Rajani Palme Dutt (19 June 1896 – 20 December 1974), generally known as R. Palme Dutt, was a leading journalist and theoretician in the Communist Party of Great Britain, and briefly served as its fourth general secretary during World War II from October 1939 to June 1941. His classic book India Today heralded the Marxist approach in Indian historiography.[1]
Early life
Rajani Palme Dutt was born in 1896 on Mill Road in Cambridge, England. His father, Dr. Upendra Dutt, was an Indian surgeon, his mother Anna Palme was Swedish.[2][3] Dr. Upendra Dutt belonged to the family of Romesh Chunder Dutt.[4] Anna Palme was a great aunt of the future Prime Minister of Sweden Olof Palme.[5] Rajani's sister was the statistician Elna Palme Dutt, who went on to become an official of the International Labour Organization in Geneva. He, along with his older brother Clemens Palme Dutt, was a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
India Today, 1947 Edition, published by People’s Publishing House, Bombay, India.
Dutt made his first connections with the Socialist Movement in England during his school days, before the outbreak of the First World War. He was expelled from Oxford University in October 1917 for organising a socialist meeting. He joined the British Labour Movement as a full time worker in 1919, when he joined the Labour Research Department, a left-wing statistical bureau. Together with Harry Pollitt he was one of the founder members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1920. In 1921 he founded a monthly magazine called Labour Monthly,[4] a publication that he edited until his death, and also visited India.
In 1922, Dutt was named the editor of the party's weekly newspaper, the Workers' Weekly.[7]
Dutt was on the executive committee of the CPGB from 1923 to 1965 and was the party's chief theorist for many years.[8]
Following an illness in 1925 which forced him to stand down as editor of Workers' Weekly, Dutt spent several years in Belgium and Sweden as a representative of the Comintern.[7] He also played an important role for the Comintern by supervising the Communist Party of India for some years.
Palme Dutt was loyal to the Soviet Union and to the Stalinist line. In 1939, when the CPGB General Secretary Harry Pollitt supported the United Kingdom entering World War II, Palme Dutt promoted Joseph Stalin's line and forced Pollitt's temporary resignation. As a result, he became the party's General Secretary until Pollitt was reappointed in 1941, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union cause a reversal in the party's attitude on the war.
His book Fascism and Social Revolution presents a scathing criticism and analysis of fascism, with a study of the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy and other countries. He defined fascism as a violent authoritarian, ultranationalist and irrational theory: "Fascism is antithetical to everything of substance within the liberal tradition."[9]
After Stalin's death, Palme Dutt's reaction to Nikita Khrushchev's Secret Speech played down its significance, with Dutt arguing that Stalin's "sun" unsurprisingly contained some "spots".[10] A hardliner in the party, he disagreed with its criticisms of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and opposed its increasingly Eurocommunist line in the 1970s. He retired from his party positions but remained a member until his death[11] in 1974. According to the historian Geoff Andrews, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was still paying the CPGB around £15,000 a year "for pensions" into the 1970s, recipients of which "included Rajani Palme Dutt".[12]
The Labour History Archive and Study Centre at the People's History Museum in Manchester has Palme Dutt's papers in its collection, spanning from 1908 to 1971.[13]
India visit
RPD Portrait at PPH, Jhandewalan, Delhi
In 1946 the British Indian Government permitted RPD to visit his father's country for the first time since 1921, this time as a special correspondent for the Daily Worker. The visit lasted four months, during which he spoke at several rallies in different cities of India, all organised by the Communist Party of India. During this time he also interacted with many of that Party's workers, along with senior leaders including PC Joshi. During this visit he also met several important leaders of India including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Stafford Cripps. He was also invited by newly-built All India Radio for a broadcast. [14][15] His visit had such a profound effect upon Indian Communists that when they established the headquarters of their “People’s Publishing House (PPH)” in Jhandewalan, Delhi, between 1956 and 1958[16][17] they named the building the “R. Palme Dutt Bhawan” (Bhawan meaning Building) after RPD.[18] On that building's second floor stairwell hung a portrait of RPD taken during his 1946 visit to India, remaining there until very recently and now possibly hanging in the Party's headquarters at Ajoy Bhawan.[citation needed]
^ abcdeColin Holmes "Rajani Palme Dutt", in A. Thomas Lane (ed.), Biographical Dictionary of European Labor Leaders, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995; vol. 2, p.284
^Francis Beckett Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party, London: John Murray, 1995
^Gupt, Anand (2007). Delhi ki Communist Party ka Itihaas (History of Communist Party of Delhi). Urdu Bazaar, Jama Masjid, Delhi 110006: Communist Party of India, Delhi State Committee. p. 70.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
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