghosh's speech to the CPI Congress, in the Political Resolu-
tion published after the Congress, and in the advice Suslov
reportedly gave to CPI leaders during the Congress.
The only other major criticism made of Indian foreign
policy by Moscow in the first half of 1961 concerned the
Cuban invasion: on 4 April, an article placed in Litarary
Gazette expressed at some length Soviet "bewilderment" at
Nehru 's statement that he was unable to judge the right or
wrong of the Cuba situation; this article was broadcast by
Moscow six times to South Asia in English, and was understand-
ably picked up promptly by NCNA.
These examples of pressure, however, have been more than
balanced by the many Soviet statements and actions flattering
and supporting the Nehru government. In December 1960, soon
after the Moscow Conference, the Soviet New Times ran an arti-
cle appraising and ,on the whole approving the new third In-
dian five-year plan. In late January, the CPI's New Age print-
ed a two-part article by the deputy head of the Soviet Insti-
tute of Oriental Studies on Indian state cap?Aialism: a
qualified verdict was rendered that so far state capitalism
in India had been progressive and had fulfilled a national
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function. In late January a Soviet broadcast to Asia describ-
ed how India was "growing stronger year by year, becoming more
influential and more wealthy", primarily because of her pro-
gressive foreign policy. On Indian Republic Day, 26 January,
the Soviet leaders sent warm congratulations to the people and
government of India and to Nehru personally, praising them
for India's contributions to the causes of peace; disarmament,
and the ending of colonialism. The semi-annual-CPSU slogans
published in April similarly flattered India. On 28 April,
a Soviet broadcast in Bengal .(possibly meant for the West '
Bengal Communist Party to hear) stressed that the: Soviet Union
and India have "kept faith in the fundamental Bandung princi-
ples," and quoted.Khrushchev on the unanimity of views between
the USSR and India on nearly all international problems placed
before the UN. And in June another Soviet broadcast, in
Mandarin to China, pointedly emphasized to Peiping the coopera-
tion which India had furnished the bloc in opposition to im-
perialist schemes for the recognition of "two Chinas" by the
United Nations.
These statements have been accompanied by the continua-
tion of Soviet assistance to the Indian economy. During a
Kosygin visit to India in February a credit agreement between
the two countries, negotiated and announced the previous year,
was signed with much fanfare; and a few days later the USSR
Ambassador in New Delhi, Benediktov, publicly denied to In-
dian newsmen published reports in the Indian press about dif-
ferences between the Soviet Union and the CPR over Soviet aid
to India. A further sizable credit at low interest from
Hungary was announced in March. In April the Soviet Ambassa-
dor to Mexico, while piously denying in a private conversation
that Soviet foreign commercial activity was ordinarily sub-
ordinated to . political Motives, admitted that this was true
in the case of India.
Finally, with regard to the Sino-Indian border issue,
Moscow was equivocal in the first half of 1961. On the one
hand, the CPI was apparently instructed to say as little as
possible. Guidance to this effect may conceivably have been
furnished Indian party leaders in Moscow in December 1960; at
any rate, at the end of February 1961, a letter was received
from the CPSU, signed by Suslov, asking :the CPI not to make
statements categorically condemning China, but on the other
hand to do nothing either to antagonize further Indian public
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opinion on this issue. This guidance was reiterated by Suslov
during his visit to India in personal briefings to CPI leaders
on 6 and 14 April, and the CPI went from reiteration of the
Meerut formula (in the February National Council resolution)
to silence on the border issue (in the resolutions of the ApFil
party congress). At the same time, the Soviet-linked Indian'
organ Blitz continued to manifest a strongly nationalistic,
explicitly anti-Chinese line. The Soviet Union itself was
non-committal, particularly in regard to the question of its
maps of the Sino-Indian border, a topic on which New Delhi
was repeatedly prodding Moscow during the spring. In March,
an Indian spokesman declared that 1959 Soviet maps had shown
Bhutan and Sikkim as independent states, whereas much older
maps had shown them as Indian protectorates; he said India
had brought up this matter repeatedly, the last time in Novem-
ber 1960, but that no positive reply had yet been received
from the USSR. According to Indian government announcements,
by April the GDR, Hungary, and North Vietnam had assured India
that they would not print incorrect maps again, but other
Communist countries--as Nehru put it on 21 April--"were reluct-
ant to correct them as they felt to do so would mean taking
an active political step."
CPR Policy: The Chinese attitude toward Nehru's govern-
ment was typified by a pamphlet published in Peiping contain-
ing a collection of the speeches Chou En-lai made during his
1960 tour of Southeast Asia. Translated into various langu-
ages, this pamphlet contained a map of the south Asian area
showing India as a country under imperialist domination, while
Bhutan, Nepal, Burma, Cambodia and Indonesia were described
as being "aligned with the Socialist countries." On 29 March
it was disclosed in the Indian Parliament that the Indian cus-
toms had been instructed to seize all copies of this pamphlet.
Peiping's depiction of India as the principal imperialist
agent in Asia, surrounded by other states friendly to the bloc,
is consistent with the policy the CPR has followed over the
past two years of attempting to 'igalate India, its chief Asian
rival, through the settlement of existing controversies with
other south Asian states on terms acceptable to the latter.
(Examples have been the settlement of the Chinese-national
dispute with Indonesia and the border question with Burma: in
both cases the terms agreed to by Peiping are definitely known
to have been strongly influenced by the desire to isolate
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India.) In late 1960 and early 1961, the CPR also put out
feelers to Pakistan to negotiate the border with Kashmir and
Ladakh (claimed by both Pakistan and India), while the Indian
dependency Bhutan was enticed both with the prospect of in-
dependent border negotiations with China and with':the possi-
bility of economic aid from Peiping. These feelers--which
the Indian Communist-party felt obliged to denounce publicly
in February, both in Parliament and in a National Council
resolution--have since led to no concrete result, except to
stimulate the aspirations of the Bhutan government for a
greater degree of autonomy and for Indian permission to seek
economic aid directly from.the United States. These CPR
gestures again demonstrated, however, Peiping's overalltattitude
toward the Nehru government and the continued Chinese inten-
tion to seek to weaken India's position among its neighbors.
On 14 February, Nehru revealed that during the negotiations
of the previbus winter the CPR had stated that it respects
only India's.'"proper" relations with plutan and Sikkim, where-
as in April 1960--Nehru claimed--Chou En-lai during his visit
had said that China respects those relations, without qualifi-
cation. Throughout 1961, there were a number of reports
indicating Chinese intensification of efforts at subversion
and propaganda within Bhutan; one leaflet distributed was
said to have warned the Bhutanese against "collusion with the
government of India to convert Bhutan into a land of slaves."
This Chinese attitude toward the Indian government has
been accompanied by a determination not to virald in tho hr_
der dispute.
an Inaaan lettast
advised the Indian Foreign Ministry that the
CPR was willing to settle the dispute by arbitration provided
India made the first public move for this, a subsequent In-
dian attempt to test the Chinese attitude came to nothing.
When in July R.K. Nehru, .% secretary general of the Ministry
of External Affairs, stopped off in Peiping on his way home
from Mongdlia, the CPR was reported to have made fresh ter-
ritorial claims to him orally; such new Chinese claims, how-
ever, have not subsequently been announced publicly. The
Foreign Ministry official subsequently complained privately
that the Chinese had treated him with "intolerable arrogance;"*
*It had previously been reported that Indian diplomats in
Peiping had frequently been humiliated and insulted, that mem-
bers of the embassy staff had even been publicly attacked and
beaten in the streets, and that protest notes about this had not
been answered.
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in response to his reassertion of Indian claims, Liu Shao-chi
is said to have told him that it was ridiculous of him to
have travelled so far only to restate unacceptable conditions;
and Mao, whom he claimed to know well, refused to see him.
After this, both Prime Minister Nehru and a Chinese Embassy
official in New Delhi were reported to have predicted, cor-
rectly, that relations between the two countries would con-
tinue to worsen.
It has been a principal Chinese endeavor--still unsuccess-
ful--to obtain from the Soviet Union and the CPSU both a policy
toward the Indian government and a Marxist appraisal of Nehru
more consonant with Chinese national interests. In early June,
Chen Yi was reliably reported to have again indicated Peiping's
discontent on this score in a conversation with a bloc diplo-
mat in Geneva. Chen repeated to this bloc official the long-
standing CCP line on Nehru: his increasing closeness to Wash-
ington; his role as "spokesman for the interests of the Indian
upper bourgeoisie"; his government's inability to solve the
basic problems of the Indian people and consequent fear "that
the example of the enormous accomplishments of New China will
seduce the impoverished masses of the subcontinent;" all this
serving to explain India:' unfriendly attitude toward China
and its periodic formentation of frontier incidents between
the two countries. Chen went on to assert that the Indian
government, by following a policy of "complete duplicity," had
even gone so far as to aspire to a certain amount of support
from Moscow against Peiping. �Fortunately, he said, the Soviet
press had "now" started to uniask this maneuver, which showed
that the Soviet authorities had not let themselves be duped.
(Chen's tone implied, however, that Moscow up to now had in-
deed let itself be duped.) Chen was intimating Chinese hopes
that the various Soviet press allusions to Indian policy on
the Congo and the one April Literary Gazette article criticiz-
ing Nehru over Cuba heralded a fundamental change in the So-
viet line toward India. Such expectations, however, were
neither realistic nor (probably) sincere; there have been no
more such direct Soviet comments, and the gap between Chinese
and Soviet policy toward India has again widened.
Peiping's propaganda has meanwhile continued to utilize
every conceivable subject and pretext to attempt to discredit
Nehru both to the bloc and the Communist movement and to the
radical but non-Communist forces of the "national liberation
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movement." Working occasionally through direct commentaries,
but principally through frequent, selective, and highly slanted
NCNA reportage of events and statements, Peiping has built up
a picture of Nehru as a faithful servant of United States
policy on the Congo, on Laos, on Cuba, and on Berlin whom
Washington has explicitly promised to reward for these services
with large economic assistance, and who has accordingly offer-
ed ever more favorable terms for U.S. "imperialist domination
of the Indian economy. This long-standing and still continu-
ing Chinese campaign, while apparently directed only indident-
ally to the Indian Communist party, has nevertheless helped
to maintain that climate of opinion within which the pro-CCP
left faction of the CPI appraises the Indian scene.
C. The Indian Party Congress, April
March WPC Meeting: Two weeks before the Sixth CPI Con-
gress opened, a five-day meeting of the World Peace Council
in New Delhi provided the Indian party with a practical demon-
stration at close quarters of the continuing differences bet-
ween Soviet and Chinese policy toward India. In addition to
furnishing a new occasion for subdued conflict between the
CPSU and the CCP, the events of this meeting were significant
in that they provided what was at least the ostensible reason
for the CCP's failure to attend the Indian party congress and
consequent abandonment of guidance of the congress to the CPSU.
