Ajit Roy

Ajit Roy (Mookerjee) came to England from India in 1931. He was sympathetic to the Communist Party and joined the League Against Imperialism. He studied law at the LSE where he met a student who was sympathetic to Trotsky and who provided him with a copy of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution and his writings on Germany.  This student  introduced him to other students at the LSE who supported Trotsky. He wasn’t impressed by them. Later his friend introduced him to CLR James. He was impressed! Subsequently he shared a house with James and he joined the James’ Marxist Group.
Later he went back to India and helped form the first Trotskyist group there. Eventually he returned to England and finding that there was nothing for him in the RSL he joined the WIL. During the war he travelled the country visiting the major WIL branches and on returning to London he did important work in the engineers union.
After the war he became politically disillusioned and returned to India but subsequently left the movement, whilst remaining sympathetic to it.

Recorded by Ajit Roy in Calcutta, November 1975. For the authors of the “History of Trotskyism in Britain.”

Well, my dear Sammy. You want me to tell you how I came into the Trotskyist movement, and about my experiences in the movement, and I suppose you would also like me to tell you about my experiences in India after I left your country at the beginning of 1948.

Well, it seems so long ago that I came into contact with the Trotskyist movement. It seems very difficult to say exactly when the introduction took place. I sort of moved into the movement from the Labour Party, through the Communist Party and then from the Communist Party into the Trotskyist movement.

I went to England as a student, about 1931, and my political capital at that time was a kind of radical, national liberal. Most of the Indian students in universities in those days were radical nationalists. We felt neither the country nor we would have any future, if British power continued to rule India. Many of us were, in the 1930s, moving into the direction of the socialist youth in the Congress, not because we knew much about Socialism, but because we thought that Socialists were more uncompromising in their opposition to British rule than the Congress Party.

I remember that my first contact with socialist thinking was through George Bernard Shaw’s little book, the “Intelligent Man’s Guide to Socialism”, and something that struck me most was that he said about Socialism being a state of society where the most unpleasant jobs would be paid at the highest rate, whilst under capitalism, the most unpleasant jobs were paid at the lowest rate.

When I first arrived in England, I started with a good deal of sympathy, like most Indian students, for the Labour Party. We all felt that Labour was far more likely to respond to Indian aspirations than the Tories and the left wing of the Labour Party would respond far more sincerely to our struggle than the right wing. But my respect and confidence in the Labour Party did not last very long and before long I was drawn towards the Communist movement. Many of my friends who were studying in the London School of Economics were convinced communists, and through them I came into contact with communist literature. What struck me most about the Communist Party and the communist movement was its international character. The Labour Party did not give that impression. It was a British Party and its membership of an international organisation did not mean much. All the parties of the Second International appeared to be national parties.

The Communist International had all the appearance of a real international movement. When I used to pick up the mouthpiece of the Communist International in those days, Impreccor, the “International Press Correspondence”, you opened it and you saw that there was a movement stretching from China to Europe. No country was outside it. There was correspondence from Brazil, from Austria correspondence, from India correspondence, correspondence from Burma, correspondence from all over the world. It seemed that the proletariat was really united in the Communist International, and what was being forged was a movement against capitalism on a world scale.

And for a new society which included India, I think that this International was the first external aspect. I didn’t realise it at that time, because this international of Marxism, you must remember, had been developing for some time. And apart from this, the communists were the most vocal everywhere in the cause of colonial emancipation. This is what moved me imperceptibly in their direction.

I remember how I used to look forward to reading the “International Press Correspondence” every week. I used to buy it dutifully every week, at Tottenham Court Road. Sometimes I used to pay over the price as my contribution to what I thought was a great and wonderful movement. I would go and join demonstrations unsolicited. I had no contact with the Communist Party but my heart and soul were with it.

But somehow or other I did not feel as sympathetic towards the communist movement in India as I did to the rest of the communist movement in the world. There was something about the Indian correspondents in the “International Press Correspondence” that didn’t quite read true to me. What I thought was a defect in the Indian Communist Party could be corrected. After some time, I thought that, being a Communist, I should do something about it, and that I should participate actively in the movement. I knew about the League Against Imperialism which had its office somewhere in central London, so I went there, and Bradley who had become famous in the Meerut Conspiracy case was, I believe, the secretary of the League Against Imperialism in those days.

I went there, and it so happened that Ben Bradley was there and we started talking. He inquired about me, about my family, about my career which I wanted to pursue and appeared to be very much interested. He advised me that I should not join the Communist Party right then, but rather the League Against Imperialism, and participate in their activities. They made me a member, and there I was. But my honeymoon with the Communist Party did not last very long. Before many months were over, I began to feel very cynical about the Communist International as a whole. That also was the result of an accident.

