The Comintern and the Indian Revolution
India was at the center of the struggle between revolutionary Russia and the British Empire. In the Bolshevik geopolitics of revolution, a blow struck at British India would inflict a decisive defeat to British power in Asia, inspire anti-imperialist revolts from Syria to China, and so "set the East ablaze."[83] Calculations such as these formed the basis of an audacious scheme to ignite a revolution among the Muslims of India launched under Comintern auspices in late 1920.[84]
The project was planned in the Small Bureau of the Comintern Executive Committee and approved by the ECCI, the Politburo, and Sovnarkom in the early fall of 1920 during the period following the Second Comintern Congress and about the time of the Congress of Asian Muslims at Baku. The central element of the plan, which was premised on the active support of Emir Amanullah, was to train and equip an army of Indian liberation in Afghanistan. Troops, recruited from among the Muslim population of India, would join with the forces of the anti-British resistance among the Pathan tribes of the North-West Frontier Province. This "Army of God" would occupy territory in northern India, set up a government there, and extend the Indian liberation movement from this base. The central figure in the scheme was M. N. Roy, then a leading member of the Central Asian Bureau of the Comintern. In late 1920 he was dispatched to Tashkent to organize the Indian revolutionary army. With him he took two trains with twenty-seven wagons loaded with weapons, ammunition, and military supplies, ten wagons of dismantled airplanes, a supply of gold coins, bullion, and pound and rupee notes, and the staff of a military training school.<Popup-03-85>
Those recruited by Roy in Tashkent were young Muslim zealots, mujahedeen , members of the Pan-Islamic Khilafat movement in India who regarded the preservation of the Ottoman Empire and the temporal authority and spiritual leadership of the sultan to be essential to the unity and welfare of all Muslims.[86] They were incensed at the partition of the Ottoman Empire, at the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres (August 1920) in which it was codified, at the treatment nationalist Turkey received at the hands of the Allied powers, and at infidel rule in India. In the summer of 1920, 18,000 of them left India for Afghanistan, some of whom intended to travel to Turkey to join the army of Mustafa Kemal Pasha, organizer of the Turkish Nationalist Party. On their way some fifty of them were captured
by Turkmen tribesmen in Afghanistan and then liberated by the Red Army. Taken to Tashkent, some became enthusiastic Communists. Of these, the most important was Shaukat Usmani, who was to become a leading figure in the Indian Communist Party. Others, amused at being designated "representatives of the Indian revolution," resisted political education.[87] Only a few eventually became Marxists.
The Indian Military Training School at Tashkent lasted only a few months before it was disbanded in May 1921 along with the Central Asian Bureau of the Comintern. The task of directing revolutionary activities in Central Asia was transferred to the newly formed Eastern Commission of the ECCI in Moscow. Roy returned to Moscow, where he was placed in charge of coordinating Communist activities in India. With him went twenty-two graduates of the Indian Military School who received further training at the Communist University of the Working People of the East established in April. A year later, Roy and his activities were transferred to Berlin, where he published a journal and wrote books that were then smuggled into India, probably via the Soviet diplomatic mission in Kabul.
Just as Roy withdrew from Tashkent, Raskolnikov arrived in Kabul as polpred , or diplomatic representative. Chicherin formally instructed him to "categorically avoid the fatal mistake of undertaking artificial attempts to plant communism" in Afghanistan.[88] Instead Raskolnikov's considerable talents and efforts were expended on persuading Amanullah to permit the organization in Afghanistan of revolutionary activities directed at India. His immediate task was to induce the Kabul government to allow Moscow to open the consulates provided for in the Soviet-Afghan treaty concluded the previous February. Three of them were located in the north of the country (at Herat, Meimen, and Mazar-i-Sharif), but two were located in the south near the frontier with India (at Kandahar and Ghazni), where Moscow had no commercial interests and in which no Soviet citizens resided. (The joke making the rounds of the Kabul bazaar at the time was that Afghanistan would claim the right to open consulates in Siberia.)[89] The only conceivable purpose of the consulates in southern Afghanistan was to maintain points of observation, propaganda, and infiltration on the borders of the North-West Frontier Province of British India.
British intelligence correctly recognized the intended purpose of the consulates. In the terms of London's note of protest to Moscow, it was "to secure facilities for attacks through Afghanistan against the peace of India."[90] The Foreign Office warned both Kabul and Moscow against establishing the consulates. For months, Surits and then Raskolnikov avoided making an explicit and binding declaration that the consulates would not be opened, and the Afghan foreign ministry delayed assuring London pend-
ing official notification from the Soviet government. The notice from Moscow arrived on 21 November 1921; the next day the governments of Afghanistan and Great Britain signed a treaty normalizing relations and exchanging diplomatic representation.[91] Thereafter, Amanullah refused to allow Afghanistan to be used as a base for revolutionary operations against British India, requiring that all arms sent through Afghanistan be placed under the control of the Afghan government, that all Indian revolutionaries entering Afghanistan be disarmed, and that the Soviet-supported "Provisional Government of Free India," which was headquartered at Kabul, leave the country.
The Muslim Indian revolutionaries trained in Tashkent and Moscow began filtering back into India in late 1922. Some of them traveled on foot across the mountainous Afghan-Indian frontier in apparent contradiction of Afghan restrictions. Many were promptly arrested by British authorities on passport violations and immediately forswore Communism. Others augmented the several small groups of party members in India supported by Comintern funds. The government of India responded by tightening censorship and increasing surveillance. Roy's newspapers were confiscated; his confidential dispatches were intercepted by British intelligence; and the chief courier between Roy in Europe and India was apprehended. Shaukat Usmani was tracked down and arrested, and the government in Delhi notified its provincial governments that "prompt and definite steps must be taken to counter M. N. Roy's organization and propaganda and to terminate the activities of his principal followers."[92] Nine of the latter were tried in the Peshawar conspiracy case in 1923. The next year in the Cawnpore Bolshevik conspiracy case, additional members of the Indian Communist Party, including Usmani, were convicted of conspiracy to organize a revolution to overthrow British rule in India. A court of appeal upheld the convictions but found the notion of a conspiracy "absurd and unbelievable."[93]
With the trial and conviction of the cadres of the Indian Communist Party, the authorities of British India effectively suppressed what there was of the small, irresolute, and undisciplined invasion force mobilized by Roy. The leadership structure of the Communist Party of India was destroyed at least temporarily, and potential followers were discouraged. Within two years, the Indian Communist Party had but fifteen to twenty members, and the Bolshevik revolutionary offensive among the Muslims of southwest Asia and India ended for all practical purposes. In the months between Roy's withdrawal from Tashkent and the Cawnpore Bolshevik conspiracy trial, Soviet foreign relations developed in other directions. In October 1921 the NKID undertook a major initiative aimed at concluding a comprehensive postwar settlement of outstanding problems affecting Soviet
relations with the victors of the World War. In April 1922 the Rapallo agreement was signed, sealing the Soviet-German "special relationship" that would be the lodestar of Soviet diplomacy in the years to follow. And, at the end of 1923, the first Soviet political and military advisers arrived in Canton to assist in a revolution of national liberation and unity in China. These developments are considered in the next two chapters.