Communism in the colonies was ‘nationalism painted red’, so said M.N. Roy — the famous revolutionary who went from throwing bombs in Calcutta to rubbing shoulders with Lenin, mismanaging the Shanghai uprising in 1927 and finally becoming a pensioner of the British imperial government in India. The Indian communist movement was forged in the aftermath of the First World War amid the combined effects of the Bolshevik Revolution abroad and the Khilafat and Non-Cooperation Movement in India.
Roy was introduced to Lenin by Mikhail Borodin, the Bolshevik agent in Mexico. He soon travelled to Moscow and became active in the deliberations of the Communist International (COMINTERN). The Comintern, on its part, was established by the Bolshevik revolutionary government in March 1919 to promote socialist revolutions worldwide, committed as it was to the unconditional liberation of colonies held under economic and political subjugation by European colonial powers. Its first manifesto, titled Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World, was prepared by Leon Trotsky. The manifesto linked the fight of the workers and peasants in the colonies with that of the West, thereby heralding a unique form of political internationalism. Trotsky wrote: ‘‘The emancipation of the colonies is conceivable only in conjunction with the emancipation of the working class in the metropolises. The workers and peasants not only of Annam, Algiers, and Bengal, but also of Persia and Armenia, will gain their opportunity of interdependent existence only in that hour when the workers of England and France, having overthrown Lloyd George and [Georges] Clemenceau, will have taken power into their own hands.”