I had a friend from Calcutta who was then studying in the London School of Economics. He was living not far away from me in London and I used to go and see him once or twice a week in the morning. His name was B K Gupta. He later on became a member of the Indian parliament. Unfortunately, he died a couple of years ago in Calcutta, here. He had one of the brightest political minds I have come across in my life. He was a lazy kind of bugger who was continuously writing books, but only the first two chapters.

Very brilliant, a great voracious reader of books, and an acute thinker. Well, I used to go and see him in the morning and talk about the Third International in the most glowing and enthusiastic terms, and he would listen to me and jeer at me, and say that I was a bloody fool and didn’t understand anything; that I was twenty years behind the times. So I asked him, “If not communism, then what?” He said, “Communism, yes, but not of the Stalinist brand.” “Then what other brand was there, but the Stalinist brand?” I asked.

He explained that the Stalinist brand of communism was not communism at all. He then wanted to know if I had read anything by Trotsky. I said, “No.” He asked me if I could care to read Trotsky, so I said, “Why not. Give me the books.” So, he said, “All right, read this book,” and he gave me the History of the Russian Revolution by Trotsky in the Gollancz single-volume edition.

I remember that I took that book and I started reading it the next day. The whole day I read it. I didn’t go out. I didn’t go out the day after, except to have my lunch, and I finished the book in two days. I believe there was a chapter at the very end, headed ‘The theory of socialism in a single country’. I read it, and by the time I finished it, I said to myself that the communists are a bunch of liars; that the Stalinists were not communists at all, but a bunch of murderers and traitors to communism. I think that that one single book finished me off with Stalinism. I went back to Gupta after that, and asked him for more books by Trotsky. He gave me the books on Germany and several other books. I had never realised that political writing could be so fascinating, that theories and political analysis could be so acute, until I had read Trotsky’s books.

For a few months, I think, I lived in a kind of dream, not knowing what to do. I was filled with a vision of a great catastrophe that was going to overtake humanity in the not-too-distant future, and the need for a new international organisation to lead humanity too, in the great fighting which had to come. It affected my studies. It affected my ideas of what I was to do in the future. I had very few contacts with Trotskyism. I admired my friend Gupta for his intellectual capacity, but he was one of the laziest men I ever came across in life, and the last person to be a member of a revolutionary party. He couldn’t show me any way out.

One day he asked me to go with him to meet a group of his friends who were meeting in a restaurant in Oxford Street. I think Harber was there, and Margaret, John, and some others from the London School of Economics: very conspiratorial, very learned, and with all kinds of hair-splitting arguments. I wasn’t very much impressed.

Some time after that, Gupta got me into contact with C L R James. He was a personality. I don’t know if you remember James in the mid-thirties, or heard him then. He was writing the book on the World Revolution. I had rarely come across a finer political polemicist than C L R James. His attacks on Stalinism were absolutely devastating. He was then thinking in terms of building an independent Trotskyist party. I joined him readily. There was no doubt in my mind that all that we had to do was to start with a clean slate. We had the answer to all the problems and that the few of us would grow in the course of time into a mighty party. Now, when I think of my faith in those days, I feel very amused.

James and I got together and we took a flat in Boundary Road, when James had another great devotee, a chap from the East End called Stanton. Our main task was to bring out The Fight and to make open propaganda in street-corner meetings. We built a portable platform, and the three of us, James, a tall West-Indian; Stanton, a very Jewish-looking chap from the East End; and myself, an Indian, took the portable platform to shopping centres all over London, regarding ourselves at the vanguard of the British proletariat. It is all very amusing, but people did listen. It was probably the very strangeness of it that gave us an audience. But once James started speaking, he always got a crowd.

I was very satisfied in those days. I was convinced we were on the right road. I did a lot of reading of Lenin and of whatever came out of Trotsky, and learnt quite a lot about the working-class movement. Then, as the years passed by, time came for me to return to India. My family was insisting that I must come back. I had completed my bar and I couldn’t give any excuse for continuing my stay there, and yet I was very reluctant to go. The Spanish civil war had taken place. Franco had triumphed. France was in a turmoil. There was every indication that Germany under Hitler was going to march deeper into Europe. Another war was inevitable, and I was convinced that the next war would lead to a world revolution and the best place to participate in that revolution was not India, but from England. But nevertheless, I had to return. I didn’t want to go into law practise in India. I didn’t want even to take my bar exam, but I was persuaded to complete the exam by the Doyle family, a building workers’ family, one of the oldest in the Trotskyist movement. Bill persuaded me to complete my bar exam. I am glad that I listened then.

