Marxist Historians
Harsh Thakor*
Applying Marxist mode, in diverse spheres he classically delved into a refuting
distortion of Indian history and the autocracy of the Indian state
I greatly admire his tenacity in the most adverse of situations to
refute the ruling class and revisionist propaganda and still never going
overboard.
When many intellectuals fell into the quagmire of bankruptcy after the collapse
of the Soviet Union in 1991 Ghosh stood relentless like a rock. Till the very
end, he grappled with the problems and concerns of the rebuilding of the
communist revolutionary movement in India.
EARLY LIFE
Suniti Kumar Ghosh was born on 18 February 1918 in the
Sibpur area of district Howrah in West Bengal. After matriculating from the B K
Paul Institution, Sibpur, he joined St. Paul's College, Kolkata, and received
his BA with honours in English literature and an MA degree in English from the
University of Calcutta. He adopted teaching as his career and taught at nearly
eleven colleges encompassing East and West Bengal as also Bihar. He was an
active participant in the Tebhaga movement (l946-47) and joined the Communist
Party of India (CPI).
POLITICAL LIFE
Suniti Kumar Ghosh joined the Communist Party of India
(Marxist) sometime after its formation in 1964 and was associated with the
editorial boards of Desh Hitaishi and People's Democracy—the
two organs of the CPI(M). Being disappointed by the CPM’s revisionist he
revolted against it he associated with a radical Bengali periodical (magazine) known
as Kalpurush along with Saroj Datta and others. He wrote a series of articles
that reflected the ideology of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in
China and the impact of Mao Tse-Tung's Thoughts on it.
The 'Naxalbari, propelled Sunitibabu into action. He accepted
the role of editor of organs such as Deshabrati and Liberation which
propagated the mass-line of the Indian revolution and became highly popular.
He was an integral part of the movement for the rest
of the decade, and only returned home when burnt to the last straw. In that
decade of the revolutionary movement not only his family (his wife Anima and
his two daughters, but he was subjected to turmoil.. He never forgot the
martyrs of that movement, to whom he dedicated several of his writings. “I owe
to those who, sharing my ideals and braving immense risks, gave me shelter and
food when shelter was more precious than food.”
In 1974 Ghosh was
instrumental in the formation of the Central Organising Committee of the CPI
(ML), which made a constructive self-criticism of past errors of CPI (ML). In 1977 he officially left the party stating.
“The COC held that the battle
of annihilation of class enemies, carried out by secret squads of militants,
cannot solve our problems nor can it serve as the beginning of the guerrilla
war. That is why the COC considered it necessary "to participate in and
lead mass struggles of the people on all fronts – economic, political and
cultural – and establish the Party's political leadership over mass
organizations to organize armed struggles of the peasantry based on an Agrarian
Programme and for building up base areas in the countryside.“
2ND PHASE
Thereafter he ventured on a second phase, in which he
methodically welded a treasure house of literature: The Indian Big Bourgeoisie: Its Genesis, Growth and Character
(1985, then revised and enlarged in 2000); India
and the Raj 1919-1947: Glory, Shame and Bondage (vol. 1: 1989; vol. 2: RUPE,
1995; re-published as a single volume in 2007 by Sahitya Samsad); The Historic Turning-Point: A Liberation
Anthology (in two volumes,1992 and 1993); The Tragic Partition of Bengal (2002); Naxalbari – Before and After:
Reminiscences and Appraisal (2009). Apart from these, he published several
shorter publications or booklets: Development
Planning in India: Lumpen Development and Imperialism (RUPE, 1997, 2002); Imperialism’s Tightening Grip on Indian
Agriculture (1998); India’s Constitution and Its Review (RUPE, 2001); The
Himalayan Adventure: India-China War of 1962 – Causes and Consequences (RUPE,
2002); and India’s in journals such as Aspects of India’s Economy, Bulletin of
Concerned Asian Scholars, Economic and Political Weekly, Frontier, Monthly
Review, and Visvabharati Quarterly. He dipped his pen as late as 2010, at
the age of 92, after which his body simply gave in.
Since the 1980s, Ghosh
was not politically active and did not formally belong to any political
organization, but handed over the baton to those activists who waged
revolutionary struggles in the following years. His academic vigour and
political activism were intertwined. The root of his academic work was the
Naxalbari struggle, and his academic work planted the theoretical breeding
ground for the activists to bloom in the later phases of the revolutionary
movement.
His arduous toil in the
second phase were never ends in themselves; but part and parcel of serving the
same cause to which he devoted his energies in the earlier phase. Now no longer
in a position to directly participate in the revolutionary movement, he took up
the mantle of neglected political tasks of that movement as if it was his very
duty, in particular, the analysis and substantiation of the character of
India’s ruling classes, the nature of modern India’s historical development and
political economy, the revolutionary struggles of the Indian people to
transform Indian society, and the political leadership of that revolutionary
movement. No author has as classically analyzed the nature of
the Indian big bourgeoisie.
He nourished
revolutionary optimism at every juncture and placed unwavering faith in an
India emancipated from exploitation and that the Indian Communist revolutionary
movement would emerge triumphant sometime in the near or distant future. Many
of his old associates were disillusioned with the future of the Indian
revolution and joined the reactionary camp, but Ghosh never relented in holding
the baton of the ideals he cherished. No intellectual gave the politics of
Naxalbari such a concrete frame or shape to revive its politics.
