24 SOCIAL SCIENTIST the congress adopt any specific resolution or thesis on India. Instead, it formulated abroad guideline on the "colonial question" in the form of a manifesto, which was probably drafted by Trotsky:3 "The Comintern considers it its obligatory task to establish a permanent and close bond between the struggle of the proletariat in the imperialist countries and the national liberation movement of the oppressed peoples in the Colonies and Semi-colonies and to support the struggle of the oppressed people to facilitate the final breakdown of the imperialist world system."4 In the words of the manifesto, "emancipation of the colonies is possible only in con-juction with the emancipation of the metropolitan working class. The workers and peasants not only of Annam, Algiers and Bengal, but also of Persia and Armenia, will gain their opportunity of independent existence only when the workers of England and France have overthrown Lloyd George and Clemenceau and taken state power into their own hands."5 Indian Situation Analysed At this point of time the Comintern probably hesitated to go beyond the above generalization. It had not yet had sufficient opportunity to study the specificities of colonial problems. Its contact with the colonial world in general and India in particular was minimal. But it was sufficiently aware of the significance of the anti-imperialist movement that was going on in India during this period. Besides, there were no representatives from India who could have supplied first-hand information about the nature,-character and perspective of the Indian freedom movement or of the Indian National Congress which was leading it under Gandhi^s guidance. It is true that some Indian revolutionaries like Maulana Barakatullah, Raja Mahendra Pratap and Maulana Obeidullah Sindhi were already in the Soviet Union. But politically, they were not the type who could help the Comintern in this matter-The Indian question therefore remained pending till the arrival of M N Roy in Berlin (December 1919). In one of his earliest writings on India (jointly with Abani Mukherjee and his wife Evelyn Roy), ^An Indian Communist Manifesto" (February/March 1920), Roy tried to analyse the Indian situation from a Marxist point of view (probably the first serious attempt ever made). In this manifesto, Roy, in the light of his own studies and experience, tried to elaborate the Comintern's views as expressed in its first congress. In so doing, he seemed to have slipped into an illusionary world and painted a distorted picture of the Indian reality. According to his analysis, "today there are