I came back to India and immediately made contact with a student group in Calcutta. By that time, it had attracted a large section of radical youth, who had gone over to communism, but was now breaking away from communism – I mean Stalinism – and were looking for a way out. The Socialist Party inside the Congress was also very critical of the Communist International. Well, we formed the firs Trotskyist group in India. Kamalesh Banerjee was the most important person in this group. Nobody who didn’t know him in 1938 can appreciate what a wonderful person he was. He had some magnetic qualities about him, which enabled him to draw young people around him. But he insisted that I should go back to England. He made some arrangements with a newspaper, to set up an office in London, and he made arrangements that I should start the office. The idea was that after the office was started, some of them would be able to come to London, and acquire some experience of the European working-class movement and come back to give strength to the Indian movement.

Well, I returned to England and broke with my family and arrived in England with half a crown in my pocket, and if it hadn’t been for the Doyle family, who gave me a room in their house and fed me in those difficult days, I don’t think that I would have survived. I got in touch with C L R James again. The Fight then became the Workers Fight and we resumed our old activities. I used to write for the Workers Fight on Indian and colonial problems.

I don’t know how long it was before an attempt was made to unify the various sections of the Trotskyist movement in England. I only remember that sometime before the war, Cannon with a few of his young disciples, one of whom I think was called Gould, came over from the United States to bring about unity in the movement. We had a meeting somewhere in South London, where Cannon made what I considered a very good speech, a very impressive speech, where he referred to the meeting as a ‘roll call’ for the coming revolution. We all stood up to answer the call. The result, I think, was the unification of the various Trotskyist groups, but for me it was a bit of a personal tragedy, because Cannon felt that the unification could succeed in England only if C L R James was taken away. So, James packed up, left me, and went to the United States. I remember that I was feeling very lonely after James’ departure, but it wasn’t for very long.

Shortly after that, I made contact with the WIL group, and that was the beginning of an entirely new political experience. Once I came into contact with the WIL group, the feeling of loneliness disappeared. There was something about the group which was entirely new. There was a place where everybody was active about it. There was a comradeship and an integration of a substantial number of people. There was nothing in the RSL. For the first time, I began to feel that there was an organisation for the future of the movement. I have vivid memories of Ralph Lee, he greatly impressed me; and also of Jock, who was running the press, I believe, at the time; and of Millie, who thing was the main cementing factor of the group.

I had a lot of personal problems in those days. War was coming and I had no livelihood. I didn’t want to, or feel like making any arrangements, any stable arrangements, for the future, because I felt that war was going to upset everything. Yet I had to eat. An Indian friend of mine took me into an engineering factory, and I started learning how to work a lathe. So, when war broke out, I was what you may call a member of the British proletariat. I would work in the factory during the day, and spend most of my time in the evenings in the WIN office attending meetings, selling Workers’ International News, and there with bitter fights with the communists in those days. I remember a number of times when I was beaten up by the Stalinists while selling Workers’ International News, and later on the Socialist Appeal, but I was very happy in those days.

The war broke out. I was, at that time, among the top leaders of the party. We expected that as soon as war broke out, we would be arrested. We held meetings: sometimes at my place, or in candlelight at some other places. It was all so secretive. Now I know that it was totally unnecessary. The British government weren’t worried about us at that time.

I remember that I was sent, shortly after war broke out, from London to make contact with all our groups throughout the country. I went to Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Stockport, Newcastle, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Carlisle, Liverpool, and back to London. I take great pride in the fact that I was the first person to visit all our groups immediately after war broke out. Some of the experiences of that trip I shall never forget.

I remember meeting a comrade in Cumberland or Carlisle, a person called Bryce, a railway worker. I went to see him in his cabin in the railway yard. He took me to dinner at his place and saw me off on the night train. It was freezing cold. The heating was off at that time. I don’t know how I survived the night in that cold train.

I went to Liverpool and met Jimmy Deane’s mother, and she made a tremendous impression on me and the young group in Liverpool. I met all kinds of people.

I went to Sheffield, stayed at Carford’s place and attended the trades council meeting there. I made a speech as a delegate. I wondered why nobody questioned my credentials. I made a terrific speech about the iniquities of the British Empire and why the war was being fought for the division of the world between the imperialist powers. I got a resolution through condemning the war itself.

There were amazing experiences.