The Chinese party indicated in advance to the left faction
of the CPI that it intended to use the WPC meeting as a vehi-
cle for attack on the Nehru government. On 13 March, 11 days
before the meeting opened, a senior Chinese embassy official
in New Delhi told a CPI confidant that the main mission of
Peiping's delegation would be to put pressure on the other
delegations to denounce India's role in the Congo, Laos, and
Algeria, where Indian policy was said to be based "on the Am-
erican pattern." This Chinese official emphasized to the
Indian party leftist that Khrushchev's explicit request to
Nehru on the Congo question had been spurned, and noted that
President Kennedy at a press conference had quoted Nehru's
statements to support his own views. A week later, another
embassy official acknowledged that the Chinese delegation would
have to fight at the WPC meeting for a denunciation of India,
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but stated that he expected many African and Asian delegations
to assist Peiping in this effort. The Chinese embassy officers
suggested that the importance Peiping attached to this matter
could be judged from the importance of the delegation being
sent; this delegation to be was headed by Liu Ning-i, president
of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. (Liu had been
one of the principal figures in the Sino-Soviet clash at the
WFTU meeting in Peiping nine months before, and had subsequently
attended the Moscow Conference of November 1960. Most notably,
Liu had been attacked by name in the September 1960 secret
resolution of the Indian Communist party, a resolution to which
Peiping is known to have taken violent exception.)
While conclusive evidence is not available, reports from
several different sources suggest that the CPR delegation at
the World Peace Council meeting may indeed have made an attempt
to get some critical reference to the Indian government's policy
on colonialism included in the WPC resolutions, and that this
attempt was defeated through Soviet influence. The scene of
this struggle was apparently the closed meetings held from 25
through 28 March in the WPC commission on "Na
ence and Abolition of Colonialism."
a draft resolution on the Congo plac is commission
with Chinese support contained a bitter attack an India and
on Nehru's "pacifist attitude;" this provision was opposed by
the Indian delegation, and was ultimately defeated.
The CPR delegate is said to have declared
that the so-called neutral nations were merely playing the game
of the imperialists in-the Congo, and to have asked how such
nations could extol Lumumba on the one hand and fail to condemn
Hammarskjold- and the actions of the UN on the other hand; if
these neutrals were sincere in their protestations of neutrality,
he said, they would have recognized the Gizenga government and
supported it. To this statement, which certainly was primarily
aimed at India, the Soviet delegate Tikhonov was said to have
replied that he could not accept the view of those who criti-
cized the neutral nations and said that they were playing the
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imperialists' game; while he thought Hammarskjold- should be
condemned, he extolled the role of the neutrals in the main-
tenance of world peace.*
On the other hand, the USSR
made considerable effort, both directly and through the CPI,
to prevent the Sino-Indian border question from becoming an
issue at the WPC meeting. This was in line with the position
taken in the Suslov letter to the CPI at the end of February,
when the CPSU apparently asked the Indian party to evade this
topic as much as it could, consistent with the need to avoid
complete alientation of the Indian public. Despite these So-
viet intentions, the issue kept emerging at intervals through-
out the WPC sessions, and had to be suppressed each time with
difficulty. On the opening day, during the deliberations
over formation of an agenda, one non-Communist Indian delegate
proposed that a discussion be held on the question of whether
some Indian territory was being occupied by the CPR, as a
result of which the peace of Asia was being endangered. This
suggestion was supported by a member of the CPI extreme right-
ist faction; and CPI leftists subsequently charged, probably
falsely, that the latter had been encouraged by Romesh Chandra,
the CPI functionary and Ghosh agent who was steering the WPC
sessions. The proposal was in any case rejected by Sunderlal,
Chairman of the All-Indian Peace Council, who made the mis-
take of publicly claiming that Prime Minister Nehru had re-
quested that the question not be discussed: a claim which
Nehru later publicly repudiated.
*While the USSR certainly did not want a direct attack on
India included in any WPC resolution, this Soviet willingness
to undertake a polemical defense of India at a front group meet-
ing may have been specially influenced by the locale of the
WPC session. At a subsequent meeting of the Afro-Asian Peo-
ple's Solidarity Organization in Indonesia a few weeks later--
where several much stronger Sino-Soviet clashes on a number
of issues were reported--it was reported that the Chinese dele-
gate launched a similar strong attack against India for having
sent troops to the Congo, without contradiction from the So-
viet representative.
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There were several subsequent reports to the effect that
during one (or possibly more) at the closed meetings of WPC
commissions some Western delegates attempted to raise the
Sino-Indian border issue for discussion, that the CPR delega-
tion thereupon threatened to walk out of the meeting, and
that the proposal was defeated with Soviet assistance. At
least one CPR walkout acutally did take place over this is-
sue during the WPC proceedings, in public. On the evening
of 24 March the Chinese delegation attended ceremonies com-
memorating the centenial anniversary of the birth of the In-
dian poet Tagore, in the course of which Indian Cultural
Minister Kabir said that Tagore would not have remained silent
regarding China's encroachments on Indian soil. Liu Ning-i
followed Kabir to the platform, criticized him severely for
being unfriendly to a peace-loving neighbor, repeated Peiping's
version of the Tibetan and border events, implied that the
Indian government did not have the support of most Indians
on these matters, and concluded with the charge that India
was attempting "to reap the seeds of confusion sowed by Brit-
ish imperialism." Liu then led the Chinese delegates out of
the meeting.
More important consequences flowed from this event than
from anything else that happened at the WPC meeting. There
was an immediate uproar among the Indian public and press;
Nehru in Parliament a few days later termed the walkout "of-
fensive"; and the right wing of the Indian Communist party
made haste publicly to disown Liu: on 3 April Mrs. Renu
Chakravarty declared in Parliament that "we do not agree at
all" with "certain remarks made by the Chinese... We do not
like what the Chinese did or said." Subsequently, the Indian
government refused to extend the visas of those members of
the Chinese delegation, including Liu, who had planned to re-
main in India after the WPC meeting to attend the Indian Com-
munist party congress opening ten days later. The Ministry
of External Affairs told Sunderlal that the continued presence
in the country of the Chinese delegation would not be welcome.
Peiping did not attempt to send another delegation to
attend the CPI Congress, and the Indian government did not pre-
vent Moscow from sending a delegation led by Suslov to the
Congress. The result was that the CPSU had the field to it-
self in providing guidance to the Indian party at an event
of central importance. It seems likely that the Indian government
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had this in mind from the first, that New Delhi never had any
,intention of allowing the CCP to be present to encourage the
CPI leftists and lobby for a thoroughly militant'line,-and
that the government wished the Indian Communist'partY'to be
oriented along the moderate line New Delhi associated-With the
Soviet Union..*- It is therefore likely that Liu Ning-l's'visa
would not have been extended in any case; it is even Possible
that Minister Kabir's provocatory remarks were planned delib-
erately to entrap Liu into making public statements which could
Tbe used to justify this refusal and to, make'- it politically
un-
feasible for the CPI to protest.**
�, Nevertheless, the actions of the CCP would seem peculiarly
inept if it were assumed that a primary object of Peiping was
to attempt to secure predominance within the CPI at this time.
If this had been the first consideration, it would have been
appropriate (despite the threat to national pride) to .make
another attempt to get a CCP delegation admitted to India to
attend the party congress. Moreover, if Liu Ning-i's atten-
dance at the congress on Indian soil had been considered vital,
it would . seem extraordinary to have first sent him to
the World Peace Council meeting with instructions to attempt
*Similarly, New Delhi has on occasion sought to prevent CPI
extremists from making contact with CPSU leaders: thus in
February 1959 it was reported that Ranadive, originally named
to the CPI delegation to the 21st CPSU Congress, had been re-
fused a passport, while more moderate CPI leaders had been
given passports. In another step likely to have been intended
at least in part to weaken the left faction of the CPI, the
Indian government on 27 December 1961 was to withdraw the
foreign exchange trading license of the Bank of China; this
bank had reportedly been used as a base for CCP financing of
its adherents within the Indian Communist party.
**Not only did the CPI not protest the exclusion of the Chi-
nese, but it seemed to go out of its way to avoid mentioning
the fact. Thus on 23 April the article on the opening of the
party Congress carried in New Age noted that "the fraternal
delegates from the parties-OT France, German Democratic Repub-
lic and Israel were unfortunately refused visas and could not
attend;" there was no allusion to Liu Ning-i or the Chinese
party.
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to secure a public condemnation of Indian government policy.
Finally, if Peiping had had both the intention and the serious
hope of securing a major change in the balance of forces with-
in the CPI, it would probably have appointed a delegation to
the congress headed by a man equal in stature to Suslov (num-
ber three or four in the Soviet hierarchy), rather than by
Liu Ning-i--who, while important, is a second-echelon figure
not belonging to the CCP Politburo.* (In June, the CCP did
appoint such a man--Teng Hsiao-ping, CCP secretary-general--
to lead a delegation to the Japanese party congress, to counter
the CPSU assignment of Mukhitdinov, a lower-ranking Presidium
member, the Japanese government, however, refused to admit
either delegation.) These considerations suggest that Peiping
had decided in March that despite the undeniable increase in
CPI left-faction strength and the optimistic claims of their
leaders, they were unlikely to score an organizational victory
at the party congress, and that it would therefore be unwise
to risk sending a top CCP leader to India to dispute the au-
thority of Suslov. It is also possible that Peiping at this
point in 1961 was still reluctant to abandon the conservative
policy in the movement which it had apparently followed since
the 1960 Moscow conference--of refraining from further overt
attempts to displace CPSU influence in areas of continuing
CPSU hegemony.
Ghosh Pravda Article: The Sixth CPI Congress was schedul-
ed to begin on 7 April. On 5 April, the same day that Suslov
and his entourage arrived in New Delhi, Pravda published a
lengthy article by Ghosh keyed to the congress. In view of
the many conflicting and distorted repoits which later became
current concerning the congress and Suslov's role in it, this
Pravda article--which Moscow broadcast widely to South Asia--
is of great importance in documenting the line which Ghosh and
the CPSU both endorsed for the CPI before the congress battle
began, and therefore in distinguishing which of the actions
Suslov urged upon Ghosh during the congress were reflections
of CPSU policy and which were tactical moves to preserve Ghosh's
position and prevent a split in the party.
*Moreover, the Indian government might not have felt free
to refuse to xtend the visa of a top Chinese leader.
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Ghosh's article repeats and expands the tributes paid in
his draft political resolution to Nehru's contributions to
peace and disarmament and his resistance to imperialist pres-
sures. At the same time, Ghosh adds--in accordance with the
trend of Soviet policy since his February draft was adopted--
a lengthy, detailed, criticism of the "vacillations" of the
Indian government, particularly in regard to the Congo, which
was not found in his draft resolution. The changes in the
resolution eventually made on this topic were therefore fore-
ordained before the congress, and owed nothing to the demands
of the CPI leftists. Ghosh's conclusion was that the CPI
must organize the masses to put pressure on the Indian govern-
ment to overcome these "weaknesses" and make New Delhi's policy
more "consistent."
On the internal economic situation, Ghosh's article placed
only slightly more emphasis on the negative side of Indian gov-
ernment policy than had his draft resolution. His appraisal
was still fairly balanced: he paid tribute to the first two
five-year plans for broadening and strengthening the industrial
basis of the Indian economy, noted that the third plan, "as
before, places the stress on the development of heavy industry,
mainly in the state sector," and concluded that Indian politi-
cal independence now rested on a firmer economic base than be-
fore. Ghosh also stated that "it would be, of course, incor-
rect" to think that the Indian government has submitted to the
blackmail attempted by the imperialists to force a reduction
of the plan and a weakening of the state sector in exchange
for the granting of loans to India. Nevertheless, Ghosh com-
plained of instances of concessions made to foreign capital,
of the growing ties between Indian and foreign bourgeoisie,
of the government's failures to enact significant land reform,
and of the dissolution of the Kerala government. He spoke of
an "intensification of the contradiction between the govern-
ment of India and the people." But on the whole, Ghosh's
Pravda appraisal of the economy did not lean as heavily on the
negative side as he was to do in his speech to the congress
or in the final version of the political resolution, suggest-
ing that here changes may have been forced by the need to off-
set CPI leftist pressure.
