No independence but reactionary and communal Partition: The partition of India 9-1. In India, Congress, with the support of the Stalinist CPI, played the central role in aborting the mass anti-imperialist movement that emerged immediately after the war and in restabilising capitalist rule across South Asia. Terrified that a renewed Quit India movement would slip out of their control and increasingly apprehensive before a rising tide of working class and peasant struggles and growing unrest in the princely states, the Congress leadership moved as quickly as possible to reach a settlement with Britain, which had already recognised the unviability of clinging on to its Indian empire. In doing so, Congress jettisoned key aspects of its own program and sought a deal not only with the British but also with the communal parties—the Muslim League and Hindu Mahasabha—and with the zamindari landlords and the princes, who formed the conservative base of the colonial state. 9-2. The Muslim League, which represented the interests of the Muslim landlords and capitalists in India had put forward its demand for a separate Pakistan comprising the Muslim majority provinces in 1940. The Muslim elites, whom the British had organised and cultivated as a separate political force through the use of communal categories as a key instrument of their imperial rule, feared both their marginalisation within a unified Indian state and growing social unrest. The demand for a separate Muslim state was the means for the Muslim elite to stake its claim to a substantial share of political power in the anticipated post-war reorganisation of South Asia and to whip up communalism so as to divert and divide the increasingly restless masses. The Hindu Mahasabha, based among sections of the Hindu princes, landlords and big business, justified their own collaboration with the British in communal terms as the means of resisting Muslim “domination.” The Hindu Mahasabhites railed against the Congress for “appeasing” the Muslims and argued that Muslims were alien to the “Hindu nation” and should be denied full citizenship rights. The only means of politically combating communalism was through the mobilisation of the workers and rural masses around their common social needs. Organically hostile to such a strategy, as it threatened the fundamental interests of the Indian bourgeoisie as a whole, Congress increasingly adapted to communalism while containing and suppressing social struggles in which the masses implicitly challenged the communal divide. In the 1945–46 elections, the Congress flirted with an electoral pact with the Hindu Mahasabha in Bengal and elsewhere welcomed Hindu Mahasabhites into its ranks. 9-3. The post-war anti-imperialist upsurge initially took the form of opposition to the brutal repression of the Quit India movement and the trials of leaders of the Indian National Army (INA). INA leader Subhas Chandra Bose, a militant Congress leader, had opposed Gandhi, but sought to fight British rule not by turning to the working class, but to a rival imperialist power. He agreed to head the INA, formed from Indian soldiers who had been captured by the Japanese army, and to fight against the British under Japanese leadership. Despite their misguided aims, the INA leaders were widely regarded as heroes and patriots, and protests calling for clemency began to mushroom across India, in the process unifying Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. In November 1945 and again in February 1946, the BLPI was closely involved with student organisations in leading mass demonstrations in Calcutta against the INA trials. The protests were violently suppressed by police and troops, while the CPI joined hands with the Congress to disperse the crowds in the name of the struggle against indiscipline and disorder.
Posted on: Thu, 15 Aug 2013 01:32:15 +0000
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