He resigned When the Party Aligned with the RSS
The resignation of P Sundarayya from the post of the general secretary of the CPI (M) and Politburo, during the emergency in October 1975, was a closely guarded secret for a long time, till his resignation letter came to public notice, in 1991. He had confirmed his resignation in his autobiography, in 1984, though it got published in English only in 2009. The Party never allows a cadre to resign, but it expels the cadre; even if a member leaves the Party, it would be termed by the Party as expulsion. But, Sundarayya left it citing differences with its policy, and it was unprecedented in the history of the communist movement in India.
Born in 1913, Putchalapalli Sundarayya became popular as the leader of a peasant revolt, referred to as the Telangana Rebellion, in the Nizam of Hyderabad State. At the age of 17, he joined Gandhi’s Non-cooperation Movement and like EMS Namboodiripad, he made initial contacts with the Communists in jail. Mentored by Amir Hyder Khan, who was in charge of the southern states in the Party, he came into contact with leaders like Sajjad Zaheer, EMS Namboodiripad, Dinkar Mehta, P Krishna Pillai, P C Joshi, Soli Batliwala and others. He became one of the founding members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). In 1952, he was elected as a member of the Rajya Sabha from the Madras assembly constituency and became the leader of the Communist group in Parliament.
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| Sundarayya with wife |
He was so dedicated to the upliftment of the poor that he and his spouse chose not to have children. Sundarayya remained General Secretary of the CPI (M) until 1976.
Sundarayya was born in a feudal farmer’s family on 1 May 1913, at Alaganipadu in the Nellore district in Andhra Pradesh. Young Sundarayya was influenced by social reformers like Kandukuri Veeresalingam, Gurajada Appa Rao and Komarraju Lakshmana Rao. Inspired by Gandhi, at the age of 14, Sundarayya went to the Congress conference held in the Madras state and participated in the ‘Simon Go Back’ agitation. Studying intermediate at Loyola College in Madras, he formed ‘The Council of Fraternity’ along with other students with the aims of developing a love for the country, selling khaddar on Sundays, doing exercises, and educating the agricultural workers in the villages during vacation. On the birth anniversary of the Telugu people’s poet, Vemana, Sundarayya organized a common lunch for the caste Hindus and the Harijans in his village. The feudal orthodox people opposed this and as a result, Sundarayya went on a protest hunger strike for two days.
On Gandhi's call in April 1930, Sundarayya decided to give up his education and join the freedom movement. He wrote a letter to his mother and elder brother and joined the Satyagraha camp at Bhimavaram in West Godavari district and served imprisonment for two years. After release, Sundarayya started fighting against untouchability and organizing unions of agricultural workers. He believed that the mere ending of colonial rule was not enough and there was a need to eradicate the evils of "class oppression." Sundarayya joined the Communist Party at a time when there was a ban imposed by the British rulers on the Party.
The arrest of Amir Hyder Khan in 1933 led to Sundarayya stepping into his role as an organizer of the Party. In 1934, at the age of 22, he was taken into the Central Committee of the Party, the first organized leading body of the Party which was constituted after the release of the Meerut prisoners. He took up the task of building the Party in the Southern States of Andhra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, at the instance of the CC of the Party.
Sundarayya, along with S V Ghate, was responsible for the entry of E M S, P. Krishna Pillai and A K Gopalan into the Party. His discussions with the leaders of the Congress Socialist Party from Kerala – P Krishna Pillai and EMS – in Mumbai and elsewhere led to his visit to Kerala, after which the first communist unit was set up in 1937. This unit consisted of P Krishna Pillai, EMS, K Damodaran and N C Sekhar. Sundarayya was accompanied by S V Ghate when this unit was constituted. In Tamilnadu, Sundarayya played an important role in recruiting some of the early communist leaders. He worked with P Ramamurthy, P Jeevanandam, B Srinivasa Rao, A S K Iyengar and others. In 1936, in the presence of Sundarayya and Ghate, the first Communist unit of Tamilnadu was set up.
When different Communist groups merged into an all-India centre in 1936, Sundarayya became a member of the Central Committee. During the same year, he established the All India Kisan Sabha and worked as its joint secretary. He organized a march for the protection of farmers covering 1,500 miles from Itchapuram to Madras. Hunted by the police, Sundarayya led underground life between 1939 and 1942. When the ban on the Communist Party was lifted in 1943 after it cooperated with the Second World War efforts of the British colonialists and opposed the Quit India movement, he was elected to the Central Committee in the first all-India conference of the Party held in Bombay. Since then and until his death he served the party and the Communist movement— first CPI and later CPI (M), in various capacities.
