CPI(M) MP John Brittas launched a sharp attack on Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman over her remark that communists are cowards, saying that an “associate of Savarkar, who submitted mercy petitions to the British and the one who licked the boots of the British”, should be the one making such a statement.
CPI(M) MP John Brittas thinks he can get away with calling a great freedom fighter derogatory names like “shoe-licker”? Not anymore.
📌 I urge everyone across the nation to step forward, file formal complaints/FIRs, and let the law take its course.
Watch & Amplify 👇 [Video] pic.twitter.com/X2yUozC0Ef— Kannan M S (@kannanKL07) August 11, 2026
Brittas also mocked Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah, saying the remarks came from someone associated with leaders who were “afraid to come to Parliament”.
“Communists went to the gallows shouting Inquilab,” Brittas said, accusing Savarkar and his associates of having “licked the boots of the British” and submitted mercy petitions. He said it was an associate of Savarkar who had now chosen to comment against communists.
Mr Brittas, You’re Wrong; Historical Record Shows CPI Founder SA Dange Was The Original Bootlicker
Brittas attacked Nirmala Sitharaman by invoking Savarkar and accusing him and his followers of “licking the boots of the British” and submitting mercy petitions. But the historical record shows that Communist Party of India co-founder SA Dange himself submitted petitions to the British seeking release from prison during the 1924 Bolshevik Conspiracy Case.
A 1924 government document records that Dange and CPI co-founder Nalini Bhushan Das Gupta applied for their release and agreed to give an undertaking that they would not commit similar offences in future. They told the District Magistrate of Cawnpore that they were undergoing suffering they could not sustain and asked the government to grant their request.
Dange also submitted a separate petition to the Governor General of India seeking remission of his sentence. In it, he offered to use his position as an influential Communist leader “for the good” of the British government and the country if he was released. He further stated that imprisonment had brought a change in his attitude towards the sovereignty of the British King-Emperor in India.
Dange went on to state that he had never been positively disloyal to the British monarch in his writings or speeches and did not intend to be so in future. He signed off the petition as “Your Excellency’s Most Obedient Servant.”
The petitions were later published by Bombay magazine The Current in 1964. According to the source, Dange, then a senior CPI leader, subsequently denounced the letters as forgeries through the party Secretariat. Other Communist leaders and party workers rejected that claim, triggering a power struggle within the party. Dange’s opponents used the letters to demand his removal and an investigation into his alleged offer to cooperate with the British.
The 1924 record turns Brittas’s attack on Savarkar on its head. Brittas belongs to the very Communist political tradition founded by S.A. Dange – the man whose own record includes petitions to the British seeking release and pledging not to repeat his offences and Brittas has the gall to lecture Savarkar about “bootlicking” the British. The historical record leaves a simple question for him: what was his own Communist movement’s founding generation doing when Dange sought release from the British, promised not to repeat his offences, offered to work for the government and signed himself “Your Excellency’s Most Obedient Servant”?
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