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India and Quit India: roses for those great patriots and brickbats for the betrayers

By MV Kamath

Source: Free Press Journal

August 15, 2002







The one party that opposed the Quit India Movement and sought to undermine it with deliberate intent was the Communist Party of India (CPI) which denounced Gandhiji and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and accused them of decadence, of all things! The CPI argument was that the Soviet Union had been invaded by Nazi Germany and it was incumbent on all Communists to rush to Moscow's rescue while Indian freedom would wait. To gain Communist support which in any event was freely forthcoming the British Government released some of the Communist leaders then in jail like S.A. Dange, B.T. Ranadive and Soli Batliwala. The Communists turned out to be more loyal to the British than the King.

`People's War', the CPI organ, ridiculed the Quit India resolution and denigrated the clarion call to Do or Die as illustrative of Congress political bankruptcy. The CPI (then a united party) went about systematically denigrating the Congress and the Mahatma. It wanted to build up its base and to that end it supported the Muslim League demand for Pakistan with the objective of recruiting Muslims to the party. The traitorous role of the CPI has never been fully exposed. The CPI went to the extent of betraying Congress vol-unteers to the police. `People's War' called all opponents of the CPI, including the Congress, as fascist elements and made the most reckless and fantastic statements damning Gandhiji and other Congress leaders.

To curry British favour, CPI leader P.C. Joshi submitted to the government a 120-page report on how the Communists had been disrupting the Quit India movement in province after province, in the most shameless manner. What is even worse, the CPI, in a thesis, proclaimed that India was not one nation, but a collection of several separate nationalities, that the demand for Pakistan was a just and democratic one and that the Congress must concede to the Muslims the right of self-determination. Between 1942 and 1947 the CPI turned out to be the most anti-national party functioning in India.