CPI(M) MP John Brittas needlessly invoked Veer Savarkar and said he ‘submitted mercy petitions and licked the boots of the British‘ in response to Union Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman’s attack on the Communists calling them ‘cowards’.
Let us take a look at how the Communists in India have been bootlickers of their Chinese masters and have been a hinderance to India’s development and progress over the decades.
Political parties may have backed the wrong side of history once or twice. But India’s communists are a different kind – they have backed the same wrong side – Beijing, against Delhi, for eighty straight years.
From the demand to carve India into eighteen sovereign statelets before independence, to walking out on a nuclear deal that would have anchored India as a great power, to running interference for the PLA within hours of a lethal clash on the Ladakh border — the pattern isn’t a series of accidents. It’s a doctrine. Ideology over nation, every time the two have collided.
Here are the episodes that make that case.
1950s: When China Took Tibet, Indian Communists Echoed Beijing
The first major warning came when Communist China moved into Tibet.
The People’s Liberation Army entered Tibet in 1950 and Beijing subsequently established control over the territory. Tibet’s occupation transformed India’s strategic environment by bringing Chinese military power directly to India’s Himalayan frontier.
But when the Tibetan uprising erupted in 1959, the undivided Communist Party of India did not condemn Beijing’s crackdown.
A 31 March 1959 CPI statement praised the Chinese for supposedly leading Tibetans out of “medieval darkness” and blamed the rebellion on Tibetan “serf owners” backed by Indian reactionaries and Western imperialists.
That is hard to reconcile with India’s own security interests.
China’s consolidation of Tibet subsequently became central to the India-China border problem. Chinese construction of a strategic road through Aksai Chin in the 1950s strengthened Beijing’s hold over Tibet and directly affected India’s territorial security.
1959–62: As China Pressured India, The CPI Split Over Whose Side To Take
The border crisis exposed just how deep the China question ran inside Indian communism.
When Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru disclosed Chinese military activity in Ladakh and the North-East Frontier Agency, the CPI initially remained largely silent and sought to minimise the dispute, according to historical accounts. Some CPI leaders subsequently demanded that the party explicitly support Nehru’s border policy.
By the time India and China went to war in 1962, the issue had become explosive within the party.
The Sino-Indian war and the wider Sino-Soviet split deepened divisions within the CPI and were major factors behind the eventual 1964 split that produced the CPI(M).
This is where the historical record needs precision. A powerful pro-China faction including EMS Namboodiripad, Jyoti Basu, P Sundarayya, AK Gopalan, among others opposed the government’s position.
The fact that India’s Communist Party could fracture so violently over whether to support India during a war with China tells its own story.
1967 – Naxalbari & Mao
Five years after the Sino-Indian War, Beijing was no longer merely influencing sections of India’s communist movement from afar. It was openly encouraging an ‘armed revolutionary’ movement on Indian soil.
In 1967, an armed peasant uprising broke out at Naxalbari in West Bengal, led by radical communist leaders including Charu Mazumdar and Kanu Sanyal, who were trained in China for this. The ‘uprising’ was inspired by Maoist revolutionary theory and called for armed struggle against the Indian state.
This ‘movement’ spread all through India, derailed development and took almost 5 decades to cull Naxalism today.
China immediately seized on the revolt. The Communist Party of China’s People’s Daily published an article titled “Spring Thunder Over India”, portraying the Naxalbari ‘uprising’ as the beginning of an Indian revolutionary movement and praising the armed peasants.
The result was the birth of a movement that sought to overthrow the Indian state through armed struggle. What began at Naxalbari developed into decades of Maoist insurgency across parts of India, involving armed attacks, killings, destruction of infrastructure and prolonged conflict with the security forces.
While India was trying to build a functioning democratic state, a section of its communist movement was looking to Mao’s China for a blueprint to overthrow it, ably aided by minions of China.
West Bengal: When Communism Turned Against Modernisation
The China question is only half the story. Where communist parties gained power, their ideological rigidity also collided with India’s economic modernisation.
West Bengal’s 34-year Left Front government provides perhaps the clearest example. It was led by the same Jyoti Basu who refused to condemn China during the 1962 Sino-Indian war.
The Anti-Computer Campaign
During the 1970s and 1980s, Left-backed trade unions opposed computerisation and automation, arguing that technology would destroy jobs.
A 1980s CITU publication explicitly condemned the government’s computerisation policy and warned that automation would add to unemployment.
Former West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee later acknowledged the absurdity of the position. In 2004, he described the earlier opposition to computers as “foolish”, recalling that employees had protested computerisation in banks and insurance and that the Left had supported them. It derailed West Bengal’s progress by decades.
