7 - A Dream Deferred

Summary

The seventh chapter, ‘A Dream Deferred’, explores how the dream and utopian promise of interwar internationalism faded during the upheavals of the Second World War and a violent decolonization. The Left in India was forced to choose between internationalism and nationalism. Through the lives and politics of those involved in this fateful choice, I examine the CPI’s position with respect to the ‘People’s War’ waged by the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany and the demand for Pakistan by the All India Muslim League (AIML). As its political choices narrowed in the run-up to independence, I trace how the communists’ internationalist loyalties placed it in a mutually acrimonious relationship with the presumptive heirs of the Raj in India and Pakistan. In a far cry from its heyday in the early years of the interwar period, when there seemed little to separate internationalism and nationalism, the manifold possibilities imagined by Communist Internationalism seemed at an end in the devastation wrought by Partition.