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Communism now so dominant in West-Bengal had a
chequered but very interesting history in the 1940s.
It’s focus on social revolution as opposed to
merely independence as well as it seemingly alien intellectual ideology made
for a difficult start. The war years further complicated matters, as the Soviet
Union, in line with the socialist world strategy dictated much of the political
line to the CPI, and as the USSR was an ally of the British so it seemed to
many was the CPI just at a time when other parties intensified fight against
the British.
After the war on the other hand the social
inequalities and economic problems resulting from the war (not least the
experience of the famine) made many open to the radical social ideas of the
communists. The communal violence partly overshadowed the social issues but
also let the party's secularism look attractive. So in line with many other
countries at the time, communism was steadily on the rise in Bengal. This
however, together with increasing number of political strikes as well as armed
activities of splinter groups like the RCPI led to Communism being banned and
many activists being imprisoned in free post independence Bengal. Only the new
Indian constitution in 1950 led to a resumption of activities which always also
embraced Communism in Asia.
Actual political power was still far away but the
party had at least managed to become a strong opposition to Congress in Bengal.
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MR Spratt came out to India as a young man and threw
himself with a proselyte's zeal into the trade union movement in this country.
He was one of the accused in the celebrated Meerut Conspiracy Case and was
given a long term in prison.
He later veered away from Marxism which he had
espoused and propagated with great conviction. He appears to have made India
his home but is no longer in politics, Congress or trade unions. His ethical predilections
made him see the incompatability of his temperament with Marxist orthodoxy, and
he writes his book on Gandhism "from a point of view which can be called a
qualified Marxism", which explains why this book will" please neither
the Gandhist nor the Marxist.
He deals with Mr Gandhi's life more or less
chronologically and finds much to admire. There is nothing unusual about that,
but Mr Spratt is a diligent student of modem developments in psycho-analysis
and occasionally tacks it on his "qualified Marxism" to produce some
interesting judgments.
"His (Mr Gandhi's) ethics can best be regarded
as that of the insurgent bourgeois, striving to free himself from medieval
encumbrances. It is complicated, however, by the circumstance that medievalism
is Indian and so the object of patriotic attachment while bourgeois ideas come
from the West and from Christianity." This is the standpoint from which he
describes Mr Gandhi's ideas.
(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing'
terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with The Statesman)
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From Madiun to Syriam, from Malacca to Mandalay, the
banging and chattering of hand grenades, rifles and automatic weapons punctuated
day & night last week. International Communism was trying to tear Southeast
Asia to pieces.
The long-range Communist plan, laid down in 1920, is
to create Communist governments in all the colonial countries. The short-range
plan is more recent and more urgent: to undermine Marshall Plan recovery in
Europe by fanning the fires of unrest in Southeast Asia.
The new plan was devised last March. Communist
delegates attended a "Southeast Asia Youth Conference" in Calcutta. A
planeload of experts from Moscow came to give them their orders. Representing
Burma was stout, 30-year-old Hari Narayan Goshal. From Malaya came Chinese
Communist Lee Soong and from Australia, Laurence Sharkey, who flew back to
Singapore with Lee for a two-week stay after the conference.
After Words, Deeds. The plan worked out at Calcutta
called for simultaneous revolts in Burma and Malaya. Three months after the
outbreak of the Malayan revolt, Indonesia's Communists were to strike. As
coordination center for the drive a 26-man Soviet Legation, largest in
Southeast Asia, was set up in Bangkok.*
A preview of what the Communists are trying to do in
Southeast Asia is visible in French Indo-China, where Viet Nam's Communist
President Ho Chi-minh's forces have been fighting the French for the past three
years. In 1937 Indo-Chinese exports amounted to $101 million; last year they
were $56 million, in inflated dollars. Actual export tonnage in fiscal 1948 was
400,000 as against 4,000,000 tons before the war—a 90% drop.
Most nearly reduced to the Indo-China level was
Burma, in normal years the world's largest rice exporter. After Goshal's return
from the Calcutta conference, a series of uprisings broke out which reached
their peak just when Burmese peasants should have been out in the paddy fields
gathering the new crop. Last week, as Burma's parties battled for power, and
food prices in Rangoon soared, it was doubtful whether Burma this year could
even feed herself.
