LA POLÍTICA. El Estado ideal

The upsurge in communal violence during the 1920s in one way or another influenced the agendas of all political actors. In contrast to the mutual recriminations of communal leaders—in politics, these originated notably from Hindu Mahasabhites and some Muslim Leaguers—, INC grandees Motilal Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad made plans for the formation of an All-India party in 1924. Its membership would exclude members of any communal organization (quite possibly the blueprint for the provision to the same effect in the CPI’s 1925 program). In Bengal, Chittaranjan Das negotiated a pact between both communities for the sharing of employment opportunities in the public sector, and Gandhi protested against the rise of inter-communal violence with a widely publicized three-week fast in autumn 1924. Yet, these endeavors proved largely ineffective: The Nehru-Azad party never materialized, Das died soon after the conclusion of his pact, which quickly became undone, and Gandhi’s sincere but only momentarily effectual efforts did little to dispel long- term constellations for communal conflict.

Construction of Communalism, 16. On the close intertwinement of religion and (sub-)national group formation

on the subcontinent see Reetz, “Religion and Group Identity.”

407 _{Pandey, The Construction of Communalism, 233–4. For a (not exhaustive) list of the most important sites of}

riots in the 1920s, see The Communal Problem: Report of the Committee Appointed by the Indian National

Congress (Karachi Session 1931) to Enquire into the Kanpur Riots of March 1931 (Delhi: National Book

Trust [1933] 2005), 150–1.

408 _{For the numbers, see Namboodiripad, A History of Indian, 193. The tendency of riots to propel escalation in}

further riots and thus deepen the communal rift is emphasized in P. K. Dutta, “War over Music: The Riots of 1926 in Bengal,” Social Scientist 18, no. 5–6 (1990): 40–1.

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The increase in violence was also noticed in communist quarters. Still caught in the whirl of the post-war upsurge, they were loath to acknowledge the reality of religious rifts among the erstwhile revolting ‘masses.’ At the same time, however, denouncing rising communalism as the ‘natural’ consequence of an ill-designed movement also provided grist to Roy’s anti-bourgeois mills, and ex post supported his refusal to forge ties with the non- cooperators. The analysis took shape accordingly: While the absolute number of written contributions on the communal issue remained low, from the outset they undertook to externalize the religious divide from the spirit of protest, even religious, that had carried the movement until its termination. In a February 1923 comment Evelyn Roy identified religious extremism as “rank reaction,” but only “when exposed in its true colours,” hinting at a non-reactionary quality—little wonder given the lingering communist enthusiasm for anti-imperialism based on religious radicalism.409 _{In June 1923, the first text explicitly}

dedicated to the problem appeared in the Vanguard’s columns and considered the issue from a more materialist angle. M. N. Roy contrasted the “helpless” undertakings of South Asian leaders to contain the growing communal tensions by well-meaning appeals with his own analysis: “Communal rivalry is fomented by the upper classes of both the communities, and the Government always stands behind the scene.”410 _{The solution lay in exposing intra-}

communal class conflicts for fostering unity in the struggle for freedom.

Under bourgeois auspices, however, the fuss around injured communal sentiments would never cease. By following the injunctions of their spiritual leaders, Hindus and Muslims were “consciously or unconsciously playing into the hands of Imperialism.”411

This was not a product of Roy’s imagination. (Pro-)British and conservative newspapers had been quick to question the viability and reasonability of subcontinental self-government upon the outbreak of communal riots.412 _{Nevertheless, notwithstanding his counterfactual}

claim—in the years before, it had been the very injunctions of spiritual leaders that had brought about a uniquely huge protest movement—Roy could obviously not imagine a worse incrimination than national betrayal. This is telling because it demonstrated two essentials of Roy’s view: First, that the problematic of communalism was not religious; and second, that neither the anti-libertine and socially conservative character of communal assertions, nor even their aggression against other communities, were overly disturbing to him.

409 _{Santi Devi, “Bolshevism for India,” Vanguard, 15 February 1923.} 410 _{“Communal Conflict and the Congress,” Vanguard, 1 June 1923.} 411 _Ibid.

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The “Manifesto on the Hindu-Moslem Unity and Swaraj,” written by both Roys and published in the Vanguard in October 1923, constitutes one of the most often-cited communist texts on the issue to date.413 The pamphlet summarily blasted non-cooperation, the main error of which had been that an “unreliable ground,” that is, “religion was allowed to play the chief part in the movement.” Also, the khilafat movement finally began to appear as problematic—half a decade after its inception, during which time considerable revolutionary laurels had been bestowed upon its militantly anti-British pan-Islamism. With the khilafatists’ Islamic anti-imperialism fast transforming into political anti-infidelism Roy now identified it as a culprit for the current debacle, a “foregone conclusion of such an ill- started movement.” Nevertheless, it was not all bad as the khilafat committees had at least succeeded in creating “some sort of political consciousness among the Mussulman masses of India.”414 _{Interestingly, Roy didn’t bother to scrutinize quality of this consciousness,}

probably for the same reasons that another article in the Vanguard had vaguely deemed khilafat leader Mohamed Ali the “better revolutionary” than Gandhi.415 _{Under the prevailing}

circumstances, a thorough investigation into the categories constituting contemporary revolutionarity might have turned out overly disappointing. In this light, the allegation that the upsurge in religious conflicts testified to the “essentially reactionary character” of bourgeois politicians only rang even hollower.

