Introduction

Puchalapalli Sundarayya was one of the early communist leaders in India, being a founding member and subsequently being a part of the central committee and then the politburo of the Communist Party of India. Following the split between CPI and CPI(M), Sundarayya became the General Secretary of the newly founded CPI(M) and held that position till he resigned citing numerous differences regarding how the party was functioning and the direction it was going to. The resignation letter written by Sundarayya remains one of the most important and informative document in the history of Indian communist movement. It has been 50 years since he wrote his resignation letter, and it still remains as relevant as ever. Last May, in an online discussion in one of Aditya Nigam’s facebook post, the issue of the letter came up. Following this, Aditya Nigam said that he held the resignation letter in very high regard, and had already written about it in the ‘90s in one of his articles. In the following article, which was published in Mainstream Weekly Vol 63 No 22, Nigam lays down his perspectives on the resignation letter and the questions it raised on the Indian communist movement. This online discussion and the subsequent article led Comrades of Bengal – a group of young communists – to write their own perspective regarding the matter. We are publishing the article written by Aditya Nigam first, followed by the one prepared by Comrades of Bengal, so that readers can understand the context and the discourse.  

However, I would like to take up two of the most important issues raised by Sundarayya, briefly for discussion below. The first is what can be called a ‘tactical issue’, where I believe Sundarayya’s position was extremely rigid and unable to respond with flexibility to the demands of the times. On the second issue, however, I think the position he was articulating had – and I believe, continues to have – far greater possibilities than what he was prepared to envisage. And when I say it continues to have some relevance today, I do not mean it as something in relation to his party but as something that might have a lesson for a broader Left today.

The JP Movement and the RSS

The first issue has to do with the question of the RSS and its affiliate, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) on the one hand, and the political party, namely the Jan Sangh on the other, in relation to the crucial question of entering into joint actions and forming joint action committees with them. Given the background of Indira Gandhi’s obvious drive towards a one-party state and the need to resist it, this question had acquired an urgent dimension. The declaration of internal Emergency was still a couple of years away but the rigged 1972 elections in West Bengal had given a foretaste of things to come and by the beginning of 1974, tumultuous strikes – the 1974 Railway strike in particular – and mass movements were breaking out in different parts of the country. The beginnings of the Gujarat Navnirman movement could already be seen by the end of 1973, and by early 1974, the Bihar movement, aka the JP movement, had also emerged. Sundarayya’s position, in itself unexceptionable, was that under no condition could the party go into joint actions with these communal and ‘semi-fascist’ outfits. The question had come up in the Trade Union front with respect to an all-India Convention against Wage-Freeze in mid-1974, and in relation to the JP movement too, around the same time. Was it correct to invite the BMS to the convention? Should the party join or not join the Jan Sangharsh Samitis that were formed at different levels to steer the JP movement? Such questions were at the centre of the disagreements.

While the position articulated by Sundarayya with much clarity in this document is in itself unexceptionable, I now believe that it completely misses the dimension of the dynamics of mass movements. Spontaneous mass movements are always fluid and provide opportunity to all kinds of elements to enter the political scene and acquire shape and form depending upon what the forces active within them are, what their relative disposition is and how forces are rallied – in this case, by radical and Left forces. The position taken by Sundarayya and even the compromise position finally adopted by the party actually amounted to staying away from the JP movement. On the TU front, the Convention against Wage-Freeze too, the pressure to include the BMS in the larger unity, it seems, was coming from other trade unions as well. In my reckoning, here too the matter really ought not to have ended with whether to invite them or not: joint actions and participation in mass struggles are often dangerous and open-ended games but there is no other way of transforming the correlation of forces and radicalizing the movement. In the TU case too, the political question would have to do with drawing their mass of workers into the larger working class struggle.

Sundarayya presents the arguments of the opposite side, very honestly in his letter – mainly those of BT Ranadive but also occasionally, EMS Namboodiripad on the larger issue of political joint actions with these organizations. It is also evident that the position of most of the other Polit Bureau members too wasn’t quite in agreement with Sundarayya’s.