Sundarayya married Leila on 27 February 1943. Both of them just told P C Joshi, the then General Secretary of the Communist Party, that they would lead the life of wife and husband. After two years of their marriage, Sundarayya underwent a vasectomy operation, after both the wife and husband discussed the issue and came to an understanding that they would not have enough opportunity to rear their children properly. However, Sundarayya felt that the choice of having or not having children should be left to the discretion of his wife. He used to advise the cadres of the Party to get married and have a limited number of children. Prakash Karat followed his advice.
The wealthy Sundarayya sold away the entire share of the family property and gifted the amount to the Party, which people like E M S tried to emulate. His book, Visalandhralo Prajarajyam (People’s Rule in the Enlarged State of Andhra), was a landmark in the struggle for the formation of Andhra Pradesh. The Telangana peasants’ armed struggle, which he led and where thousands of young men laid down their lives, was the model for the Punnapra-Vayalar upsurge in Kerala.
Thinking the time is ripe to form a communist government in Andhra, he moved to active electoral politics in the State. He served in the State Assembly from 1955 to 1967 and from 1978 to 1983. He used to go to the Parliament and Legislative Assembly on a bicycle. When the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was formed after the break in 1964, Sundarayya was elected as the General Secretary, till his break up in October 1975. Until his death on 19 May 1985, he remained a true communist.
Sundarayya had definite views on how the strategic tasks of the Party should be translated into action. He had increasing differences in the political tactical line and the line to be pursued in the trade union and Kisan fronts. By 1974-75, these differences led Sundarayya to conclude that his continuing as the General Secretary was untenable as the overwhelming majority in the Polit Bureau and Central Committee did not share his views. In his resignation letter, he said that his resignation is because the CC majority decided on joint actions with Jana Sangh and the RSS, in the name of fighting the emergency, which he considered harmful for the party. E M S, who skipped his son's wedding to take part in Sundarayya's funeral, was in the vanguard of pushing away Sundarayya, from the Party, along with B T Ranadive.
Having fought for his line and lost, he bowed out of the Party. His resignation letter contains the essence of the struggle he had to lead inside the Party.
The text of Sundarayya's resignation letter was first made available by his friends in Kerala. They took the decision to have it circulated in wider circles in view of the importance of the issues raised therein.
Sundarayya submitted his resignation in October 1975, but it was never circulated to party ranks. The Statement of Policy document which the undivided Communist Party adopted in 1951 remained central to Sundarayya's differences with the majority faction led by EMS, who became general secretary, after Sundarayya. It is just poetic justice that ultimately the Party asked E M S to vacate the post, sending him to a lifelong vacation in Kerala.
After Sundarayya's death in 1985, The Marxist, the Party’s theoretical organ, in its July-December issue, carried M. Basavapunnaiah's article, The Statement of Policy Reviewed. In a note to this article B T Ranadive said that the Statement of Policy Reviewed was adopted by the party in 1976. It means it was reviewed after the demise of Sundarayya. There was nothing new; the reviewed Statement acknowledged the Statement of 1951. It is sad that the Party took nine years to circulate their review resolution through The Marxist. Ranadive justified the delay by blaming the Emergency. But there was ample time to circulate it in 1977 or after. It is evident that the Party was struggling to keep Sundarayya’s self-exile, a secret. The review was just an exercise in futility to rebut Sundarayya’s document. The Party chose to bury it till 1985 because it feared Sundarayya’s reaction if it was published during his lifetime. Thus, the Party cheated its cadres.
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| Basavapunnaiah |
The issue of The Marxist that came out after Sundarayya's death did not publish an obituary of him.
Sundarayya Vs BTR and Others
Sundarayya was peeved with the way in which the dominant leadership of the Party ignored the Party Program and the Statement of Policy (Tactical line) adopted by the undivided Party, in 1951.
On 25 June 1975, Indira Gandhi clamped the State of Emergency, and on 12 October 1975, Sundarayya put in his resignation. The dominant section of the party leadership called on Indira Gandhi at New Delhi, pledging support to the "national" fight against "right reaction and communalism." But, Sundarayya found that the Emergency exposed glaring inadequacies in the party organization. The party had learnt little from the "semi-fascist" attacks in West Bengal in 1972. While the cadres fled their homes, the leaders, safe in the party offices, were happy with their achievements in terms of votes polled and trade unions captured.
Sundarayya felt disillusioned that his Party failed to anticipate such a massive attack like the Emergency. He felt the Party failed to keep itself in consonance with "the perspective of how Indian Revolution will have to be worked for". Though Party Congress and CC resolutions endorsed the Tactical line (the Policy), in practice he found it was being neglected. Like the AICC resolutions on land reforms and socialism, his own Tactical Line remained dusty on party shelves. Thus, from 1975 to his death in 1985, he lived without his dream getting fulfilled. His trusted comrades betrayed the founding principles of the Party and the heritage of the Telangana armed struggle. He died as a betrayed leader on 19 May 1985.