After Tin, Oil. The return of Lee Soong and Sharkey
to Malaya was soon followed by a wave of terrorism through the rich tin mines
and rubber plantations of the north (TIME, Aug. 23). Most of Malaya's tin and
rubber normally go to the U.S. Britain can ill afford the loss of dollars from
her small hard-currency pool.
Latest result of the Calcutta conference has been
Moscow-trained Muso Suparto's proclamation of an Indonesian "People's
Republic" and his seizure of Madiun, Java's third city. Production of
Indonesia's rubber, tin and oil and their distribution throughout the world was
the basis of Holland's prewar prosperity. If the Communists succeed and choke
off revival of this trade, it will take more than Marshall Plan aid to keep The
Netherlands afloat.
Britain has already sent the Second
Guards Brigade, the Fourth Hussars, the Royal Inniskilling
Fusiliers as well as naval and airforce units to Malaya. To hold their
rebellious colonies, the French and Dutch are using men who could be used for
the defense and recovery of Europe. The Kremlin did not create the anti-Western
drive in Southeast Asia—but stepping up that drive now is a shrewd and
important move in the Kremlin's World Plan.
-f Easily amused Siamese laughed & laughed when
the Russians, for their headquarters, took over two "hotels" which
had been the gaudiest bordellos in Siam.
(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing'
terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Time Magazine)
THE Chinese Communists' offer of peace may indicate
some sympathy for the people's woes; also doubts of their ability, owing to
known difficulties of supply, to capture Nanking immediately by storm. Plainly,
however, it throws the responsibility for hostilities or otherwise, fumblingly
passed of late to the Communists, back to the Kuomintang.
Mr Mao's terms, at first sight, seem stiff. He has
turned down-Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's demand for preserving the new
Constitution and the "entity of the armed forces". The incongruous
references in the New Year broadcast to the "free mode of living and
minimum living standards" of the people he has ignored. The offer's
acceptance or otherwise will probably hinge on what the offerers mean by punishment
of "war criminals" headed by, the Generalissimo himself.
The chances of his being allowed to go into exile,
where he could become, .even unwillingly, the core of a
"counter-revolutionary" movement, seem remote. Equally distasteful to
most Chinese (perhaps even to Chinese Communists) sentiment would be his
execution.
(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing'
terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with The Statesman)
WITH Nanking and Shanghai
gone, Kuomintang China is almost a body without a head. The debacle along with
the Yangtse is complete. Shanghai's fall may mean that the last battle of the
Chinese civil war has been fought. The fighting has been as unreal as any
before it. A desperate defence was promised by KMT commanders in response to
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's call to "stand fast". Houses were
requisitioned as defence points, sandbags piled high and haphazardly, villages
burned to give a clear field of fire; a dock was blown up, secret agents were
shot nightly, a curfew was imposed, and citizens went more in fear of their
trigger-happy defenders than of the approaching enemy.
(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing'
terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with The Statesman)
ON the Chinese mainland, the vestiges of Nationalist
resistance are disappearing. Generals have followed airway personnel over to
the enemy. "Thousands of troops have sought internment in Indo-China.
Acting-President Li Tsung-Jen is in the USA and seemingly not anxious to
return. Former President Chiang-Kai-shek, in Formosa, is meditating who knows
what—perhaps making the territory left to him a naval and air raiding base,
reminiscent merely of the Barbary corsairs. Whatever may be U.S.
distinclination, for special reasons, to move in the mattes other Powers must
uneasily wonder how far recognition, at least de facto, of the Peking
Government can with propriety and safety further be postponed.
(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing'
terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with The Statesman)
As the Red tide engulfed the China mainland (see FOREIGN NEWS),
non-Communist capitals from Washington to
New Delhi faced an increasingly urgent question: Should they recognize the Chinese Communists?
The British are known to favor recognition, chiefly and frankly because
they want to safeguard their large
trading interests in China. Advocates of recognition in the U.S., whose China trade has always been relatively
small, advance more speculative reasons.
