Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

148 I Ramnath
Vidyarthi, and through this milieu, began his connection
to the Hindustan Republican Association. He traveled
around northern India forging links among radical groups,
leafletting at me/as and fairs, and presenting educational
magic lantern shows.
Singh returned to Lahore in 1926, just as some of the
returned veterans of the Ghadar movement were building a
new formation known as the Kirti group, a worker-peasant
organization that was in effect a rogue Communist Party.
'fhe party's founders came from the same faction as Acharya
and Chatto, and maintained their autonomy from CPI directives.
Beyond the factional rivalry with Roy that dated
trom the international meetings in Moscow in the early
1920s, they differed also in temperament and approach:
"Kirti communism" tended to be more agrarian and rooted
in actual militant experience, as opposed to the more urban
intellectual profile of the CPI. The Kirti group also harbored
a tendency in the eyes of the latter toward romanticism and
individual adventurism (in a word, "infantile").
Kirti began publication in 1926, edited by Sohan
Singh Josh. Bhagat Singh wrote fo r the journal under the
nom de plume ofVidrohi ("rebel") in 1927-28 on a variety
of topics related to the history of the revolutionary movement
in India, the importance of revolutionary methods,
and why youth should prefer the movement to Congress
and mainstream leadership.52
Between May and September 1928, he also produced a
serialized essay for Kirti on the history of anarchism, commenting,
"The people are scared of the word anarchism
... [which] has been abused so much that even in India