Communists in 1940s made a mistake by equating Congress with Muslim League: Irfan Habib

New Delhi, Sep 15 (PTI) Historian Irfan Habib on Monday said the launch of Quit India Movement at a time when the Japanese were at India's borders was wrong. He also said the Communists in the 1940s made a mistake by equating the Muslim League with the Congress. Delivering the first Sitaram Yechury Memorial Lecture here, Habib recalled the freedom struggle and stressed, "The past has always shadowed the present".

Habib said that in the 1940s, the Congress and the Communists were "at each other's throats".

He recalled that a student of his father Mohammad Habib was a communist but was asked to go to the Muslim League by the then Communist Party of India (CPI) general secretary P C Joshi. Habib said that though he did not recall the name of the student, he remembered him complaining about being sent to the Muslim League and had to later move to Pakistan.

"We should recognise that to place the Muslim League and the Congress at one level was not just a mistake but a grievous one. There was a communal party and there was a national party. The Congress at least had a socialist programme at that time. They called it socialist. We might not call it socialist, but that was for public welfare," Habib said.

"Muslim League had no such programme. How could you then ask the Muslim Communists to go to the Muslim League?" he said.

Following Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the CPI had declared the second world war a "people's war" against fascism and supported the British's war efforts. The CPI had opposed the Quit India Movement launched in 1942, and instead aligned with groups that it believed were supporting the war, including the Muslim League.

Habib said it was wrong of the Communist party at that time to treat the Congress and the Muslim League in the same way.

"Of course, with the Congress we (Communists) had differences on the question of the (second world) war. After the German invasion of Russia, our position was that war efforts should be supported, whereas the Congress still had a large amount of hesitation on that," he said.

"This is not the place to go into a discussion on that. But it is important to realise that after 1942, our position with regard to the war was very different from that of the Indian National Congress. I think the decisions that we took under that division, in which we equated the Congress with the Muslim League, is one which all fair historians should now freely discuss. They were not the same. Muslim League was a communal organisation, the Congress was not," Habib said.

"The Muslim League cooperated with the British. The Congress opposed the British. On what grounds could we then say that they were the same?" he asked, adding, "I think it is time to look into our own shortcomings in the 1940s." However, he said the timing of the launch of Quit India movement was also not right.

He said with Germany's invasion of Russia, the war between imperial powers changed into a war between fascism and socialism.

The Quit India resolution of 1942 looks very awkward "when you think that Japan was on the Indian frontier", he said, asking, "Was it right at that time to say that the British should quit India?" "If you look at Jawaharlal Nehru's own papers, far from trying to oppose the British government at that time, he was thinking of how the Japanese invasion would be tackled by the Indians," the historian said.

"It is proper on our part today to question the wisdom of the Bombay resolution of the Congress, which initiated the Quit India movement at a time when Japanese were on our borders," he said.

The veteran historian added that both socialism and democracy are priceless, "one can't be of value without the other".

"India today should not only propagate socialism, but also propagate full democracy," he added. PTI AO RUK RUK