When I came to London, I started work in a big engineering factory, where I commenced serious trade union work in the Amalgamated Engineering Union. We had a number of party comrades working in the AEU and we built up quite an important faction in the engineering union in London. Not as important as Newcastle or Scotland, but nevertheless quite important. In the Edgware No. 3 branch, we had fine comrades: Johnny Pye, Kagan, Henry Cezarnovitch, a wonderful friend. We made the Edgware No. 3 branch famous, as the Trotskyist branch in London. I learnt a lot through my trade union work. I learnt a lot about the British working class, its democratic instincts, its ability to respond to noble calls, and its idealism, but also its narrowness and limitations.

I spent the whole of the war in London. In 1942, I met Annie during an air raid and we got married shortly after that. I used to send her to sell the Socialist Appeal in all the factories where we were working. We never thought in those days that we would return to the old society. We were convinced that the end of the war would be the beginning of a new revolution, and that revolution would spread throughout the world. How disappointing it was that the war didn’t end that way.

When the war ended with out any fundamental changes, I felt that it was useless for me to continue to stay in England. All kinds of new problems were coming up and the party, the Trotskyist movement in England, when it started to face up to their problems, began to answer it in different ways. The nature of the states which had been set up by the victorious Russian armies in Eastern Europe came up for discussion, and differences began to crop up. The main question was, “What would be the role of Trotskyism in the period opening up?” A period of changes, but not revolutionary changes.

I began to feel at that time that we had made a big mistake when we started; that the idea that we could build up a revolutionary party in England to fight both the Conservatives and the Labour Party was a mistake. It is possible that this would not have been a mistake if a revolution had taken place, but it became a mistake in the light of subsequent events. So, I decided that it was of no use for me to continue to stay in Europe.

Kamalesh Banerjee came from India and appealed to me, “Though Europe might not be ripe for revolution, India is definitively ripe for revolution, and there is a tremendous future for the Trotskyist movement in India.” The idea of participating in an revolution, even only an Indian one, was very appealing to me. So, I decided that it was time for me to say goodbye to England and come back to India.

Now, Sammy would possibly like to know something about the highlights of my experiences in the Trotskyist movement in England. All I can say is this: that all the experiences that I went through in England were amongst the most enjoyable and wonderful experiences of my life.

Firstly, I had genuine comradeship, the participation in a common cause with a large number of people, all coming from different walks of life. Most of them I greatly respected. I shall never forget those days. I shall never forget the working together in that office in Harrow Road, with Jock, Millie, Harold, Ted, and a whole host of other people. Going to meetings in Hyde Park, taking classes all over London, the Neath by-election, the great debate in the Town Hall, and the climatic movement when Jock flung down from the platform some book or other: all of these things stand out as amongst the finest experiences of my life.

Then I remember going to Liverpool with Jimmy Deane, contacting a group of striking sailors, Indian sailors in a British ship, trying to organise them into the Trotskyist movement, and the meetings in Farringdon Hall, the fight with the Stalinists. Oh, these were wonderful days.

Now that I come to think of it, if anyone asks me what it was that attracted me towards the Trotskyist movement, I could say that it was essentially its democratic appeal. I think that the idea of “workers’ democracy” drew me most towards the Trotskyist movement, and I think that this is the most valuable part of the Trotskyist movement. Today, there are many versions, but I somehow feel that many of them missed what I consider to be the distinguishing feature of Trotskyism. It was not only that Stalinism was not for the world revolution. IT is not old that Stalinism is essentially nationalistic, and that Trotskyism is international. That certainly is a factor to be taken into account, but to me the most essential yardstick of Trotskyism is what its democratic aspect gave to the socialist moments, which is inherently absent in Stalinism.

I returned to India and I had hoped that we would find a ripe revolutionary situation in this country and that it would be possible to build a genuine revolutionary party. But I soon found out that the position was entirely different and I had learnt by that time the futility of sectarianism from my British experience. I advocated that the Trotskyist party should immediately merge into the socialist movement, but with the help of the Ceylon comrades of the Lanka Sama Samajist Party, who were working in India in those days, we were able to pass a resolution for a merger with the Socialist Party.

The merger took effect, but unfortunately, the majority of the members of the Trotskyist movement didn’t not subscribe to this merger. Most of them dropped out, but we continued, in the socialist movement, in the early 1950s, and we worked in India, in Burma, and in Indonesia. To my mind, these were the finest types of the political movement in the East after the war. If it did not succeed, if it disintegrated, and they were defeated, it were not through any fault of their own, but because social conditions in society were not ripe enough for these movements.

Today, I am not at all certain about the future. One thing that I have learned from my experiences of the past is this: that change is a law of life. [Tape ends mid-sentence]