Harpal Brar was born on 5 October 1939 and is an Indian communist politician, writer and businessman, based in the United Kingdom.
18 Facts About Harpal Brar
2.
Harpal Brar is the founder and former chairman of the Communist Party of Great Britain, a role from which he stood down in 2018.
3.
Brar owns buildings in West London which he uses for CPGB-ML party activity, and he part-owns an internet shop called "Madeleine Trehearne and Harpal Brar" which sells shawls.
4.
Harpal Brar is the editor of a left-wing political newspaper Lalkar, the former journal of the Indian Workers' Association.
5.
Harpal Brar has written multiple books on subjects such as communism, Indian republicanism, imperialism, anti-Zionism, anti-colonialism, and the British General Strike.
6.
Harpal Brar is a co-founder of the Hands off China Campaign.
7.
Harpal Brar joined the Maoist Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist League but soon left to become a founder member of a small group, the Association of Communist Workers, as well as being a member of the Association of Indian Communists.
8.
Harpal Brar was the parliamentary candidate in Ealing Southall in 2001, coming eighth with 921 votes.
9.
From this, in July 2004, the Communist Party of Great Britain was formed, and Harpal Brar was its chairman.
10.
At the eighth congress of the CPGB-ML in September 2018, Harpal Brar announced that he would step down as chairman of the party, to be replaced by Ella Rule.
11.
Harpal Brar strongly disagrees with the popular belief that the Indian independence movement was peaceful and pacifist, and was led entirely by Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress.
12.
Harpal Brar accuses Gandhi and Congress of supporting British imperialism, describing the latter as "the most compromising, cowardly and obscurantist representatives of the India bourgeoisie".
13.
Harpal Brar defends the governments and leaders of the USSR until the appearance of Khrushchevite revisionism during the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956.
14.
Lalkar, the newspaper edited by Harpal Brar, criticises The British Road to Socialism from its earliest version in 1951 as "un-Marxist" and regards the claim that Joseph Stalin approved it as a "fiction".
15.
Harpal Brar is seen as an admirer of Stalin and has been attacked as an "anachronism" in the Weekly Worker publication of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which Harpal Brar in turn regards as Trotskyite propaganda.
16.
Harpal Brar has chaired and is an active member of the Stalin Society, along with his daughter Joti Brar.
17.
Harpal Brar continues to publish the journal, but the IWA cut its ties with the paper in 1992, when members of the executive committee with affiliations to the Communist Party of India objected to Brar's publishing of an article that was mildly critical of the adoption of market socialism in China.
18.
Since 1992, Harpal Brar has self-published fourteen books on various aspects of Marxism, imperialism and revisionism.