This is in continuation to our previous article
Chemistry: Indian Communists and Indian National Congress – I.
Here in this article we would like to bring in front
of our reader excerpts from a classified CIA file which was submitted on 7th
February 1962 and was declassified in May 2007, THE INDIAN COMMUNIST PARTY AND THE SINO-SOVIET DISPUTE (Reference
Title: ESAU XVI-62). The entire report is readily available at www.foia.cia.gov and the link for the file
is given as the 1st reference in the Reference section.
INDO-CHINA WAR
CPI Started
Betraying during China War
Nehru for the first time made a
statement in Parliament substantiating the press reports of such Chinese
incursions and armed clashes. This statement inflamed Indian public opinion;
according to a private comment that day by the chief of the Communist Indian
Press Agency, it confused and staggered the party members. During the next two
days the CPI Central Secretariat, minus Ajoy Ghosh, held an emergency meeting
on the problem, following which the party issued the first in what was to be a
long and varied series of statements on the border, a vague declaration
glossing over the question of border violations, holding (as the Chinese were
to do) that the entire border has never been defined, making no mention of the
MacMahonline, and urgently calling for negotiations. The CPI subsequently came
under wide public attack as a result of its failure in this statement to take a
clear-cut stand supporting the Indian government position.
Page 61
CPI planned to
start Armed Rebellion
In Feb 1958 an official of the Soviet Embassy
contacted CPI Leaders to renew the request to setup an underground
organization. While Ajoy Ghosh refused, HK Surjeet and others privately decided
that Ghosh was taking a complacent line and decided to reach out to the CPSU
outside of party channels. The CPI did proceed to recruit a secret organization
within the Indian Army.
In February
1959, Ajoy Ghosh in his report to the Central Executive Committee that China
Russia insisted that the CPI must develop a standby apparatus capable of armed
resistance, while intensifying penetration of Indian Military forces.
In the September Central Executive Committee meeting
Ajoy Ghosh argued against the tendency to welcome Chinese military presence on
Indian borders to justify a new militant line for the CPI. This was rejected by
the hard left who argued that with the PLA now present along the Indian Border
the Indian Party had a channel of support for Armed Operations and a potential
liberator in the event of mass uprisings.
CPI Propaganda
War and Ideological Support
On the border question, the leftists circulated at
the CEC meeting a document upholding the Chinese case entirely , and claiming
that the dispute was linked both with a shift in Indian foreign policy and
Nehru's reactionary domestic tendency recently shown in Kerala. This document
said that the government was using the dispute to distract the Indian people
from the real issues and to create a situation where the CPI could be isolated
and outlawed. It called on the party to "expose this game of the Nehru government".
Ghosh, however, is reported to have proposed a
"middle way" suggested to him in Moscow, whereby the CPI would state
that acceptance of neither the MacMahon line nor the line shown on Chinese maps
should be made a precondition for Sino-Indian negotiation. This formula, plus a
statement of the CPI's conviction that socialist China could never commit
aggression, formed the core of the CEC resolution eventually adopted on this
subject and published on 25 September. This second CPI resolution on the border
dispute aroused a great public uproar; the CPI's failure to place any blame
upon China or to support any aspect of the Indian government's position was
widely denounced as virtually treasonable.
History behind
CPI Resolution criticizing Chinese Aggression!
On 11 July Ghosh left for one of his periodic visits
to Moscow, to consult with CPSU leaders on a variety of subject......
In early September Ghosh returned to India, bearing with him
instructions reportedly given him by CPSU Presidium member Kuusinen to see that
the CPI in its forthcoming Election Manifesto made some gesture in support of
the Indian nationalist position on the border issue and in condemnation of the Chinese
position. While it is undoubtedly true that the CPSU gave such advice primarily
because it wished the CPI to make the most effective possible appeal to
nationalist sentiment in the elections, the fact that this consideration had so
much greater weight with Kuusinen in September than with Suslov in April
strongly suggests that Moscow was at least partly influenced by the fact that
it was about to launch a major offensive against the CCP and its adherents at
the CPSU party congress the following month. This is also suggested by the
extreme nature of the plank that Ghosh is reported to have attempted to get
the CPI to adopt. During a Central Executive Committee meeting held from 11 to
17 September at which a draft Election Manifesto was prepared, a plank on the
border issue was drawn up, reportedly by Ghosh personally, which was said to
have condemned China as an aggressor, to have strongly supported the Indian
position on the border, and to have specifically commended the Indian
government study team for its report which "proved" the correctness
of the Indian stand.
