All India Kisan Sabha

The Kisan Sabha movement started in Bihar under the leadership of Sahajanand Saraswati who had formed in 1929 the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha (BPKS) to mobilise peasant grievances against the zamindari attacks on their occupancy rights and thus sparking the farmers' movements in India.^[3][4]

Gradually the peasant movement intensified and spread across the rest of India. All of those radical developments on the peasant front culminated in the formation of the All India Kisan Sabha at the Lucknow session of the Indian National Congress in April 1936, with Swami Sahajanand Saraswati elected as its first president.^[5] The other prominent members were N.G. Ranga, Ram Manohar Lohia, Jayaprakash Narayan, Acharya Narendra Dev and Bankim Mukerji. It involved prominent leaders like E.M.S. Namboodiripad, Indulal Yagnik, Sohan Singh Bhakna, Z.A. Ahmed, Pandit Karyanand Sharma, Pandit Yamuna Karjee, Pandit Yadunandan (Jadunandan) Sharma, Rahul Sankrityayan, P. Sundarayya, Yogendra Sharma and Bankim Mukherjee. The Kisan Manifesto, released in August 1936, demanded the abolition of the zamindari system and the cancellation of rural debts. In October 1937, it adopted the red flag as its banner.^[6] Soon, its leaders became increasingly distant with Congress and repeatedly came in confrontation with Congress governments in Bihar and in United Province.

In subsequent years, the movement was increasingly dominated by Socialists and Communists as it moved away from the Congress. By the 1938 Haripura session of the Congress, under the presidency of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, the rift became evident^[6] and by May 1942, the Communist Party of India, which was finally legalised by the government in July 1942,^[7] had taken over All India Kisan Sabha all across India, including Bengal where its membership grew considerably.^[8] It took on the Communist Party's line of people's war and stayed away from the Quit India Movement, which started in August 1942, and so lost its popular base. Many of its members defied party orders and joined the movement. Prominent members like N. G. Ranga, Indulal Yagnik and Swami Sahajananda soon left the organisation, which increasingly found it difficult to approach the peasants with its watered-down pro-British and pro-war approach. That made increase its nationalist agenda, much to the dismay of the British Raj.^[9]