Did India Attain an Average Level of Capitalist Development After the First World War?
Proletarian Path contests the viewpoint of this journal that India in the half century after 1947 has effected the transition from being one of the more industrially advanced countries of the colonial world to the economic level of the inter-bellum Balkan states which were at the bottom rung of the medium level capitalist countries in Europe.12 It is argued that India had attained this level of development in the immediate aftermath of the First World War: the authority of Lenin, M.N. Roy, Stalin and the Comintern is invoked to support this case. Formally, of course, the international communist movement did not divide the world into three economic categories until the intervention of Stalin in July 1928, so the question must be rephrased in terms of its substance. First we examine the views expressed on this question at the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920. Lenin did not mark out India from the other colonial nations in his Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and the Colon
