Marco legal y regulador Europeo

In furtherance of certain strands in Bolshevik revolutionary tradition, subcontinental communist reservations against even remotely anti-imperialist and non-bourgeois assertions of Islam had ever been minor. As a matter of fact, this common characteristic constituted a bond between the CPI and the early Bolsheviks: Just as the penchant for linking communist anti-imperialism to Muslim identitary notions marking notably the Calcutta group’s approach in the early 1920s had been anticipated by the same, only greater penchant exhibited by early Soviet nationality policy, it was international communism’s organs that conserved the CPI’s claim to the appropriation of committedly Muslim political subjectivity at a time when the party itself was defunct.

A Community of Resistance

Thus, extremist nationalist-turned-communist émigré Virendranath Chattopadhyaya proved that he had grasped the gist of subcontinental communism in a series of reports in Inprecorr on the 1930 tribal revolt in the NWFP. The NWFP was a much-neglected backwater of British India without any appreciable amount of infrastructure or avenues for political participation. What little education work had been done had largely been taken up by religious dignitaries of the likes of Maulana Obeidullah Sindhi, whose influence emphasized Islam’s anti-British and anti-Western thrust. Accordingly, the formation of political will among the NWFP Pathans was firmly rooted in fundamentalist religious sentiments and aspirations from an early stage.569

During the first civil disobedience movement in 1930, a wave of non-violent mass protest under the guidance of the “Frontier Gandhi,” Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, gripped

569 _{See Reetz, “Community Concepts and Community-Building,” 128–9. After the post-war disintegration of}

the Berlin group of revolutionaries and long years as a revolutionary vagrant, Chattopadhyaya had found refuge in the Soviet Union. He taught courses at the Leningrad University and was shot along with other émigré revolutionaries in 1937 during the “Great Purges”: Gupta, Comintern and the Destiny, 271–4.

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Pathan areas.570 _{According to Chattopadhyaya, their anti-British militancy elevated the}

Pathans above their reputation as “backward” and fanatical in matters of faith. He discerned a veritably “revolutionary” movement, whose characterization revealed much about Chattopadhyaya’s own notions of practical progressive transformation: Members of their organization, the “Red Shirts,” called themselves “‘Servants of God’. Recruits are sworn in on the Koran to follow the teachings of Islam, to live a pure and righteous life.” While he conceded that “these objects are anything but revolutionary,” both the “terrible economic conditions” and the low social position of the protesting population apparently went a long way to making amends. Thus, he commended for the volunteers marching from village to village, shouting “Inquilab zindabad” (“Long live the revolution”) and forming local committees. From there—despite, or even because of the yet strong “religious illusions” among the peasantry—, these “revolutionary activities” would eventually spread to Pathan army units, or so Chattopadhyaya hoped.571

Et voilà a concrete example of an alternative to Gandhian civil disobedience more amenable to communist tastes in the Comintern’s sectarian “third period.” Little did it matter that the main ideological theme of the Red Shirts consisted in a “revival of the Muslim Pathan identity.”572 _{Despite the admission of non-revolutionarity, communist}

reflexes worked, and sensed revolution whenever Muslims raised radical, anti-colonial slogans. Chattopadhyaya’s assessment remained uncontested even decades later when Namboodiripad nostalgically harked back to the virtues of “an entire people [the Pathans] rising against imperialism.” Their ethno-cultural merits shone in comparison to the INC’s bourgeois civil disobedience.573

The subtle appeal of the ‘Muslim option’ permeated even communist commentaries detached from subcontinental day-to-day politics, such as ex-muhajir Rahmat Ali’s treatise on communalism. Published in 1933 as his PhD thesis at the Sorbonne, it opted for a direct class approach, stipulating that inter-communal conflicts occurred only where class and religious constellations coincided, and chose his examples accordingly—in the main Kashmir, the (eastern) Punjab, and east Bengal. There, as well as in most cities, a Hindu stratum of moneylenders, landlords, and bourgeois confronted a substantial “élément

570 _{On the religious underpinnings of this movement of Pashtun awakening see Reetz, “Religion and Group}

Identity,” 80–1.