BT Ranadive's note to M Basavapunniah’s article in the Marxist said: "In 1951 the Communist Party of India adopted two documents – the Party Program and the Statement of Policy. Subsequent developments led to the abandonment of the 1951 Program since it contained many mistakes. But the companion document Statement of Policy was neither reviewed nor revised. In the struggle against revisionism in the communist movement in India, the Statement of Policy came under attack from the revisionists. The CPI (M) reiterated its adherence to the basic postulates of the document but incorporated changes in the changed circumstances. After a discussion within the Central Committee of the CPI (M), the understanding that emerged in relation to the document could be finalized, only in 1976."
While BTR says that the party did no more than reiterate its adherence to the basic postulates of the document, Basavapunniah clarifies that his party since its formation was drawn into a ferocious internal struggle in defence of the Statement of Policy and strove to orient the work according to it. The Polit bureau and the CC, he says, upheld its Marxist-Leninist viewpoint on the Party Program and Statement of Policy while rejecting the Naxalite line. The Eighth CPI (M) Congress in December 1968 endorsed and reiterated the Statement of Policy as piloted by the general secretary, Sundarayya. It incorporated into the Policy, strategy and class alliance of the Indian Revolution. However, it was reiterated that the Policy essentially dealt with the path of the Indian revolution.
However, Sundarayya argues in his resignation letter that the dominant section of the party leadership was not inclined to steer the party, as also the working of TU, Kisan and Student fronts on the path of the Indian revolution. The endorsement of the Policy in the Eighth Congress was just ritualistic, and the contradiction led to his exit. The glorious traditions of the Telangana armed struggle and other popular struggles were thrown into the winds. The dominant leadership needed the Policy only to establish their "anti-revisionist" credentials. Not to be identified with Naxalism, they pleaded for the status quo. With Sundarayya around they would not be explain the status quo, which explains why BTR and MB preferred to circulate the revised Policy of 1976 to the party ranks only in 1985.
The Statement of Policy says: "India has essentially an agrarian and backward economy, the immense importance of peasant struggle should not be minimized. Therefore, the political general strike in the cities and in industrial areas is not the main weapon of our revolution and such a general strike alone will not be enough to unleash country-wide insurrection leading to the overthrow of the present State." It further reads: "For the victory of Indian revolution partisan warfare of the peasants has to be combined with the other major weapon, the general strike and uprisings in the cities led by detachments of the working class. The two basic factors of the revolution are the partisan war of the peasants and the uprisings of the workers in the cities."
To move forward in this path, Sundarayya proposed the urgency to help build peasant partisan warfare, instead of frittering away its resources on building state-level and all-India-level trade unions. However, BTR proposed de-linking the working class from the peasantry. He would not oppose the idea of a worker-peasant alliance, but he would project the hegemony of the working class with which nobody disagreed. By hegemony of the working class, he meant the hegemony of the CITU over the CPI (M) or rejection of the peasantry's role in the Indian revolution, in the Tactical Line. An exasperated Sundarayya retorted that BTR's "idea of establishing proletarian hegemony on the basis of State-wide and all-India-wide organizations, comes from his whole understanding that it is the all-India-wide general strike and insurrection of the working class that will spark off the armed actions of the peasant masses."
Sundarayya even charged: "In fact, this advocacy is nearer to his own tactical line of 1949". The reference was to the horrible Calcutta thesis, an adventurist policy, which saw the ouster of BTR from higher posts.
But in Bengal, when the Left Front Government under Jyoti Basu put an embargo on the Party and CITU activists who raised the slogan of Andolan chai (We want agitation), it was BMS, the BJP labour outfit which filled the vacuum. When Sundarayya was alive, BTR did not choose to interfere, but after the Muzaffarpur CC meeting, he attacked its basic postulates. He exhibited the obverse side of his 1949 tactical line. Whereas BTR could be reticent, MB could be vociferous. In his sixty-page rebuttal in The Marxist against Sundarayya, he attacked the accusations in the resignation letter, against the dominant section of the PB, of deviation into right revisionism and parliamentary illusions. EMS was in this camp.
The two documents MB recalls in the rebuttal, were the outcome of bitter inner-party struggles during the years 1947-51, in the backdrop of the Telangana armed struggle and other struggles in the wake of the British withdrawal. These issues related to the stage and strategy of the Indian revolution, whether it is the "Russian Path" or the "Chinese Path." In the end, the tactical line of 1951 was adopted.
