By Sankar Ray
Kalantar Dainik, Bengali morninger of Communist Party of India in Kolkata, hit newsstands – albeit select ones – on 26 December , the 96th birthday of a first communist party on Indian soil. The CPI – carrying forward the unanimous decision of undivided CPI – continues firmly to claim that the party was set up on this day in 1925 at the Kanpur Communist Conference. On the contrary, CPI(M) asserts that the CPI was born in Tashkent on 17 October 1920 by a group of émigré Indian revolutionaries led by M N Roy, Abani Mukherjee, among others
The very resolve to make Kalantar daily speaks eloquently of courage to take on the unprecedentedly heavy odds as official Marxist parties like the two aforesaid CPs – conspicuously the CPI – are in a serious crisis organizationally in Bengal.. Kalantar Dainik was first brought out with Bhowani Sen, a legendary communist stalwart of yesteryears as its editor on 7 October 1966. The masthead was designed by the film icon Satyajit Ray whose birth centenary year began on 2 May this year.
The political thermodynamics was inspired by a spontaneous food movement, directed against food policy of the Congress government with Prafulla Chandra Sen. The new daily became the voice of pro-left anti-Congress masses. The CPI(M)’s eveninger, Ganashakti which was converted into a daily after the Left Front government, led by CPI(M), was more partisan, mainly due to the sectarian propensities of party leadership. Kalantar’s also had its problems due to the party’s pro-Congress-tilt in the early 1970s.
But the daily was kept alive. However, the state party leadership when Nandagopal Bhattattacharjee was the state CPI secretary temporarily shut down Kalantar on 1 November with a view to converting it from a four-page to an eight page format. The paper reappeared on 1 May 1993 as a preparatory issue but resumed as regular issue on 15 June 1993. But the daily plunged into a crisis in 1911 when the All India Trinamool Congress came to power. Advertisement revenue dried up as the new government stopped release of even routine advertisements. The party leadership was forced to suspend the publication of the daily from 1 November 2018, a compulsion, forced by severe financial crunch
West Bengal state CPI secretary Swapan Banerjee told The Indian Express a few days before temporary shutdown that apart from the anti-Left AITC Congress that stopped ads ‘the Centre, too, has been doing the same. Being a small party, running a daily requires a lot of money and effort. We have been publishing it for over 50 years. Now, we have exhausted all our resources and without advertisements we cannot continue’. However, Kalantar resumed publications as a fortnightly magazine in 2019.
Now, two private publishers have come forward to share a sizable expenditure burden to help the daily reappear. “The two entrepreneurs promised to stay away from editorial matters while they will use the printing establishment for their publishing business’, according to a senior member of Kalantar editorial board.
A non-CPI(M) Left Front party leader, associated with its labour front, told IPA that in contrast to Ganashakti, we expect Kalantar will keep up its broad line of Left and democratic unity and so we welcome the reappearance of Kalantar Dainik..
Bhanudeb Dutta, a state council member of the party and head of state party education cell, thinks that the decision of resuming publication of Kalantar on 26 December ‘is judicious in as much as there is an unbridled distortion in the media about the history of formation of CPI.’ Dutta who was co-editor of 15-volume history of communist party in Bengal wrote a Bengali booklet, ‘Bharater Communist Andoloner Suchanaparba (Initial Phase of Communist Movement in India ) in 2015 where he quoted documents in defence of the claim that the CPI was born at the Kanpur Communist Conference in 1925.
Octogenarian Dutta referred to an article in the CPI mouthpiece New Age in the 1960s by Sachchidanand Vishnu Ghate, joint general secretary of CPI, elected at Kanpur conference, where Ghate made a mention of a meeting of the central secretariat of undivided CPI on 19 August, 1959 to send a reply to a query from an Indonesian journal of the CP of Indonesia about the date and year of birth of CPI . The meeting attended by the then CPI general secretary Ajoy Ghosh, P.C. Joshi, Z.A. Ahmed, S.A. Dange, M. Basava-punniah, B.T. Ranadive and A.K. Gopalan –the last three were among the founder polit bureau members of CPI(M). . Dutta informed further that the minutes were written by Basavapunnaiah and the letter in reply was signed by Ranadive.
. After the party split, veteran CPI(M) leader Muzaffar Ahmed fished out a copy of an issue of The Vanguard’, organ of the émigré CPI ( 15 May 1923), edited by M N Roy, stating on the masthead that the party, set up in Tashkent, was a section (or constituent) of the Communist International. But this claim ( Roy having furnished no proof that it was a section of Comintern) is set at naught by Comintern historian and archivist A Reznikov that ‘the group organized by Roy in Tashkent did not become a Comintern section’ (A Reznikov: The Comintern and the East: Strategy and Tactics in the National Liberation Movement, Moscow 1978, p 132).
CPI(ML) Liberation too announced that the undivided CPI’s birth took place at the Kanpur Communist Conference on 26 December 1925. (IPA Service)