On the other hand, Ghosh added an element which he was
to repeat in his Congress speech, which the leftists were to
object to strongly, and which had not been found in his draft
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political resolution: an explicit statement that the continua-
tion of the Sino-Indian border dispute had hurt the CPI more
than anything else and had been the chief factor pushing the
Indian government in the direction desired by imperialists and
reactionaries.
Finally, Ghosh's Pravda article called for a "broad na-
tional association of all patriotic and democfatic forces"--
based on the alliance between the workers and peasants, the
nucleus of the national-democratic front--to defend the state
sector, achieve land reform, control the monopolies, prevent
imperialist loans, criticize harmful tendencies in government,
and so generally gain influence over government policies.
Ghosh called vaguely for the overcoming Of differences among
democratic forces resulting from their belonging to different
political parties, but did not clearly indicate which social
classes, parties, or elements of parties might belong to the
national democratic front, and on what basis.
To sum up: Ghosh and the CPSU had apparently agreed be-
fore the CPI Congress on a balanced line including both praise
of Nehru's foreign policy and criticism of his vacillations;
credit for aspects of the government's domestic policy and a
certain number of detailed attacks on its faults; and emphasis
on the harm being done to the Communist cause in India by the
Sino-Indian dispute. They were also agreed on the need for
a broad national-democratic front, but had not yet specified
the makeup of that front beyond the generalized call for the
inclusion of "all democratic forces."
Chronology of the Congress: On 6 April, Suslov arrived
at the site of the CPI Congress, the town of Vijayavada, in
Andhra Pradesh province of southern India. Either that night
or on the morning of the next day, Suslov is reported to have
briefed a few top representatives of all the CPI factions--
Ghosh, Ranadive, Bhupesh Gupta, and Dange--and to have reit-
erated the Soviet request that there be no CPI discussio
the Sino-Indian border dispute.
Suslov is said to have later indicatea to CPI moderates that
this was all the more necessary because the CCP was not repre-
sented at the congress; if any resolution on the subject were
passed, the Chinese would assume that he had sponsored it as
a new CPSU attack on them. In fact, no resolution was to be
passed and there was to be no congress discussion of the issue
permitted, although four resolutions prepared from different
viewpoints were presented.
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On 7 April, the outgoing National Council met to decide
the agenda for the congress, and there was an immediate fac-
tional battle over whether the congress was to take up first
the political resolution or the ,long-term party Program. The
Ghosh-Dange forces, with their superior National Council're-
sourCes, won this skirmish, and the right to consider the
party program first; it was supposedly felt that there was
greater congress support for the Dange draft of the program
than for Ghosh's political resolution, and that an initial
victory might affect later voting.
Early on the morning of 8 April, the congress began dis-
cussion of the two drafts of the_program. A serious attempt
was made to keep all, the congress debates secret. Dange and
others, speaking for the rightist draft, reportedly; set forth
the goal of "national democracy" for India, urging that "pro-
gressive" elements of the Praja Socialist party and the Con-
gress party-,-especially the mass following, Of, the.,latterbe
drawn into the broad National Democratic Front alliance by the
CPI, and proposing that the alliance seek above-all to isolate
the reactionary elements in the Congress party and in the
right-wing parties. Ranadive and Bhupesh Gupta, who presented
the leftist view, supported "people's democracy"--or a limited
alliance led by the Communists--as the goal for the CPI's new
program. They tended to discourage any dealings with the Con-
gress party; they wished to place little 'trust in the national
bourgeoisie; and they sought to unite progressive forces clearly
under the leadership of the working class, directing the mobi-
lization of the masses against the Congress party,
The debate on the program went on for 11 hours, through
the morning and afternoon congress sessions on 8 _April and
the morning session of 9 April. At some point Namboodiripad
is said to have offered a "golden mean" draft program the de-
tails of which are unknown, but which apparently attempted to
reconcile the conflicts between the other two drafts. On the
morning of 9 April, Ghosh gave a speech on the program in
which he made a final effort to swing the congress toward the
Dange draft, defending "National Democracy" as a correct slogan.
It is not clear whether any vote was ever taken; the upshot,
however, was that the congress could not agree. A party spokes-
man acknowledged this to newsmen after the morning session on
the 9th, and attempted to gloss over the differences as con-
cerning only questions of emphasis. The spokesman asserted
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that although both of the principal drafts had envisaged the
formation of a united democratic front at a particular stage,
opinion differed as to when the slogan of national democracy
should be taken up. The eongress had therefore decided that
the new National Council to be chosen at the end of the con-
gress sessions would work on a new draft program to be pre-
sented to the next party congress (which some reports indicated
might be called after the Indian elections in 1962). Mean-
while, the spokesman announced, the CPI would continue to be
guided by the Amritsar line.
Suslov was instrumental in
getting Ghosh to agree to shelve the question of the party
program. Suslov is said to have argued that it was senseless
for the CPI to further split itself over this issue when the
old party program could be made to serve immediate needs.
This was one of the first confirmations of the supposition
that a primary purpose of the CPSU at the CPI Congress was to
keep the CPI from formally splitting apart, and that as in
1960, the CPSU was prepared to make some concessions to this
end.
In the meantime, Suslov had addressed the party congress
on the afternoon of 8 April. He paid emphatic tribute to the
importance of India to the outcome of the world struggle against
imperialism and to the vital significance of the Indian policy
of neutrality. He pointedly warned the CPI of the need for
discipline and unity in its ranks. He spoke of the Indian
party at one point as struggling "against imperialism and feudal
oppression, for national independence, and for democracy and
social progress," and at another point as working "with other
national patriotic forces...to liquidate economic backwardness
and to establish a stable and independent economy, to strengthen
the political independence and sovereignty of their country,
and to promote social progress." Suslov also referred to the
"specific complicated conditions" in which the CPI had to work;
alluded to the CPI's task as one of "determined struggle against
imperialism and the remnants of feudalism" (not, it will be
noted, against the ruling bourgeoisie); and called on the In-
dian party "to unite into a single national democratic front
all the patriotic forces interested in India's advancement along
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the path of economic and social progress."* In short, Suslov
endorsed a national democratic program for the CPI--and a very
minimal one at that--and breathed not a word about socialism
being a goal toward which the CPI should strive. The same was
true of the CPSU message to the Indian party congress read by
Suslov; in contrast, the CCP message read out at the same ses-
sion, while generally restrained in tone, did put-in a word
for socialism in India. As in the case of Ghosh's Pravda
article, the conclusion seems inescapable that the CPSU, while
not committing itself on the subject of alliances with the
Congress party or Congress party units, was far more in sympathy
with the general thrust of the Ghosh-Dange line than with that
of the leftists.
Nevertheless, it has been widely reported--and there is
good reason to believe--that'; it was Suslov who counseled
Ghosh to insert in his General Secretary's Report to the con-
gress (delivered on the afternoon of ,9 April) material tend-
ing considerably more to the left on certain issues than did
the National Council's Political Resolution. which Gh9sh had
prepared back in February. Suslov
may have given such advice at a meeting of top CPI leaders on
the evening of 8 April, when he is said to have criticized
both the National Council draft and Ranadive's alternative,
while supporting Namboodiripad's middle-of-the-road proposal
for a Political Resolution.
This CPSU action was subsequently subjected to wide mis-
interpretation by both extreme left and right factions, being
variously termed an attempt to placate the leftist leaders and
a betrayal of the rightists. In fact, Suslov's advice to
Ghosh appears to have been conditioned by four factors. The
first and most important of these was the need to preserve the
loyal CPSU adherent Ghosh in authority as General �etretary
at all costs, in the face of trends within the party congress
which threatened seriously to displace him.
*The provisions summarized in this sentence were omitted
from the TASS text of Suslov's speech, perhaps because they
revealed too explicitly that the CPSU was attempting to set
a line for the CPI. They appeared in the New Age version
of the speech.
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Second was the need to neutralize enough of the follow-
ing of the left-faction leaders at the congress--while rebuff-
ing those leaders themselves--to head off any inclination by
the leftists to try to take the provincial organizations they
controlled out of the CPI. (The CPSU had for some time feared
as a serious possibility such an organizational split in the
Indian party, and, as has been seen, went to considerable
lengths in early and mid-1960 to prevent it.
From Moscow's point
of view, an open schism in the Indian party--unlike the many
mass explusions of dissenters which have occurred in European
parties--could prove disastrous to Soviet hegemony, because
of Peiping's availability to inspire and guide a rival Indian
Communist party.)
The Soviets were therefore prepared to underwrite an at-
tempt by Ghosh to steal the leftist leaders' thunder by warn-
ing against expectations of an automatic and smooth parliamen-
tary transition to power, provided that the essentials of the
current Soviet line--the very broad alliance seeking limited
democratic goals through peaceful means--were maintained. This
implied a retreat from the exposed position taken by the 1958
Amritsar congress to the more reserved but still fairly opti-
mistic view of peaceful transition ID socialism taken by the
Palghat Congress of 1956. This method of undercutting the
arguments of the CPI leftist faction was somewhat analogous
to the way in which the CPSU in 1960 had sought to undercut
the Chinese appeal to the world Communist movement by adopt-
ing a more militant line on colonial revolutions; but it will
be seen that Ghosh's retreat was not intended to support the
CPI left wing any more than the CPSU retreat from the extteme
version of the peaceful coexistence line was intended to sup-
port Peiping.
Thirdly, while the CPSU, unlike Ranadive, desired that
a balance be kept bettveen support and criticism of Indian gov-
ernment domestic policies, it was probably felt that the bal-
ance contain 3d in the National Council draft Political Resolu-
tion was too heavily weighted toward the positive side to
serve CPI short-term interests in the coming election campaign.
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Finally, while the CPSU wished general support for Nehru's
neutral foreign policy to be retained, it was necessary that
Ghosh's speech 7-ow also reflect the specific criticism of New
Delhi's Congo policy which had become apposite since the draft
Political Resolution was prepared in February (as Ghosh had
already, in fact, done in his 5 April Pravda article).
These considerations were all reflected in the speech
Ghosh delivered to the CPI-Congress on the afternoonof 9
April, and in the description of that' speech Published in,
,Pravda three days later. Ghosh's speeCh was' his second of the
congress; it was a report given in his capacity as general
secretary, opening the debate on, the political resolution and
introducing the National Council-draft. In this report Ghosh,
,while praising Nehres foreign policy in general terms, was,
like the 5 April Pravda article, somewhat more specific than
his draft political resolution had been on New Delhi's defi.,!:
ciencies regarding colonialism. At the same'time he placed
somewhat more stress on the degree to which the Indian govern-
ment had yielded to the attacks of domestic reactionaries and
had shifted to the right, and spoke more of the "anti-people
measures" of the government. He devoted less attention than
had his draft political resolution to an explanation of how
democratic tasks are in the "objective interest" of the nation-
al bourgeoisie, and in fact spoke less of the national' bour-
geoisie generally, instead concentrating on the danger of the
"monopolistic bourgeoisie," who were no longer portrayed as
the insignificant handful the draft political resolution had
described.
