There were reports that the ruler of a small princely state in Mewar had
been threatened by his peasants that he would meet the fate of the tsar,
but since the source of such reports were British officials, how far this
can be attributed simply to imperialist panic is difficult to ascertain. One
thing was clear: the Bolshevik Revolution promised liberation – the Soviet
insistence on the right of self-determination and independence for all
peoples, and the genuinely non-racist fraternal declarations emanating
from the USSR clearly impressed many in India, and to that extent Indians
were very interested in events in Russia. But this fell short of a clear
engagement with all socialist principles. Only a few intellectuals had
read any Marx, far less Lenin. Some Indian political agitators in exile, men
like M.N. Roy, Abani Mukherji and Virendranath Chattopadhyay, were
moving towards communist politics (Roy actually attended the Second
Comintern Congress in 1920 as a delegate from Mexico). In 1920, S.A.
Dange, a prominent trade unionist from Bombay, wrote a book in which
he debated the relative merits of a Gandhian, non-violent, and a Leninist,
insurrectionary, movement largely in terms of appropriate tactics against
the British colonial state, even as he insisted that without participation of
peasants and workers, no movement could succeed in India.^13 This could
be read as an attempt to ride the tide rather than swim against it, for by
1921 Dange described himself as a Leninist; the relative newness of the
Leninist position in India would have required him to present the ideas
somewhat gently to a new audience. Not many knew of M.N. Roy’s debate
with Lenin over the latter’s view of Gandhian leadership as ‘progressive’;
nor had many people heard of Roy.
One line of criticism of the Non-Cooperation-Khilafat Movement
by sceptics and opponents within the nationalist movement was that
linking up with pan-Islamic tendencies through the claim to the brother-
hood of Hindus and Muslims centrally brought religion into politics. The
Muslim Leaguer and Congressman (it was, until the 1940s, possible
to belong to other groups and still be a member of the Congress and it was
only in 1938 that members of ‘communal organisations’ were excluded
from it) Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who detested the obscurantist religious
sentiments invoked on both the Hindu and Muslim sides by such anti-
rational politics, was one such critic. (He was to learn the lessons well,
when he decided to use similar tactics himself in the 1940s – with fewer
qualms about potentially violent consequences.) Many critics were not
taken seriously because they had dubious credentials in the eyes of the
THE YOUNG GANDHIAN 43