An update and the meaning of the Meerut campaign. Facing a rising movement against their rule in India, British imperialism arrested dozens of leading Communist activists in March, 1929 for conspiring “to overthrow the sovereignty of His Majesty the King in British India with a view to the establishment of a Socialist State under the dictatorship of the proletariat and the supreme command of the Communist International.” A campaign of international solidarity was initiated, several of the arrested were British activists, the cases lasted several years before being dismissed or overturned.

‘Meerut versus British Imperialism’ by Conrad Komorowski from Labor Defender. Vol. 9 No. 3. March, 1933.

OUT of the original thirty one Meerut prisoners, one is dead, three have been acquitted, and the rest, except for eleven who received four and five year sentences of rigorous imprisonment, have been exiled for life, for twelve years, or ten years to the Andaman Islands. These are death sentences comparable to the sentence Angelo Herndon received. sentence was to eighteen to twenty years on the chain-gang, and that means death! These workers, in being sent to the Andaman Islands, are getting death, for this prison camp is the worst in the world, lying as it does almost on the Equator, in a heavy swampy jungle, the driest part of which receives 136 inches of rain a year.

Three of these workers are English; the rest are Indians. They were charged with “conspiracy against the King-Emperor” and their trial lasted four long years under the prison regime in the oven-like prisons of India. The trial cost the Government 120,000 pounds sterling (about $480,000)! The acts of their indictment charged them with the organization of a demonstration in commemoration of the Russian Revolution, another for the release of Sacco and Vanzetti, with the organization of trade unions, a Communist Party, and with the leadership of strikes. The Judge in the case was assisted by Five Assessors, but it is the Judge who pronounced the sentence and who was not bound by the decision of the Assessors. The Assessors found fourteen not guilty, but eleven of these were sentenced by the Judge!

The legal issues in the case were these: They were refused trial by jury (due to the fear of acquittal); they were refused bail and had to remain in prison for four years; their trial was dragged on while the prosecution studied the documents (such as The Communist Manifesto, Lenin’s works, etc.) to bring against them; their trial was moved by the Government from the industrial center where they lived and worked to a little provincial town (this was done for fear of the organized action of the proletariat); and they were not tried for specific illegal acts but for Communism. The very fact that they be longed to the Communist and the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party proved their guilt in the eyes of the Government!

Tremendous protests arose out of this case. Trade Unions passed resolutions demanding the release of the workers condemned for the sole reason that they were organizing the exploited natives. In Glasgow, forty Labour Party and Independent Labour Party Councilors, violent anti-Communists, signed a petition demanding release and demanded that the City Council itself pass a similar protest. At Bathsea a twenty-four-hour protest strike was called. Workers everywhere were aroused at this terrorist invasion of elementary rights.

But what is the real significance both of the case itself and of the actions of the Government? The bourgeois press does not publish much about the labor movement in India; most of its information is concerned with Ghandi and the Nationalists, with religious battles, and with the wise and just rule of Britain and its attempts to bring “civilization” to an ignorant tradition bound people. It is the great problem England is struggling with for humanity’s sake, we are told. It is the romantic land of filth and degeneracy, with animal worship and castes and child marriage, incalculable wealth and unimaginable poverty and dirt.

On April 27, 1932, Sir Samuel Hoare admitted that in March there were 26,000 political prisoners in the imperialist dungeons. But Pandit Malaviya challenged his confession by stating that over 80,000 arrests were made in four months only, and that firing took place at least 29 times, and that the police charged crowds in more than 325 places. In a debate on India in the British House of Commons, Sir Samuel Hoare began his speech by stating that “if a foreign visitor came over here today imagine that this country and India were in a state of war.” At one time 30,000 Red Shirts, of whom 8,000 were women, were encamped around Mardan. This fact is particularly significant because in the East, it is only the most revolutionary section of the working class and peasants that has gone so far in the emancipation of women. We hear these facts about the revolutionary emancipation of women in the national minority territories of the Soviet Union and in Soviet China. Now the Indian revolutionary movement has advanced so far as to have almost 25% of one of its contingents composed of women!

This is a startling fact exposing at one blow the tremendous strength of the upheaval going on in India, an upheaval symbolized to tens of millions of Indian workers and peasants by the Meerut prisoners. It was against this force that British imperialism struck. It struck against the leading and best loved leaders of the Indian trade union and working class movement. It struck with the intention of intimidating, and of ending trade union organization.

Prior to 1919 a strike in Indian industry was practically unknown. But with the development of industry in India, where the British found the cheap labor they needed to swell their profits, there was created a proletarian class. With the development of the proletariat, daily becoming more class conscious under exploitation, grew huge strike movements despite the tremendous obstacles and the fierce repressive brutality of British imperialism. The sharpest struggle came in 1928 when 150,000 cotton textile workers stood solid for six months. It was during this strike that the Girni Kamgar Union was formed in definite opposition to the Trade Union officials (nominees and agents of British imperialism). As a result of militant struggle every member of the Executive Committee of the new workers’ own trade union was seized along with prominent members of other Trade Unions. Then came the political frame-up. Their conspiracy consisted of the organization of workers against the actual starvation conditions forced upon them by the blood-sucking imperialists. Their crime lay in the organization of the revolutionary struggles of the workers against their oppressors and exploiters.

Has British imperialism succeeded in its purpose? The news of martial law being proclaimed in province after province, of fierce struggles perennially breaking out (disguised as “Hindu-Moslem” fights), of armed rebellions, of the arrest of revolutionaries tells us that the great tide of revolution is rising in India against the British imperialist and their lackeys, the Ghandites and other nationalist leaders, as it is rising in all parts of the world.

The Meerut prisoners were arraigned because they dared to assert their class aim of social emancipation. In their arraignment was arraigned the whole working class of the world before the bar of imperialist justice. But we shall refuse to be the accused, the criminals. We shall say with G.M. Adhikari, one of the prisoners:

“Who are the social criminals? I ask. The blood-thirsty imperialists who carried fire and sword through entire continents, who have instituted a colonial regime of blood and terror, who have reduced the toiling millions of these continents to abject poverty, intolerable slavery, and are threatening them with mass extinction as a people.”

In as spirited a way as the Meerut prisoners took the offensive against imperialism, as courageously, we shall work for the unity of the white and Negro toilers, of workers in imperialist countries and native workers in the struggle for the release of all class-war prisoners as symbolized in Tom Mooney, the Scottsboro boys, Angelo Herndon, the Meerut prisoners, and the other thousands.

Labor Defender was published monthly from 1926 until 1937 by the International Labor Defense (ILD), a Workers Party of America, and later Communist Party-led, non-partisan defense organization founded by James Cannon and William Haywood while in Moscow, 1925 to support prisoners of the class war, victims of racism and imperialism, and the struggle against fascism. It included, poetry, letters from prisoners, and was heavily illustrated with photos, images, and cartoons. Labor Defender was the central organ of the Scottsboro and Sacco and Vanzetti defense campaigns. Not only were these among the most successful campaigns by Communists, they were among the most important of the period and the urgency and activity is duly reflected in its pages. Editors included T. J. O’ Flaherty, Max Shactman, Karl Reeve, J. Louis Engdahl, William L. Patterson, Sasha Small, and Sender Garlin.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1933/v09n03-mar-1933-lab-def.pdf