However, when during the following week Ghosh attempted to get the
National Council to approve this plank, it was found that the expected rightist
margin in the Council had disappeared, presumably partly because less than half
the Council members were actually present, and partly because some who were
willing to support moderate measures on domestic CPI policy were not willing
to back an open condemnation of the Chinese. Three amendments to the plank were
offered, one strengthening it, one leaving it essentially unchanged, and a
third, from Ranadive, denying all support to the Indian position. During
acrimonious debate Randive charged that Ghosh was reneging on an understanding
reached at the CPI Congress not to discuss this issue, Sundarayya and
Basavapunniah threatened to leave the meeting, and Sundarayya and Konar each
warned that their respective organizations in Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal
would not be bound by the plank if adopted. When the Ghosh CEC plank was
submitted to a vote, it was defeated, 25-22. The issue was finally put off by
instructing Ghosh to amend the draft in the light of the National Council
discussion; and as a result of negotiations between the factions Bhupesh Gupta
finally prepared the compromise version that was finally included in the
Manifesto released to the press on 12 October. Despite press reports to the
contrary, this version was not any advance on previous CPI positions. Exactly
like the February 1961 National Council resolution, it affirmed the MacMahon
line in the east and an unspecified "traditional frontier" in the
west, supported India's title to all of Kashmir (and therefore implicitly her
exclusive right to negotiate with the CPR for Ladakh), and called for a
political settlement. Even this much, however, did not please the leftists,
who had wished the CPI to continue to maintain the party's congress' policy of
silence on this issue. The CCP was duly informed by the leftists of the details
of the struggle over Ghosh's plank, as well as of the fact that Kuusinen had
encouraged Ghosh to write that plank.
Note: These
only show one thing very clearly. We often see separatists of Kashmir run
to their bosses across the border in Pakistan to approve their stand on violence
to be imparted. Indian communists & Indian policy were approved by the communist
leaders in Moscow. Other faction was in
touch with China, without national interest keeping in mind.
CPI hoped to
switch side to China During War
The left - faction members of the CPI Central
Secretariat--Ranadive, Bhupesh Gupta, and particularly Basavapunniah--became
increasingly active late in 1959 in promoting the line given them in Peiping
throughout the CPI. In mid-November, Basavapunniah was reported by two sources
to have repeated,to a meeting of CPI leaders concerned with creating an
underground organization, his belief that the CPI lack of a contiguous foreign
supply base during the Telengana revolt had now been remedied with the Chinese
occupation of Tibet and other frontier areas. In late December he was said to
have reiterated to a meeting of the Maharashtra State Council Mao's statement
to Ghosh that Tibet, Sikkim, Bhutan, and the Northwest Frontier Agency are
provinces peopled by the same race, that China had a historic right to these
territories, that the MacMahone line was not valid, and that the Indian
government's raising of "the bogey of Chinese aggression" had
resulted from its realization that Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and India would be
deeply affected by the social and economic revolution in Tibet.
CPI planned to
sabotage DefenseServices
Dange claimed that the CPI had decided to establish a
network of underground "combat cells" all over India during the next
two years, to be used in case of need; and Jaipal Singh, the head of the CPI
secret organization in the defenseservices, told a recruit after the congress
that his organization was in full swing again after having been deactivated in
May 1960 because of party factionalism and government attention to his activities. Nothing more has been heard since the congress
about tile possibility of Chinese help to and guidance for these CPI
underground activities ; there had been indications earlier in the year that
Peiping had responded to the leftist plea for such help by predicating it upon
leftist seizure of organizational control of the CPI at the party congress,
GOI Reply to
Parliament on CPI Stand during Indo China War:
On November 13, 1962 while replying to the
discussions in the Rajya Sabha, Lal Bahadur Shastri
pointed out that Jyoti Basu equated India with China during the war and called the
Chinese aggression as provoked by Indian statements and “across an imaginary
line called MacMohan line”. But the Marxists were not merely
satisfied with words. Kalimpong town had become a den of Chinese spies. Every
move of the Indian army was monitored and reported to the enemy. Like in 1942,
the communists played a major role in helping the Chinese.
Raman (ex-Boss of IB) in an Article "China's Interest Is Our Interest’ Published in Outlook writes:
After joining the IB in 1967, I went on a visit to
Kolkata. Those were the days of the Cultural Revolution in China. The Marxists
were not yet in power in West Bengal, but were very active. As I was travelling
in a taxi from the Dum Dum airport to downtown, I saw the following slogan
painted by the Marxists on the walls everywhere: "China's Chairman is our
Chairman."
This article will continue ......
Reference
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