Born in Muktsar, Punjab, British India, Brar has lived and worked in Britain since 1962, first as a student, then as a lecturer in law at Harrow College of Higher Education (later merged into the renamed University of Westminster), and later in the textile business. Brar owns buildings in West London which he uses for CPGB-ML party activity, and he part-owns an online shop called "Madeleine Trehearne and Harpal Brar" which sells shawls.
Scargill expelled the entire Yorkshire Regional Committee and five members of the National Executive Committee. From this, in July 2004, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) was formed,[5] and Brar was its chairman.[1]
Adopting positions maintained by Brar and his comrades since the 1960s, the CPGB-ML has been vigorously opposed to all those who work with or in any way endorse the Labour Party since its inception. Its stated aim on formation was to oppose opportunism in the working-class movement, revive the "class against class" programme embodied by the Communist Party of Great Britain during the 1920s, and to work for the establishment of socialism in Britain.[6][7]
The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist–Leninist) was registered with the Electoral Commission in 2008 under the name "Proletarian", which is the title of the bi-monthly newspaper of the CPBG-ML. The party was registered "to prepare for standing in elections".[8]
At the eighth congress of the CPGB-ML in September 2018, Brar announced that he would step down as chairman of the party, to be replaced by Ella Rule.[9]
Views on China
On 19 July 2008, Harpal Brar was one of the people who founded the Hands off China campaign, dedicated to defending the People's Republic of China and to defending "China's sovereignty and territorial integrity" and "the country's just stance on issues of its vital national interest such as Taiwan and Tibet."[10]
Views on India
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. In his book Inquilab Zindabad: India's Liberation Struggle he argues that a violent and bloody class struggle involving the masses took place. He accuses Gandhi and Congress of supporting British imperialism, describing the latter as "the most compromising, cowardly and obscurantist representatives of the India bourgeoisie".[11]
For many years, he was on the executive of the Indian Workers Association (GB) and was the editor of that organisation's journal Lalkar. He 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 (Marxist) objected to Brar's publishing of an article that was mildly critical of the adoption of market socialism in China.[19]
Since 1992, Brar has self-published fourteen books on various aspects of Marxism, imperialism and revisionism. These works are a combination of original material and articles previously published in Lalkar and have been translated and distributed internationally by a number of sympathetic communist parties around the world.
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