By Vijay Burgula
Hyderabad: The first Lok Sabha was constituted on the April 17, 1952 ,after India’s first General Election and as historian Ramachandra Guha notes in his book ‘India After Gandhi’: The honour to first enter the Lok Sabha was given to the parliamentarian who had polled the highest votes.
That singular distinction was the then tallest communist leader from Telangana, named Ravi Narayan Reddy, who won from the Nalgonda Lok Sabha seat with 309,162 votes, whereas Jawaharlal Nehru won with 233,571 votes.
On his 114th birth anniversary,≤ it is fitting to remember his struggles and contributions to Telangana and India. One of the tallest leaders of the Telangana Armed Struggle (1946-51) and twice Parliamentarian and State Legislator, Ravi Narayan Reddy was born on the June 4, 1908, in Bollepalli, Nalgonda district, which was then part of the Nizam’s Hyderabad state.
He was born into a landlord or Jagirdar family. His ideas of nationalism and socialism were drawn from the writings of Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders, while his later readings of Marxist literature convinced him of the need to wage a relentless struggle against social and economic exploitation of the poor by the rich.
Ravi Narayan Reddy joined the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930-34 while he was still a student and offered ‘Satyagraha’ at Kakinada (now in AP, which was then part of the British administered Madras Presidency) in 1938 as state general secretary of the Congress. He was one of the leaders of the Harijan Sevak Sangh and established hostels for Harijan (Dalit) students.
The communist party leader was a keen sportsman and he also conducted sports competitions for students and youth. But having seen the brutal oppression of the peasantry at close quarters Ravi Narayan Reddy became convinced about waging a relentless struggle against the feudal system of exploitation held up by the autocratic Nizam.
The Marxist ideologue and CPI leader, late Mohit Sen wrote that Raavi Narayan Reddy ….” did not break from the Congress to become a leader of the Communist Party but moved with his heritage to a new level of his life and work.”
In 1939, Ravi Narayan Reddy joined the CPI and in 1941, he played a critical role in transforming the Andhra Mahasabha from a reform-pleading umbrella organisation of various political forces to a mass organisation fighting against feudal exploitation and oppression. Within five years, a variety of struggles had developed from fighting against feudal exploitation to demanding popular representation in government.
As a result, in 1946, the Nizam banned the Communist Party in Telangana and most of the Party leaders went underground in order to avoid being arrested. But the people’s discontent was so deep and the Communist-supported upsurge was so great against the landlords and the Nizam’s forces, that they were able to bring a halt to the practice of “vetti chakiri” or forced labour, illegal exactions and grain levies.
Reoccupation of lands seized by the landlords was also taken up. The movement surged forward after the Nizam refused to join the Indian Union in August 1947 and on September 11, 1947, the call for an armed struggle or rebellion was issued by Ravi Narayan Reddy, Baddam Yella Reddy and Makhdoom Mohiuddin.
Before the state’s Communist Party of India unit gave the call for armed struggle, it had discussed the matter with the party leadership in Delhi, and PC Joshi was the then General secretary since the founding of the CPI. The party’s policy had been to work with the Congress party in a national unity front.
However, this changed completely with the Soviet theoretical formulation that Nehru was a ‘lackey’ of Anglo-American imperialism. Immediately, one section in the CPI picked up this line of argument and became a faction opposing PC Joshi and his supporters.
In February 1948 at the 2nd Congress of the CPI, P.C. Joshi was removed in an acrimonious manner and replaced by B.T. Ranadive who advocated a Soviet-style insurrection in India to overthrow the “running dog of imperialism”- which was the Congress and Nehru. But the Party in Telangana was confronted by the Indian Army after the Police Action of September 17, 1948.
The Hyderabad State conundrum and Operation Polo
Though the British formally left India in 1947, it however gave princely states and their monarchs the option to join India or Pakistan, or to stay independent. Osman Ali Khan was one of the handful of kings, like Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir, who wanted to stay independent. The state then comprised 16 districts in 1948 (8 in Telangana, 5 in Maharashtra and 3 in Karnataka).
However, a separate parallel political power emerged in the Hyderabad state, in the form of Syed Qasim Razvi, a lawyer from Latur (Marathwada region in Maharashtra), who took over the reigns of the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (started in 1927) in 1946, after the death of Bahadur Yar Jung in 1944. Jung was one the MIM’s most powerful leaders and was a respected figure. It is hard to say what would have happened had he not died under suspicious circumstances (suspected poisoning).
It may be noted that Osman Ali Khan was also one of the richest men in the world, and was the king of a relatively peaceful state. However, the underbelly of it, especially in Telangana’s districts, was that of extreme oppression by state-appointed Jagirdars (landlords), whose main task was to collect revenue (taxes and rent) from farmers and give it to the state. The landlords were anything but benevolent.
However, post independence, his bid to run a separate nation, ran parallel with the Communist-backed Telangana Armed Struggle. Many believe that the peasant rebellion is also one of the reasons behind the Indian government sending its army, as the CPI leadership continued it till 1951.
A revolutionary life
Faced with the superior strength of the Indian Army and mass arrests and killings of revolutionaries after Hyderabad’s annexation to India, Ravi Narayan Reddy was of the opinion in his famous document, “Naked Truth of Telangana”, that the Communist Party should call off the armed struggle, consolidate their gains among the peasantry and the urban working class, and contest the First General Elections of India in 1951-52.
However, the Andhra Communist leadership under P. Sundarayya and M. Basavapunnaiah was bitterly opposed to this and championed the continuation of the armed struggle through guerrilla warfare, portraying Telangana as “the Yenan of India” or the template for the rest of India, just as Yenan was for the Chinese Communist revolution. The struggle was futile against the Indian Army.
In 1951 the CPI, under the leadership of the new general secretary Ajoy Ghosh, who replaced Ranadive, adopted a new programme which signalled the change of line on Telangana, and also allowed the party’s entry in parliamentary politics in post-independence India. The Telangana Armed Struggle led by leaders like Ravi Narayan Reddy was called off on the 21st October 1951.
A win bigger than Nehru’s
In the first General Elections of India in 1952, Ravi Narayan Reddy won from the Nalgonda Constituency with an even bigger majority than Nehru (309,162 vs 233,571). He again represented the same constituency in the Third Lok Sabha during 1962-66. In between he was a Member of Andhra Pradesh Legislature during 1957-62.
He was deeply associated with the various programmes of the upliftment of the peasantry and other weaker sections of the society. Ravi Narayan Reddy was also instrumental in getting Freedom Fighters status accorded to all those who perished or participated and were jailed in the Telangana Armed Struggle.
In his later interviews and talks, Ravi Narayan Reddy has repeatedly stressed on the contributions made by the movement to language and culture – especially with Telugu and Urdu literature and cultural forms such as “burra katha” which were revived and given a new cultural content.
It would be fitting to conclude in the words of the Marxist ideologue and leader, Mohit Sen – “Despite all that was done to him—slander, isolation and, at one stage, threat to his life—by some of the leaders of the Communist Party, he was not disillusioned about the ideals and philosophy of communism.
What had changed in him, to an extent, was his integration of these ideals and philosophy more directly with the noblest ideas of Indian thought and more particularly with Gandhism.
Ravi Narayan Reddy considered that Gandhiji’s emphasis on morality in action was needed by all activists especially the Communists who generally thought not of the best way to reach their goal but what seemed to be the quickest way of so doing. In his view, this was one of the main reasons for the grave setback suffered by the Communists all over the world.”
Views expressed above are personal
(The author is a filmmaker and farmer from Telangana)
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