Puran Chand Joshi

Puran Chand Joshi (14 April 1907 – 9 November 1980), one of the early leaders of the communist movement in India.

Joshi was born on 14 April 1907, in a Kumaoni Hindu Brahmin family of Almora, in Uttarakhand.

His father Harinandan Joshi was a teacher.

In 1928, he passed his M.A. examination from the Allahabad University.

He was arrested soon after completion of postgraduation.

He became a leading organizer of the Youth Leagues during 1928-29, along with Jawaharlal Nehru, Yusuf Meherally and others.

Soon, he became the General secretary of the Workers and Peasants Party of Uttar Pradesh, formed at Meerut in October 1928.

In 1929, at the age of 22, the British Government arrested him as one of the suspects of the Meerut Conspiracy Case.

The other early communist leaders who were arrested along with him included Shaukat Usmani, Muzaffar Ahmed, S.A. Dange and S.V. Ghate.

Joshi was given six years of transportation to the penal settlement of Andaman Islands.

Considering his age, the punishment was later reduced to three.

After his release in 1933, Joshi worked towards bringing a number of groups under the banner of the Communist Party of India (CPI).

In 1934 the CPI was admitted to the Third International or Comintern.

At that time the left movement was steadily growing and the British government banned communist activities from 1934 to 1938.

He was the general secretary of the Communist Party of India from 1935 to 1947.

After the sudden arrest of Somnath Lahiri, then Secretary of CPI, during end-1935, Joshi became the new General Secretary.

He thus became the first general secretary of Communist Party of India, for a period from 1935 to 1947.

In February 1938, when the Communist Party of India started in Bombay its first legal organ, the National Front, Joshi became its editor.

The Raj re-banned the CPI in 1939, for its initial anti-War stance.

When, in 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, the CPI proclaimed that the nature of the war has changed to a people's war against fascism.

An outstanding contribution of PC Joshi

to the theory and practice of Communist

movement was his initiation of politico-

ideological hegemony and cultural

renaissance.

One rightly talks of Gramsci’s

contributions, but PCJ’s contributions have

not been given proper attention; they left

deep imprint on mass consciousness.

Even

today people become Communist or demo-

crats when they delve deep into political,

ideological and cultural contributions of his time.

PC Joshi, firstly, rendered political move-

ment of his times revolutionary as none else.

His slogan of ‘National Front’ against im-

perialism, colonialism and fascism fully

accorded with times and aspirations of educated masses.

People were attracted in huge numbers to Communist Party even

if they all did not join it.