571 _{All quotes in Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, “The Indian Mohammedans and the Revolutionary}

Movement,” Inprecorr, 28 May 1930, NMML, Roll 1921/3-B ; Chattopadhyaya, “On the Situation in India,”

Inprecorr, 12 June 1930, ibid., repeats the gist.

572 _{Reetz, “Community Concepts and Community-Building,” 129.} 573 _{Namboodiripad, A History of Indian, 244.}

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musulman” concentrated in the dispossessed workforce, the service industry, and among poor peasants and tenants.574

Although he also included opposite constellations, Rahmat Ali’s conclusions led him away from an impartial assessment. While his tendency to identify the socially disadvantaged position with Muslims largely corresponded to subcontinental reality, his sympathetic comments on the identitary moves of the Muslim bourgeoisie recalled Tatar Muslim communist Mirsaid Sultangaliev’s designation of “Muslim peoples” as “proletarian peoples”: As they supposedly had reason to fear their demise, the Muslim bourgeois “ne firent que leur devoir” by insisting on communal safeguards. To Rahmat Ali, it was perfectly understandable that they had aligned themselves with pauperized Muslim intellectuals and the peasants exploited by Hindu moneylenders for the realization of their class aims in communal terms.575 _{Similar empathy for processes of communalization were}

absent in his references to Parsees, Sikhs, and of course Hindus—not surprising for someone who had deemed the quran as the “history of the revolution” from an early stage in his political career.576

Ahrar Socialism

Before the rise of the Muslim League, the Ahrar movement provided the best link for rooting communist themes in the Muslim field. With the united front policy emphasizing broad anti-imperialist alliances from 1935, the Ahrars counted among the formations eligible for support as they were deemed to vent progressive aspirations of broad population strata.

The Majlis-i-Ahrar-i-Islam (League of Freedom-Loving Muslims) had been founded in 1930 by Muslim nationalists from the Punjab. The Ahrars’ aims were to liberate India from British domination while avoiding a “Hindu raj.” Instead, they envisioned an “Islamic system” for Muslims, and demanded the Muslim community’s material uplift. The Ahrar agenda also called for equal distribution of wealth, the abolition of untouchability, universal respect for religion, and freedom for practicing sharia law. Clearly, the Ahrar leaders “concentrated their political energies on the defense of Islam.”577

574 _{Rahmat Ali, Contribution à l’Etude, 9–10.}

575 _{Ibid., 136–41. Rahmat Ali’s approach would occasionally resurface in later analyses of religious conflict,}

for example, in Zaheer, “Recent Muslim Politics.”

576 _{Sarkisyanz, Rußland und der Messianismus, 280.}

577 _{Gilmartin, Empire and Islam, 104–5 (quote); Majlis Ahrar-i-Hind, Ahrar Point of View,}

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Accordingly, Ahrar campaigns exhibited a clear religious list. For example, Ahrars participated in the “Muslim Bazaar Campaign,” which called for villagers to supply themselves at Muslim shops only, and mobilized Muslims against the Hindu village elite. They also staged campaigns against social evils such as dowry and untouchability, both of which they by and large associated with Hindu culture. “In their doctrinal training, the MAI [Majli-i-Ahrar-i-Islam] […] strictly followed Sharia’t.” Their stance towards deviations from Sunni Islam was harsh: Shias, Ahmadis, and more liberal and inclusive Muslims such as Jinnah were victims of Ahrar ostracism.578

However, the Ahrars had something to offer to the communists. Their flag was red with a white crescent and star upon it, an obvious aesthetic similarity to the CPI’s own red-white hammer-and-sickle banner. Hierarchy in the MAI was strict and centralized. Another area of agreement between Ahrar Islam and communism was the movement’s pronounced egalitarianism. Since many of the MAI leaders came from lower social strata, socialist ideas held considerable attraction for them. According to Awan, the Ahrars even “had a vague idea of class struggle and the orthodox Marxist ideology.”579

