Indian History Quiz: Trade Unions and the Left Movement in British India

Ansari. Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari was a physician and a Congress leader who presided over the Madras session of the Congress in 1927; he had nothing to do with the communist prosecutions and was never an accused in the Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy Case.

A follower of Jyotiba Phule and the editor of the Marathi paper Dinbandhu, Lokhande organised the Bombay mill workers in 1884 and placed their demands for shorter hours and a weekly holiday before the Factory Commission, which is why the body is called the first labour association in India.

Bahman Pestonji Wadia, a theosophist associated with Annie Besant, organised the workers of the Buckingham and Carnatic Mills at Madras in 1918 into the Madras Labour Union, the first body in India with members, subscriptions and office bearers, and therefore the first trade union in the modern sense.

The All India Trade Union Congress was founded at Bombay on 31 October 1920 and Lala Lajpat Rai, the Punjab Congress leader, took the chair as its first president, linking the labour cause to the national movement.

In 1918 Gandhi led the Ahmedabad mill workers in their demand for a wage rise and undertook his first fast as a weapon in an industrial dispute; out of that struggle grew the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association in 1920, which stood for arbitration between workers and owners rather than class…

It allowed unions to register, gave a registered union the standing of a body that could hold property and sue, and protected its office bearers from certain civil suits and from the charge of criminal conspiracy for lawful union work.

Manabendra Nath Roy, who had gone abroad in search of arms during the First World War and had helped found the Communist Party of Mexico, formed a small emigre Communist Party of India at Tashkent on 17 October 1920 with a handful of muhajirs and revolutionaries.

Sweeping arrests were made in March 1929, soon after the great strikes of 1928, and the trial at Meerut went on until 1933, making it one of the longest political trials of the colonial period.

Spratt had been sent to India by the Communist Party of Great Britain and worked with the Workers and Peasants Parties; he was arrested in March 1929 and tried at Meerut along with Benjamin Francis Bradley and Lester Hutchinson, the three Englishmen in the dock.

Both measures were aimed at the growing labour and communist movement, the first to deport foreign agitators and the second to curb strikes in public utility services, and the two young men threw bombs and leaflets to make, in their words, the deaf hear.

A lawyer of Madras who turned to the labour cause, Chettiar organised the first May Day meetings in India on 1 May 1923 and founded the Labour Kisan Party of Hindustan; a red flag was used on the occasion.

The Congress Socialist Party was formed in 1934 as a group within the Indian National Congress to push it towards socialism, and Jayaprakash Narayan became its first general secretary.