Daily Times

As the weeks passed, the mass upheaval of 1946 spread to the other Indian armed forces of the Raj. Nearly 2000 men in the Royal Indian Army Signal Corps mutinied near Jabalpur. There were mini-revolts by Indian gunners in Madras, signallers at Allahabad, and clerical staff at army headquarters in Delhi. Indian officers of the Royal Air Force (RAF) refused to fly out British troops to attack the sailors and to pilot planes to bomb the ships. Felled trees blocked train tracks and roads. The RAF strikes spread to airbases in Allahabad, Mauripur (Karachi), Dum-Dum (Calcutta), Cawnpore, Palam (Delhi), Poona, Vizagapatam, Kallang, Chaklala (Rawalpindi), Lahore and Negombo. The strike also spread to South East Asia where 4000 airmen struck at Seletar, Singapore.

This was a scenario the British never expected to be faced with and it was this movement of the proletariat that forced them to retreat. In an interview in March 1976, Clement Atlee, the post-war British prime minister of the times reminisced, “The RIN Mutiny which made the British realise that the Indian armed forces could no longer be trusted to prop up the British.” When asked about the extent to which the British decision to quit India was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s and his movement, Attlee’s lips widened in a smile of disdain and he uttered, slowly, “Minimal.” Sir Stafford Cripps in the debate at the British House of Commons had said, “The Indians in the (Royal Indian) Army are not obeying the British officers… In these conditions if we have to rule India for a long time, we have to keep a permanent British army for a long time in a vast country of four hundred million. We have no such army and money….”

It’s a historical irony that Congress and the Muslim League, the so-called implacable rivals both condemned the Royal Indian Navy revolt. These indigenous bourgeois leaders condemned the striking sailors and workers. Mahatma Gandhi issued a statement criticising the rebels. The Muslim League too denounced the strikers, arguing that ‘unrest on the streets was not the best way to deal with grievances and that protest should be through constitutional methods only’. Valabhbhai Patel demanded that the sailors surrender and summoned the vice-president of the sailors strike committee, Petty Officer Madan Singh in a flat in Bombay. Patel demanded that he should sabotage the revolt. Nehru, who did not want to be left behind Patel, in another meeting with Madan, advised him and his comrades to surrender and bring the naval revolt to an end. Nehru even held a press conference to reprimand the revolting sailors.

It’s an historical irony that Congress and the Muslim League, the so-called implacable rivals both condemned the Royal Indian Navy revolt

The Communist Party of India was in a dilemma due to the flawed ideological concepts of the leaders. On the one hand they wanted to ‘be with the people’, in order to restore some of CPI’s credibility which was lost during the war, when the party overtly supported the British Raj in the name of ‘People’s War’. Their rank-and-file, particularly amongst the students, enthusiastically joined the uprisings in Bombay and Calcutta. Ultimately this contrast in policy led to the beginning of the split of the CPI after differences emerged between its two main leaders Bhalchandra Trimbak Ranadive and P.S. Joshi the General Secretary in the aftermath of the stormy events.

Ranadive was the party’s main trade union leader and was active in strike action. He was deeply influenced and moved by the uprising and wanted the party to take up the leadership of the revolutionary movement. While Joshi as the party’s general secretary was more receptive to instructions from Moscow under Stalin. However, at the second Party Congress held in Calcutta in February 1948 the party elected Ranadive in place of PC Joshi as CPI’s general secretary. But in 1950 Ranadive was deposed, and denounced by the party as a “left adventurist”. The factional disputes continued and finally the split materialised in 1964 when two parties that emerged were the CPI and CPI (M). Ranadive was the founder and leader of the CPI (M) that is today the largest communist party in India.

The betrayal of the political leadership ultimately led the movement into disarray and it scattered. On February 24, 1946, white flags were raised from the decks of all ships to announce surrender. In its last session, the strike committee passed a resolution that stated, “Our uprising was an important historical event in the lives of our people. For the first time, the blood of uniformed and non-uniformed workers flowed in one current for the same collective cause. We the workers in uniform shall never forget this. We also know that you, our proletarian brothers and sisters shall also never forget this. The coming generations, learning its lessons shall accomplish what we have not been able to achieve. Long live the working masses. Long, lives Revolution”. With a revolutionary party having cadres tempered in the foundations of Marxism could have provided the leadership to the sailors, soldiers and millions of workers who came out on the streets across united India to the path of a socialist revolution. Soviets could easily have been established in Bombay, Lahore, Calcutta, Karachi, Allahabad, Peshawar, Madras, Kanpur, Delhi and many other major metropolitan cities, towns and villages. Unfortunately due to the criminal role played by the Comintern and the leadership of the CPI with the disastrous policy of forming ‘people’s front’ with the “progressive bourgeois” of Congress and the Muslim League an historic opportunity was missed. Despite the CPI leaderships overtures to the British by supporting the imperialist war, when the actual time for the transfer of power came, the preferred option for British imperialism were of course the bourgeois parties, Congress and the Muslim League, as they wanted to ensure continuity of capitalist plunder.

The victory of the 1946 revolution could have changed the course of history. During liberation struggle the rising mass movement would have neither paused at the stage of national independence nor it would have accepted capitalist exploitation and coercion. It would have gone the whole hog by not just shoving the imperialists out of India but by overthrowing their system of exploitation and coercion. The hatred emanating from harrowing genocides and flowing of innocent human blood during the sweltering, humid and stifling summer of 1947; are still tearing apart the social fabric of south Asia. These would have never transpired had a united class struggle led the national liberation into the realm of social emancipation. It would have gone forward for the socioeconomic transformation through a socialist revolution. With the revolutionary storm sweeping through China and most of the East Asia, at the time, a revolutionary victory in South Asia would have become the precursor of the red dawn setting the Asian continent alight with the flames of the revolution. Capitalism and Imperialism on a world scale would have suffered a fatal blow. Its revolutionary impacts and the dawn of liberation would have shone across the planet. The destiny of putting an end to want, deprivation, misery and exploitation along with the reality of humanity’s emancipation would have been within the sights of the human race.

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaig

Published in Daily Times, February 27^th 2019.