Ghosh now criticized the line of the Amritsar congress,
and favored instead the qualified endorsement of peaceful tran-
sition made by the Palghat Congress of 1956. The Amritsar
resolution was described as both reformist (because it implied
a belief that the parliamentary slide into power would be both
automatic and smooth) and sectarian (because it did not appeal
for a broad enough united front for strictly limited, non-so-
cialist goals). Ghosh warned against interpreting-the peace-
ful path to socialism as mere reliance upon parliament alone;
this he termed a reformist deception which had been exposed
by the Kerala events. Ghosh predicted that the conditions of
life for the masses would remain bad under the third five-year
plan, and that class contradictions would sharpen. He cautioned
that anti-democratic tendencies might increase within the ruling
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class, that violations of parliamentary methods and traditions
by the bourgeoisie--such as the means used to expel the CPI
in Kerala--might increase; even a reactionary personal dicta-
torship, he said, might be a possibility after Nehru's death.
All this, however, was at least offset by an emphatic
restatement of many central elements of the right-wing line.
Ghosh upheld his political resolution's contention that con-
ditions were nevertheless still favorable for the formation
of a very broad national democratic front, whose chief goal
would be not the replacement of the government but the enact-
ment of a series of democratic reforms. While making it plain
that the CPI would have to fight the next election on the basis
of its own program, with the government necessarily made the
clear target of electoral attack--and that therefore any gen-
eral electoral alliance with the Congress party was impossible--
Ghosh also made it plain that this did not mean abandonment
of the long-term effort to draw both the following and the
"progressive" section of the leadership of the Congress party
into the national democratic front.* As in his draft resolu-
tion, all Ghosh's allusions to Nehru except those concerning
the Kerala events were most favorable; blame was almost invari-
ably placed upon "the government," not upon Nehru. Ghosh also
declared that it would be a "big mistake" to equate the Con-
gress with the rightist Indian parties. Citing the Palghat
line on the need to take into account the Congress' hold on
the Indian masses, Ghosh reiterated the assertions made in his
draft political resolution that a process of "rethinking" is
going on among many Congress supporters and that an attempt
must be made to appeal to the Congress masses and to progres-
sive Congress leaders. His draft resolution had called on the
CPI to undertake joint action with local Congress Party com-
mittees in peasant areas; Ghosh now similarly spoke of the
need to take into account the loyalty of Congress followers
to their organizations and to Nehru, as well as the need to
*While Ghosh in this speech merely implied strongly several
times that the national democratic front must include suitable
elements of the national bourgeoisie, Pravda's 12 April report
on his speech, in summarizing this portion of his remarks, took
the liberty of saying so explicitly: another indication of
the CPSU's position.
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make direct appeals "not only to the Congress masses but also
to Congress committees, taking into account the issue concern-
ed." In short, despite his ruling out of any general alliance
with the Congress Party during the election campaign, Ghosh
insisted that "united front from above" as well as "united
front from below" tactics must be used toward the Congress
in the long-term effort of building the national democratic
front. This was anathema to the West Bengal left-faction
leaders.
Worst still, from the point of view of the Ranadive fac-
tion, Ghosh went beyond the scope of his draft resolution to
add a direct polemical attack on the "deep-rooted sectarian-
ism" of CPI leaders who found themselves unable to mobilize
the masses to combat the negative features of Indian govern-
ment foreign policy because they were not willing or "inspired"
to mobilize movements in support of favorable aspects of New
Delhi's policy. It is again characteristic of the CPSU's at-
titude that this passage was included in its entirely in Pravda's
highly selective account of Ghosh's speech. Also included
in the Pravda summary was a pointed attack made by Ghosh on
the contention of the old 1951 program of the CPI that the
Nehru government was pro-imperialist.* Ghosh also attacked the
Ranadive alternative draft political resolution as reverting
to the pre-Palghat line of mere hostility to the government,
of mere�Trexposure of the government and the Congress and gen-
eral propaganda about people's democracy" without any real
attempt to reach Congress supporters. Ranadive's attitude,
Ghosh said, was based on the "politically passive" expectation
"that some day or other the masses, drawn by misery, would
come over to us;" and Ranadive's draft was "permeated with a
sense of conspiracy." In attacking the CPI leftists in these
terms, Ghosh was surely aware that he was repeating the langu-
age used in the assault on "contemporary left-wing adventur-
ists" in the Communist movement made by Shevlyagin in a June
1960 Pravda article--in other words, that he was identifying
Ranadive as a pupil of the Chinese.
Finally, Ghosh repeated the statements made in his 5
April Pravda article about the "heavy blow" dealt "to the
democratic forces and to the CPI" by the Sino-Indian border
dispute, and implied that the failure to settle this conflict
has helped reactionary forces in their efforts to alter Indian
foreign policy. The reiteration of this point originally made
*This point was again emphasized in a short review of the
CPI Congress in a fall issue of the Soviet journal Peoples of
Asia and Africa.
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in Pravda suggests that it had Soviet approval; and it is known
that the CPSU had utilized this charge about the baneful ef-
fect on the CPI of the Sino-Indian dispute in several of the
secret confrontations with the CCP during 1960. It is possible
that while the Soviets wanted the Indian party to avoid public
denunciations of Peiping if at all possible, nevertheless Mos-
cow also wanted the CPI to realize clearly the fact that the
dispute was hurting the party, and to suggest again to Indian
cadres that the CCP bore part of the responsibility for this.
A furious concurrent debate on Ghosh's report and on the
political resolution next ensued at the CPI Congress on the
morning of 10 April, and went on for five full days. On 10
April, Ranadive on the left and Namboodiripad in the center
introduced their alternative drafts; but both of them now found
that they had been outflanked by Ghosh. Many elements of
Namboodiripad's balanced plan for both CPI support and criticism
of the government had already been accepted by Ghosh (a fact
which the secretary general had acknowledged in his speech);
while Ghosh's leftist points calling for a strongly anti-gov-
ernment election campaign had stolen many of Ranadive's argu-
ments. The left-faction leaders, who were more anxious to
seize organizational control of the CPI than to secure modifi-
cations of wording in the political resolution, were reported
to have commented at this time that Ghosh had "beat us with
our own stick."
The right wing of the party under Dange, however, felt
betrayed by Ghosh's retreat, and made an unsuccessful attempt
to head it off. Following the introduction of the Namboodiri-
pad and Ranadive drafts, Dange convened a factional meeting
of.the CPI right wing, with delegates from many provinces pre-
sent. At this meeting Dange is reported to have been pressed
by extremists on the right to attempt to force a congress deci-
sion on their terms. Dange is said to have replied that he
was unsure of his following's strength, and suggested that it
be tested by submitting a motion to the congress approving the
National Council political resolution unmodified by anything
in Ghosh's speech. According to the report, this was done,
and the motion was defeated by a vote of 205-197. Dange is
subsequently said to have told his followers that they were
unable to carry the party with them now, must accept modifi-
cations in the resolution:, and should rely on the resolution's
retention of the "national democracy" slogan to protect the
essence of their views.
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On the morning of 11 April, Ghosh is reported to have
explained to the delegates that he, Ranadive, and Namboodiri-
pad were negotiating over the political resolution, and that
debate was to continue in the meantime. On the afternoon and
,evening of 11 April, as previously arranged in the agenda, the
congress .was adjourned for private dickering; on 12 April de-
bate was resumed; and on the morning of 13 April the congress
Noted on numerous amendments to Ghosh's report, which was to
be disposed of before the political resolution. Certain amend-
ments to the speech from both sides were adopted: from the
left, provisions stating that unity with�the.national bourgeoisie
was to be .predicated on the extent to which it tought imperi-
alism and feudalism, calling on the CPI to explain to the peo-
_
ple the falseness of the Congress party's use of socialist
slogans, and calling on:-.the party, while developing common .
activity with Congressmen, to explain to the Congress party
masses the inadquacy of that party's policy; and fromt.the
right, an emphatic explanation of the need for cooperation and
alliances with patriotic organizations and "leading Congress-
men." With these contradictory elements added, Ghosh's -General
Secretary's Report was formally acCepted by the party congress
on the morning of 13 April, and was later duly published in,
this form in New Age.
On the afternoon of the same day, discussion of the poli-
tical resolution resumed. The leftist and centrist draft
resolutions were now withdrawn, and the delegates agreed to
seek adoption of the Ghosh National Council resolution with
amendments. The battle now again revolved around which amend-
ments were to be accepted; more than two hundred were report-
ed offered, and the voting was said to be close and bitter,
with the delegates shouting and heckling one another. On 14
April, the party congress finally voted to accept the Ghosh
resolution plus three amendments of some consequence leaning
on the whole toward the left-faction side: these were said
to relate to the pernicious role of Western capital in India;
the need for the party to lead mass struggles; and the cir-
cumstances under which cooperation with leftist elements among
Congress party leaders would be feasible. The resolution was
also amended to include the final section of Ghosh's report
dealing with the party's tactical line during the coming elec-
tion campaign: as has already .been noted, this was the most
markedly anti-government aspect of Ghosh's speech. Ghosh was
authorized by the congress to tidy up the resolution along
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these lines and release it later. As eventually published in
the 7 May New Age, the resolution in its final form clearly
showed the influence of the leftist amendments, which gave to
it a more consistently militant and anti-Congress tone over-
all than that of Ghosh's speech, let alone that of the original
National Council draft. This was the greatest achievement
the left-faction leaders were to register at the party congress,
and was a good indication of their strength among the delegates.
However, because the leftists were unable to follow this up
by seizing organizational control of the party, and because
neither the CPSU nor Ghosh was behind them, the incorporation
of many leftist views into the resolution did not mean enforce-
ment of those views upon the party as a whole, because pro-
vincial party organizations could and did find in the resolu-
tion some language to justify the moderate or extremist course
the particular faction in control of each province intended
to continue to follow.
Later on 14 April, Suslov is reported to have had another
conversation with CPI leaders. Although much of what he said
on this occasion is available only through the distorting prism
of left-faction propaganda,* the CPSU official appears to have
reiterated previous Soviet emphasis on the need for the CPI
to maintain both support for Nehru's progressive foreign poli-
cies and criticism of his policy shortcomings in an effort to
bring pressure on the Indian bourgeoisie to arrest India's
slide toward the West and pull it tOward the bloc. Suslov also
seems to have repeated his advice to CPI leaders not to volun-
teer any public attacks on the CPR, subject again to the im-
portant qualification that the CPI as a mass party was bound
to encounter questions on this issue and had a responsibility
to answer them.
*Basavapunniah, for example, continuing his efforts to con-
vince the CPI that the CPSU had given authority over the Indian
party to Peiping, claimed privately that Suslov had strongly
urged the CPI to "follow" the Chinese example of economic de-
velopment and had emphasized that the Chinese method of "solv-
ing the agricultural crisis" was applicable to India. This
claim was remarkable in view of the current Chinese economic
situation and the many Soviet public and private allusions in
1961 to the mess the Chinese party had created.
