Communists, freedom struggle and media propaganda
Quite a lot of propaganda is being spread, even through mainstream media, claiming that the Communists are celebrating independence day for the first time. Some basic reading of Indian history would have helped them know that AKG, who was still in jail on August 15, 1947, had hoisted the national flag in jail.
This is what AKG wrote in his autobiography on that day (Quoted by Sitaram Yechury in a speech some years back) — “On August 14, 1947 I was in solitary confinement in the big Cannanore jail. The whole country was waiting for the celebration due after sunrise. How many among them had waited for years for this and fought for it and sacrificed their all in the struggle. I nurtured feelings of joy and sorrow. I was glad that the goal for which I had sacrificed all my youth and for which I was still undergoing imprisonment had been realised.”
Also, this is not the first time that the independence day is being celebrated in party offices. This calculated propaganda is part of attempts to wipe away the history of Communist party’s involvement in the freedom struggle, which is well-recorded, right from the Peshawar, Kanpur and Meerut conspiracy cases of the 1920s to the Naval Munity of 1946. Not to forget, the party’s role in the many peasant revolts in the pre-independence period including the Punnapra-Vayalar Struggle of 1946 or the Tebhaga movement in Bengal in 1943, or the fact that Bhagat Singh drew his inspiration from the Russian Revolution and was reading a book on Lenin on the day he was hanged.
The organisation whose men were busy licking British boots and plotting to assassinate the leaders of the Indian freedom struggle, and their minions in the media are behind this propaganda. It is their organisation that refused to hoist the national flag for more than 50 years. Anyway, what difference would it have made, if they had actually hoisted, after not being part of the freedom struggle, and now treating fellow Indians even worse than how the British had treated.