I was in college in those days and having formally joined the SFI some months ago, quite keen to get a handle on what the party’s position on these issues was. Many of us were actually drawn into the mass demonstrations related to the JP movement in those days in Delhi University and elsewhere, and I remember feeling quite confused and let down about this strange position of the party – of joining but not quite joining the movement. That, I realized later, was largely Sundarayya’s contribution and the net result was that the CPI(M) practically stayed away from the movement and formed its own Janwadi Sangharsh Samitis – which were non-starters really because the mass of people on the move were elsewhere.

Obviously, this position came up for threadbare discussion at the party’s Jullunder Congress in 1978, where basically it was seen as a big mistake not to have joined the movement, staying practically on its margins. The argument being made by the majority of Polit Bureau and Central Committee members at that time, as one can see from PS’ letter itself, was linked to the party’s own need for drawing in more allies by being with the movement. But it was also based on a tacit recognition that it wasn’t really the movement that needed you, it was your need to connect with the movement. My own sense of the debate as it continued after the end of the Emergency, in the context of the formation of the Janata Party government was that there did not seem to have been much of a sense, even among those who were pushing for joining the movement, that active participation would have been necessary so as to not cede political space to the Right and the RSS within it. It is clear that the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahinis in most of the places had a fairly strong component of radical groups, ranging from smaller Naxalite groups and individuals on the Left of the CPI(M), to Socialists, many of whom were strongly opposed to the RSS. It would have strengthened the overall position of the Left had the decision been to join the movement more actively. And I am saying this in full awareness of the fact that JP himself eventually came to depend so much on the RSS that he made scandalous statements in its defence.

Not to forget, of course, that had it participated in the movement with a clearer head, the party might also have got a much-needed entry into the Hindi-speaking region, which has remained barren land for it –- barring the dent made in recent years by the CPI(ML) Liberation in Bihar. Anyway, that is another story.

’Contiguous Areas’ Thesis and the Problem of Hegemony

The differences, especially on what came to be known as the ‘contiguous areas thesis’, had actually come to fore very early on. They started as early as in 1969 and continued right till the Emergency, when eventually Sundarayya resigned, citing irreconcilable differences with the majority of the leadership. So what was the thesis? Very briefly, it was drawn from Sundarayya’s understanding of two earlier documents –- both pertaining to the Telangana peasants’ armed struggle (1946-1951). The first document was prepared by the Andhra State Secretariat of the CPI and submitted to the party’s central leadership. Known as the ‘Andhra Thesis’, this document intended to extend the lessons of the Chinese revolution, which had greatly influenced the Telangana leaders, including Sundarayya himself, to a larger strategic perspective in other parts of India. India, being a largely peasant society, it was felt that it could benefit and learn from the experience of the Chinese revolution. BTR as the then general secretary, simply did not consider the document and perhaps consigned it to the dustbin. The second document, known as the Tactical Line, was actually drawn up with the assistance of the Soviet Communist Party and Stalin himself is said to have met the CPI delegation that had gone to meet him. In advising the CPI delegation to withdraw the Telangana struggle, Stalin is said to have emphasised the ‘uneven development’ of the movement and that they could not possibly sustain an armed struggle for revolutionary transformation unless the movement in the rest of the country caught up. The point then came up about the possibility of carrying out peasants’ partisan (armed) struggle for partial demands even while the movement in other parts of the country was at very elementary stages or non-existent. Here, the Tactical Line’s position was that it was possible, once again, depending on the actual situation and context. However, this remained a purely hypothetical question because, as far as the CPI and later, CPI(M) were concerned, there was no peasants’ partisan struggle for partial demands going on anywhere.

