Many stalwarts whose roles in the communist movement started during the period covered by this volume but continued for many more years and decades, will be dealt with in the later volumes. Here we give the notes on one whose life within the movement started and ended in this period.

MN Roy

Narendranath Bhattacharya was born to a priestly family in a south Bengal village on 21 March, 1887 (according to some sources in 1886[1]). During 1905-15 he was actively involved, first, with the Anushilan Samity and then with the Yugantar group — the two most (??) national revolutionary organisations of Bengal. As part of a grand plan for armed assault on the British, he made double trips to Java in 1915 to receive German arms from SS Maverick. The mission failed and Roy journeyed to the United States via China and Japan. It was in the US that he assumed the name of Manabendra Nath Roy. In New York he acquired some book knowledge of Marxism and in 1917 fled to Mexico with his American wife Evelyn to avoid police harassments. There he managed from the Germans $50,000 plus 50,000 pesos in gold coins for promoting anti-British struggles in India, a part of which he gave to different Indian revolutionaries. In 1919 he got involved in the formation of the Mexican Socialist Party and financed some of its expenses. Late that year he became a friend of Michael Borodin (who had just arrived from Moscow) and began to have real grounding in Marxism with Borodin’s help. The latter told Roy that he could became a delegate to the approaching Second Congress of the Comintern if he founded a communist party in Mexico. Accordingly, Roy urged the Socialist Party to change its name, failing which he split away with a small fraction that called itself Communist Party and elected Roy and Philipps as delegates. After a short stay in Berlin, where he had a not-very-friendly encounter with the Indian Independence Committee but befriended with German communists, Roy arrived in Moscow in  may or June, 1920. He played a prominent role in the Second Congress and from this time upto 1927 served the Comintern as member (in different periods) of the ECCI, the Presidium, the Political Secretariat, the editorial staff of lnprecor and so on. He also edited the CI papers meant for India (The Vanguard, The Masses of India).

In late 1926 Roy was elected chairman of the Eastern Commission and in early 1927 sent to China as Comintern representative. After the great setback the Chinese revolution suffered in 1927, he returned to Moscow and then in March 1928 went to Berlin for medical treatment. He therefore could not attend the Sixth Congress of the Comintern. During 1928-early 1929 he wrote several articles in the Inprecor criticising the sectarian line of the Sixth Congress. In Berlin he aligned himself with the “Communist Party Opposition” (KPO) — a faction led by August Thalheimer and Heinrich Brandler. After the German Communist Party's abortive attempt for an armed insurrection on the May Day 1929, Roy contributed an article to the KPO press entitle “The crisis in the Communist International”, criticising what he considered an ultra-left action and the Comintern Sixth Congress line responsible for that. At the end of the year he was expelled from the CI explicitly on this ground (i.e., for “contributing to the Brandler press” and for “supporting the Brandler organization”). In the second half of 1930 he sent four of his followers including Tayab Shaikh (pen name : AK Hindi) and Sundar Kabadi to India and he himself came over at the end of the year. Their main propaganda material-cum-political document was a manifesto addressed to the “Revolutionary Vanguard of the Toiling masses of India”. It declared: “In India, the way to Communism lies through the national revolution ... To this end it [the Communist Party] must work through the national mass organisations — the National Congress, Youth League, student organisations and volunteer corps.” The main logic cited for this was the underdeveloped state of the forces of production. On the tactical plane, it projected the demand for a “Constituent Assembly” as against the RTC (whereas the Draft Platform of CPI opted for Soviets of workers and peasants). The CPI attacked Roy’s slogan as a bourgeois eyewash to prevent immediate revolutionary struggle and bracketed him with Nehru and Bose.

Roy and his followers penetrated the Congress organisation and the Naujawan Bharat Sabha in Bombay and concentrated on the labour front. The assistance of GL Kandalkar, president of the GKU and a vice-president of the AITUC, helped them capture the former stronghold of the CPI and in October 1930 they expelled Deshpande, the communist general secretary of GKU. A bitter confrontation thus started from the very beginning and before long the Royists succeeded in cornering the communists in some other Bombay trade unions as well. Roy was arrested in July 1931, prosecuted as a defendant in the Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy Case of 1924 and served RI upto November 1936. His followers, now including VB Karnik among others, formed the League of Indian Independence and a few other organisations with different names in different places and published numerous leaflets, magazines in Marathi, Bengali and English. In 1934 they formed an all-India body called the Revolutionary Party of the Indian Working Class (RPIWC) which maintained links with Thalheimer’s KPO in Germany and worked as a ginger group within the CSP.

Roy’s activities during 1935-39 (departure from CSP, cooperation in struggle with other left forces etc.) have been discussed in Part V. He contested for Congress presidentship in the Ramgarh session (March 1940) and was miserably outvoted. Being expelled from the Congress in late 1940 for working against the Congress policy on war (e.g., observing September 1 as Anti-Fascist Day), Roy transformed his league of “Radical Congressmen” (founded in mid-1939) into the “Radical Democratic People’s Party”. From the middle of 1940s he gradually lost taste for active politics, concentrated on philosophical studies and abandoned Marxism for what he called radical humanism.

MN Roy was the first and only Indian to hold leading positions in the CI for several years. For all his mistakes and weaknesses discussed in various chapters, he will be remembered as the most outstanding theoretician of the early period of communist movement in India (upto mid-1930s to be precise).

Note:

1. See Leftism In India — MN Roy And Indian Politics 1920-48 by SM Ganguly, op. cit., and MN Roy, Political Biography by VB Karnik; Nava Jagriti Samaj (Bombay, 1978) for more information.