MB hold Ajoy Ghosh and S V Ghate to be responsible for relegating these two documents to the archives. It is clear that the dominant section of the CPI (M) leadership resorted to this document to create a facade of non-existing ideological squabbles with the post-1964 CPI, and to outshine the Naxalite groups. Hence MB admits: The "positive defence of the Statement of Policy against the Left-adventurist distortions of the Naxalites, did not automatically mean that a collective and common understanding existed on all the different propositions that had been made on the Tactical line document".
But the cat comes out of the box when he confesses that the CC and the PB of "CPI (M) also did not and could not discuss this Statement of Policy, afresh and collectively, to arrive at a correct and common understanding of its different aspects". MB could make this confession only after Sundarayya’s demise.
From his resignation letter, it is clear that only Sundarayya followed the tactical line, during his term as CPI (M) General Secretary. In the Telangana People's Armed Struggle 1946-1951, Sundarayya provided the background to the Tactical Line. But MB in his sixty-page article, has used Sundarayya's documents against Sundarayya's politics.
In 1974, a year before his resignation, Sundarayya reproduced his party's perspective on the path of the Indian revolution. (SPARK Republic Day Number, 1974, on the request of the Socialist Forum of Nagpur University). A Telugu version of the article was published in Comrade Sundarayya Erin Rachanalu, Part I compiled by V.R. Boma Reddy, Praja Shakti Book House, Vijayawada.) Detailing China’s virtues, Sundarayya said: "However, like China India is a country of vast expanses. Again, like China, India has a vast peasant population. Our revolution, therefore, will have many features in common with the Chinese revolution.”
"For the victory of the Indian revolution, partisan warfare of the peasants has to be combined with the other major weapons, the strike of the working class, the general strike and uprising in the cities led by detachments of the working class. The two basic factors of the revolution are the partisan war of the peasants and the uprisings of the workers in the cities."
But, the dominant leadership left the revolution and opted for parliamentary democracy.
MB informs that the Eighth Party Congress in December 1968 endorsed and reiterated the Statement of Policy, and it observed: "The Eighth Congress of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has reiterated the Statement of Policy”.
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| BTR with AKG |
"The old program describing the stage of the revolution as anti-imperialist and anti-feudal had advocated a General United Front in which the big bourgeoisie was also to be a participant. The present party program, correctly characterizing the present stage of the Indian revolution as the second agrarian stage of the revolution, directed not only against the Indian big bourgeoisie, has laid down that the big bourgeoisie has no place in the People's Democratic Front.
"It is necessary to keep this in mind while studying this Statement of Policy, which essentially deals with the path of the Indian revolution."
It meant Sundarayya is the lone maverick in the party leadership who fought for the revolution, for the tactical line, in a hostile house. In Sundarayya’s letter MB figures only in two places-once when he lightly refers to MB who attributed all differences to Mao's supposedly wrong understanding of contradictions, and secondly when he (PS) approvingly refers to MB's complaint that the party leaders were mostly given to deify the perspective, Tactical Line.
The complaint in Sundarayya's letter is that the dominant section of the party leadership was not inclined to orientate the party functioning as well as the direction of class and mass organizations in conformity with the Tactical Line. Thus, he found himself in splendid isolation.
In 1985, after Sundarayya's death, MB says that in 1976 the party leadership had to assess the socio-economic developments during the post-Independence period, strategy and class alliance in the new party program of 1964, and begin "to integrate such an assessment with the Tactical Line and its implementation". This is absurd, because the dominant leadership had aligned itself with the Emergency, and EMS was free. Mb is trying to say that Sundarayya was seeking to foist upon the party a line hardly reciprocated by the party ranks and leadership at various levels. But for Sundarayya, the Statement of Policy remained the anchor of the country's Communist revolution, though it is just a mirage. Any reader of Sundarayya’s resignation letter would discover that it was this concern of his which led to the squabbles in the party leadership and to his isolation and final resignation.
The party leadership feared that if Sundarayya's allegations reach the party ranks, they would certainly be greeted with a volley of inconvenient questions, and as a pre-emptive measure MB had to resort to platitudes. Hence, they kept mum till Sundarayya’s demise. But Sundarayya’s questions would continue to haunt the Party. Sundarayya has charged that the party leadership clearly deviated from the party resolutions and the Policy document. The Statement of Policy, or the Tactical line continues to remain just a revolutionary rhetoric.
From Sundarayya's resignation one may have seen the CPI (M) leadership is determined neither to own nor disown this document. In some isolated quarters a secret longing is being nursed that the so-called Bengal line, though subdued at this stage will Kerala is today the lone bastion of the Party, and the situation there is far less encouraging, for the Party is only worried about the hard arithmetic for victory in electoral hustings, even by aligning with the militant Islam. In this despicable milieu, Sundarayya’s letter is a pointer to the Party’s inevitable doom.
© Ramachandran
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