The selection of Indian nationalist Krishna Menon as a Dundee Parliamentary Candidate for the Labour Party in 1939 and his rapid deselection one year later, is a fascinating story from Dundee’s Labour history. Menon was selected by the Dundee Trades & Labour Council at a meeting in July 1939. At that time, what later became two separate entities, the local Dundee Labour Party District Committee and the Dundee Trades Union Council, were one body.
On 29th November 1940, the National Executive of the UK Labour Party sent a letter to Krishna Menon confirming the “Cancellation of your candidature for one of the Dundee seats… As you know, our Constitution exacts a degree of loyalty and discipline rendered necessary by circumstances. It feels sure that you would not claim that, owing to your natural allegiance to India, you can give full support to Labour Party policy”. This formal letter confirmed a decision that had been taken seven months before, in April 1940, and reported at the time in the Dundee Courier.
The first question for us must be: Who was Krishna Menon?
Vengalil Krishnan Kurup Krishna Menon was born into an aristocratic family in Thiruvangad on 3rd May 1896. He was educated at Presidency College, Madras (now Chennai). As a young man he joined the Theosophical Society and became a member of Mrs Annie Besant's inner circle, volunteering in her Indian Home Rule campaign. Besant was a remarkable character. She was involved in advocating both Indian and Irish Home Rule, was a member of the Social Democratic Federation and had been involved in Trade Union campaigning, including in the London Matchgirls’ Strike in 1888. She moved to India in the 1890s and became President of the Indian National Congress in 1917. She helped Menon move to London in 1924. He graduated from the London School of Economics and University College London. He also studied Law and was called to the Bar by the Middle Temple.
In 1927 Menon became the general secretary of the India League. He transformed the British-based independence movement, moving the group away from a largely student body and from Annie Besant’s pedestrian and polite movement, towards a more radical and effective vehicle for change. Through the League, Menon developed a close relationship with future Indian Prime Minister Pandit Jawarahal Nehru which was to last throughout his life. In 1934 he was elected as a Labour councillor to the St Pancras Borough Council in London. Three years later, he had been proposed as a Labour Parliamentary Candidate in St Pancras but was unsuccessful.
So how did he come to be selected by Labour for Dundee? His selection by the Trades & Labour Council arose by him being nominated by the Jute & Flax Workers’ Union (JFWU), seconded by the National Union of Railwaymen. What was their motivation?
In 1922, K S Bhat of the Workers Welfare League of India addressed the Scottish TUC Congress and spoke of the need for a union between Scottish and Indian workers. He specifically mentioned Dundee and Jute. Three years later, John Sime of the Jute & Flax and Tom Johnston, a Scottish Labour MP, visited the Indian jute mills. The Union were increasingly convinced that, to address the issues being faced by their members in Dundee, it was worth investing time and effort in campaigning for better wages and conditions for Jute workers in India.
In 1928, the working week for Calcutta’s jute workers was increased from 54 hours to 60 hours with no increase in pay. This had a devastating effect on the workers in India but also had dire consequences for Jute workers in Dundee. There were calls for import duties, which the British Government ignored because getting more cotton into India was a much greater political and economic priority and Lancashire had a greater voice than Dundee.
In 1937 half a million Bengal jute workers went on strike but to no effect.
It is clear that the main impetus to have Menon selected in Dundee came from the Jute & Flax. They had specifically approached him in 1938 to become a candidate in Dundee, so their analysis must have included a strong indication that he would be beneficial to their interests, either for their members and the industry in Dundee or, more plausibly, for the pay and conditions of Jute workers in India. Indeed, the India Office of the British Government noted that Menon was accepted in Dundee “mainly on the vote of the Jute Trade Union interests”.
Menon did have another potential ally in Dundee, the Indian-born Labour Councillor Dr Jainti Das Saggar who had been elected in 1936 and who was himself an Indian nationalist. Saggar, after whom Saggar Street in Dundee is named, was a remarkable character. He was Scotland’s first Asian councillor and an advocate of forward-thinking and progressive policies on the Council, often focused on health improvements, including school meals and community meal provision for Dundee’s poorer areas.
There is an elephant in the room here, both in Menon’s selection but possibly more significantly in his deselection, and that is the Communist Party of Great Britain.
That Menon had links with the Communist Party is not in doubt. A previous Labour candidate in Dundee, Jean Mann, wrote of Menon: “he stalked across the Scottish platforms like a colossus, always urging policies which were espoused by the Communists, in whose company he seemed more at home than even the ILP [Independent Labour Party]”.
