Red Jihad

Red Jihad   

Abani Mukherji briefed Lenin himself on the Mappila Revolt. Then why are Marxist historians ignoring his work?  

Ramachandran 

During the Great Purges of 1937-1938, Stalin had two Indians lined up against the wall and shot. 

One was Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, the younger brother of Sarojini Naidu. He was a brilliant revolutionary, and a rival of M N Roy, one of the founders of the Indian Communist Party in Tashkent, which the CPM recognizes and the CPI doesn't. Virendranath, popularly known as Chatto, was executed by Stalin's police on September 2, 1937. He was the hero of Somerset Maugham's short story ‘Giulia Lazzari’. 

The second Indian to be killed was Abani Mukherji, who joined the Soviet Communist Party in 1918. He was a founder of the Indian Communist Party along with Roy. The party was formed using vulnerable muhajirs from India, who were on their way to jihad in Turkey. The Ottoman sultan had been removed by the British at the end of World War I. The Muhajirs were trained in a military school set up by the Soviet Union in Tashkent. Mukherji was given charge of the school. Roy, together with Mukherji, concluded that the Turkey jihad was a class war. No wonder, Mukherji, in his document on the Mappila revolt of Malabar, prepared for Lenin, interpreted it as a class war between Hindu lords and Muslim peasants. 

This document, prepared in October 1921, was read by Lenin and handed over to his chief ideologue, and politburo member Nikolai Bukharin on November 14 with a note. The document was subsequently published in the German and French journals of the Communist International and was translated from the German Die Internationale by Eden and Cedar Paul and published in the March 22 issue of the journal of the British Communist Party, The Communist Review. While researching on Mukherji’s political life, I found the article in the Marx Memorial Library and Workers School, London. 

The existence of the document was never a secret. In fact, Pinarayi Vijayan, hardly an intellectual, observed in an article titled ‘Muslims of Malabar and the Left’: “Lenin had instructed Abani Mukherji, an Indian communist of that period to prepare a pamphlet after collecting all available facts regarding the agrarian issue in India and peasant struggles”.  

Mukherji’s essay was, however, the first Marxist interpretation of the Malabar Mutiny as a class war, and all leading Marxist historians, including K N Panicker, have subscribed to that view. Regrettably, Panicker has not even mentioned the name of Mukherji in his thesis and book, Against Lord and State: Religion and Peasant Uprisings in Malabar, 1836-1921. If he had seen Mukherji's article and chose to omit it, it is deplorable and if he had not seen it, it is despicable. 

 

A reason must be there for Marxist historians ignoring Mukherji's document. Clearly, the reason is that Mukherji, while trying to interpret it as a class war, also highlights the fanatic content of the rebellion. He observes that the Khilafat movement was coopted and subjugated by the fanatic Muslim clergy. He avows that the mullahs, forgetting the aim of the movement, diverted their rank and file, against their peace-loving Hindu neighbors. The Hindus were given the option, of " death or Islam". Thus, the Hindus were massacred, forcibly converted and if they refused, were hacked to death. They ransacked the military depot at Malappuram and looted the treasury of 40,000 pounds. 

Of course, Mukherji’s narrative has lots of contradictions. He unabashedly compares the Malabar revolt to the peasant uprising in Oudh, proving that Marxists hardly read Marx – In The Annexation of Oude in the 28 May 1858 issue of The New York Daily Tribune, Marx rightly pointed out that governor-general Lord Canning had attached all the property of the peasants in Oudh. Mukherji should have known the difference between jihad and revolution. Maybe, he and the Marxists pushed for a revolutionary jihad – a Red Jihad. 

Marxist historians have a pervasive tendency to infer first, distort facts and then theorize. Thus, Fazal Pookkoya Thangal, leader of the Malabar jihad,who had declared three fatwas against Hindus and hence deported to Arabia, has become an expert in class wars, in the eyes of Marxist historians like K K N Kurup. When jihad becomes class war, fundamentalists become Marxists. 

Mukherji too was a victim. The difference between him and contemporary Marxist historians is that he chose to reveal the truth, not hunting for platitudes. The fanaticism of 1921 is there in the document, making him a renegade. It is better to ignore him. He was not a historian, but a textile technologist, trying to weave Marxist draperies out of abundant absurdity.  

The writer is a senior journalist and academic  

Times of India,16 November 2019