P SUNDARAYYA An Extraordinary Communist Leader: Prakash Karat
MAY 1, 2012 marks
the birth centenary
of Putchalapalli Sundarayya. It is an occasion to
commemorate the life and work
of an extraordinary Communist leader. P
Sundarayya, PS as he was popularly known, was a product of
the anti-imperialist
and anti-feudal movements in the two decades leading up to India’s
independence. Joining
the freedom
struggle at the young age of 17, Sundarayya began his
political journey from
being a Congress activist to a committed Communist.
As in the case of
many other militant
freedom fighters who became Communists, Sundarayya revolted
against the caste
system. One of
his first public actions as
the young boy was to
sit on a hunger
strike in his village to protest against the caste
discrimination practiced
against dalits.
Sundarayya was
recruited to the
Communist Party by Amir Hyder Khan, the first Communist to
visit South India. He saw the potential
of a revolutionary in the
young student. From
then began the
remarkable revolutionary path of PS. Looking
back with the long view of history, PS will be recognised as
one of the
builders of the Communist Party. He became a member of the Central
Committee of the Party in 1936 at
the young age of 24. This
was the first
Central Committee of the centralised re-organised Party. He was assigned
the task of organising the
Party in South India. As EMS
Namboodiripad has written in the
`History of the Communist Party in Kerala’, it was P
Sundarayya who played the
key role in recruiting the first batch
of Communists in Kerala.
In Andhra
Pradesh, his home state, PS worked tirelessly to build the
Party and attract
the young radical elements from within the nationalist
movement. It was due to
his pioneering and strenuous work that the foundation of the
Communist movement
was laid in Andhra Pradesh.
PS was
intimately associated with the first group of Communists in
Tamilnadu who were
then part of the Madras
province which included parts of Andhra Pradesh.
Later, PS played a
key role in the
formation of the CPI(M). He became the general secretary of
the Party at the
founding Seventh Congress in 1964. For
twelve years, PS served as the general secretary of the
Party and devoted all
his energies to building the Party as a Marxist-Leninist
organisation. The
`Task on Party Organisation’ adopted by
the Central Committee in 1967, which sets out the blueprint
for a revolutionary
organisation, bears his imprint.
P Sundarayya made
a major
contribution to developing the strategy of the agrarian
revolution. He
was one of the founding members of the All
India Kisan Sabha in 1936, when he became a joint secretary.
He was one of the
first to recognise the importance of organising the
agricultural workers and
their role as the rural proletariat. His leadership of the
Telangana armed
struggle of the peasantry is legendary. His book, `The
Telangana Armed Struggle
and its Lessons’ provides the most comprehensive account of
this historic
struggle. Later,
he continued to study
various aspects of the agrarian situation and the classes
developing in the
countryside. As
late as the
mid-seventies, he organised a survey of villages in Andhra
Pradesh to get a
scientific understanding of the land question and the
agrarian classes. He was
fully convinced that without an agrarian revolution which emancipates the
poor peasants and
agricultural workers, there can be no completion of the
democratic revolution
in India.
PS was an ardent
defender of the
Marxist-Leninist ideology and principles. He struggled
against revisionism
within the Communist movement and fought equally vigorously
against the
`ultra-Left’ deviation.
The man who led
the Telangana peasant guerilla struggle could easily discern
the
Left-adventurist and petty-bourgeois revolutionism of the
Naxalite movement.
Sundarayya’s other
great quality was
in the nurturing and development of cadres for the Party and
the movement. In
all the leadership positions that he held
at various levels and times, he would identify potential
cadres, assess their
abilities and after recruiting them, nurture and develop
them. Successive
generations of activists were moulded
and reared as Communist cadres because of this unique
capacity of PS.
There were a
number of Communist
leaders of PS’s generation who were self-sacrificing and devoted, but
Sundarayya stood out amongst
them for his simplicity, sense of sacrifice and total
commitment. Sundarayya
cycling for miles at a go in the
rural areas of Andhra Pradesh, trudging through thick
jungles in Telangana for
days and leading a disciplined life for years in jail –
there were very
few who could
match his physical
stamina and
endurance. He was selfless as far as the
Party was concerned and, by example, could get others to
emulate him. It
was due to this simplicity and sacrifice
that many non-Communists in Andhra called him a “Communist
Rishi”.