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On the morning of the 15th, Namboodiripad presented his
organizational report on the party, together with his proposed
draft of A new party constitution. Both- were apparently
briefly discussed by the congress and then shelve(1, like the
party program, as too controversial for the 'party to consider
in its present divided state. Namboodiripad's report was a-
long and scathing documentation of the process by which-the:
Indian Communist Party since the early- 1950s had lost every
semblance of internal discipline or coherent Centralized
direction, touching inter alia on such factors in this pro-
cess as the 1947-1951 factional battles for the leadership,
the tremendous effects of deStalinization on the CPI, and the
steady growth of parliamentary illusions throughout the party.
Although there may be some truth to subsequent CPI leftist
claims that Suslov read and approved aspects of this report
it is very doubtful that any CPSU representative could have
approved of the way Namboodiripad tried to resolve the dual
question of discipline Within and among Communist parties.
After deploring the erosion of faith within the CPI in both
democratic centralism and the solidarity of the international
:movement, Namboodiripad hailed the 1960 Moscow Statement as
"pointing out the way in which the ideological-political is-
sues of the international movement, are to be further discussed
and decided." He declared:
While every national party will discuss and decide
questions of national importance as a centralized
party in which it is obligatory for the minority -
to submit itself to the majority and for the lower,
units to submit themselves to the higher units,_
the international relations of the world Communist
movement are so arranged that "the Communist and
Workers parties hold meetings whenever necessary
to discuss urgent problems'cand otherwise maintain
the unity of the international movement. This would
give us a clear perspective of the way in which the
world Communist movement is grOwing and is arrang-
ing its affairs. This new conception of the unity of
the world movement.. .should help us a good deal in
overcoming the consequences of the shocks felt by
us after the Twentieth TCPSU7 Congress.
_
The context of this passage suggested that Namboodiripad
was implying that he welcomed the 1960 Moscow Statement as
representing Soviet public acknowledgement that it was loosening
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the reins on the world movement, and that only such a relinquish-
ment of CPSU authority could satisfy the demands of CPI mem-
bers and restore their willingness to accept internal discipline
in View of the misuse to which the CPSU had put party discipline
in Stalin's time. But if Namboodiripad thought the CPSU was
in fact willing to accept as final the defeat it had suffered
on this issue in 1960 at the hands of the Chinese party, he
was naive; and this may have had something to do with the fact
that his report was shelved.
It was also on 15 April that four separate draft resolu-
tions were presented to the congress on the border question,
expressing, with varying degrees of warmth, regret at the
position taken by Peiping. In accordance with Suslov's ad-
vice, none of these resolutions was adopted or even allowed
to be discussed by the congress.
The final major battle of the CPI congress, over the
election of a new National Council, began on the evening of
15 April and went on through an all-night session until the
morning of 16 April, accompanied by booing, heckling, and dele-
gate walkouts. The issue was joined when the old National
Council on 15 April was unable to agree on the customary
Communist single list of candidates for the new party organ,
because the leftist leaders insisted on complete autonomy for
the provincial committees in choosing their own slates of
representatives. This was a move designed to allow the left-
ists in control of such provincial organizations as those of
West Bengal and the Punjab to purge the few rightist leaders
from their provinces previously placed on the National Council.
The struggle was transferred to the congress plenum, and the
leftists attempted to carry out their purge; but the rightist
faction retaliated by proposing changes from the floor. The
leftists from West Bengal, the Punjab, and Tamilnad then with-
drew their slates and walked out of the congress, leaving a
rump of the new National Council elected. Although Dange re-
portedly wished to allow this rump_ to go ahead and function--
which would have formalized an open schism in the CPI--Ghosh
worked frantically through the night (with, presumably, Suslov's
help) to try to find an acceptable compromise. In the end,
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it was agreed to amend the CPI Constitution to enlarge the
limit fixed for the National Council sufficiently to accom-
modate the leftist slates plus the persons the leftists had
ousted.* Thereupon,- the leftist Ramamurft announced on 16
April that all those who had withdrawn from the new National
Council were now back; the Italian party observer Pajetta Was
said to have commented privately on the strong factional
discipline this revealed.
The upshot of this struggle--in which the open split the
CPSU feared had almost materialized--was that the rightists
retained a reduced majority on the Natibnal Council; of the
110 members of the new body, 56 were estimated to be rightists,
36 to be leftists,- with 18 neutrals. It will be seen, however,
that the tactics the leftists had used to achieve this limited
improvement of their.position were to cost them dearly when
the time came for the rightist-led National Council to elect
a new Central Executive Committee and Central Secretariat.
Later on r6 April, Ghosh was duly re-elected general sec-
retary of the party, and the congress closed. Neither wing
of the party had obtained everything it wanted, but many of
the leftist leaders could and did congratulate themselves on
the greatly increased strength they had shown at the congress,
and claimed they had made at least a start toward seizing con-
trol of the party. Extremists on both sides tended to be bit-
ter and to. offer contradictory estimates of what had happened.
At an alcoholic luncheon with cronies later in the month, Dange
took an exaggeratedly pessimistic line, complaining that Rana-
dive now had the strongest organization in the CPI and blam-
ing Suslov for the concessions to the leftists Ghosh:hdd-made.
The Andhra extreme leftist Sundarayya, on the other hand, told
friends a week after the congress that he regretted that the
congress could not give a clear lead to the people, and was
caustic about the proposed formation of a national democratic
front including "so-called" progressives of the Congress party.
*Actually, one or two of the nine extra persons thus re-
stored to the National Council were leftists from Maharashtra
whom the rightist faction h.ad also sought to purge.
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Sundarayya thought that some comrades had betrayed the party,
lured by the prospect of temporary gains; that the parliamentary
path had been tiled and had failed, and should have been
abandoned; that the party was losing its spirit of sacrifice
and revolutionary character, and therefore the rightist resolu-
tion had been accepted by the congress;* that the leftists had
tried to reorient and revolutionize the party, but had failed,
because "a powerful section" of the party wished to support
Nehru's government. If the party supported Nehru, he said,
it might as well not exist as a separate party, and should
join the Congress organization (an echo of the Chinese guidance
to the leftistsrrovided in December 1960). Sundarayya asked
how the CPI could cooperate with a robber, even though a small
fraction of his spoils went to the underprivileged; he could
not understand how there could be a "good" robber (echoing the
Red Flag articles of April 1960). Support for Nehru and for
the parliamentary system was estranging the CPI from the masses,
he felt; "when leaders like me shed blood," he added, "only
then can the party grow."
In the sense, therefore, that the'Sixth CPI Congress did
not encourage Sundarayya to shed his blood and did indicate
continued (if conditional) reliance upon parliamentary tactics,
the outcome favored the rightists. On the other hand, in line
with the party's retreat from the Amritsar expression of faith
in a parliamentary transition to socialism to the Palghat as-
sertion that the feasibility of a parliamentary transition would
depend on the future attitude shown by the bourgeoisie, steps
seem_ to have been taken at the congress to expedite decisions
previously taken to build up the party's underground organiza-
tion. Dange claimed that the CPI had decided to establish a
network of underground "combat cells" all over India during
the next two years, to be used in case of need; and Jaipal
Singh, the head of the CPI secret organization in the defense
services, told a recruit after the congress that his organiza-
tion was in full swing again after having been deactivated in
May 1960 because of party factionalism and government attention
to his activities. Nothing more has been heard since the congress
*Sundarayya's view of the nature of the resolution finally
passed by the congress.
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.0.5geft-Er
about the possibility of Chinese help to and guidance for these
CPI underground activities; there had been indications earlier
in the year that Peiping had responded to the leftist plea for
such help by predicating it upon leftist seizure of organiza-
tional control of the CPI at the party congress, and the fail-
ure of the leftists to do this, together with the apparent
CPSU moves to preempt supervision of this field, may have in-
duced Peiping to back off.
D. The CPI Between Its Congress and the 22nd CPSU Congress
June National Council Meeting: Two months after the Sixth
Congress, the new National Council met at Bangalore, with its
most important task the election of the Central Executive Com-
mittee and the Central Secretariat, the executive bodies that
would be charged with immediate supervision of the party un-
til the next party congress. Both of the old organs had pre-
viously turned out to have leftist majorities, despite the
large rightist majority on the old National Council which had
elected them: a fact suggesting that the polarization of the
party which was brought to everyone's awareness under the im-
pact of the Sino-Soviet dispute in 1959 and 1960 had not gone
nearly so far in 1958 when the party organs were last chosen.
Now, this discrepancy was intolerable to the rightists; and
the new National Council, with a much smaller rightist majority
than before, replaced the old Central Executive Committee
dominated 14 to 9 by the leftists with a new body in which the
moderates had a 13 to 12 edge. An even greater .change occurred
in the Central Secretariat, which is responsible for the day-
to-day operation of the party, and which the leftists had been
able to use to their own advantage on several occasions in
Ghosh's absence. This body was cut down to five members, of
whom the first four--Ghosh, Dange, M.N. Govindan Nair,* and
Z.A. Ahmad--were moderates, while Bhupesh Gupta was the sole
leftist remaining. Although some reports have suggested that
*After going through several stages in his political evolu-
tion (like a number of other CPI leaders), Nair had now adopt-
ed a moderate position.
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this one-sided result came about partly because certain left-
ists, including Ranadive, withdrew their names rather than
participate in a larger rightist-dominated Secretariat, the
direction of the change was not caused by these leftist maneuv-
erings. The most important effect of the Secretariat reshuffle
was to ensure that until the next party congress the central
direction of the Indian Communist Party would remain in hands
at least more likely than before to be loyal to the CPSU un-
der all circumstances. For this reason, it seems reasonable
to believe--although there is no direct evidence--that the
basic trend of these changes, if not the details, was endorsed
by the CPSU in advance.
Provincial Factional Struggles: The CPI was supposed to
have united to concentrate its energy in preparations for the
electoral campaign. However, factional infighting--slightly
subdued--vent on as before, particularly in the provincial
party organizations. The right wing scored a temporary vic-
tory in a marginal province in June, when the Andhra Pradesh
party narrowly elected a rightist as the new party secretary
against a leftist opponent supported by Sundarayya. In July,
the northern Uttar Pradesh organization controlled by right-
ist Central Secretariat member Ahmad again defeated the local
left-wing opposition. In May and June Ranadive and Dange
both were reported making strenuous efforts to strength the
positions of their minority adherents in the respective op-
position strongholds of Maharashtra and West Bengal; in neither
case did these efforts bear immediate fruit.
While most CPI leaders during this period were guided by
the Soviet advice to remain circumspect in their public state-
ments on the border issue, this was not so of everyone: Ahmad
in July indicated that the party would take a clearly nation-
alist stand on the question of Chinese incursion into India,
a position for which he was severely berated in the West Bengal
organization, and from which he subsequently retreated.
Ramamurthi, the leftist from Tamilnad, on the other hand was
quoted in June by a provincial bourgeois newspaper as having
declared in a private interview that India, not China, had
committed aggression on the border. The leftist attitude on
this score was made clear by Ranadive in May when he told a
closed party meeting that the attitude Nehru showed toward
China on the border dispute should be an important criterion
for the appraisal of his foreign policy.
