Indian nationalists’ cooperation with soviet Russia in central Asia: The case of M.P.T. Acharya

Abstract

While the major European powers were engaged in world war, a group of Indian nationalists were attempting to use the conflict to work toward the liberation of India from British rule. One of the main players was M.P.T. Acharya. Having left India in 1909, he joined a group of Indian nationalists. In 1915, the Germans established an office in Kabul, where Acharya was sent by the Berlin Indian Committee. After Germany’s defeat in the war, the Indians abandoned the Germans to try their luck with the Soviets, who were vying for supremacy over the British Empire in Central Asia. The first Soviet legation to Afghanistan, which Acharya later joined, arrived in Kabul in August 1919. The Soviets were hoping to export revolution to the Indian subcontinent, and the road to India lay through Afghanistan. Acharya spent two years in Central Asia working with a variety of Indian nationalists and with (and ultimately against) the Communist International; he was a founding member of the Indian Communist Party abroad and eventually its severest critic. Under the influence of his European experience, Acharya’s political views developed from proto-Bolshevik and narrowly nationalistic to international anarchism and libertarianism.