Source: – Sanjeev Sanyal / Twitter.
It is not widely known that in the 30s & 40s, the British deliberately promoted socialist/Marxist ideas among younger Revolutionaries in jail as a way to weaken their roots in nationalism. Here is a first hand account from Subodh Roy who was later in the CPM. pic.twitter.com/DBEPTPCLOv
— Sanjeev Sanyal (@sanjeevsanyal) January 21, 2019
The lynchpin of this strategy seems to have been a double agent called Rajani Palme Dutt who seems to have worked both for the Russians and the British. His activities need to be thoroughly researched as he seems to pop up in suspicious places in the records.
— Sanjeev Sanyal (@sanjeevsanyal) January 21, 2019
Subodh Roy also tells us how the younger Revolutionaries from mid 1930s were so successfully indoctrinated that they broke away from their earlier nationalist beliefs & no longer listened to the earlier generation of revolutionary leaders. The British benefitted from this in WW2 pic.twitter.com/wtmDhqK8sf
— Sanjeev Sanyal (@sanjeevsanyal) January 21, 2019
Interestingly, the British then trained 400 Bengali communists (many former revolutionaries like Subodh Roy) to fight alongside armed Jehadi groups against pro-Japanese Buddhist Maghs in the Chittagong area in 1943. The bloody conflict is the origin of today's Rohingya crisis
— Sanjeev Sanyal (@sanjeevsanyal) January 21, 2019
Thus, we ended up with Rashbehari & Netaji fighting against their own former followers on the Indo-Burma border. Herein lies the tragedy of Bengali revolutionary nationalism and why the Bengalis themselves have done so little to keep alive the history of the revolutionaries.
— Sanjeev Sanyal (@sanjeevsanyal) January 21, 2019