Most of them base their position on two assumptions: 1) the Chinese Communists,
busy with staggering internal problems,
are not likely soon to launch an expansionist policy in Asia; 2) Red Chinese Boss Mao Tse-tung is
likely to become an Asian Tito. Therefore,
argue the advocates of recognition—many of them in the U.S. State
Department, which is still trying to
figure out a U.S. policy for Asia—the Chinese Communists ought to be officially acknowledged as China's rulers,
get some form of U.S. assistance to spur a
break with Moscow. Last week London's shrewd Economist analyzed the
premises on which this argument is
based, found them extremely shaky. The Economist's analysis gave sharp warning that the China Reds represent a
clear and present danger to the West. Excerpts:
Far East Cominform. "An unpleasant shape of things to come in
Chinese foreign policy is ... gradually
emerging . . . The Peking conference of Asian and Australasian trade
unions [held Nov. 16-Dec. 1] marked out
the main lines on which Chinese Communist activity is to develop. This conference . . . declared its
support for the 'national liberation' forces
in Burma, Malaya, Indonesia, Indo-China and the Philippines ... It was
finally decided to set up a permanent
liaison bureau and secretariat, which . . . would serve as a 'general staff' for all the Communist-led
revolutionary movements ... In fact, the Far East now has its Cominform.
"What is most striking in the new 'Chinese Cominform' program is
that it is to be applied over a region
in which the Chinese imperial monarchy formerly held a kind of paramount position, and in which large Chinese
communities have been built up in modern times by emigration from China. It is also the region which, in the
abortive Japanese plan for 'Greater
East Asia,' was to have been . . . included, together with China, in a bloc
of states under Japanese hegemony. The
propaganda against 'Anglo-America' which poured forth from Tokyo only five years ago has now been taken over, sometimes
in identical phrases, by Communist
China . . ."
Glamourous Gospel. "China remains extremely weak in modern industry
and heavy armaments, and the Communists,
with all their energy, have little prospect of substantially altering this state of affairs for a long time. There
is no danger in the near future of Chinese
fleets and armies following the Japanese path of conquest to the Bay of
Bengal or the Timor Sea.
"But Communist methods of subversive propaganda and intrigue, with
the infiltration of armed bands, might
have great success against weak or vacillating opposition in a region already full of disorder and unrest. This is
the ideal mode of expansion for a nation
which lacks real military strength, but can bring to bear politically
the mass weight of a population of four
hundred millions, the prestige of a traditional ascendancy and the glamour of a revolutionary gospel . . .
"In talk about the prospects of 'Titoism' in China, it is generally
assumed that all satellites must be
treated alike by the Russians without any degrees of dependence. There have been signs that they are willing to
accept from China a much looser form of
attachment than is required from the East European satellites. Apart
from the vast extent and remoteness of
China, the fact that the Chinese Communists have had an army and territory of their own for more than twenty
years . . . puts the Chinese in a different
category from all other non-Soviet Communists.
"There may be conflicts between Moscow and Peking . . . But for the
present there is no detectable heresy,
and it looks as if the Moscow-Peking Axis may work about as well as did the Berlin-Rome Axis."
(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing'
terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Time Magazine)
ON June 26, 1945, the Charter of the United Nations was
signed at San Francisco the act was a stride towards international cooperation,
peace and the eventual possibility of One World. Cobwebs shrouded the failures
of the old League of Nations, and the enthusiastic support of the USA, for UNO
forecast success instead of the series of disasters, broken pledges, and
appeasements of the period between the wars. Hopes were high. Today the United
Nations celebrate the second anniversary of the Charter's signing. In the
interval optimism has given place to realism, the overworked veto clause has
contributed to a hardening into two worlds, and UNO's power has been
demonstrated as incommensurate with its responsibilities.
(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing'
terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with The Statesman)
By
Abu Sayeed Ayyub
THE Atlantic Pact formalises the division of the
world into two camps. This division is not merely a matter of politics, but
more a question of morals and of faith, Perhaps the best way to see its basic
implications is to view it as a splitting up of the principles of the French
Revolution; liberty on the one side (with important qualifications particularly
so far as the colonial peoples are concerned); and equality and fraternity on
the other (again with qualifications for non-believers in the system are
treated with anything but fraternity).
The Communist camp claims, of course, that its
theory and practice of liberty are superior to those current in the
"bourgeois" States. The claim seems to be lacking in seriousness.
When challenged on specific counts, its camp-followers lose patience and shift
over to a denunciation of liberty as a "bourgeois" illusion, or to
the Hegelian identification of freedom with necessity, of
liberty with submission to the collective State, of democracy with
dictatorship.