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Both Dange and the leftist leaders acknowledged in the
months after the Sixth Congress that the line the CPI was now
following was an ambiguous one designed solely for the interim
period of the election campaign, and that a more consistent
line (by which they meant one following their own views) would
have to be sought after the elections. In the meantime, as
expected, the provincial organizations and central factions
were interpreting the tactical line for the elections to suit
themselves. In some cases this meant completely ignoring
everything that had happened at the party congress. A central
party official was to complain in the fall that certain pro-
vincial committees had not even troubled to get the Political
Resolution translated into their respective languages, so that
party members were not told of what was supposed to be the of-
ficial line of the party. This official noted the "depressing"
fact that "some leading cadres have not even cared to read the
resolution," and that no provincial committee had bothered to
inform the party center what if anything it was doing to ex-
plain it to local party members. (At the June meeting of the
National Council, Namboodiripad had lamented the "sorry state
of affairs /Tihereby7 the Central Office of the party...is not
in a position even to collect information on the organizational
position of the party in various states and regions.") '
Even when the provincial organizations took cognizance
of the line the congress had adopted, they reacted in opposite
directions. On the one hand, during the spring and summer
right-wing party units in Delhi and Andhra were negotiating
to support Congress candidates, Namboodiripad was pledging
CPI support for a Congress or Praja Socialist candidate for
the Kerala Assembly speakership,and Ghosh and Namboodiripad
were seeking to pull the CPI out of its political isolation
by issuing public appeals to the Congress and Praja Socialist
parties to form a united front with the CPI to fight communal-
ism in India. On the other hand, West Bengal party meetings
heard attacks on the rightist activities of the central party
leadership, and criticism of Bhupesh Gupta for agreeing to
serve as the sole leftist on the rightist Central Secretariat.
In August, followers of Konar prepared a draft resolution for
the West Bengal party attacking the political resolution adopted
at the CPI Congress, complaining that even Ranadive's proposals
had not gone far enough to the left, and denouncing the party
leadership for failing to see that the National Democratic
Front line was unsuitable for India. Konar himself at a
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Provincial Executive Committee meeting declared that this line
was unrealistic, and attacked the central leaders for wishful
thinking on the question of cooperating with progressive Con-
gress party elements, declaring that Ghosh and the others in
New Delhi appeared to want to avoid serious battles on the
economic as well as the political front. He asked the West
Bengal organization to scotch any illusions about the growth
of a "bourgeois" democratic front in their province, and stated
that the West Bengal party was fighting for a leftist alliance
in West Bengal rather than for a bourgeois democratic alliance.
What this meant in practice was that the leftist West Ben-
gal leadership not only emphatically rejected attempts by
the local right-wing minority to have the provincial party
support occasional progressive Congress Party candidates, but
also refused to allow the important but vehemently anti-Chinese
Praja Socialist party into the alliance they were constructing
for the elections, declaring that they would "not surrender
to attempts to smuggle Congressite political thought into the
leftist alliance." Instead, the West Bengal party allied it-
self only with a group of tiny splinter parties on the extreme
left which it could expect to dominate without the need for
compromise. Moreover, because Konar and the other extremist
leaders held out the unrealistic hope to party cadres that they
could unaided win control of the West Bengal Legislature and
form a purely Communist provincial government, the party was
niggardly in alloting legislative candidatures to its allies
in the leftist alliance, to the point of endangering that al-
liance. Finally, the left-faction leadership of the West Ben-
gal party is reported to have attempted to continue its purge
of rightist opposition within the provincial party by denying
party nominations for seats in the legislature to leading
_ rightists.
Ghosh and Basu Visits to Moscow: Meanwhile, on 11 July
Ghosh let for one of his periodic visits to Moscow, to con-
sult with CPSU leaders on a variety of subjects. In addition
to holding discussions on the international situation and on
CPI internal dissension and policies. Ghosh is said,
to have taken
part in meetings of an international committee considering
fresh CPSU-CCP grievances. While this is completely unconfirmed,
it is quite possible that the CPSU gave Ghosh some briefing
on the current state of Sino-Soviet relations. There is no
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evidence, however, that Ghosh was told of a Soviet intention
to attack the Albanian leaders--and thus indirectly the CCP--
at the 22nd CPSU Congress in October.
A few weeks after Ghosh's departure for the Soviet Union,
he was followed there by Jyoti Basu,- the West Bengal leader.
who had stepped down as provincial party secretary in January.
Reports indicate that during the two or three weeks that Basu
remained in Moscow, the Soviet leadership made some effort to
influence his views both on the issue of the "national demo-
cratic front" and on the question of the relations of the West
Bengal party to the CCP. While there was some indication both
before and after Basu's journey that his views had become a
trifle less extreme than those of Konar or Promode Das Gupta
(the new provincial party secretary), there was not subsequent
evidence that the CPSU had succeeded in driving a serious
wedge into the pro-Chinese left-faction phalanx in West Bengal
which Konar and Gupta now controlled.
September National Council Meeting and Election Manifesto:
In early September Ghosh returned to India, bearing with him
instructions reportedly given him by CPSU Presidium member
Kuusinen to see that the CPI in its forthcoming Election Mani-
festo made some gesture in support of the Indian nationalist
position on the border issue and in condemnation of the-Chi-
nese position. While it is undoubtedly true that the CPSU
gave such advice primarily because it wished the CPI to make
the most effective possible appeal to nationalist sentiment
in the elections, the fact that this consideration had so much
greater weight With Kuusinen in September than with Suslov in
April strongly suggests that Moscow was at least partly in-
fluenced by the fact that it was about to launch a major of-
fensive against the CCP and its adherents at the CPSU party
congress the following month. This is also suggested by the
extreme nature of the plank that Ghosh is reported to have at-
tempted to get the CPI to adopt. During a Central Executive
Committee meeting held from 11 to 17 September at which a
draft Election Manifesto was prepared, a plank on the border
issue was drawn up, reportedly by Ghosh personally, which was
said to have condemned China as an aggressor, to have strongly
supported the Indian position on the border, and to have speti-
fically commended the Indian government study team for its re-
port which "proved" the correctness of the Indian stand.
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However, when during the following week Ghosh attempted
to get the National Council to approve this plank, it was
found that the expected rightist margin in the Council had
disappeared, presumably partly because less than half the
Council members were actually present, and partly because
some who were willing to support moderate measures on domes-
tic CPI policy were not willing to back an open condemnation
of the Chinese. Three amendments to the plank were offered,
one strengthening it, one leaving it essentially unchanged,
and a third, from Ranadive, denying all support to the Indian
position. During acrimonious debate Ranadive charged. that
Ghosh was reneging on an understanding reached at the CPI
Congress not to discuss this issue, Sundarayya and Basavapun-
niah thkeatened to leave the meeting, and Sundarttyya and
Konar each warned that their respective organizations in
Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal woulct not be bound by the plank
if adopted. When the Ghosh CEC plank was submitted to a
vote, it was defeated, 25-22. The issue was finally put off
by instructing Ghosh to amend the draft in the light of the
National Council discussion; and as a result of negotiations
between the factions Bhupesh Gupta finally prepared the com-
promise version that was finally included in the Manifesto
released to the press on 12 October. Despite press reports
to the contrary, this version was not any advance on previous
CPI positions-. Exactly like the February 1961 National Coun-
cil resolution, it affirmed the MacMahon line in the east
and an unspecified "traditional frontier" in the west, sup-
ported India's title to all of Kashmir (and therefore implicitly
her exclusive right to negotiate with the CPR for Ladakh),
and called for a political settlement. Even this much, how-
ever, did not please the leftists, who had wished the CPI to
continue to maintain the party's congress' policy of silence
on this issue. The CCP was duly informed by the leftists of
the details of the struggle over Ghosh's plank, as well as of
the fact that Kuusinen had encouraged Ghosh to.write that
plank.
Otherwise, the National Council meeting was chiefly not-
able for its rejection of the leftist attitude on electoral
alliances. In areas where no Communist candidate was to be
offered, the Council reportedly approved both the conclusion
of alliances with the Praja Socialist Party for the defeat of
reactionary Congress candidates, and support for "acceptable,
progressive" Congress candidates to defeat the nominees of
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extreme right-wing parties. Both of these tactical measures
had been and continued to be rejected by the West Bengal
party organization.
E. The 22nd CPSU Congress and Its Aftermath
Suslov at the CPI Congress in April had reportedly again
requested that the CPI send a "balanced" delegation of left-
ists and rightists to the CPSU Congress in October. This re-
quest was fulfilled; in addition to himself, Ahmad,� and the
MaharaAhtrazi:ler Sardesai--three moderates--the delegation
included Promode Das Gupta, the West Bengal leader, and from
one to three lower-level figures associated with the leftist
faction.* The CPI delegation witnessed the :tumultuous events
of the congress, and heard Ghosh address the congress on 21
October. During or shortly after the congress Ghosh appears
to have had private discussions with Khrushchev and MikOyan
(during one of which the other members of the delegation may
have been present); and early in November, after the close of
the congress, all members of the delegation except Ghosh went
on a tour of the Soviet provinces, while Ghosh remained in
Moscow to confer with Suslov. It also seems reasonable to
expect that some members of the delegation--most notably Das
Gupta, the leftist leader*t-would have met with members of the
CCP delegation during the congress, and one report of uncertain
reliability purported to give details of such a conversation
between Chou and the CPI leftists, in which Chou attacked
Khrushchev's actions and policies along familiar Chinese lines.
*A seven-man delegation was supposed to go to Moscow, but
it is not certain that two of the lesser CPI delegates actually
went.
**On 24 September, Ranadive had reportedly sent an inter-
mediary to the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi to emphasize to
the CCP that Das Gupta was a reliable member of the leftist
faction and should be taken into confidence by the Chinese
at the 22nd CPSU Congress.
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There is little doubt that the CPI delegation, and Ghosh
personally, were profoundly disturbed by the violent assault
unleashed on the Albanian leaders at the congress in what was
to prove the opening step in a campaign to force Peiping to
relinquish support of Albania and thereby undermine its own
challenge to CPSU authority over the international Communist
movement. Ghosh well knew the reaction this would evoke from
the left-faction strongholds of the CPI, and he may have sur-
mised that Chou En-lai's charge that the CPSU action was an
un-Marxist way to try to resolve differences between Communist
parties might receive sympathy even in sections of the Indian
party normally loyal to the CPSU. In view of his subsequent
statements, Ghosh may even have felt this way himself, although
he certainly held no brief for the basic views of the Albanians
or the Chinese; in any case, his primary concern was to pre-
serve his own position and if at all possible to prevent the
public facade of CPI unity from being destroyed on the eve of
a national election. In his speech to the CPSU Congress Ghosh
therefore refrained for the time being from joining in the
attackon the Albanian leadership; in this evasion he was joined
at the congress by a number of other leaders of non-bloc Com-
munist parties who in the past had demonstrated at private in-
terparty meetings staunch loyalty to the CPSU and hostility
to the CCP.