The position that remained with Sundarayya, however, and which began to reflect in party-building after the CPI(M) split from the CPI, was this question of ‘uneven development’ and the idea, influenced by the Chinese experience, of ‘protracted warfare’. The prospect of the Indian revolution would be more that of a protracted war fought over decades, in different terrains, rather than one of a ‘simultaneous revolutionary uprising’ of the working class at the all-India level as had happened in the Russian revolution. This is where the ‘contiguous areas’ thesis comes in. The conception of party and movement building in that perspective, therefore, underlined the identification of ‘priority areas’, which would be decided on the strategic importance of industry in that area and similar concerns. The main focus of the party would be to develop the movement in these areas. The emphasis here was on developing the movement in peasant belts contiguous to the industrial centres, as well as developing ‘all-front movements’ in these areas – students in particular. These would function as base areas, and the next move would be to develop from one base to the adjoining, contiguous areas. The really serious differences, however, arose with the further assertion that till movements in base areas had developed to a certain stage, even the movements of priority fronts (i.e. the trade unions) in non-priority areas should be kept at an elementary stage.

Obviously, the outbreak of mass movements all over the country referred to above made all these plans redundant — at least in the way they were articulated by PS. But there is another sense in which, reformulated to meet the challenges of the changing times and bringing in the Gramscian concern with ‘hegemony’ in civil society, this conception had possibilities, way beyond what PS had imagined. After all, Gramsci’s idea of ‘war of position’ was one of a protracted, long-term nature and a ‘war of manoeuvre’, which involves direct, frontal attack, is seen as a relatively rarer occurrence by him.

I had myself written an essay (‘Understanding Indian Communism: Hegemony and Counter-hegemony’, which was published in the EPW in 1996) making an argument to this effect. That essay was in response to an article by Javeed Alam (also in EPW, some years before that) where Javeed had argued that the communist movement in India had basically worked with a ‘non-hegemonic conquest’ model — and hadn’t paid any attention to the longer-term question of cultural hegemony. I had later reworked that essay for Partha Chatterjee’s edited volume on 50 years of India’s independence, Wages of Freedom. Both Javeed’s piece and my reworked response (the bulk of the essay was the same) were published together. In that article, I had actually taken up this key theme from Sundarayya’s line - the ‘contiguous areas thesis’, for further discussion. My argument was that of all the possible ‘lines’ in the Indian communist movement, (CPI, CPI-M, and the various CPI-ML groups included), this was the only one that had the space for longer term hegemonic struggle – though that wasn’t necessarily Sundarayya’s position, since this was a Gramscian question being posed retrospectively.

As it happens, I still believe that to be true. Why? Since the key point in the ‘contiguous areas thesis’ was to focus on key/ priority areas where all the energy of the party was to be focused to build all-front movements, within a ‘protracted war’ conception, this also left open the question of what was to be done in the non-priority areas meanwhile? This is a ‘silence’ in Sundarayya’s discourse. His conception was obviously in stark opposition to the diametrically opposed line of BT Ranadive and others who fantasised about repeating the Russian revolution, riding on the back of a spontaneous upsurge in ‘storming the Winter Palace style’. The key thing that in the ‘non-priority areas’, the party should keep the movement at more elementary levels, raising many questions and opened many possibilities. In my understanding, it could mean everyday cultural-political interventions and other such forms that address the Gramscian question of ‘transforming common sense’. Sundarayya’s own model was too rigid in terms of relating to what we could/ would do if mass spontaneous upsurges broke out in areas that were not our priority areas. The JP movement was an instance of that. But that is precisely the question – there always are and have been people associated with the movement, even in non-priority areas, and that is most of the country. What does keeping the movement at an elementary stage in non-priority areas mean? In Sundarayya’s discourse, that is a blank – an empty space. But that is where, it seems to me, the struggle for hegemony has to be conducted. Apart from the fact that one must, of course, always be flexible enough to see that often non-priority areas too might become priority, the more important question is to recognise that we are dealing with the prospect of a war of position over a long period.

Courtesy – Mainstream, Vol 63 No 22, May 31, 2025
Saturday 31 May 2025

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