Accordingly, the Hindu and Muslim ‘masses’ had been distracted from their actual unity on class grounds. They had fallen victim to those who cunningly operationalized religion: “The consciousness of this union is interfered with by large doses of conflicting religious dogma administered by interested parties. Religious propaganda is an indigenous method of exploitation of the ignorant masses by the able doctors of Divinity.” The latter depended on the support of the feudal upper classes for their existence, and apparently shaped mass consciousness at will. Reversely, nationalist middle-class intellectuals just had to shed their religious prejudices and “replace the religious propaganda and metaphysical

413 _{Usually Roy is credited as the author; however, it appears to have been Evelyn who wrote the text, and Roy}

only published it: Innaiah, Evelyn Trent, 21, 113.

414 _{All quotes in “Manifesto on the Hindu-Moslem Unity and Swaraj,” Vanguard, 1 October 1923. Rajani}

Palme Dutt concurs: Dutt, Modern India (Bombay: Sunshine Publishing House 1926), 117–19, 124–6. Only much later were communists able to thoroughly criticize the heavily religious formation of political

consciousness among Hindus and Muslims. See, for example, Sajjad Zaheer, “Recent Muslim Politics in India and the Problems of National Unity,” in India and Contemporary Islam: Proceedings of a Seminar, ed. S. T. Lokhandwalla (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study 1971), 209–11. For contemporary positive appraisals of the khilafat movement, see Shramendra Karsan “Die politische Krise in Indien,” Inprecorr Roll No. 3-B (1921):28; and Shadananda Karsan, “Revolutionary India,” Inprecorr 1, no. 18 (1921), Roll No. 3396, 150. Both were aliases of Roy, see Ganguly, Leftism in India, 293–6.

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abstractions by economic slogans to make the masses conscious.” Yet, in the absence of national liberation, “India must continue to be a helpless victim of religious civil war.”416

This underscores the commitment of contemporary communism to national liberation and highlights the redeeming qualities associated with its mere advent. Its embrace was precipitated on the deep sense of the Leninist demand for national self-determination of an essential intactness of indigenous culture, however religious its assertions. The latter had to be salvaged from the communally polluting colonial encumbrance in order to develop healthily: Roy opined in the Constructive Programme that men could not be educated in modern political principles “unless they extricate themselves from the bondage of religious superstitions and social prejudices,” which was impossible without a “free and normal national life.”417 _{The latter followed its own messianic teleology, as the “inevitable and}

inexorable” development of nationalism on “purely secular” lines would by itself put an end to communalism.418 _{Such ‘historical-materialistic’ eschatology is obviously closely related}

to its religious counterpart; hence, it is not surprising that Singaravelu reveled in similar prophecies at Kanpur with respect to the end of untouchability (“with the advent of Swaraj, these social and religious disabilities will fall of themselves”419_{). Roy even deemed}

revolutionary nationalism “the deadly enemy of communalism”—a daring claim in view of the religious leanings of many revolutionary nationalists. Undaunted, he maintained in 1927 that national liberation was revolutionary in itself.420

Firmly rooted in the antinomy of national liberation, which envisaged the emancipation of the ‘backward’ masses through a “free and normal national life” resting on, and achieved by, these very same masses, his views made Roy the prompter for left-wing nationalism. From the early 1930s onwards, leftist Congress leaders increasingly insisted on British departure as the only solution to the communal problem. In his 1936 autobiography Nehru commented on the post-1922 riots that “divide and rule has always been the way of empires,” and was similarly convinced that “communal leaders represent a small upper class reactionary group” and “exploit and take advantage of the religious passions of the masses.”421 The parallels to the communist pattern of analysis are obvious. Roy’s line of

416 _{All quotes in “Manifesto on the Hindu-Moslem Unity.” See also Dutt, Modern India, 113–15.} 417 _{“Constructive Programme,” Vanguard, 15 May 1922.}

418 _{“Unity,” Vanguard, 15 November 1924.} 419 _{NAI-Satyabhakta A/17, 5.}

420 _{“Unity,” Vanguard, 15 November 1924 (quote); “The Workers’ and Peasants’ Party,” Masses of India,}

April 1927

421 _{Jawarhalal Nehru, An Autobiography. With Musings on Recent Events in India (London: Bodley Head}

1936), 134–6, 467–8. Roy’s stances on the question were almost verbatim reproduced by the nationalist press during the Calcutta riots (see next section): See Amrita Bazar Patrika, 24 and 27 June 1926; Forward, 27

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argument contributed to the constitution of nationalist progressivism that regarded nationalism as

all that was forward-looking, progressive, ‘modern’ in Indian politics. Communalism was all that was backward-looking, reactionary. Nationalism reflected the spontaneous urge of the Indian people for economic advancement and freedom from exploitation. Communalism reflected the machinations of the colonial regime and reactionary upper-class elements.422