This was not all, however: even worse, from Ghosh's
point of view, was the equally violent attack at the CPSU Con-
gress upon Stalin. This attack placed upon the public record
and even elaborated the denunciations of Stalin's crimes--and
the revelations of the realities of Soviet life under his re-
gime--that had previously been recorded only in Khrushchev's
1956 secret speech (which, while published by the West, did
not have quite the same standing with non-bloc party members
as a direct, public avowal of the facts by the CPSU). Ghosh
could not forget the staggering and lasting effect upon CPI
morale and discipline wrought by the first great denigration
of Stalin; Namboodiripad in his organizational report to the
April 1961 CPI Congress had declared the present chaos in the
party in large part attributable to that event. Ghosh knew
that despite the 1956 move against Stalin, the latter's
memory was still revered by many members of all factions of
the Indian party. The CPI general secretary also knew that
his own position was in large part dependent upon that CPI
rank-and-file faith in the happiness of life in the USSR and
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the eternal wisdom of the CPSU which Khrushchev was busily
,demolishing. For all these reasons, it is credible that, as
reported, Ghosh in his private talk with Suslov "had a serious
discussion over the deStalinization issue" and protested,.
against the CPSU decision to remove Stalin's body from his
tomb. (Ghosh, in fact, publicly confirmed this in New Age on
10 December.) It was also reported that when during the�E6n-
gress the entire CPI delegation met with Khrushchev, this i0-
.sue was also raised; one delegate was said to have commented
that Stalin was still highly regarded outside the USSR, and
Khrushchev reportedly replied that this was an issue which the
individual parties must handle as they see fit.
.When Ghosh and the others returned to India in the first
week of November, they found the party already in turmoil.
During the 1-5 November meeting of the,Andhra Pradesh pro-
vincial party council, a complete split had developed, with
the rightists supporting Khrushchev's action and calling, .
Stalin a "sadist" and "fascist," and the leftists denouncing
Khrushchev and saying that he should be "shot dead." :The
provincial council finally narrowly passed a leftist-sponsored
resolution attacking the CPSU and Khrushchev--the second time
such a resolution was passed within the Indian party, the
first having been the West Bengal statement of October 1960.*
The resolution condemned both the Soviet public attack on
Albania (as a regrettable violation of the principles, govern-
ing the settlement of such disputes) and the new attack on
Stalin (as improper, disgraceful and tragic treatment of a
still-respected figure). Though this resolution was not made
public, four members of the Andhra party Council are reported
to have cabled Khrushchev condemning his "vindictive" action.
A number of party agencies and district committees of the
West Bengal party meanwhile wrote to party headquarters can-
celling their subscriptions to New Age: in protest against the
reports of Soviet attacks on Stalin which the central CPI pub-
lication was carrying. West Bengal leaders in mid-November
were privately commenting that the Soviet "open and vitupera-
tive denunciation" of Albania had "certainly violated the 81-
Party Conference code of conduct between two sister parties,"
and that "the treatment of Albania was little different from
the conduct of a colonial power." Calcutta district party
leaders were reported quoting NCNA releases indicating Chinese
*Subsequently, an unconfirmed Yugoslav press report on 10
January 1962 claimed that the secretariat of the West Bengal
party had also adopted a resolution denouncing the Soviet at-
tack on Albania at the 22nd Congress.
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support for Albania. In Kerala, the party organ Jana Yugam
on 31 October said that it was tragic that the battle against
Stalinism had degenerated into an attack on his body, and one
Kerala leader asked for the body to be sent to the Kerala
party. Namboodiripad on 3 November reportedly praised Stalin
and his work in a press conference. Members of the secretariat
of one CPI district committee in Maharashtra published an open
letter to Khrushchev urging him to "reconsider the propriety"
of the decision to move Stalin's body, and asking (like Hoxha)
whether Khrushchev's actions against his rivals was not build-
ing up a concentration of his own power and a cult of his own
personality. Communists in the Tamilnad city of Madurai car-
ried pictures of Stalin in a procession of 18 November. The
turmoil was equally great among sections of the party which
accepted the accusations against Stalin: in early November,
a general meeting of the Bombay City party organization was
reported to have been broken up by wild heckling from the rank-
and-file, who shouted demands to the Bombay leaders to explain
what they had been doing while Stalin was committing his crimes.
_Much of this was discussed at a meeting of the CPI's Cen-
tral Executive Committee in early November which heard Ghosh
report on the CPSU Congress events but took no action. In
mid-November Sundarayya, Das Gupta, Namboodiripad, and several
of the leftist-dominated provincial organizations were report-
ed demanding a meeting of the National Council to discuss the
CPI position on Stalin and Albania; but Ghosh was opposed, be-
cause he knew that any such meeting would be disastrous for
the party on the eve of the elections. He instead preferred
to postpone the meeting until after the elections; the members
of the National Council were polled, and it was reported that
they agreed with him. Basavapunniah thereupon commented that
Ghosh was hiding behind the elections to prevent the party
from meeting to decide the issue, and that the internal con-
troversy would continue to rise nevertheless.
Finally, Ghosh spoke out himself, in an effort to calm
things down. On 10 December, he published an article in New
Age in which he deferred to a later meeting of the National
t-Efrincil any evaluation of the 22 Congress' attack on Albania
"as well as the comment made by Chou En-lai on the propriety
of making such open criticism." At the same time, he finally
went on record with qualified support for Moscow against Al-
bania by mildly condemning Albanian attacks on Soviet foreign
policy and on the 20th Congress decisions as "not in conformity"
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with the 1960 Moscow Declaration.* (Ghosh's anxiety about the
effect of the Sino-Albanian-Soviet struggle upon the CPI, how-
ever, was made manifest when he told a 16 December press con-
ference that "these differences should be ironed out by nego-
tiations and discussions as agreed to at the meeting of Commun-
ist parties in Moscow last year"--a statement suggesting that
Ghosh privately agreed with Chou En-lai's point.)
In his 10 December New Age article, Ghosh attempted to
combat disallusionment wIEN the Soviet party with a lengthy
tribute to the accomplishments of the Soviet Union, the signi-
ficance of the new CPSU program, and the role of the CPSU as
the "vanguard of the world Communist movement." At the same
time, he stated that a "big majority" of CPI members had been
"deeply hurt" by the decision to move Stalin's body, he insist-
ed that Stalin was a distinguished Marxist-Leninist of extreme
.importance, and he expressed "deep regret" that the struggle
against Stalin's cult had been carried so far. Moreover, Ghosh
implicitly sided with the Italian party in declaring that the
question of how the excesses occurred and how they would be
prevented from recurring had not been properly answered. Ghosh
added this pointed warning that Khrushchev had undermined not
only Stalin's but the CPSU's authority:
The 20th Congress...not merely ended the deification
of Stalin, but also demolished the belief in the in-
fallibility of any Party or any leader. This was neces-
sary for such a belief is contrary to the very-spirit
of Marxism-Leninism.** (Emphasis added)
Ghosh concluded by admitting that even CPI members were
"dumbfounded and demoralized" by these events, by begging party
members to keep silent, and be declaring that it was impossible
*A number of other non-bloc Communist parties whose repre-
sentatives did not attack Albania at the CPSU Congress never-
theless went on record against the Albanians subsequently; it
is likely that this belated conformity (which has still not
extended even to all European parties) was evoked by subsequent
CPSU pressure, and it is possible that such pressure was ap-
plied also to Ghosh.
**Khrushchev subsequently conceded, in another context, that
he personally was not infallible.
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to hold a National Council meeting to discuss recent develop-
ments until after the approaching elections.
Sino-Soviet Policy on India and the Return of the Border
Dispute: By the time Ghosh wrote the New Age article cited,
however, another factor had arisen to exacerbate greatly rela-
tions between the CPI factions and between Moscow and Peiping:
a revival of the border dispute.
During the latter half of 1961, the Soviet and Chinese
attitudes toward the Nehru government had continued to move
further along the lines each had marked out. The USSR main-
tained a policy of economic assistance to India and continued
to depict Nehru's foreign policy as generally progressive,
while simultaneously sustaining discreet pressure upon the
Indian government to bend toward the Soviet view on specific
topical issues. In the latter half of the year, the emphasis
shifted from the Congo and Cuba, and the most important of
these. pressures were now concerned with the Soviet resumption
of nuclear testing, Nehru's stand at the neutralists' con-
ference, and particularly the Berlin issue. The CPI was re-
peatedly briefed by the CPSU on these issues in the spring
and summer, and maintained continued propaganda pressure in
support of Moscow's position. While Nehru's actions and state-
ments in each of these matters was far from wholly satisfactory
to Moscow, the USSR did not at any time repeat its earlier
direct criticism of the Indian government. Meanwhile, a
subsidiary campaign which the Soviet Union had been actively
promoting for a long time--both directly and through the CPI--
to induce Nehru to take armed action against the Portuguese
enclave of Goa finally bore fruit in December, with a number
of gratifying consequences: it forced the United States and
Britain to take stands publicly condemning India; it promoted
disharmony between Portugal and the other NATO allies; it
distracted some Indian public attention and anger from the
Chinese border dispute; it enabled the CPI to wear the cloak
of Indian nationalism it had been unable to assume on the
Chinese border issue; and it bolstered the stock of the un-
popular but pro-Soviet Indian defense minister, Krishna Menon,
who was reported in trouble in his campaign for re-election
to Parliament from Bombay.
Aside from the question of the Sino-Indian border, there
was only one aspect of Soviet policy toward the non-Communist
world during this period which caused any internal difficulties
for the CPI: the decision to resume nuclear testing. This
decision caused the Indian party some embarrassment in the
election campaign because of its earlier vigorous campaigns
against American testing; it also evoked some disarray on
the fringes of the party, among fellow-travellers and extreme
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right-wing party members. Thus the Indian branch of the Afro-
Asian Solidarity Committee reportedly adopted a resolution
expressing regret at the Soviet decision, an abortive attempt
was said to have been made in the All-India Peace Council to
do the same, and two rightist CPI leaders in Kerala made pub-
lic statements opposing the USSR's action. On the whole, how-
ever, the internal CPI troubles over this issue were so minor
as to be totally obscured by the violent disturbances which
shook the party in November and December over other issues.
Peiping in the latter half of 1961 maintained its vitriolic
line toward Nehru, continuing in its propaganda to build up
a picture of him as a faithful servant of American imperialism
and enemy of both Peiping and Moscow. To maintain this single-
hued portrait, Chinese propaganda continued to make extremely
tendentious selections from Nehru's statements, going to
extravagant lengths in this regard in connection with the
neutralist conference and Nehru's remarks on the Berlin is-
sue. On the Indian side, general relations with Peiping con-
tinued to worsen, with the Indian government taking steps to
round up and expel more Chinese from Calcutta and to dis-
courage all activities of the India-China Friendship Society.
In the meantime, the border issue again became inflamed,
with Peiping and New Delhi again exchanging charges of fresh
border incursions in a series of notes in the summer and fall.
On 20 November, Nehru brought these matters to public atten-
tion before the Indian Parliament, thereby setting in motion
new violent denunciations of the rPR by tie Indian and Western
press. Peiping believed
that Nehru naa peen persuaded to take this action by President
Kennedy during the Indian Prime Minister's November visit to
the United States; indeed, Peiping subsequently publicly said
as much. The Chinese Communist regime may also have believed
that despite India's public support for Peiping's admission
to the United Nations, Nehru's statement was timed to help the
United States block this action by influencing hesitant neu-
trals against Peiping.
Already angered by this action of Nehru's, Peiping was
infuriated when on 21 November, the day after Nehru's statement,
Ajoy Ghosh issued a public statement on his own initiative as
CPI general secretary strongly criticizing the CPR. Ghosh
expressed "surprise and regret" at the information disclosed
by the Indian government, implicitly accepting the Indian ver-
sion as beyond question. He declared that the Chinese actions
could not but heighten tension and embitter relations between
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the two countries, and "demanded" that the CPR government
put an end to such actions and take measures to ensure that
they would not recur.