The free enterprisers are, on their part, loud in
proclamation of their faith in equality and fraternity. The Communists deny
that there is any genuine liberty in the" capitalist States. The best
proof that a substantial amount of liberty does exist in most of the democratic
countries of the West is the legally recognized existence of their own powerful
organizations there, and the facilities which are available for the publication
and sale of the revolutionary writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and their
lesser followers. Nothing corresponding to this can be imagined ~ in the Soviet
Union or the "people's democracies", Mr J. B. S. Haldane, an eminent
biologist and a leading Communist, occupies an important chair at Cambridge.
Would T. S. Eliot, per haps the most significant living poet and literary
critic in the world—certainly in the English-speaking world—be given a chair at
Leningrad University?
The British Government with all its faults, allows
the common reader to judge whether Haldane's (and Marx's) ideas are right or
wrong. Would the Soviet Government with all its solicitude for the common
people have sufficient respect for them to let them read and Judge whether
Eliot's "Notes towards the Definition of Culture" make sense or
nonsense ?
(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms
as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with The Statesman)
WHEN historians look back upon the year 1949,
provided that their eyes are not dazzled to all else save the collapse of
Kuomintang China, they can hardly fail to note a positive achievement fit to be
ranked with the great changes of 1947. Then, in travail but also in triumphant
hope, two great Asian nations augmented the number of independent States, to be
followed not much later by a small neighbour, Ceylon, and a big one, Burma. The
United States of Indonesia now joins their company.
(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms
as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with The Statesman)
"MALICE in Wonderland" according to a news
item, is the title of a series of articles being prepared by the National
Broardcasting Company of America, in an attempt to answer Russian shortwave
propaganda about the USA. "Wonderland" at any rate, seems fair enough
about Moscow's propaganda. Having run through a long series of inventions and
discoveries, such as penicillin, electricity, and the cinema, which she claims
for her own, Russia now is playing a new gambit. On the centenaries and other
anniversaries of various great men born beyond her , confines, she asserts that
their ideas were Communist. Among those lately claimed as Old Comrades arc,
rather surprisingly, de Maupassant and Balzac. On the centenary of de
Maupassant's birth Pravda and Izvestia enrolled him among "the ruthless
ex-posers of capitalism. . , as a participant in the struggle of the French
Communists, dockers, seamen, mothers". On Balzac's recent death-centenary
Soviet newspapers ran front-page stories about this "first great French
writer to raise an indignant voice against the impure domination of the vandal
bourgeoise". It may be supposed that the French Academy received these
announcements with shocked silence, but that there was a slight rustle
elsewhere of corpses turning in their graves,
(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing'
terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with The Statesman)
In 1925 an obscure Javanese schoolteacher, angry
with his Dutch masters, joined a Marxist study group, became a Communist, got
into a rebellion, and was clapped in jail. Almost at once he escaped and made
his way to Moscow, where he stayed quietly for 23 years. Last August, Muso
Suparto (now calling himself simply Muso) turned up in Java again. Thirty-eight
days later he emerged at the head of a successful Communist rebellion.
Muso and his men struck at Madiun, the republic's
third largest city, in the heart of Java, straddling a major east-west rail
link not far from Jogjakarta, the republic's capital. Supported by a mutinous
brigade of the Republican army, they seized the key points in the city, set up
a "People's Republic" and called for the immediate overthrow of
President Soekarno's Republican government. "These arms," screamed
the Communist radio from Madiun, "will not be silent until the whole of
Indonesia is free!" President of the "People's Republic" turned
out to be none other than the resurrected Muso.
He was trying to carry out the Calcutta plan by
stepping into a power vacuum created by the deadlock between the Dutch and the
Indonesian Republic. Muso made his intent fairly clear. In a speech in Madiun
ten days before seizing the city, he declared: "For three years our
government has licked the boots of the Americans, with the result that the
Americans are still supporting the Dutch . . . Up to this moment this policy
continues. We have got to fight it."
In Jogjakarta the Republican government denounced
Muso and his men as "traitors," ordered the army to put down the
rebellion. From Washington, Dutch Foreign Minister Dirk Stikker, who had been
telling U.S. officials about the Communist threat in Indonesia, made a cagey
offer of Dutch help: "We are ready to meet and support Premier Hatta if he
is ready to make arrangements with the Dutch." To Indonesia's Premier
Hatta it looked like a very big "if"; he said he would not tolerate
any Dutch "meddling."
