100 years of CPI: What the Communist Party of India discussed at 1925 Kanpur conference where it was born

He said that “mere entry” into temples, tanks and roads will not “raise these unfortunates in the social scale in equal terms”, asserting that “the problem of untouchability is essentially an agrarian problem, and unless this economic dependence is relieved, talk of removing untouchability is basely insincere”.

One of the founding leaders of the CPI, Singaravelu was a freedom fighter and a pioneer of trade union movement, who organised the first ever May Day celebrations in India in Madras (currently called Chennai). He chaired the Kanpur conference of communist groups, which adopted a resolution for the formation of the CPI.

In his address to the conclave, Singaravelu took a swipe at “no changer” reformers who, he said, issued platitudes about injustice to untouchables without talking about their “famished homes”. “Here is an example of the bourgeois mentality of the Indian reformer who while waxing eloquent against social wrongs is significantly silent on the economic degradation to which the country’s bourgeoisie have confined these millions of our agrarian workers,” he said.

“To talk of removing untouchability by itself is obviously insincere and grotesque,” he said, stressing that communists should press for “a living wage” for them to make their lives endurable.

Singaravelu disagreed with Mahatma Gandhi’s khadi campaign as a way forward for the Indian masses. Recalling that the economic logic of “khaddar” was celebrated during the non-cooperation movement from 1920 to 1922, he said its limitations became obvious later. He said it could serve as a “national costume in the fight for Swaraj” in the absence of a national uniform, “but that it would supplement machine-made cloth is an impossible feat”.

He said it was bad economics to see the campaign for boycotting foreign clothes as a salvation for the masses. “To ask the famishing worker to drudge at the charkha for a few more hours… is simply cruel… Mankind has been steadily growing out of the manual drudgery by the aid of the machine, and this has secured them some leisure for higher pursuit of life which has raised him higher in the scale of animal existence,” he added.

Singaravelu also defined communism for the delegates: “The means of production should be in the hands of the producers themselves in order that everyone can have a fair share in all the things produced by them… Outside this system there is none else which is so potent as to increase the sum of human happiness.”

He then sought to look at communism in the distant past, saying that “Communism is as old as history. It was taught by Buddha in a form and practised by his disciples. Jesus as an Essene was himself a communist.”

He pointed out that Karl Marx gave communism a scientific form. He explained the Marxian communism as a theory that human society was a class struggle between the ones who controlled capital and the ones who put in the labour, with the former imposing exploitative conditions on the latter.

Singaravelu made it clear that the CPI’s immediate objective would be to ensure Swaraj for the people of India, prevent exploitation of workers and peasants, and end all distinctions of caste, creed and sect. He also said the party’s communist ideal was “to end the domination of capital, make war impossible, wipe out state boundaries and frontiers, and wield all states into one cooperative commonwealth.”

He lauded the Bolshevik regime that took charge of Russia after the 1917 Russian Revolution, calling it the first successful communist experiment where the differences between the “rich and the poor, the worker and the lazy,… the haves and the havenots”, have been removed. “The spectre of the empire which haunts the rulers of other lands has been exorcised from the Russian national mind. The subjugation of one nationality under another is deemed by the Russians as wicked and unholy,” he asserted, claiming that communism was a counter to the imperialist conflict.

Communal differences

He flagged the “communal and religious differences” that surfaced after the non-cooperation movement, saying its fire may spread as “we Indians are so religious-minded and caste-ridden”. “The Hindu Sabhas, Sanghathans and Shuddhis are more bourgeois tactics of the leisure class,” he averred.

While acknowledging that the Congress had once potential and was under Mahatma Gandhi a “live force” for at least a year – an apparent reference to the launch of the non-cooperation movement – Singaravelu claimed that the party pitched for Swaraj without understanding it, and got entangled in multiple and contradictory ideas and actions, rather than just looking at Swaraj and seeking the support of workers. Soon afterwards, after the formation of the Swaraj Party in 1923, “the bourgeois mentality” of the Congress, he said, made it fight within for loaves of office. “One thing stands clear before the nation: that it is impossible for the bourgeoisie of the country to secure Swaraj for the nation,” he claimed.

Singaravelu also paid glowing tributes to Lenin as a tall communist leader – he died in 1924 – and also, among Indian nationalists, to Lokmanya Tilak, who passed away in 1920, calling the latter “that beacon of light for all true lovers of freedom”.