Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

130 I Ramnath
difference of opinion with the government officers regarding
anti-British strategy, Acharya-who favored a more
overt alliance with the Bolsheviks-relocated to Tashkent
in July of 1920 with his colleague Abdur Rab to cofound a
separate party called Inqilab-e-Hind (Indian Revolutionary
Association), the precursor to the CPI associated with
M. N. Roy. l!
He attended the second and third congresses of the
Third International in Moscow with consultative status.
During his two years in Russia, he married an artist called
Magda Natchmann. (Long forgotten, apparently, was the
woman to whom his parents had married him before he
ducked out of the country over a decade prior.) He contributed
articles to Russian journals, including a monthly report
fo r the Foreign Office Review and Herald NKJD on revolutionary
developments and movements in India. Meanwhile,
he maintained contact with tribes along the Indo-Afghan
frontier (what is now Pakistan's Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa region)
in the continued attempt to move anTIS across the
border. This had always been an important part of the
Provisional Government's agenci::t, as a prerequisite for the
cherished dream of sparking an uprising.
By 1921, Acharya was referring to himself as a "confirmed
communist." But a factional split pitted Acharya
and Chatto against Roy, who wanted sole leadership of
the fledgling Indian Left to be organized in a party whose
doctrine and direction he alone was to determine. Acharya
had always been part of the less orthodox faction, and his
true ideals, at least in his colleagues' view, leaned in an
antiauthoritarian direction. By the time he left Moscow,