Moni Guha

1914 – 2009

Moni Guha was born on September 29, 1914, to a Bengali lower-middle-class family. Their poverty did not allow him to complete his school education. He joined the struggle for Indian independence at an early age, becaming an activist of Anushilan Samiti in Faridpur. He was jailed because of his political activities when he was only 16. In prison and out he met communist leaders and began studying Marxism.

Guha was actively involved in the Tebhaga movement. During this period he was again arrested and spent a few years in jail. In the early 1940s he joined the Communist Party of India, moved to Calcutta and came in close contact with CPI leaders including Abdul Halim and Muzaffar Ahmed.

As early as 1956, Guha publicly rejected the picture of Stalin presented by Khrushchev in his secret speech on the former Soviet leader at the 20th Congress of the CPSU that year. He wrote an article criticizing the 20th Congress and defending Stalin which he subsequently distributed to delegates to the 1958 CPI Congress. He was charged with anti-party activity and expelled from the CPI by the West Bengal leadership. Now, although outside the communist party, he remained very active in the ideological struggle against revisionism.

With the rise of the Maoist movement in India in the late 1960s, Guha became close with a group of activists in Andhra Pradesh, including T. Nagi Nagi Reddy and D.V. Rao. With their help, Guha, together with Sunil Sen Gupta and Shanti Rai, helped form the West Bengal Co-ordination Committee of Revolutionaries. The organization launched a journal, Proletarian Path, under the joint editorship of Guha and D.V. Rao.

Proletarian Path played a leading role in consolidating the communist revolutionaries at an all-India level and conducting ideological struggles. During this period (1969-74) Guha wrote a number of theoretical articles in defence of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought and propagated the strategy of the New Democratic Revolution and its concrete application in Indian conditions.

In 1975 he took part in the founding of the Unity Centre of Communist Revolutionaries of India (Marxist–Leninist) (UCCRI(ML)) and played an important role in drafting its basic documents. He also became one of its five Central Committee members, along with T. Nagi Reddy and D.V. Rao. In 1976 the UCCRI(ML) split, and Guha was elected general secretary of one of the two UCCRI(ML) factions (the other being led by D.V. Rao). When the internal emergency was proclaimed by Indira Gandhi in June 1975 the UCCRI(ML) and its Central Committee went underground. His party nom-de-guerre was Nakul.

In 1977 the Guha-led UCCRI (ML) successfully held its 2nd All India Conference. At the conference Guha continued to defend Mao Zedong and the Three World’s theory. He remained underground until April 1978 as a leader of the UCCRI (ML) but left thereafter and disassociated himself from the organisation. He did so because he now rejected the Three World’s Theory and Mao Zedong thought in favor of the line being put forth by Enver Hoxha in Albania. In the same year he took part in the founding of the India-Albania Friendship Association and now began to advance the view that India has become a predominantly capitalist country and thus the stage of revolution in India would have to be a socialist one. Till his death he remained loyal to this understanding.

Moni Guha died on April 7, 2009.