The communist approach was the first to systematize these tenets. Hence, rather than being indistinguishable from left-wing nationalism until the late 1930s it was the communist analysis of subcontinental religiousness and communalism that provided later left-wing nationalists with the essentials of their own stance. This testifies to the dynamic and modernizing impetus of communism in colonial South Asia, where its ambiguous relationship with nationalism entailed not only fierce political rivalry and competition but also the potential for cross-fertilization. The mutual quality of this process was ensured by the nationalist socialization of most subcontinental communists, who, after all, started out as chips off the nationalist block, and never severed their ties with mainstream nationalism.—

Even within the purview of his own theoretical perspective, however, Roy’s critique of interreligious strife reveals itself to be principled to the same extent that communalism was recognized as a thing-in-itself. Which it was not: While Roy’s interventions formed the most vocal and most analytic criticism of communalism of its time, the efforts to confine communalism to the influence of imperialism and the upper social strata clearly exhibited blind spots towards religious mass militancy. Roy’s determination to appropriate the social content of the openly religious Moplah rebellion (and, although in a different manner, also the Akali movement) suggests that revolutionary communalism could be a legitimate point of reference as long as it was distinguished by a sufficiently radical and popular anti- establishment thrust. Non-revolutionary, that is, neither anti-colonial nor (however mildly) anti-landlord communalism, on the other hand, was exactly the kind of communalism that couldn’t be accepted as part of mass.

Therefore, Roy clung to the conspiratorial character of such ‘non-revolutionary’ communalism: “Anonymous persons” hired “goondas […] to start trouble,” which could be done “by such simple means as playing Hindu music before a Mussulman mosque; by Mussulmans slaughtering a cow before the enraged eyes of Hindu worshippers; by

April and 20 May 1926; Atmasakti und The Statesman, both 23 April 1926. See also Pandey, The Construction

of Communalism, 242; Habib, “The Left and the Nationa,” 23; and S. Gopal, “Nehru and Minorities,” in Jawarhalal Nehru. Political Thinkers of India 10, ed. Verinder Grover (Delhi: Deep and Deep 1992), 210–11.

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sensational reports of kidnapping of children of one community by the other.”423 _{While the}

subcontinent was the best example that religion was indeed the opium of the people, “the virulence of this kind of opium-poisoning in the body-politic of India […] shows” not the critical state of ideologized popular consciousness, but merely “to what extent the dealers of this dope have been active.”424 This approach deflected the challenge to progressive notions of mass consciousness into a separate mercenary sub-cosmos by asserting that those who actually participated in riots were “the scum of society, which cannot be said to possess any sincere religious fanaticism.”425

Since in this reasoning not even the most vociferous and violent proponents of communal antagonism were considered true fanatics it was only consequential to downplay basic communal differences themselves as “artificially fomented” and, hence, “less serious” compared to “other defects in the programme, ideology and organization of the nationalist movement.”426 _{This was the core of Roy’s analysis: Writing away the urgency of a}

widespread reactionary social phenomenon and thus uphold the proper communist hierarchy of (anti-imperialist and socialist) emancipation. Yet, even this approach did not remove uncertainties: Just as Roy had criticized the inclusion of communal unity among the prerequisites for swaraj by the Congress in 1924 (as this paid undue homage to an artificial conflict), he advocated the opposite only a year later when he attacked the veteran nationalist and Hindu Mahasabhite Lala Lajpat Rai for denying the necessity of communal unity for the attainment of independence.427

To be sure, Roy was not the only architect of this theoretical edifice. Contemporary communist opinion concurred with the thrust of his analyses. For example, Rajani Palme Dutt (1896–1974), a leading CPGB theoretician, confirmed Roy’s positions in his influential 1926 oeuvre Modern India. If anything, he was even less convinced of communalism’s ideological significance, and more optimistic than Roy that the laws of historical materialism would ensure the proper course of history. Even though Dutt castigated the bourgeoisie for fishing for “all kinds of cults and superstitions of barbarism, ignorance,

423 _{“What Lies behind Hindu-Muslim Discord?,” Vanguard, 15 August 1924.}

424 _{“The Hindu-Muslim Problem,” Masses of India, April 1925.}

425 _{“Unity,” Vanguard, 15 November 1924.} 426 _Ibid.

427 _{Cf. ibid., and “Lalajis Mistake,” Masses of India, February 1926. The reluctance to over-emphasize a ‘non-}

essential’ conflict was behind Roy’s demonstrative ignorance towards religious questions throughout his programmatic writings in 1924. See Vanguard, 1 January and 15 April 1924, where the provision to separate the state from religion appears at the end of the list of programmatic demands, and is the only instance to refer to religion at all.

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submission to God, etc., in order to spread these among the masses,” the attempts to influence the latter were ultimately in vain: It was “idle to believe that this fashionable make-believe can have the slightest effect on the real processes at work.”428 However, subsequent events on the subcontinent would cast an eerie light on these “real processes.”