Declaration on the occasion of S A Dange’s 125th birth anniversary | Feb 2, 2025

Celebrating S.A. Dange’s Life work

Shripad Amrit Dange was a freedom fighter, a nationalist, a trade unionist, a founder of the Indian Communist Party and a creative tactical and political thinker. He was born in 1899 in Nasik, Maharashtra. The Indian freedom struggle led by figures such as Tilak deeply shaped Dange’s consciousness. As a student, he threw himself into the freedom struggle.

Dange was also inspired by the historic Russian Revolution of 1917. He was thus shaped by two great world movements of the twentieth century, the world Communist movement on one hand, and the anti-colonial struggle on the other. He not only participated in them, but applied his creative genius in trying to understand, interpret and theorize these two movements. He saw the resonance between the Indian masses and Gandhiji’s satyagraha, as well as the historic achievements of the Russian Revolution. In this way, Shri Dange started his political ideas by contrasting Gandhi and Lenin but spent his life in finding the common ground for the ideas of Lenin and Gandhi, and eventual synthesis of their contributions.

For this reason, Dange remains one of the most important and relevant political thinkers of our national movement. This year, we are celebrating the 125th anniversary of Shri Dange’s birth.

Dange’s importance is as a theorist of the Indian Revolution. He did not believe that the revolutionary process in India would look like the one in Russia and China. Nor did he believe in a dogmatic application of the theories of Marx to the Indian context. Thus, it is through Shri Dange’s work that we can come to a proper chronology and understanding of the Indian revolutionary process. His thinking can help guide us on several questions that confront us in this time. What is the nature of the Indian state and how can we theorize the relationship of the Indian state to the Indian people? How must we reconceptualize the relationship of the revolutionary struggle in this time to the struggle for ‘socialism’?

Dange studied concretely the conditions of the Indian people. Having his pulse on the consciousness and movement of the people, Dange was able to see the dialectical relationship between the masses of India and their leader in Mahatma Gandhi. In this, he differed from other thinkers of the communist movement throughout his life. He saw Gandhi as a revolutionary, and his methods of nonviolent civil disobedience to be the tactics most suited to the Indian people. He had a profound and deep love for and belief in the Indian people.

Dange had a sophisticated understanding of what constitutes a revolution. First, he disagreed with the idea that the Indian revolution was a bourgeois revolution. He saw its anti-imperialist character and its base among the masses of people. He saw that the particular characteristics of the Indian people necessitated a non-violent revolutionary struggle. Further, he saw in the Indian national movement the revolutionary aim of the non-violent destruction of the British colonial state.

Throughout the freedom struggle, Dange attempted to push the communist movement away from immature sectarianism, ultra-leftism and petty-bourgeois ideology. In this vein, he did not see Congress leaders such as Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, Sardar Vallabhai Patel etc as being compromisers with British imperialism because of their so called social conservatism. He rejected the claim that the bourgeoisie class was the same all over the world, and argued for a sophisticated understanding of the Indian nationalist capitalist class. Thus, he believed that all progressive and revolutionary forces had to join forces with the Congress at the time of the freedom struggle to bring about revolutionary transformation among the Indian people.

After Independence, he did not hold romantic ideas of the seizure of state power and a violent overthrow of the “bourgeoisie”. Rather he sought to work with the hard-won Indian state to develop the conditions for the people’s social and political transformation and a completion of the democratic revolution. His practice and tactics were based on an accurate understanding of the nature of the Indian state. He saw that the Indian state did not fit previous liberal or communistic theorizing. It was not just an oppressive structure above society used to bring order to an otherwise savage people, nor was it a blunt instrument of class interest. It was an instrument to further the democratic aspirations of the Indian people who had struggled for their voice to be heard through the freedom struggle. Therefore, Dange fought for the continuation of the democratic revolution in the framework created by the Indian state.

During the critical period of Indira Gandhi’s government, Dange supported Indira Gandhi’s measures like bank nationalization, land redistribution and reforms in capital ownership and the national tax structure. He saw the 1971 Indo-Soviet treaty as a progressive and anti-imperialist step. He saw Indira Gandhi’s leadership as a continuation of the legacy of the freedom struggle, and recognized the people’s love for her. He said the people had a special place in their heart for Indira because she was a woman leader. When the emergency was imposed, he saw it as a necessary step to counter the atmosphere of color revolution and anarchy that was being created in the country by elements that were supported by the American Deep State. For this, he paid the price of being ostracized and thrown out from the very party he had helped found. In this, his life parallels the life of Nirmala Deshpande, and to some extent Aruna Asaf Ali. They constituted the wing of the Indian national movement that saw through the superficial claims of a ‘total revolution’. The assassination of Indira Gandhi began a counter-revolutionary, westward looking movement within Indian society and elite.

Today, when we evaluate Dange, we do so more than 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the neoliberal reforms of the Indian economy which tried to negate some of the ideas of our freedom struggle. We do so in a time when the Indian economy is growing but in an atmosphere of sectarianism, religious divide, identity politics, poverty and rising inequality. In this atmosphere, we must come back to Dange’s slogan of unity and struggle. We must work to unite all the forces in favour of peace and democracy. At the same time, we must struggle for correct ideas and a correct understanding of the political situation in India and the world.

Some think that the primary struggle of this time is to ‘save the constitution’ or fight for liberal, individual rights, but we must fight for a more substantive democracy for the Indian people in the spirit of our freedom struggle. Rather than opportunistic alliances, we must struggle for ideas which can unite the people. We must seek to change the Indian state in a way that makes it more accountable to the people, eliminate poverty and achieve the dream of socialism, which is ultimately democracy.

Dange understood that we can not think of the Indian people in isolation and must see them as playing their part in changing world history. In this sense, we are living in historic times and there is reason for optimism and hope. There is a deep crisis in the West, especially in American politics and society. On the other hand, a new democratic world order is being born through the emerging countries of BRICS. However, crisis and war continue both in West Asia and Eastern Europe and the possibility of nuclear war looms. The leading “democracy” supporting the genocide of the people of Palestine raises the question, where is fascism located? The example of Bangladesh shows how a stable democratic society can be destabilized with the help of foreign powers under the name of fighting “fascism”. We must understand the real culprit behind these wars, destabilization and play our role in fighting for peace.

We must seek to understand the Indian people. Instead of blaming the masses of Indians as being sectarian, majoritarian or communalist, we should fight against the forces that keep them in poverty. We must proceed, like Shri Dange, from a fundamental belief in and love for the people. It was his love for the people that made Dange interested in Indian tradition and hold an open-minded view on the Indian philosophical tradition. We must struggle today for unity, for peace, for the elimination of poverty and for a new world order. In this way we must fight, ultimately, for the Indian children so they can reach their full potential in the future.