It is likely, in view of Peiping's reaction, that the CCP
concluded that Ghosh had been incited to make this statement
by the CPSU--particularly in the context of the increasingly
open propaganda and organizational battle that was simultaneously
developing between the Sovdet-led parties and the Chinese-
Albanian bloc. A CPI leftist member of the delegation to the
CPSU congress subsequently claimed that the Chinese delegation
to that congress had briefed the CPI at the time on the Chi-
nese version of the current border controversy; and a fairly
reliable source reports statements by the Maharashtra leader
Sardesai, another CPI representative at the Soviet congress,
alleging that Khrushchev told the Indian delegation that Nehru,
as a "patriotic leader," was bound to resist aggression, and
that the CPI should take a "practical" attitude toward this
problem. Although this evidence is not conclusive, it does
seem probable that the CPSU was also aware in October of the
Sino-lndiah exchange of notes, considered it possible that this
would lead to public polemics, and authorized Ghosh to take
such action as he saw fit if this happened.*
After waiting two weeks, Peiping in early December pub-
lished the texts of the notes it had exchanged with New Delhi,
followed by a ferocious People's Daily editorial denouncing
the "anti-Chinese campaign launched by Nehru in India." In
this editorial, Peiping summed up all its efforts of the past
year to indict Nehru as an enemy of progressive mankind, and
charged that he had initiated his "anti-Chinese campaign" at
American instigation to hurt the bloc, as well as to bolster
what Peiping depicted as the sagging chances of the Congress
party in the coming Indian elections. In addition, in this
editorial the CCP finally gave vent publicly to its long-held
feelings about Ghosh, attacking him for having "trailed be-
hind Nehru and hurriedly issued a statement in condemnation
of China...without bothering to find out the truth or to look
into the rights and wrongs of the case."
*It is particularly credible that the CPSU gave Ghosh such.
contingency authorization because this is exactly what had
happened in October 1959, when the CPI made its strongest pre-
vious criticism of Peiping in connection with the Ladakh in-
cidents. (See pages 71-72.)
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This unprecedented CCP attack upon Ghosh was also neces-
sarily both an indirect slap at the CPSU and a Chinese. action
in support of the leftist CPI faction and in condemnation of
the rightist,faction. It served to further increase the. ten-
sion between the opposing groups within the party, The West
Bengal party, secretariat was already reported to havebanned
from its distribution system the 26 November issue of New. Age
which contained Ghosh's attack on Peiping; and Bhupesh-Utipta
was said to have conveyed amultimatum,from the:West Bengal
party to Ghosh that circulation. of NewAge would be halted
completely in that province if,such statements continued.
Other, leftists meanwhile avowed. their intention to contradict
GhOsh if they were questioned during the election, campaign
about Ghosh's statement.* The West Bengal party orgaiLSwadhinata
did in fact publish articles strongly attacking Nehru=along
the lines Peiping had taken, and as in the past, these arti-
cles were Picked up by NCNA and. Peoples. Daily. :As.one con-
sequence of this SwadhinataA.ine, an information official of
the Soviet embassy was reported to have refused an interview
to a representative of the paper; earlier, Westi3engaIlead-
ers had privately charged that the USSR had cancelled Promised
visits by Major Titov and Paul Robeson to a "peace festival"
sponsored by the 'West Bengal party in early November because
of the stand of the provincial organization.
The Peiping-Nehru polemic was soon intermeshed with the
broader Sino-Soviet battle going on concurrently, with, Albania
amplifying Peiping's denunciations of the Indian leader-, and
other East European states, like the USSR, refusing to do so.
Even before the 7 December People's Daily editorial :had been
published, Moscow's alarm at the whole trend of events was
made apparent when on 2 December TABS announced that an invi-
,tation extended to Brezhnev during the. summer to Visit India
at an opportune time was now being accepted, and that Brezhnev
was to arrive within two weeks. When Brezhnev arrived on this
emergency journey, he was accompanied by a deputy chairman
of the USSR's State Commission for Foreign Economic Relations,
and it appeared liekly that the Soviet policy of support and
economic help for the Nehru government was to be emphatically
reaffirmed.
By mid-December, Ghosh had backed off very slightly from
. his extreme anti-Chinese position, telling a press conference
that some political parties wished to make capital of the Sino-
*The West Bengal secretariat resolution reported by the
Yugoslav press in January 1962 is said to have formally af-
firmed that Ghosh's anti-Chinese statement represented "the
attitude of part of the party only."
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Indian dispute, and praising Nehru for not seeking war with
China as a means of settling the dispute. At the same time,
he reaffirmed that if Peiping indulged in any act of aggres-
sion, India would be justified in repelling the: intruders.
Other CPI rightists were not so forebearing toward Peiping.
Central Secretariat member Ahmad on 13 December publicly
declared, in response to a question about the Chinese attacks
on Ghosh, that Ghosh could well look after himself "and needs
no advice from outside as to what he should do in a matter
with which the Indian people as a whole are vitally concerned."
Ahmad'dismissed as "absurd" the People's Daily contention
that India's foreign policy and her attitude toward the CPR
was determined by the "lure of the dollar," and reasserted
CPI support for Nehru's foreign policy.
F. Prospects for the Indian Communist Party
By the end of 1961, then, the Indian Communist Party had
reached a point at which the right wing of the party was openly
criticizing the CCP and was being criticized by it; was support-
ing Moscow generally against Albania and China, though regret,.
ing the means that had been used to attack Albania; was itself
shocked by and divided over the new assault on Stalin, and was
publicly regretting that Khrushchev had reopened this issue.
The left wing was publishing statements supporting the Chinese
line on Nehru; was censuring and sometimes even boycotting
the central party organ for its anti-Chinese statements; had
adopted at least one resolution attacking Khrushchev and the
CPSU; and was generally united in opposition to the Soviet
moves against Albania, China, and Stalin.
On 6 November, Indian leftist members of the National
Council are said to have conferred with Basavapunniah and to
have agreed with his judgment that the CPI could no longer
be held together, and must break up after. the 1962 elections.
Basavapunniah was said to have felt that it was only the elec-
tions which were maintaining the facade of CPI unity now, and
that the only thing which could pull the party together might
be an unexpected success at the polls. Later in the month,
after conferring with Ranadive, Basavapunniah took a slightly
less extreme position, asserting that the leftists were pre-
paring a document which would force the issue of the CPI's
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international allegiance at the CPI.Congress or National Coun-
cil meeting to be held after the elections. He added that if
the rightists did not agree at least to a policy of non-align-
ment with either Peiping or Moscow, the leftists would initi-
ate a split in the party. At about the same time, S. G. Sardesai,
secretary of the Mararashtrh ?rovincial party organization and
a leader of the right-wing CP: faction, reportedly warned a
meeting of his followers to be prepared for a split between
the pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese wings of the CPI (and of other
Communist parties) as a result of the Sino-Soviet struggle.
In evaluating the reality of the leftist threat to split
the party, it must be remembered that non-alignment, insofar
as it involves neutrality on policy issues disputed by Moscow
and Peiping, is simply not possible for the CPI. For example,
the question of policy toward the Nehru government, on which
many of the differences between the CPSU and CCP have focussed
in recent years, cannot be evaded by the Indian party; the CPI
must lean either to one side or the other, since it can neither
avoid having a policy toward Nehru nor reconcile the incom-
patible policies of the Chinese and Soviet leaderships. Simi-
larly, the questions of whether or not to continue to seek
power through parliamentary elections, of whether to seek to
draw the national bourgeoisie into an alliance, cannot be in-
definitely evaded in fact although they .can be blurred over
in compromise resolutions. Entirely apart from the policies
urged on each wing of the party by Moscow and Peiping, extrem-
ists of each wing have their own oonvictions which they will.
not give up. The CPI in recent years has prevented this
fundamental contradiction from tearing it apart only by allow-
ing the provincial organizations dominated by one or another
faction to follow in practice their own line, within very
broad limits commonly agreed upon in the center.* With the
continued polarization of the party along Soviet and Chinese
lines, however, this arrangement has tended to break down,
because worsening relations between the CPSU and the CCP have
*One prominent West Bengal party leader privately acknowl-
edged in November that the CPI had "now become almost a
loose federation type" of party along the lines of the Indian
bourgeois parties.
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inevitably led to open conflict between the autonomous left-
ist provinces and the center. Basavapunniah on 6 November
declared that if the Chinese party were to "take action
against the CPSU"--meaning a direct attack on Khrushchev--this
would cause the breakup of the CPI; and in this he was probably
correct. In the absence of Sino-Soviet mutual direct denuncia-
tion, however, the CPSU will in the near future probably con-
tinue to strive to maintain the facade of unity in the Indian
party. It would do so if only because the three greatest
centers of Communist popular strength in India--Kerala, Andhra
and West Bengal--are also centers of considerable left-faction
rank-and-file strength, so that in the event of the formation
of two Communist parties in India the leftist one, oriented
toward the CCP, might well take with it a great deal of the
present party.
By the estimate of the CPI itself, the February elections
are unlikely to help the party significantly, and are hence
themselves unlikely to help keep the party united. Therefore,
whether and how long the CPSU, in the absence of an open Sino-
Soviet split, would be successful in holding the Indian party
together would depend on a number of long-term factors which
are beyond the scope of this paper: how many concessions the
CPSU would be willing again to make to the leftist faction;
the development of Sino-Soviet relations, and of the policy
of the Chinese leadership toward the CPI; how far the Soviet
deStalinization campaign is continued and extended, and how
far Soviet prestige suffers in consequence; whether Nehru and
his successors within the Indian government and the Congress
party veer toward the left or the right on foreign and domestic
policy; the overall state of East-West relations, and the
prospects for the peaceful coexistence line; and the related
question of the future views of the Soviet leadership on the
current balance of power, the level of acceptable risks, and
the consequent choice of a more or less militant policy toward
the West.
Finally, Soviet short-term chances of averting a schism
in the CPI must hinge in large part on Moscow's success or failure
in finding a suitable successor to Ajoy Ghosh, who died on 13
January 1962. It will be most difficult to discover any CPI
leader who is both firmly reliable from the CPSU's point of
view and capable of conciliating the opposing wings of the In-
dian party in their present hostile mood. The most obvious
candidate will be E.M.S. Namboodiripad, who has aspired to
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succeed Ghosh for several years and who has served as acting
general secretary on occasion; however, Namboodiripad has
made many gestures toward the leftists over the past two years
in response to their growing strength within the party, and
there are good indications that he is now distrusted both by
the CPI's right wing and by the CPSU. If Namboodiripad were
chosen general secretary, this might increase leftist influ-
ence within the central CPI machinery sufficiently to induce
the party militants not to split away--but at the cost of
reduced Soviet influence within the Indian party and increased
disaffection by the CPI rightists. If on the other hand Mos-
cow were to succeed in installing as general secretary a right-
ist such as Dange or even some neutral nonentity, Soviet in-
fluence in the party center might be preserved, but the danger
of a leftist split would be increased. The most hopeful expedient
for Moscow would seem to be to accept Namboodiripad reluctantly
as the new CPI leader and attempt to influence him subsequently
to turn again in the Soviet and moderate direction. This,
Namboodiripad is opportunistic enough to do; but there is as
yet no evidence that Moscow has resolved upon this course, or
that, if followed, it would extricate the CPSU from its Indian
dilemma.
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