In early September 1910, the Indian social democrat Dr Narayan Kesheo Krishna (1875–1949) caused a stir at the International Socialist Congress, held at Copenhagen from 28 August 1910 to 3 September 1910. A world traveller in the international socialist movement for a few years, Krishna had joined the Socialist Party of America in late 1906, going “from devout Hindu to freethinker, from nationalism to socialism.” While Krishna may have been the first Indian to join a socialist party, it was not his turn to socialism, however, that attracted attention at the congress, but the very fact that an Indian demanded to speak in front of the socialists gathered at the Second International Congress.
Krishna argued that since the Paris-based Indian revolutionary Bhikhaiji Rustom Cama, known as Madame Cama, had been permitted to speak at the International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart in 1907 (and was also at Copenhagen), he should be allowed to address the audience. However, the Dutch social democrat Henri van Kol, a powerful figure within the Second International, who had met Krishna a couple of years earlier in the Netherlands, said that Krishna could not be trusted, so his request was denied. What was worse, Ramsay MacDonald, the British Labour Party member, refused Krishna entry to the British section of the delegation, even though he acknowledged that the latter was a British subject, on the grounds that Krishna was not a member of an accredited socialist organisation related to the British section. In reality, as a Danish newspaper wrote, MacDonald did not want to admit ‘people with another skin colour’ to their private meetings. Confronting the British socialists, Krishna staked out in the lobby outside the office of the British section and grabbed everyone going in and out by the shirt collar and asked: ‘Do you call this brotherhood?’