Background
Joshi was born on 14 April 1907, in a Kumaoni Hindu family of Almora,in Uttarakhand. His father Harinandan Joshi was a teacher.
Joshi was born on 14 April 1907, in a Kumaoni Hindu family of Almora,in Uttarakhand. His father Harinandan Joshi was a teacher.
He was the first general secretary of the Communist Party of India from 1935-1947. In 1928, he passed his Master of Arts examination from the Allahabad University. Soon, he became the General secretary of the Workers and Peasants Party of Uttar Pradesh, formed at Meerut in October 1928.
In 1929, at the age of 22, the British Government arrested him as one of the suspects of the Meerut Conspiracy Case.
The other early communist leaders who were arrested along with him included Shaukat Usmani, Muzaffar Ahmed, South America Dange and G.V. Ghate. Joshi was given six years of transportation to the penal settlement of Andaman Islands.Considering his age, the punishment was later reduced to three.
After his release in 1933, Joshi worked towards bringing a number of groups under the banner of the Communist Party of India (Consumer price index). In 1934 the Consumer price index was admitted to the Third International or Communist International.
After the sudden arrest of Somnath Lahiri, then Secretary of Consumer price index, during end-1935, Joshi became the new General Secretary.
He thus became the first general secretary of Communist Party of India, for a period from 1935 to 1947. At that time the left movement was steadily growing and the British government banned communist activities from 1934 to 1938. The Raj re-banned the Consumer price index in 1939, for its initial anti-War stance.
In the post-freedom period, the Communist Party of India, after the second congress in Calcutta (new spelling: Kolkata) adopted a path of taking up arms.
Joshi was advocating unity with Indian National Congress under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru. He was severely criticized in the Calcutta congress of the Consumer price index in 1948 and was removed from the general secretaryship.
Subsequently, he was suspended from the Party on 27 January 1949, expelled in December 1949 and readmitted to the Party on 1 June 1951. After the Communist Party of India split, he was with the Consumer price index. Though he explained the policy of the Consumer price index in the 7th congress in 1964, he was never brought in the leadership directly.
In his last days, he kept himself busy in research and publication works in Jawaharlal Nehru University to establish an archive on the Indian communist movement.
In February 1938, when the Communist Party of India started in Bombay its first legal organ, the National Front, Joshi became its editors When, in 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, the Consumer price index proclaimed that the nature of the war has changed to a people"s war against fascism.