(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing'
terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Time Magazine)
Nine months after attaining its independence, Burma
was falling apart. A battle royal of rebellion, mutiny and murder surged around
Rangoon. The government could not govern, the army scarcely knew whom to fight.
Last week the guns of the Burmese Navy frigate Mayu drove rebels from Syriam, a
town only a mile and a half from the capital.
Top government officials surveyed the ruins of their
shattered Union from the relative safety of Windermere Park, Rangoon's most fashionable
suburb, now known as "the Concentration Camp." Heavily armed guards
patrol its four miles of 15-ft.-high barbed-wire fence. Each house within is
ringed by its own barricade. Windermere Park is one of the few areas in Burma
which the government controls.
The Rivals. One official who dared to live outside
the Concentration Camp was former Foreign Minister U Tin Tut. He resigned from
the government to head a loyal "Burmese Auxiliary Force" to fight the
rebels.* One day last month, as he started to drive away from the office of the
English-language New Times of Burma, a bomb planted in his car blew it to
pieces. Tin Tut died two days later (TIME, Sept. 27).
Most of the confusion in Burma was caused by rival
Marxists. Hari Goshal, carrying out the Calcutta plan, was busily at work with
the so-called White Flag Communists. A group called Red Flag Communists worked
separately from them. Closest to the government in outlook, but believing in
cooperation with the Communists, was a group of veterans of the People's
Anti-Japanese Army, organized by former Premier U Aung San, assassinated last
year. Another important group is the Karens, who are mostly Christian, and
oppose the government, which they say is heavily Marxist.
Some Burmese leaders think there is a chance that
the army veterans might revert to the government side. Most optimistic is
pretty, petite Mrs. Aung San. "After all, they are my husband's old army,
and practically my sons," she says. "I am just like a mother to those
boys. They'll come home soon and we'll welcome them back to the family."
Less hopeful was toothless, 73-year-old Thakin Kodaw
Hmine, the Ben Franklin of Burmese independence. "I was unhappy under the
British and Japanese," he groaned last week, "but now I am very sad.
My young disciples are killing each other like barbarians. I guess this isn't
the time for young men to take the lead in government affairs."
Carnegie & Marx. Thakin Nu, the cowlicked,
amiable young man who has just been re-elected Premier, seemed to agree with Kodaw.
Nu is probably the only political leader in Burma who does not want the
Premier's job.
Nu had been a reckless and mischievous youth
somewhat overfond of the bottle. On his graduation from Rangoon University in
1929, he became a devout Buddhist. Later he joined the Thakins (masters), a
party of young intellectuals dedicated to throwing the British out of Burma. A
student of Marx, Dale Carnegie, Bernarr Macfadden and Havelock Ellis, he
also" dabbled in yoga. In 1939, as co-founder of a book club with presently
jailed Communist Leaders Thakin Soe and Thein Pe, he translated into Burmese
How to Win Friends and Influence People.
On the whole, Dale Carnegie seems to have made a
deeper impression on Thakin Nu than the stern tenets of Marxism. Nu tells a little
story to explain his attitude. "The rebels," he says, "remind me
of an actor playing the tiger in the famous Burmese drama Mai U. While waiting
for his cue to chase the villain he fell asleep, only to wake up suddenly in
the middle of the next play, where Prince Siddhartha (Gautama Buddha) was
setting out on his charger to follow the life of an ascetic. Thinking he was
still in the previous play, the sleepy actor chased savagely after the noble
horse."
The villain in Nu's little story is, of course, the
British Empire. Buddha is the Burmese nation. The noble horse is presumably
Thakin Nu.
To combat the rebels who are chasing him, Thakin Nu
has an armed force of some 12,000 men, three Spitfires and two pilots (whom the
rebels tried to assassinate last week). Fortunately for the outnumbered
government forces, personal animosities and the wide gap in principles
separating the rebel factions have so far prevented any lasting military
mergers among them. Each group is forming its own island of resistance, from
which it strikes in sporadic attacks.
Oddest attack of last month was reported from Thakin
Nu's own home town of Moulmeingyun. A band of Red Flag Communists led by a
fair-skinned, 25-year-old girl named Bo Moe Kyi (Officer Clear Sky) swept down
at dawn and quietly took over from the police. In the presence of the town
elders, Clear Sky removed 60,000 rupees from the government treasury, burned
all legal records at the courthouse and emptied the jail.