Attempts to exclude Communist influence from Trade Union organisations, including the Trades Council and the Jute & Flax, had clearly failed over the years. In 1928, the JFWU introduced what were known as Bans and Proscriptions. These were common in Trade Unions and tried to ban Communist Party members from holding elected positions. I was told by an old timer that, in those days, at the start of Trades Council meetings, delegates would be asked to affirm that there were no communists present.
In 1937, a JFWU delegate on the Trades Council, Willie McGuire, was killed at the Battle of Jarama in the Spanish Civil War. He also happened to be the Secretary of Dundee Young Communist League. The Marx Memorial Library has a photograph of Krishna Menon, in the company of Nehru and leading Scottish Communist Peter Kerrigan, in Spain in 1937 where they were visiting the British Battalion of the International Brigade. Just months after his selection, Menon wrote to the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Harry Pollitt, sympathising with the recent death of his mother and mentioning that he was going to Dundee.
The Communist Party also had a long-standing interest in fighting for India’s freedom from the Empire as part of its internationalist and anti-imperialist positions. In 1923, we find British Intelligence expressing concern that leading British Communist Bob Stewart was trying to win over Indian students at University College Dundee. In the same year, Shapurji Saklatvala MP, an Indian and Britain’s first Communist to become an MP, spoke in Dundee, berating the Jute trade unionists: “During all these years you have called yourselves trade unionists. You are nothing of the sort. You are only Dundonians. In the jute trade, the men who ought to be in your union first and foremost were the Bengal growers of Jute”. In 1924, the Communist Internationale in Moscow gave the British Communist Party responsibility for establishing a Communist Party in India, a task which produced some results, particularly in Bengal, but with which it was still engaged in 1936. Also during the 1930s and 40s, one of the most influential British Communist leaders was another Indian, Rajani Palme-Dutt, with whom Menon developed a close relationship.
So the Communists in the JFWU Union, and on the Trades Council, quite conceivably saw an ally for their party’s policies in the form of Menon and having him as a Dundee Labour MP would assist their positions, including the goal of Indian independence from the British Empire. The Union leadership’s position in supporting him was based on their conception of him helping defend the interests of their Union’s members through better conditions for India’s workers. Menon offered both groups what they saw as a solution but they both had very different long-term goals.
Labour’s policy on India is also interesting. It was far less supportive of Indian independence. A resolution at its 1939 Party Conference stated that “the right to rule subject peoples must be regarded as a sacred trust”. The Congress Party in India protested angrily when the Viceroy took the colony into World War Two in September 1939 without consultation. The 1939 Defence of India order, which permitted imprisonment without trial, was not opposed by the Labour Party. After the outbreak of war, Menon was publicly denouncing the Imperialist War, which, at the time, was the policy of the Communist Party, definitely not Labour’s. He also wrote articles for the Communist Party’s Daily Worker and spoke at a conference ‘Labour and the War’ organised by Labour Monthly, which, despite the name, was a Communist Party publication edited by Palme-Dutt. Menon’s contribution included reference to thousands of war resisters, imprisoned in India, including Nehru, and again categorised the war as an imperialist project.
If we go back to the letter from the Labour Party National Executive, the basis they quoted for his deselection in April 1940 was: “you would not claim that, owing to your natural allegiance to India, you can give full support to Labour Party policy”. So it seems that their view is that it was Menon’s attitude to Indian Independence which was the crux of the issue. However, the Courier press report of the original decision in April mentioned “alleged activities with bodies opposed to the official policy of the Labour Party”, which is more ambiguous.
What was the response to this decision?
Under pressure from UK Labour, the Political Executive of Dundee Labour Party and the Trades & Labour Council felt they could do nothing else but withdraw his candidature. The JFWU, his nominating sponsor, was not informed. It protested vehemently to the Trades Council in Menon’s defence and demanded action. After much lobbying by the JFWU and the National Union of Railwaymen at national level, a deputation was sent by Labour’s National Executive to Edinburgh in September to hear representations.
Menon defended himself at the hearing. Remember, he was an experienced lawyer. No charges had ever been laid against him. He had heard about his deselection from the press. He had asked to meet the General Committee of the Party but no response had been forthcoming.
In his evidence, the Dundee Trades Council Secretary said that his organisation had been struggling to exclude Communist influence. Menon had spoken at the Labour Monthly conference, had written for the Daily Worker and was due to share a platform in Glasgow with Willie Gallacher, the Communist MP. Menon responded that other Labour figures had written for both publications and that once he heard that Gallacher was also to speak in Glasgow, he withdrew from the meeting. This line of accusation clearly implies that closeness to the Communist Party is the main issue.
