Against the Current: M N Roy

EPW Reviews November 19, 2005 Minority of One: In Freedom's Quest: Life of M N Roy, Vol III, Part-I: Against the Current (1928-39) by Sibnarayan Ray; Renaissance Publishers, Kolkata, 2005; pp 384, Rs 350 (hardback). Sumanta Banerjee

The tragedy of the world communist movement is that while Marxism as a philosophy attracted brilliant intellectuals, the communist politicians hounded them out of their institutional folds. The hero of the present book was one such victim. The political fate of Manabendra Nath Roy (better known as M N Roy, the Marxist ideologue who was one of the founders of the Indian Communist Party) – both at the international level (during the 1920-30 period) and in India in the 1940s – is an illuminating illustration of the plight of individual thinkers who dare to go against the current set by the party leaders. Is it rooted to something inherent in Marxism, or in the praxis followed by Marxists in politics? Or, does it spring from a basic conflict common to all ideologies – between the originally conceived values and the pragmatic norms followed by their practitioners (e g, Gandhism as an ideology as propounded by Gandhi and the violation of its ethical principles by Gandhi himself in his political praxis)? Or, does it again reflect an intolerance of any questioning of the supreme authority (whether Stalin in the communist movement, or Gandhi in the history of the Indian Congress Party)?

The well known political scientist Sibnarayan Ray, touches upon some of these issues while describing an interesting period in the life of M N Roy. In the history of international communism, Roy’s was often a lone, but prognostic voice which was dismissed by the Comintern apparatchiki. Ironically, later on several occasions, they were to accept and echo the same voice – without of course acknowledging the source! In the history of Indian politics too, Roy’s ideological contribution (spanning more than three decades from the 1920s to the 1950s) and a brief spell of activism (in the late 1930-early 1940 period – if we ignore his earlier stint as a revolutionary in the first decade of the 20th century), remain forgotten. Yet, in both these roles, Roy had left behind a rich legacy of daring intellectual thought and inchoate political experimentation – much of which strikes a chord in our minds today.

The present volume, the third and last but one, in a series of a biographical study of the life and works of Roy, is devoted to the 1928-39 period which was a crucial phase in his life. It begins with what was to become Roy’s last major contribution to the debates in the Communist International – his draft resolution on India which sparked off a controversy over his theoretical formulation of the concept of “decolonisation”, at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern in Moscow in 1928. This also signalled his break with the Comintern, which at that time was increasingly coming under the control of Stalin, with whom Roy had fallen out in the meantime because of the latter’s fight with Bukharin (who was Roy’s friend) in the factional struggle for power in the Bolshevik Party.

This was also the period of political turmoil in India – marked by widespread labour strikes, the historical Meerut Conspiracy case instituted by the British government against Roy’s Indian recruits to crush the incipient communist movement, the emergence of radical elements within the Gandhi-led conservative Congress. Roy felt that it was time for him to return to India, and give a lead to the communist movement in a direction that was different from the “ultra-Left” line laid down by the Sixth Congress of the Comintern.

The last part of the present volume describes Roy’s clandestine return to India in December 1930, his arrest in July 1931, and his attempts from within the jail to build up an organisation of his own and propagate his views outside – which succeeded to a great extent as evident from the influence of the “Royists” (as his followers were known) in industrial areas of Bengal and Maharashtra. On his release from prison in November 1936, Roy joined the Congress hoping to transform it into a revolutionary party – but found to his disappointment that “as in the Comintern, in the Congress too there was some kind of an apparatchiki at the Mahatma’s disposal” which obstructed his efforts at every step. Much to his chagrin, as he was to write later, “.. the old scoundrel has still an incredibly tremendous popularity”, which he “is using for his counter-revolutionary policy”!

Sibnarayan Ray gives a fascinating description of this phase of Roy’s life and examines the theories that he developed during this period, based on a mass of materials that he had collected over the last several decades from archival records and publications (in Russia and Germany among other places, where Roy spent a large part of his political life). He has been able to clear up a lot of confusion that surrounded Roy’s position on certain major issues during his lifetime. Contrary to the campaign carried on by Roy’s critics among communists in India and Britain, and despite its best efforts, the Comintern could not make Roy a scapegoat for the great setback suffered by the Chinese revolution in 1927.

Stalin’s unwise advice was all too evident behind the tragedy. His suggestion of urban insurrection, which the then Chinese Communist Party leadership accepted without batting an eyelid led to the massacre of their cadres. In fact, Roy who was the Comintern representative in China then, held a different view (which was closer to Mao’s) in his positive assessment of the revolutionary role of peasants in Chinese history – as opposed to the orthodox Marxist tendency to despise the peasantry. Soon after his return to Moscow from China, Roy made his position clear by outlining his theoretical approach to the Chinese revolution in the light of his recent experiences there, in a magnum opus called Revolution and Counter-Revolution in China, where he described the peasantry as a “dynamic revolutionary force in Chinese history”, – a proposition that was to be turned into reality by Mao very soon.