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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Reminisces on Professor Vijay Singh, 1947-2026

by Theo Russell

Comrade Vijay Singh had a close and friendly relationship with the New Communist Party for over 45 years.

Vijay became a friend of the NCPB when our former general secretary, Eric Trevett, visited India in conjunction with a visit to Kabul to meet leaders of the Afghan Saur Revolution. During that visit Eric struck up a lasting connection with Vijay. In those days Vijay spent much more time in London than in recent years, and he frequently spoke at NCPB social and political events. He was always extremely courteous and easy to get on with and completely lacking in self-importance. Such modesty stands out even more in India, where self-importance, especially amongst men and especially among political men, is not uncommon.

Vijay spent much of his early life in London, where his father was a senior diplomat at the Indian High Commission. We will always respect him for choosing to return and to live in India for most of his life in order to teach and to further the cause of socialism rather than enjoying a comfortable middle-class life in the UK, perhaps as an academic, an option which would have been easily available to him.

Vijay Singh was for many years a highly respected and popular professor at Delhi University. He also made connections and organisational links with socialist and communist parties and trade unions throughout South Asia. As is well known, his daughter Atishi Marlena went on to become a cabinet minister and then Chief Minister of the Delhi administration in 2023–25, where she put many of Vijay’s principles into practice, representing the Aam Admi (Common Man) Party. In the last 20 years or so Aam Admi has attempted to return to the traditions of the left-socialist wing of the Congress Party in the 1950s and 1960s.

I met Vijay many, many times in London, in Delhi (I have a family connection in India) and in Moscow, which he used to visit regularly to carry out research at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism’s library. This research was mainly focussed on the Stalin period and Stalin’s relations with communist and workers’ parties and socialist governments from around the world. That research revealed many extremely useful examples of Stalin’s advice and guidance to foreign parties, including to the old Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). The relationship between communist parties and the Labour Party has been intensely debated in Britain since Lenin’s day and still is at the present time. Vijay discovered and made public a large amount of extremely valuable historical documents. From our viewpoint, the most important dealt with the roles of Stalin and Nikita Krushchev, and Stalin’s discussions with CPGB leader Harry Pollitt on the British Road to Socialism, the “parliamentary road” and the role of the Labour Party, which was the basis of the CPGB’s electoral policy and its ultimate decline and dis solution.

But Vijay will probably be mostly remembered for creating the journal Revolutionary Democracy (RD), which has continued publication for many decades. RD became an important forum for parties and individuals around the world to debate the issues of the day and published many detailed historical and economic articles. It was distributed internationally and widely respected as an academic journal around the world. At the same time it was a unique avenue for Indian socialists, communists and academics to publish material and engage in debates. The NCP re viewed almost every edition of RD and organised its sale in Britain by post and in leftist bookshops. But RD was more than a discussion magazine, Vijay used it to bring comrades together to educate and develop them as journalists.

Vijay was a controversial and sometimes dogmatic figure. Over the years the NCP had significant political differences with him over the divisions in the world communist movement following the collapse of the USSR and the people’s democracies of eastern Europe – and, above all, over the role of the Communist Party of China and the reforms that followed the end of the Mao era and the stand of the Russian communists in the wake of the counter-revolution that led to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Vijay opposed the Russian intervention in Ukraine. And he distorted the role of Korean communist leader Kim Il Sung, who led the Korean people in the fight to defeat Japanese colonialism and US-led imperialism to build a modern socialist republic in the northern part of the Korean peninsula. But those differences did not affect our friendship or our great respect for him.

I personally shared many cultural interests with Vijay, especially relating to Indian and Soviet art and cinema, and music from around the world. He even developed friendly contacts with the Institute of Russian Realist Art and arranged free entry for me when I was in Moscow.

Vijay was extremely well known and widely respected in India. During the COVID pan demic, despite having significant health problems himself, he used his influence and contacts to assist comrades from many different organisations, including those he had political differences with, in getting access to hospital treatment, which was under huge pressure at the time.

In recent years Vi jay was unable to travel to London, where he still had close family members, but we spoke regularly by phone. I can’t forget that on every occasion he never failed to ask after other NCP comrades by name. Vijay Singh will be deeply missed by members of the NCP as a friend and comrade, and by his many admirers on every continent. His legacy and contribution will be remembered far into the future, above all in India.