G R Shepherd, Labour Party National Agent, who presided, reported to the National Executive Committee and suggested that Menon’s candidature be withdrawn on the grounds of double loyalty: “His first loyalty is to India”. The decision was confirmed and they wrote to inform Menon in November.
Menon replied on 16th December maintaining that he did enjoy the confidence of the Labor movement in Dundee Labour and accusing the Agent of having “instigated and inspired the action”. Menon also wrote to the Party's Secretary, enclosing his letter to Shepherd and questioning the incompatibility of his “natural allegiance to India” with “Labour Party policy” He continued:
"The NEC have now introduced a national and racial bar into the Labour Movement. The prohibition it has laid down is on the basis of what it calls my 'natural allegiance', or other words owing to my nationality. If persons are barred from certain positions in the Labour Movement on this ground it follows logically that they must either be barred from the Movement as a whole or permitted only a degraded status.
LP policy is now opposed to the basic conception of self-determination and the national independence of subject peoples... The ending of imperial [and] racial domination and hatreds... is equally the concern of the peoples of this country as it is of those in Malaya, India or Africa. The 'natural allegiances' of peoples do not divide them; on the contrary they are bonds of unity in what is a common struggle... I shall continue to work to bring about the realisation that the struggle of peoples of all lands is a common one against common foes, that their exploiters seek to divide and weaken them, and that in their unity lies their strength... The people of India have no quarrel with the people of this country. Their struggle is directed against an exploiting and oppressive system.”
Menon also pointed out that he had been a member of the Labour Party for sixteen years and that his political position on India had never previously been questioned. But the die was cast.
So what happened to Menon?
Following Indian Independence in August 1947, Menon was appointed the first High Commissioner to the United Kingdom by Nehru. In 1953 he was elected to the upper house of the Indian Parliament and became his country's representative on the General Assembly at the United Nations, a position he held until 1962. In July 1956 when President Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, he took a leading part in the international negotiations that followed. In January 1957 he made an eight-hour speech to the UN Security Council, spread over two days, on India's position on Kashmir, the longest recorded speech made to the Council.
In 1956 Menon entered Nehru's Cabinet as Minister without Portfolio and in April 1957 he became India’s Defence Minister. He died in Delhi on 6th October 1974.
The vacant Dundee Labour Party Candidacy went to John Strachey in 1943 and he won one of Dundee’s two seats as part of the Labour landslide in 1945. Notably, he had previously campaigned on a pro-communist platform and even applied to join the Communist Party in the summer of 1932, but was rejected as an unreliable intellectual. He remained MP for Dundee West until his death in 1963.
So what do we think? Was it Menon’s allegiance to India or his closeness to the Communist Party which led to him falling foul of the Labour Party? Was racism an issue, as he claimed? It must be said that I have found little to no evidence of him suffering racist attitudes during his time in Dundee, but the sources are far from plentiful. If he hadn’t been deselected, would he have stayed on in Britain as an MP when India became independent?
I’m puzzled by the Labour Party’s apparent decision to attribute his deselection to his links to India. As he stated in his defence, he had long held positions on India during his Labour Party membership and during his many years as a Labour Councillor, but these had never attracted any concerns or censure. Had it been his criticism of the British Government’s clamp-down on anti-war protestors there which had been a final straw? We sometimes fail to appreciate, or wilfully ignore, that fighters against our Imperial rule in countries around the Empire didn’t fall into line when Britain was at war. That was certainly true in Ireland during the First World War and was also true in India during WW2. Since independence in 1947, Indian veterans who fought against Britain have received a government pension and received decorations from the Indian Government. This is not the case for those Indians who fought in Britain’s Indian forces.
So much simpler, surely, to come out and blatantly call him out as a Communist sympathiser and fellow traveller. At the time of these events, the Communist Party of Great Britain had adopted a policy of opposition to the war, in line with Moscow’s demands. This policy was forcefully implemented by Palme-Dutt against the initial opposition of those like Harry Pollitt, the Party’s General Secretary, who couldn’t reconcile the party’s support of the International Brigades, fighting Fascism in Spain, including against Hitler and Mussolini’s troops and which had seen many of the Party’s finest activists killed, with an abandonment of the continuation of that same fight in the guise of WW2.
The British Party’s policy only changed when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.
Written by Mike Arnott
Sources:
Marika Sherwood, 'Krishna Menon, Parliamentary Labour Candidate for Dundee 1939-1940', Annual Journal of the Scottish Labour History Society. vol.42, 2007.
Dr Tony Cox, Empire, Industry and Class, The Imperial Nexus of Jute 1840-1940. Routledge 2013.
Dundee Courier, various issues
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