Before evacuating Moulmeingyun, Bo Moe Kyi sought out
Thakin Nu's aging father, U Aung Nyein. "So you are the father of that
'rosary man' [psalm-shouter]," she said. "Please don't be frightened,
sir, we give Thakin Nu our due respect, but there is nothing strange in
Communists seizing from the government. As you see, we have taken 300 guns and
60,000 rupees, and now we'll leave. That is all, dear great uncle."
The most realistic view of the Burmese situation was
expressed by former Japanese Puppet Premier Ba Maw (Ph.D., Cambridge). Said he,
in his best Cambridge drawl: "Just because America and Britain make their
spiritual home in the middle of the road is no reason to expect Burma to stay
there. The Japanese spirit completely conquered these people. It's the man with
the gun who will win out here."
*Though the most Western of all Burmese leaders, Tin
Tut was not the British stooge Communists called him. Returning to Burma from
Oxford, where he had been a Rugger Blue (played in the varsity rugger team), he
was informed that as a Burmese he could not be a member of the clubs in which
his British former teammates toasted the old country. His nationalism was
hardened and embittered by this treatment.
(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms
as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Time Magazine)
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AMONG FOUR BRITISH EMPLOYEES
of a Calcutta
engineering works murdered on Saturday by members of the Indian Revolutionary Communist
Party, was Frederick Gower Turnbull (28), of Middlesbrough.
The bodies of
Turnbull, and Arthur Dwyer (37), of Halifax, (earlier reported of
Middlesbrough), and Frederick Charles Brennan, an Anglo-Indian, were recovered from two pressure
furnaces.
Altogether
four British or Anglo-Indian employees were killed by terrorists in Saturday
night's raid on the works of
Jessop and Company.
The fourth
man, Felix Augier (42), died in hospital from stab wounds.
Matthew
Ewing, a British foreman at Jessops, was struck on the head. He was rescued by
loyal workers, who dragged him to safety over a wall.
There has
been considerable labour unrest at the works, due to a reduction of over 150
workers recently.
The raiders'
savage tactics suggest that they aimed to stiffen malcontents in opposition to
the Indian Government's gradually succeeding efforts to break the general
strike threat.
Indian and
Pakistani police are combing the country to round up stray batches of raiders.
Some escaped
by boat and others in cars and lorries. Fifteen rifles and several hand
grenades were captured by the police....
(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing' terms
as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with the : Middlesbrough Evening
Gazette)
Last week India's little Communist Party saw a
chance to move its country toward the frustration and chaos the Reds have
helped to create in much of postwar Asia. The Indian government acted faster
than the Reds and thwarted them—for the present.
Two years ago, before anyone foresaw the heights
inflation would reach, the government signed a contract with the All India
Railwaymen's Federation. It included a cost-of-living allowance pegged to
rising prices. The government argued later that it could not keep the contract
without contributing to the disastrous price spiral. The railway federation,
dominated by Jai Prakash Narain's Socialist Party, screamed that it had been
betrayed. In December its 350,000 members voted to strike on March 9.
The Chance. During the breathing spell between
strike vote and walkout, U.S. educated Socialist Narain talked with the
government. By Feb. 16, he told his railroad men that the government had
granted a $3 monthly pay raise to low-paid employees and would consider other
demands. The union leaders voted to postpone the strike. But some
rank-&-filers wanted their full contract rights. The Communists grabbed
their chance.
Red leaders of local unions blasted the Socialists
with familiar Moscow invective: "Betrayers! Opportunists!
Careerists!" then announced they would go ahead with the strike. Boss
Narain promptly expelled the Communist locals from his federation.
The Result. The government of India went further. In
Madras, 73-year-old Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel thundered:
"Labor is not in the hands of people who can guide it properly. Unless
they succeed in removing Communists, there will be nothing but ruin for this
country." Patel did not wait for the unions to arrest Communist leaders.
He started a roundup of his own. By week's end, some 1,000 Communists were
crammed into already-bulging provincial jails. In the New Delhi legislature a
bill was introduced which would impose stiff fines and jail sentences for
strikers against essential industries, i.e., railways, postal telegraph and
telephone, arms manufactures, etc.