As the Majlis-i-Ahrar received communist blessings as an agent of mass progress, it garnered communist sympathy beyond what had hitherto been allotted to Muslim organizations. In the Punjab, CPI and Ahrars joined in an alliance with the INC and the CSP to contest the 1937 elections. The Ahrars’ call to Muslim workers at Kanpur to support the 1937 and 1938 general strikes elevated them considerably in communist opinion. A certain Yusuf—a leading Kanpur trade union activist and CPI member popularly known as “the ‘Maulana’”580_{—commended the Ahrars as a “Left Muslim organization” with a positive}

influence on the workforce.581 _{National Front, the CPI’s organ in the late 1930s, included}

them among “progressive Muslim political organizations” seeking to integrate Muslims into the national movement. After the outbreak of the war, CPI publications praised them for

the highly principled stance with which the Ahrars would approach questions of seat reservations in the late 1930s see Shalini Sharma, “Communism and ‘Democracy’: Punjab Radicals and Representative Politics in the 1930s,” South Asian History and Culture 4, no. 4 (2013): 457.

578 _{Awan, Political Islam in Colonial, 74 (quote). For a discussion of the Ahrars’ campaigns in the early 1930s,}

see Tahir Kamran, “Majlis-i-Ahrar-i-Islam: Religion, Socialism and Agitation in Action,” South Asian History

and Culture 4, no. 4 (2013): 472–6.

579 _{Ibid., 73 (quote), 152.}

580 _{Party Letter, 20 September 1951, CPIL-AB, 5.}

581 _{Yusuf, “Cawnpore General Strike. A Landmark,” New Age, Supplement December 1937 (quote); P. C.}

Joshi, “Cawnpore General Strike,” National Front, 12 June 1938. On the Punjab alliance, see Sharma, “Communism and ‘Democracy’,” 448.

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their anti-enlistment campaigns among Muslims. Already in 1937, Ahrars and communists had cooperated to the same effect in the League against Fascism and War.582

In these admittedly scattered but representative (if only for the lack of critical) references, the Ahrars figured as an ally in key political areas. The religious and communal dimensions of the movement were by no means problematic. It is an indicator for the intermediate period of accommodation of ‘community’ in the mid-1930s that the Ahrar campaigns’ Muslim framework went unheeded in communist commentaries. This pointed to an emerging alternative take on the matter—a non-problematic view on Muslim communal assertions—gradually manifesting itself in communist diction.” Far from a negative attribute attached to community-based formations in opposition to communist notions of society, the attribute “Muslim” came to be used ever more frequently in a neutral, purely descriptive sense. A communist viewpoint was increasingly prepared to countenance the inclusion of not merely Muslims, but a Muslim entity in both its social utopian vision and the short-term goal of building a comprehensive national community.583

However, political constellations on the subcontinent had not yet developed to a point to let principled support of Muslim communal aspirations appear as a historical necessity. Other options remained viable paths. This is illustrated, for example, by the avid communist support to the Congress’s “Muslim Mass Contact Campaign” in 1937/38. It had been devised by Nehru and INC strategist K. M. Ashraf in the wake of the 1937 provincial elections, where the Congress had emerged victorious, winning 711 out of a total of 1585 assembly seats and an absolute majority in five provinces out of eleven. Even if the results in Muslim constituencies were meagre—it had managed to win only 26—, the Muslim League had tallied only 109 of the 482 reserved for Muslims and was a far cry from being the representative of Muslim opinion it aspired to be.584

582 _{“Current Notes,” National Front, 10 July 1938; Communist 2, no. 1 (1939), WBIB File 738/39 SL}

475/1939, 103. The importance of the Punjab’s martial tradition in province politics was not lost to communists, who integrated it into their campaigns. See Sharma, “Communism and ‘Democracy’,” 456–7.

583 _{On a side note, this also indicates that the Republic of India’s eventual post-independence practice of}

secularism (aptly summarized by Tharrileth Oommen as “not only non-interference in the affairs of other communities but also developing a positive appreciation of their distinct style of life”) was a heritage of the communist milieu as well: Tharrileth Oommen, State and Society in India. Studies in Nation-Building (Delhi: Sage Publ. 1990), 105. P. N. Bhagwan emphasizes that “Indian secularism” “recognises the relevance and validity of religion in life” and therefore, by seeking to strike a balance between the “legitimate functions of religion” and the “functions of the State,” acknowledges ‘community’ as an instance in public life: P. N. Bhagwan, “Religion and Secularism under the Indian Constitution,” in Religion and Law in Independent India, ed. Robert D. Baird, 2nd _{ed. (Delhi: Manohar 2005), 37.}

