The Unquenchable Fire: How Communists Forged India’s Independence Through Mass Revolt
Prologue: The Paradox
The official story of India’s freedom emphasizes negotiation, non-violence, and the leadership of the Indian National Congress. Yet, beneath this narrative lies a truth often obscured by colonial archives and mainstream histories: India could not have broken its chains without the searing heat of communist revolution.
Communists mobilized millions, paralyzed the colonial economy, ignited peasant uprisings, and envisioned a freedom that went beyond mere flag independence. While political victory in 1947 eluded them, their mass struggles made the Raj’s position untenable. This is their story — told through the hard weight of numbers and names.
The Crucible: Foundations & Fire (1920s–1930s)
The Spark: The Russian Revolution (1917) inspired aspiring indian communists, socialists, exiles and radicals.
The Architects: M.N. Roy (founding visionary), S.A. Dange, Muzaffar Ahmed, S.S. Mirajkar, Shaukat Usmani — founders of the Communist Party of India (CPI, 1925). lead the opening salvo of communist lead worker’s organization and systematic class resistance against colonial rule.
The Weapon: Colonialism that had coopted all the exploitative elements of indian society and made it part of extractive imperialistic econonmy was now faced with concentrate of resentment that it caused under unified political umbrella of communists.
The Battleground – Factories and Mills
1928 Bombay Textile Strike: ~1,50,000 workers halted mills for 6 months, with CPI leadership.
All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC): Radical unions organized hundreds of thousands.
Repression: Meerut Conspiracy Case (1929–33) — 31 communist trade union leaders arrested.
The Battleground – Peasants
All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS, 1936): CPI-led, with 800,000+ members by the late 1930s. Challenged zamindars and colonial rent extraction.
The Inferno: Post-War Revolution (1945–1947)
The Resurgence
Membership growth: Few thousand (1942) → 60,000+ (1946) → 100,000+ (1948).
Labour Erupts
Nationwide strike wave: Thousands of strikes in 1946 alone; 1,60,00,000 man hours worth of loss effected in factories.
Royal Indian Navy Mutiny (Feb 1946): CPI organized massive civilian support — Bombay saw 3,00,000+ workers in strike and protest.
Peasant Armies Rise
Tebhaga (Bengal, 1946–47): Led by Bankim Mukherjee, Harekrishna Konar, Renu Chakravartty. ~6o,00,000 (sixty lakh) sharecroppers demanded 2/3 crop share. Dozens–hundreds killed, thousands arrested.
Telangana Armed Struggle (Hyderabad State, 1946–51): Led by P. Sundarayya, Makhdoom Mohiuddin, Ravi Narayan Reddy, Chandra Rajeswara Rao.
30,00,000 lakh people involved, 4,000 villages mobilized.
2,000–4,000 armed fighters.
3,000+ villages under “liberated zone” governments before brutal suppression.
Punnapra–Vayalar (Travancore, 1946): Led by A.K. Gopalan. Official death toll 289; popular accounts exceed 1,000.
Stance on Partition: CPI strongly opposed Partition, calling it an imperialist divide-and-rule tactic.
The Radical Constellation: Beyond Formal Communism
Ghadar Party: Founded 1913 by exiles such as Rattan Singh and Santokh Singh. Radicalized by the USSR, linked to CPI, and seeded the Hindustan Republican movements.
HSRA (Hindustan Socialist Republican Association): Chandrasekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, Rajguru. Explicitly socialist (1928), Bhagat Singh envisioned “Revolutionary Democracy”
Congress Socialist Party (CSP): Founded 1934 by Jayaprakash Narayan, Acharya Narendra Dev, Ram Manohar Lohia, Achyut Patwardhan. Initially allied with CPI.
The Indispensable Current: Why the Numbers Don’t Lie
The Congress may have signed the transfer of power, but the pressure that forced the British to quit came from mass action driven by communists and their allies:
1,00,000+ disciplined communist cadres (post-1945).
8,00,000+ peasants in Kisan Sabhas.
6o,oo,ooo sharecroppers in Tebhaga.
30,00,000 peasants in Telangana.
3,00,000+ Bombay workers striking during the RIN Mutiny.
1,60,00,000 (one crore sixty lakh)man-days lost to strikes in 1946.
Thousands of strikes, thousands of villages in revolt.
They forced class exploitation onto the national agenda, radicalized the independence movement, and proved — through both mass strikes and armed insurgency — that the old order could be directly challenged and territories liberated.
Epilogue: The Unseen Architects
The 1947 tricolor may have been hoisted in Delhi, but the ground had already been scorched in Telangana, shaken in Bombay, and ploughed in Tebhaga.
Figures such as Sundarayya, Gopalan, Konar, Dange, EMS Namboodiripad, P. Krishna Pillai, Harkishan Singh Surjeet, Godavari Parulekar, Ajay Ghosh — alongside the revolutionary spirit of Bhagat Singh and the Ghadarites — helped forge an independence rooted in organized mass power.
The communists may not have held the pen that signed the treaty, but they lit the fires that made imperial retreat inevitable.
India’s independence was forged in the crucible of mass revolt — and communists were its indispensable, incendiary fuel.
Personal Note from the Chairman of the Party: The flag that was hoisted in ’47 might have been a liberal tricolour, but the ground beneath was crimson red, bathed in blood of revolutionaries and workers and baked in fires of revolution. A moment gone and class liberation lost, marxist-leninist doctrine can not be denied forever, communism will not be denied.
If you Listen carefully, even today in the dark nights, the deserted roads are wailing, crushed bodies and souls of workers are bemoaning, what do they call out? Revolution, Revolution, Revolution!