SUMMARY OF IMPORTANT BOOKS BY GHOSH
In India and
the Raj 1919-1947, no historian has as analytically diagnosed the
collusion or complicit role of the bourgeoisie with imperialism and exploded
the myth of conventional historiography of 1947 independence as Suniti Ghosh
did. He surgically contrasts the domain of the politics of the people of
revolutionary violence with the domain of elite politics, which seeks to secure
a place within the social order.
The book investigated Gandhi’s early experiments with Satygagraha, the
collaboration of the Indian bourgeoisie with imperialism, the repression in
Jallianwala Bagh and Chauri-Chaura, civil and criminal disobedience, the
hypocrisy of nonviolent nationalism and goals and strategies of the Congress.
In his book, he illustrated how the Gandhi-led Congress consistently acted on
the behest or patronized the industrialists and landlords, as well as appeased
religious politics and a grounded analysis illustrated how the Congress was
devoid of genuine mass character and never took into its fold genuine
anti-colonial uprisings. He projects the economics of a comprador bourgeoisie with
intrinsic detail that did not divorce links with imperialism and explained how
Congress leaders appeased or operated in hand and glove with the landlord
classes. Ghosh evaluated how the Tat as, Birlas, or Singhanias acted as brokers
for British capital and differentiated the comprador bourgeoisie from the national
bourgeoisie.
In ‘Himalayan Adventure –India-China 1962 War, Ghosh most
comprehensively analyzed how it was India or Nehru who was on the offensive in the
1962 Indo-China War, by violating the McMahan line agreement. Even some Indian
generals admitted this. He extensively quotes Neville Maxwell.
Ghosh logically probed the collusion of superpowers, the USSR and the US
to conspire against China and promote Indian expansionism. They backed India’s
declaring war on China and India’s claim over Tibet, which was part of China. Earlier appeals from
China for negotiations for a peaceful settlement found no echo in the hearts of
the Nehru. However, in 1960 Nehru agreed
to Chou En-lai’s proposal to meet. The Chinese prime minister accompanied by
Chen Yi, China’s foreign minister, came to India in April 1960 to negotiate a
peaceful settlement. However, the hosts
were not quite friendly; Nehru had assured the Indian hawks that there would be
‘talks’ but no ‘negotiations’. The decision of the Indian ruling classes to go
to war with China was, as the Times of India noted, a political
decision – a decision that conflicted with military advice. This political
decision invited a rebuff from China under which the Indian army, the Indian
government, and Nehru reeled. In a short
span of 20-24 October, the Chinese
forces overran Indian positions, penetrated the NEFA territory, and occupied
Towang (not far south of the McMahon line), but halted and again began
diplomatic exchanges. But Nehru was his
old self-righteous, apt to turn truth on its head and determined not to enter
into negotiations for a peaceful settlement of the boundary problem.
In Naxalbari before and after, in incisive detail, Ghosh made a balanced appraisal of the CPI ((ML), formed in 1969. Most illustratively, he showed how Naxalbari revolutionized Indian history and how the party shaped the rebellion of all oppressed classes. Ghosh most dwelled in his analysis of how the movement was based on the mass character and how it was a turning point in the history of India. He projected how the party, uprising, and masses were an integral part of revolutionary change and symmetrical synthesis of the party with the armed struggle and mass movement.
Although a great admirer of Charu Mazumdar, CPI(ML), and Naxalbari , Ghosh
was critical of left adventurism’. He refuted the abandoning of mass organizations
and movements, the path of ‘annihilation of the class enemy ‘, and the party's
authoritarianism which was unable to obstruct all forces to converge. Instead
of placing the blame on Charu Mazumdar solely, he asserted that the fault of
the setback was due to a lack of collective leadership.
He dwells on the crystallization of the
evolution of the Naxalbari revolt into the broader ideological zone,
illustrating the dichotomy between the theory of armed struggle and the
peaceful, parliamentary road to socialism.
Ghosh’s critique lucidly portrays the
leader’s autocratic style of functioning, while it has no reflection of
factional rivalry or personal bitterness. His book revealed that Mazumdar
negated from the party the criticism of his line by Zhou Enlai and Kang Sheng,
the two top CPC leaders, when the former emissary, Souren Bose, met them in
Beijing in mid-1970.
In India’s
Constitution and Its Review Suniti made a scientific
dissection of the essence of the Indian Constitution, portraying its class character,
exploring how the Constitution could not protect the genuine rights of the
people and how in practice lot of what was enshrined was nonexistent.
WEAKNESSES
In my personal view, Ghosh failed to analyze in what ways the path of the
Indian revolution had unique characteristics being divergent from the Chinese
path of people's war or how its semi-feudalism erred.
I also disagree with his
evaluation that the 1947 independence was a mere transfer of power or his
complete negation of the role of MK Gandhi as a colonial agent, denying his
role in bridging the link of Congress with the masses.
However penetrative his analysis was Ghosh failed to expose the
autocratic nature of the formation of the CPI (ML) in 1969 or give comrades
like Tarimela Nagi Reddy, DV Rao, Kanu
Sanyal, Kanhai Chaterjee or organizations like the Andhra Pradesh Coordination Committee or
Dakshin Desh, their proper due contribution to the revolutionary movement.
*A freelance Journalist. Thanks for the information from the Research Unit for
Political Economy and Amit Bhattacharya in Frontier Weekly. He personally met
Suniti Kumar Ghosh in Kolkata in 2009.