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The INC’s left wing claimed the victory. It had been on the ascent since the mid-1930s, borne out by the election of the left candidates Jawarhalal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose as INC presidents in 1936, and 1938 and 1939, respectively. Notably Nehru’s tenure had initiated an appreciable change in the Congress’s agenda and appearance (if not necessarily politics) towards a socialist, and also more determinedly nationalist profile. Encouraged by the success of a leftist program in the general constituencies, many in the Congress sensed the opportunity to finally rally the subcontinent’s Muslims to the national mainstream: By appealing to them to support the INC’s social and economic reforms in the provinces where it formed the ministries.

Accordingly, the Congress refused to form coalition governments with the landlord- backed ML and initiated a broad campaign to win over Muslim peasants, workers, and petit- bourgeois, whom the League regarded as its own constituency. Sympathizing with its aims and similarly relying on the pull of a progressive agenda, the CPI supported Muslim Mass Contact. Yet, it resulted in failure for two main reasons: Not only did the League respond with the development of an assertive, identitary, and populist Muslim image, but also did Congress ministries everywhere fail to deliver on the promised reforms in the agrarian and labor sectors. Sarkar aptly summarizes that “secularist and radical rhetoric [of the INC’s campaign] in the end merely alarmed Muslim vested interests without winning over the Muslim masses.”585

At any rate, the communists’ active involvement was not as principally opposed to the recognition of Muslims as a separate and distinct ‘national’ minority as it may seem. Nor was switching over from one to another hectic, irrational, or arbitrary. After all, both approaches had been attempts to solve the underlying problem: The CPI’s identification of political ‘backwardness’ among Muslims and their accordingly “reactionary communal leadership” had ever hinged primarily not on a lack of unity with Hindus or the mainstream national movement, but on the perceived absence of a strong anti-imperialist current among the Muslim organizations. Unity beyond communal lines was a secondary consideration, not least because the collective practice of anti-imperialism itself promised to provide a firm ground for unity. Therefore, it seems plausible that the CPI would eventually be prepared to campaign in unilateral support of emphatically Muslim anti-imperialism—even once it was clear that the INC’s inclusive take on national unity had failed.

585 _{Sarkar, Modern India, 354 (quote), 361–5. On the involvement of the communists, see Z. A. Ahmad, “The}

Indian National Congress and the Muslim Masses,” New Age, August 1937. See also Muzaffar Ahmad, “The Calcutta AICC and After,” New Age, December 1937, and Habib, “The Left and the National Movement,” 24.

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Outside the CPI’s immediate purview, this transformation of community identity and politics into vehicles of progress had materialized as early as summer 1938. In the midst of the Sino-Japanese war, New Age published an article praising “the Chinese Muslims” as a bulwark against Japanese expansionism. It emphasized their full-blooded Muslimness, and raved that they had “been living a life very much unto themselves, preserving intact their customs, traditions and rituals which their ancestors brought with them from the Near East 1,300 years ago.” Evidently swayed by collective traditionalism, New Age held the fact “noteworthy” that one of Chiang Kai-Shek’s generals was a “staunch Mohammedan.”586

Such assessments form a contrast to the as yet more cautious identitary praise of other indigenous communities, such as the Sikhs. On the occasion of the release of a number of Babbar Akalis from prison in 1938, Sohan Singh Josh hailed their revolt of the early 1920s as “open rebellion against British imperialism” that—as Josh felt the need to emphasize— had had no truck with communalism, particularism, or religious reaction whatsoever.587 _Yet

even if the opposite had been the case: The strand in subcontinental communism that short- circuited manifestations of grass-roots communalism with progressive motives was still very much alive. Ajoy Kumar Ghosh acknowledged that his identification of an “urge for liberty […] as strong as in […] British India” in the princely states rested on the activity of “communal movements.” Still, he declared them to be basically “economic and political in character,” aspirations simply “diverted into communal channels by reactionaries.” In contrast, his criticism was directed at Gandhi for hamstringing Congress support to such movements.588