In other words, the Left eventually had to acknowledge that it had fought a technology that was transforming the global economy.
West Bengal subsequently tried to reverse course and attract IT investment, but by then Bengaluru, Hyderabad and other cities had established enormous leads.
1967: Gheraos Became a Weapon Against Bengal’s Industry
When the first United Front government came to power in West Bengal in March 1967, militant labour politics quickly spread across the state. Gheraos, workers surrounding and confining factory owners and managers until they accepted their demands, became a common tactic.
In late May, the government restricted police intervention in gheraos without prior Labour Department permission. Reported gheraos surged from 32 in March to 151 in May and 176 in June; 1,018 were recorded between April and August. The Calcutta High Court struck down the government’s circular, but another was issued in June.
The tactic helped fuel industrial unrest, with companies pressured into accepting higher wages, shorter hours and other costly concessions. Bengal’s share of India’s industrial output fell from 20.1% in 1966 to 18.4% in 1967, eventually reaching 3.7% by 2000.
Gheraos were not the sole cause, but 1967 marked a major turning point in Bengal’s industrial decline.
2008: Walking Out on The Nuclear Deal That Could Have Made India a Great Power
This is one of the clearest examples of ideology coming before national interest, because the Left said it openly.
When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh moved to finalise the India-US civil nuclear deal, the four-party Left Front, led by CPI(M), withdrew its support for the UPA government. This forced the government to face a confidence vote and nearly brought it down.
CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat did not present the opposition as just a technical issue about the deal. He made the party’s position clear: “We do not share the optimism that India can become a great power with the help of the United States.”
The CPI(M)’s own statement also warned that the deal would “seriously undermine the pursuit of an independent foreign policy.”
In simple terms, the Left did not want India to build a closer strategic relationship with the United States, even though such a partnership could help India balance China’s growing power. The party that walked out in 2008 later admitted, through Sitaram Yechury, that it had mishandled the politics of the withdrawal, but it never withdrew its opposition to the deal itself.
2017–2020: Doklam, Galwan, and Echoing China’s Version
Fifty-five years after 1962, the same pattern appeared again along the disputed border.
During the 2017 Doklam standoff and the deadly Galwan Valley clash in June 2020, CPI(M) did not clearly condemn China’s actions. Instead, it focused much of its criticism on the Indian government.
Days after 20 Indian soldiers were killed in Galwan, CPI(M)’s Bengali-language mouthpiece, Ganashakti, published a front-page article carrying the Chinese government’s version of events, claiming that Indian troops had violated the protocol, alongside India’s version. The party defended this as normal reporting of both sides, but this was the Communists giving Beijing’s version a platform at a time when Indian soldiers were being mourned.
Vizhinjam: Opposition To A Port India Actually Needed
The contradiction between ideology and development appeared again in Kerala.
The Vizhinjam International Seaport is India’s first deep-water container transshipment port and was designed to allow India to capture cargo that had traditionally been routed through foreign transshipment hubs, particularly Colombo. The project has strategic and commercial significance.
The CPI(M), when in opposition in Kerala, opposed the project and described the agreement as problematic. Later, when it returned to government, the party backed the project and defended its continuation during protests.
Covaxin: Attacked India’s Indigenous Vaccine During a Crisis
During the COVID-19 crisis, India was racing to develop and deploy its own indigenous vaccine. Instead of supporting that effort during a national emergency, opposition politicians and commentators questioned its approval, safety and clinical-trial process.
Criticism and scrutiny are legitimate, especially over a vaccine. But the larger question remains: when the country was fighting a deadly pandemic and trying to build its own vaccine capability, why was the response from sections of the political Left focused so heavily on discrediting an Indian-made vaccine?
At a moment when India needed public confidence in indigenous scientific and technological capabilities, repeatedly casting doubt on an Indian vaccine risked undermining that confidence.
The Pattern, Plainly Stated
1942: argue India isn’t a nation. 1950–59: defer to Beijing on Tibet, refuse the Dalai Lama. 1962: refuse to call a Chinese invasion an invasion. 1967: adopt Mao as ideological chairman. 1980s: block the technology that could have built an Indian Bangalore in Bengal a decade early. 2008: sabotage the strategic partnership that would have counterbalanced China. 2020: run Beijing’s press release in your own paper the week soldiers come home in coffins.
Eight decades, one throughline. When Delhi’s interest and Beijing’s interest have split, the Indian Left has, with remarkable consistency, found reasons to stand somewhere other than with Delhi.
Subscribe to our channels on WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram and YouTube to get the best stories of the day delivered to you personally.
