Philip Spratt

[1] He was among the first architects, and a founding-member of the Communist Party of India, and was among the chief accused in the Meerut Conspiracy Case; he was arrested on 20 March 1929 and imprisoned.After India gained independence from the British, he was among the lone voices – such as Sita Ram Goel – against the well-intentioned and fashionable leftist policies of Nehru and the Indian government.His elder brother David Spratt, left boarding school to join the British Army during World War I, and was killed at Passchendaele in 1917.Philip Spratt's own rejection of religion came early on: "By the age of 17 I had a fair knowledge of nineteenth-century physical science, and I read a little on my own in biology.Philip Spratt, Maurice Dobb, John Desmond Bernal, Ivor Montagu, the historian Allen Hutt, A. L. Morton, A. L. Bacharach, Barnet Woolf, and Michael Roberts comprised the tiny handful of Communist Party members at the university at that time.Spratt, Woolf and Roberts would sell the Worker's Weekly to railwaymen at the town railway station or canvass the working-class areas of Cambridge.He was expected to arrange for the infiltration of CPI members into the Congress party, trade unions and youth leagues to obtain leadership of them.Hansard records show that on 28 November 1927, Shapurji Saklatvala, the MP for Battersea North, questions Earl Winterton (then Under-Secretary of State for India in Baldwin's government) about the wrongful detention of Philip Spratt for six weeks prior to his trial.Jawaharlal Nehru contacted the Chinese revolutionaries, including Madam Sun Yat-Sen, in Brussels during the world founding conference of the League Against Imperialism.M. A. Jinnah advised Sarojini Naidu to apply for transfer of the case to the High Court and Spratt to give up his demand for a European Jury.On 28 November 1927 Shapurji Saklatvala, British Communist MP for Battersea North, questioned Earl Winterton, Under-secretary of State for India, about the wrongful detention of Spratt for weeks prior to his trial, even though not found guilty by the jury and refused bail.The front page of the Manifesto for Madras session (1927) included slogans of "A National Constituent Assembly, Universal Adult Franchise and Complete Independence".M. N. Roy also had proposed it in his journal in 1928 abroad, but it was utterly sectarian as he called upon revolutionary nationalists not to be misled by "the apparent victory at Madras" gained by passing the resolution of full independence by Congress.In March 1929, almost all the members of the Communist Party of India and about an equal number of trade unionists, congressmen and others who were working alongside them – 30 people in all – were arrested simultaneously in half a dozen different towns and taken to Meerut jail.It is his time in Meerut that marked the beginning of his emotional turn away from communism: "When we had been in jail a year or two, the significance of the new Comintern line which we had accepted so uncomprehendingly at Calcutta began to show itself.It compelled the renovated party to split the central trade union body twice within two years, and to direct fierce criticism at the Congress, whose great Civil Disobedience campaigns made our activities look rather silly.While in confinement, Spratt also wrote the foreword for Peshawar to Moscow: Leaves from an Indian Muhajireen's Diary by Shaukat Usmani.Sir Patrick Donner asked the Secretary of State for India whether he was aware of the fact that Spratt was interned in Belgaum Fort under the Emergency Powers Act and whether he would be deported.Soon after his release in 1934, he became engaged to Seetha, the grand-niece of Malayapuram Singaravelu Chettiar, who was a barrister and a founding member of the Communist Party in the south of India.[11] In its columns, he criticised the policies of the government which he believed, 'treated the entrepreneur as a criminal who has dared to use his brains independently of the state to create wealth and give employment'.He further believed that the result would be 'the smothering of free enterprise, a famine of consumer goods, and the tying down of millions of workers to soul deadening techniques'.We shall watch the act of faith with due sympathy but at a safe distance, our honour, our resources and our future free from the enervating entaglements which write a lie in our soul."