Abstract
While the major European powers were engaged in world war, a group of Indian nationalists were attempting to use the conflict to work toward the liberation of India from British rule. One of the main players was M.P.T. Acharya. Having left India in 1909, he joined a group of Indian nationalists. In 1915, the Germans established an office in Kabul, where Acharya was sent by the Berlin Indian Committee. After Germany’s defeat in the war, the Indians abandoned the Germans to try their luck with the Soviets, who were vying for supremacy over the British Empire in Central Asia. The first Soviet legation to Afghanistan, which Acharya later joined, arrived in Kabul in August 1919. The Soviets were hoping to export revolution to the Indian subcontinent, and the road to India lay through Afghanistan. Acharya spent two years in Central Asia working with a variety of Indian nationalists and with (and ultimately against) the Communist International; he was a founding member of the Indian Communist Party abroad and eventually its severest critic. Under the influence of his European experience, Acharya’s political views developed from proto-Bolshevik and narrowly nationalistic to international anarchism and libertarianism.
Acharya…is the most salient figure among the Indian libertarians.
—Victor Garcia.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The term “Great Game” that is used to describe the struggle between the British and the Russian empires for domination in Central Asia was coined by Arthur Conolly (1807–1842), a British intelligence officer, although the meaning of the term evolved over time. On the history of the term, see (Becker 2012, pp. 61–80).
- 3.
The idea of engaging Great Britain in Asia was not new for Russia. In 1855, in response to growing commercial privileges for British traders in Persia and Afghanistan, Colonel N.P. Ignatiev, a Russian military attaché in London, proposed to extend Russian political control to the Amur River. As Becker (2004, p. 16) wrote, Ignatiev believed that “only in Asia could Russia fight England with any hope of success, and only in Asia could Russian commerce and industry compete successfully with those of the other European states.” That idea eventually led to a Russia presence in Turkestan (1863) and opened the “Great Game” between the two empires.
- 4.
N.Z. Bravin, after being dismissed from the post of the Soviet envoy, defected from Soviet Russia and was assassinated in Afghanistan in 1921 on the eve of his departure for India.
- 5.
Such double appointments of Soviet envoys to Afghanistan continued into the 1940s (Tikhonov 2008).
- 6.
The only group that refused to take part in the IRA was the Provisional Government of India formed under the Germans. It was seeking a position of superiority over the other factions.
- 7.
Emir Amānullāh continued working secretly with the Soviets against the British through Djemal Pasha, one of the three Turkish generals who led Turkey into World War I and now had been sentenced to death (in absentia) in Turkey. Djemal Pasha first escaped to Germany and from there was helped by the Germans to move to Soviet Russia. For a time, Soviet and pan-Turkic interests coincided. Cf. Tikhonov (2008, pp. 63–75).
- 8.
In 1916, the Imperial government announced a draft among the local populations into the regular army. The Basmachi movement arose as a protest against that measure.
- 9.
Quoted in Hopkirk (1984, p. 119).
- 10.
The party, founded as the Socialist Workers’ Party, changed its name in 1919 to the Mexican Communist Party. Roy proclaimed himself a communist after Borodin had taught him rudimentary Marxism. The party, as Price (2005, p. 64) remarks, “had six members and a calico cat,” but with Borodin’s support it had won affiliation with the Communist International. With Borodin’s backing, Roy was chosen as adviser to the Comintern on India and began receiving its coveted funds.
- 11.
In the fall of 1920, a conference of the oppressed peoples of Asia took place in Baku. Here is a description of the heterogeneity of the attendees that is typical for the “revolutionary” forces of the East:
There were two thousand delegates present at the First Congress of the Peoples of the East organized in Baku by the Communist International. These delegates belonged to many various and highly heterogeneous ethnic entities. They were classified into Communists and non-Party members, according to somewhat doubtful criteria. We can point out five groups: the “profiteers;” Muslims of Russia and Central Asia, fiery champions of the positions of national Communism; delegations of Transcaucasia consisting mainly of representatives of small ethnic groups protected by Bolsheviks; foreign Eastern delegates—in this group, the only ones to raise their voices were the Turkish nationalists; and the representatives of the Comintern and of the Western Communist parties, who got all the credits (Chabrier, 1985, pp. 21–42).
- 12.
In 1909, 1911, and then again in 1915, Acharya traveled to Istanbul, where his efforts were directed at forming the Indian National Volunteer Corps, with recruitment among Muslim Indians who in large numbers would pass through Turkey every year on their way to the haj and among Indian prisoners of war. See Yadav (1991, pp. 36–38). Acharya even took a Muslim-sounding alias, Mahomed Akbar (not later than 1915).
- 13.
The Second Congress took place in July 19–August 7, 1920; the opening ceremonies were held in Petrograd, and then the proceedings shifted to Moscow.
- 14.
In their interest in pan-Islamism, the Soviets had a hidden agenda. They wished to use pan-Islamic forces in their own fight against the British in Central Asia. At the same time, they did not want to have Islamic fighters, like Basmachi, on their own territory.
- 15.
Comrades Ellen Roy and Roza Mukharjee were the wives of two Indian members.
- 16.
Ramath (2011, p. 131) maintains that “Acharya’s differences with Roy had developed into differences with the Communist International and with the Communist regime in Russia itself.” Acharya’s letters to the Comintern committees and his subsequent writings in German and in the Indian press support this assertion.
- 17.
With the help of Nikolai Bukharin, he managed to leave Russia first for Berlin and from there to India, where he faced imprisonment but still preferred that to the murderous Soviet reality.
- 18.
Acharya kept up his accusations against Roy for quite some time. In 1932, he wrote a letter to Trotsky (Acharya, 1932) denouncing Roy and his staunch supporter Borodin.
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Bernstein, L. (2018). Indian Nationalists’ Cooperation with Soviet Russia in Central Asia: The Case of M.P.T. Acharya. In: Barker, A., Pereira, M., Cortez, M., Pereira, P., Martins, O. (eds) Personal Narratives, Peripheral Theatres: Essays on the Great War (1914–18). Second Language Learning and Teaching(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66851-2_13
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