By week's
end small gangs of Communist terrorists were getting revenge. In the Calcutta
area they bombed an airport and engineering works, killed seven people. The
raids were timed as a warning to Prime Minister Pandit Nehru who had announced
he would address India's legislative assembly on Communism.
Nehru was not terrorized. In his angriest attack on
the Reds, he said: ". . . Communists have looked upon these strikes not
from the trade union point of view . . . but as a weapon designed to create a
chaotic state in the country . . . [They are] deliberately seeking to create
famine conditions by paralyzing our railway system ... It is not the
government's conception of civil liberty to permit methods of coercion and
terrorism."
A high-ranking official explained what the
government was afraid of: "The Communists know we are caught in a vicious
circle. To save India from disorder and Communism we need to raise living
standards. To raise living standards we need order. So it goes, round and
round."
(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing'
terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Time Magazine)
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[31634historiceventscpit.html#worldpeace]
Calcutta
March 25 [1950]
Outside the ramshackle building a poster in red and
white advertised the "World Peace Congress" Eric and I had flown from
Delhi to cover. Along the narrow bazaar street the flow of Calcutta life went
on unheeding, but near the door a smooth little man, typical of the government
intelligence agents to be found in the vicinity of Communists, looked at us
curiously. Later we learned that within half an hour of our arrival the Central
Intelligence Department in New Delhi had heard about our visit and from our descriptions
had decided who we were—correctly.
The headquarters of the World Peace Congress was at
the end of a long passageway, three flights up. The room was crowded with
arriving delegates, propaganda pamphlets, discarded sandals, and tin trunks
spilling forth clean linen. Everywhere there was a happy air of bustle.
Around the walls were various instructive maps of
the Soviet Union, pictures of Stalin and Lenin, the inevitable ecstatic poster
of triumphant peasants trampling on fat landlords, and quotations from the
masters. "There are no fortresses that Soviets cannot take. Stalin,
1933" said one of them.
We were introduced to Mr. Dutt, an earnest young man
in owlish spectacles, who said he was a lecturer in economics at a local
college. Yes, said Mr. Dutt, they were expecting delegates from Russia,
Communist China, and Indo-China to arrive at any moment. This was the day
before the opening of the World Peace Congress, and for at least a week every
interested person in India had known that the government of India had denied
visas to all foreigners wishing to attend the congress. But yes, insisted Mr.
Dutt, they will be coming "just now."
Mr. Dutt was very correct, although he knew that we
represented the decadent white press. He told us the conference had been called
by the All-India Trade Union Congress, the All-India Progressive Writers and
Artists Association, the Indian Peoples' Theatrical Association, and several
other Leftist cultural organizations—but not the Communist Party of India. He
then gave us a copy of the "Call of the Peace Preparatory Committee,"
and politely made it clear the interview was over.
The leaflet, which was in English, read in part:
"The owners of monopoly capital in America are hatching to bring about
another war—they are out to grab the whole world. "While the American
imperialists are providing a mounting evidence of their barbarous war frenzy
through a systematic undermining of the foundations of the United Nations and
through the Atlantic pact and the atom bomb, the Prime Minister of India
. . . proclaimed the friendship of the Indian government with those
bloodthirsty warmongers. Against the rude repudiation of our national interests
and popular will, we are determined to organize a powerful protest, whatever be
the obstacles thrown in our path by the government's policy of
repression."
In the case of the World Peace Congress the
government's policy of repression did not seem excessive. Evidently it was felt
that the wings of the meeting had been clipped by the ban on foreign delegates,
and in any case there are indications that the congress had been called to give
opportunity for behind-scene stock-taking, rather than to provide occasion for
violence.
Deshpriya Park, where the congress was held, is a
quiet green space in South Calcutta, surrounded by old pink and white
three-story houses. When we arrived at 1 p.m., the hour when the congress was
scheduled to begin, the crowd was just starting to collect and workmen were
still erecting a shamianah, a kind of large tent. Later much bitterness was
expressed because the congress was not allowed to have a pandal, another kind
of tent. We spotted several intelligence agents in the crowd, but not a
policeman was in sight.
While we watched, workmen finished tacking up a
painting of Picasso's dove. On one corner of the dais was a pleasantly smiling
poster of Paul Robeson, who presumably was to be with the conference in spirit.
