Indian independence trough communist revolution in 20s or 30s?

[Vabasion]

I guess it’s a two part question, first being, can the British empire of this period keep control of India by force against popular sentiment and trough rebellion and guerilla uprising?

What impact on global order is there if Britain loses India or is forced to heavily garrison it in the 20s and 30s? How does this shape British policy, the Soviets, conflict in China and potential post world war world?

 

[thaddeus]

not the expert on the subject but a religious civil war or strife might be more realistic than a Communist led revolution? Subhash Chandra Bose did go first to the USSR but my understanding the Soviets were not receptive?

 

[mianfei]

In A Marxist History of the World, Neil Faulkner says:

On 16 April 1919, General Dyer ordered 50 riflemen to open fire on a crowd of about 20,000 demonstrators gathered inside an enclosure at Amritsar. They continued firing for ten minutes and killed up to a thousand people.

As news spread of the massacre, resistance rose to new levels. Millions of peasants, workers, and urban poor were involved in mass action. Hindus and Muslims fought side by side against bosses, landlords, and police. The Governor of Bombay later admitted that the movement “gave us a scare” and “came within an inch of succeeding.”

Its failure had nothing to do with the British. The action was called off by Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian Congress leaders.

Gandhi had turned “non-violence” (ahimsa) into a principle. It did not apply to the state: Gandhi had supported Britain during the imperialist war; and the Congress leaders had no power to disarm the British occupation forces in India. Non-violence applied only to Indians fighting for their independence.

The significance of non-violence was that it limited the struggle to nationalist agitation for independence and prevented it evolving into a class struggle against exploitation — which would have threatened the interests of the Indian bourgeoisie represented by [the] Congress [Party].

Under determined revolutionary-socialist leadership, the Indian national movement could have ended British rule in the early 1920s. Under vacillating bourgeois-nationalist leadership, it allowed foreign rule to endure for another quarter century — and when it ended, it would be accompanied by an eruption of communal violence, ethnic-cleansing, and genocide of unprecedented ferocity.

...

Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution provided an explanation for the failure of the anti-colonial movements.

The nationalist bourgeoisie vacillated because it was bound by a thousand ties to a social order based on private ownership of land and capital.

Whenever mass movements of workers and peasants became strong enough to threaten colonial rule, they also threatened the property and power of native landlords and capitalists. Knee-jerk class instincts then ensured that nationalist leaders either reined the movement back or joined the counter-revolution to crush it.

The lesson was an old one: the emancipation of the masses would have to be the act of the masses. Freedom would never be granted. It would have to be taken.

If we follow from Faulkner, if there had been stronger socialist movements in India, then there would have been a strong likelihood of success with the post-World War I revolutionary wave, and independence in the early 1920s.

Ron Rogowski independently argues that without World War I and with a continued expansion of trade there was a strong prospect of peasant rebellions in India leading to revolution.

Faulkner’s writings, alongside the vanguard role India and the Indian diaspora played in the anti-apartheid movement after India actually won independence, have made me believe that earlier independence for India under a revolutionary socialist movement would have had radical effects upon the civil rights movement in the United States and Aboriginal rights movements in Australia. It is logical that the fact that India was the centre of the “Asiatic Barred Zone” established by the Immigration Act of 1917 would produce substantial hostility towards the US government and its Jim Crow policies.

The question is what departure from before World War I would have developed the sort of socialist movement Faulkner thinks would have altered history enough to produce the necessary “revolutionary leadership”?