10 - An Anti-Imperialist “Echo” in India

Summary

In 1928, the League against Imperialism (LAI) launched a quarterly journal, The Anti-Imperialist Review (AIR), which featured a lead article by founder Willi Munzenberg. He argued that the Brussels Congress produced a “powerful echo” that could be heard around the anti-imperialist world. His proof was found in India, where the Indian National Congress (INC) “hailed with enthusiasm” the creation of the LAI and resolved to associate with the movement and contribute financially to the secretariat. He celebrated the extensive coverage of the Brussels Congress in the Indian press and recognized the contributions of Jawaharlal Nehru, who continued to serve on the executive council and as a liaison between the LAI and India. Munzenberg concluded that the LAI had “taken a definite place in the Indian struggle for national liberty,” and that this “added considerable strength to the anti-imperialist movements and movements of national emancipation in the oppressed colonial and semi-colonial countries.”

Munzenberg's essay revealed two interrelated points. First, India was vital to the history and trajectory of the LAI. In this formative moment, the INC commitment to anti-imperialism set a benchmark for anti-colonial nationalists in other colonies and “added considerable strength” to the LAI. Later, as sectarianism rose within the LAI, the INC became the subject of intense criticism for its limitations as a bourgeois nationalist movement. Decisions by high-ranking INC leaders no doubt bolstered this criticism as Gandhi wavered on the question of complete independence from the British throughout the League's existence from 1927 to 1937. The second point was that the anti-imperialist “echo” shaped Indian politics, a rather effusive claim by Munzenberg, but one that inevitably rang true in the years after the Brussels Congress. A major contention of this volume is that the LAI internationalized the claims of anticolonial activists and nationalists across the world in places as diverse as Algeria and Indonesia (see the chapters by Hassett and Stutje). Even for more established institutions like the INC, the League emboldened Nehru to lead Indian nationalists down a more radical path, one tied to the anti-imperialist message. Increasingly after 1927, the anti-imperialist “echo” came to be institutionalized in INC resolutions and policies, while nationalists forged connections between India and the anti-imperialist world well before India's independence in 1947.