Communists and Independence

On September 1948, on the pretext of maintaining law and order situation in South India, the Indian army intervened and took control of Hyderabad without much resistance from the

Nizam. But the internal politics of Hyderabad became complicated due to the Telangana movement led by the communists. The alliance between the Congress and the communists had broken before the accession of Hyderabad into India.

In December 1947, the Communist Party of India (CPI) had denounced the Indian independence as ‘fake’—with the slogan, ‘ye azadi jhooti hai’—and termed the Congress government led by Nehru as the stooges of Anglo-American imperialism and the feudal forces within the country. In February-March 1948, in its Second Congress in Calcutta, the CPI adopted its ‘Political Thesis’, which formally declared that the national government established on August 15, 1947 was indeed the major enemy of the Indian people and hence required to be changed through general revolution. To achieve this goal, the communist leaders decided to follow what popularly came to be known as the B.T. Ranadive line (after the name of CPI’s then general secretary). They declared, “the present state will be replaced by a people’s democratic republic—a republic of workers, peasants and oppressed middle classes.” The Communist insurgency spread to other parts of India especially in West Bengal which saw the revival of the Tebhaga Movement and an urban insurgency in Calcutta.