P.C. Joshi to Sir Reginald Maxwell — "On the Legality of the Communist Party" (opening page of the memorandum)

                                        Bombay
                                        15.3.43

                On the Legality of the Communist Party

Dear Sir Reginald,

        I am sorry for not being able to send you this Memo and
the enclosures earlier as I had promised. After I returned and asked for
reports from the Provinces, the situation has been rapidly worsening and
we have been busy coping with it in practice.

        We have recently held a meeting of our Central Committee
along with the Secretaries of all Provincial Committees and I am writing
to you after careful consideration.

OUR LEGALITY

        Full legality to our Party was never restored and to-day our legality
has been reduced to a formality.

        A large number of our comrades were never released, especially in the
Punjab, U.P., and the Southern Provinces. During the last six months a very
large number of our comrades have been arrested carrying out the policy of
the Party.

        We are a legal Party but we are not allowed to carry our policy to the
people. Only in a few places are we allowed to hold meetings.

        After legality we were allowed to start our journals but soon after
August 9 all our journals have been repeatedly warned, security demanded
from our Punjabi and Oriya organs. We understand that quite a number of
Provincial Governments want the "People's War" closed down. The latest
from U.P. is that the C.I.D. in U.P. stops at the Post offices themselves
the individual copies sent to the regular subscribers.

GOVERNMENT ATTITUDE TOWARDS US

        How do we ourselves understand Government policy and practice towards
us?

        Taking a review of the last 6 months, we don't think the Central and
Provincial Governments had achieved a unified and agreed understanding on
what attitude to adopt towards us. The Central Government was convinced
about our being a political force in the country and our anti-fascist bona-
fides and legalised us. The implementing of the policy was left to the
Provinces (e.g. releases, permission for meetings, etc). The Provincial
Governments, for taking concrete steps, asked for reports from local auth-
orities, i.e. the local C.I.D. and to them the legalisation of the Communist
Party was the strangest and a calamitous thing to have happened. They
prevented the application of the policy even as recommended by the Central
Government through their reports and circumvented it in practice.

        After August 9, the entire initiative has been left to the local auth-
orities and we have suffered under them as most of the Indian patriots have.

        We are a centralised Party but the Government to-day is a decentralised
machine. The lower down one goes in the Government machine, the more of
the spirit of the old regime prevails.

        We know that a large number of Government circles think we have
"changed front "after August 9." According to us they never understood
our policy, i.e. they understood our policy with their digits of thought
and not ours. They are those whose general outlook can be characterised
as "You are either with us or [struck-over word] against us", i.e. they expected us to
become a loyalist organisation and cease being a patriotic party if we
took our anti-Fascism seriously. Before August 9 they wanted us to join