A History of India, Third Edition

THE REPUBLIC

This leaves the Indian Communist Party as the most consistent leftist force
in Indian politics. The party’s history begins in 1920 with the foundation
of an expatriate Communist Party of India at Tashkent, where M.N.Roy
had rallied a group of radical Indian refugees. Subsequently, a Communist
Party was founded on Indian soil in 1925. Repression by the British
brought most of these early Communists to jail; the party was then
founded once more in 1933 and sponsored a policy of leftist unity with the
Socialists. This was a short-lived honeymoon. During the Second World
War when the Communists had to tergiversate due to the Hitler-Stalin pact
and Hitler’s subsequent attack on the Soviet Union, they lost the respect of
all other leftists and found it difficult to recover credibility after the war.
They tried to make up for this by adopting a very radical line, but with
Nehru’s increasing friendship with the Soviet Union they were forced to
toe the line and follow the ‘parliamentary path’. In this they scored certain
regional successes, particularly in west Bengal and Kerala. The Chinese
attack on India and the Sino-Soviet schism were a great setback for the
Indian Communists. Their party split in 1964. The Communist Party of
India, which remained close to Moscow, had its social base mostly in the
trade-union movement and therefore in the big industrial centres; the new
Communist Party of India (Marxist) had its base in the regional
Communist strongholds in west Bengal and Kerala.
At the other end of the Indian political spectrum was the Bharatiya Jana
Sangh (Indian People’s Association), which has a Hindu outlook though it
denies that it ever was a sectarian party. Its strong emphasis on Hindi as a
national language—which, in fact, it is according to the Indian
constitution—has not commended this party to the people of Southern
India and it has remained a northern phenomenon. Its social base consisted
to a large extent of the urban traders of northern India and the Panjabi
refugees. Its strength as a cadre party was largely derived from the fact that
many of its most active members came from the ranks of the Rashtriya
Swayam Sevak Sangh (National Self-help Association). This organisation
claims to be a cultural and not a political organisation. It was for some
time under a cloud, because Nathuram Godse, who shot Gandhi, was one
of its active members. In the early years of the Indian republic when the
founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, Shyamaprasad Mukherjee, a
prominent Bengali Brahmin, was still alive this party got a great deal of
tacit support from the right wing of the Congress. It was therefore
perceived as a serious challenger by Nehru, who knew that the members of
the Jana Sangh often expressed what the right-wing Congressmen thought
but could not say without violating party discipline.

Federalism and states reorganisation

The three general elections of 1952, 1957 and 1962, which were held when