The Story of an Aborted Revolution

Abstract

In the early days of independence the province of West Bengal witnessed a violent communist upsurge in 1948–50. In many ways the events of this period foreshadowed what happened in this province during the Naxalite experiment of the late 1960s and the early 1970s. This paper, using recently declassified IB records, seeks to reconstruct this less-known episode in the history of the communist movement in India. It was apparently an attempt to revive the Tebhaga movement, which was left half way in 1946. But in areas it touched on a variety of issues affecting marginal peasants and industrial workers in the early years of independence. In the end it appeared that the mass support for this attempted ‘people's democratic revolution’ was sporadic, localised and issue-based. In 1950, following an intense internal ideological debate within the party, the Communist Party of India (CPI) decided to abandon its revolutionary line and decided to participate in the forthcoming general elections. This paper unravels this process of transformation of the communist movement in India from a revolutionary to a constitutional movement operating within the perimeters of mass electoral politics.