Under the shamianah, about one thousand Indian
delegates, men and women, sat quietly on the grass, and out in the sun several
hundred young men milled about while others relaxed in groups under the waxy
leaves of the frangipani trees. We tried to talk to some of them, but they
heard our Anglo-American accents, and after a few moments of politely
uninspired conversation, turned away.
On the steps of a Victorian bandstand, a bookstall
had been set up to display pamphlets in Hindi and English, some of them
published in Moscow and one of them issued recently in Bucharest. Wandering
nearby we saw the Russian correspondent of Tass who had traveled on the same
plane with us from Delhi.
Promptly at 2:30 the conference opened with a
rousing song by five members of the Indian Peoples' Theatrical Association, one
of the most accomplished drama groups in India. For the next four hours, while
the crows cawed and the laden oxcarts trundled by in the streets, the meeting
proceeded as scheduled: reading of messages from foreign "peace"
organizations; a speech in favor of peace and Russia by the president of an
important union; the adoption of a resolution greeting the peoples of Russia,
the "peoples' democracies" of Eastern Europe, and the "peoples
of Freed !' China"; the
adoption of another resolution condemning the ''reactionary Nehru government
for its action in denying entry visas to the Soviet and other delegations. The
afternoon was very hot and long, and sitting on the steps of the bandstand
among the propaganda pamphlets, I grew sleepy with heat and boredom.
The second day was much the same as the first. When
Eric and I arrived at the park a rapid-speaking young lady in a purple cotton
sari was giving a speech in Bengali, from which occasionally emerged such
English words as "democracy," "liberty," and "oppression"
for which there are no exact Bengali equivalents. When we left, an intense
young man was speaking in Hindi, but we could distinguish only such words as
"radio," "hysteria," and "Uncle Tom," the last
repeated several times. As we walked out of the park, we passed a group of
small boys playing cricket with improvised bats.
The third day—today—the meeting shifted, with police
permission, to the Maidan, which is to Calcutta what Central Park is to New
York. The crowd was bigger this time, and perhaps three thousand persons had
collected around the foot of Ochterlony Monument, an immense pillar put up
years ago by the British to commemorate a Scottish general who fought a
successful campaign in Nepal.
From time to time, processions of workers from the
jute mills and from various railway unions arrived waving red banners and
shouting "Down with Nehru and the West!" On the platform a speaker
declaimed: "Take any weapon you can! Make yourselves free!"
"Who are these people?" we asked our Sikh
taxi driver, wanting to see what he would say.
"They are just poor coolies and mill workers
who are hungry," he answered.
We wandered on the outskirts of the crowd, and asked
the same question of a village boy, who had been busily selling handfuls of
hotly-spiced grain to the delegates. "It does not reach my
understanding," he answered humbly.
We asked a water-seller, squatting on the ground
amid his earthenware cups and jugs. "They are people who want more bread
and rice," he said.
It was Sunday on the Maidan, and the Communist
meeting was evidently only one entertainment among many to tempt the passerby.
A huge crowd nearby had collected to watch a wrestling match; another was
entranced by two dancing monkeys; beyond it a performing bear attracted the
attention of several hundred laughing coolies. Other amusements scattered about
the huge area included a story teller telling tales of Rama and Sita, singers
and drum-beaters, a fortune-telling cow, a holy man discoursing on the Gita, a pundit leading a prayer meeting, a boy loudly
proclaiming the virtues of a foot ointment compounded to order on the spot, and
a cricket match.
The class distinction was never more evident. Easily
recognizable by their clothes, their spectacles, and their general air, the
young intellectuals, students, and other members of the middle class were
gathered en masse at the World Peace Congress. In rags and tatters, the
proletariat were having an even better time watching the dancing bears and the
monkeys.
Today, more than anywhere else at any other time, I.
have been conscious of the great shock-absorber quality of India. It doesn't
fight back, it merely tolerates, ignores, blankets, and encompasses the
opposition. This is one of the qualities of India which makes the task of the
Communist so difficult; the water-seller and the taxi driver are beginning to
believe that the Communists are offering them more bread and rice than they are
getting, but the belief is not yet very strong, and the attractions of the
bears and monkeys are stronger. And yet, the Communists play a long game, the
only kind you can play in India. Subconsciously, did the village boy listen to
their words and absorb them, while he watched the antics of the monkey, and
laughed?
(COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Reproduced under 'fair dealing'
terms as part of a non commercial educational research project. The copyright remains with Margret Parton 1959)
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