Thiruvananthapuram: The centenary of the Communist Party of India went as an unsung event on December 26, 2025.
The day marked 100 years of Indian communism in its organised form, rather than the centenary of the party known as the CPI.
As per the official historiography of the Indian communist movement, the CPI, which refers to the pre-split party, was formed on December 26, 1925, at Kanpur.
While the CPI held a low-key celebration in New Delhi to mark the day, the CPI(M) chose to ignore the occasion, as its leaders hold that the communist movement in India had already started evolving before the Kanpur gathering.
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That the occasion also went unnoticed without inspiring any engaging conversation in the national media only reflects the diminishing space of the communists-led Left in the country’s political landscape.
The initiative for the foundation meeting of the Indian Communist Party came from left-leaning leaders of the Indian National Congress (INC), drawn from different parts of the sub-continent, then under British rule.
The party was committed to the vision of the social and political ideas propounded by Karl Marx. The founders were also inspired by the revolutionary path set by V. I. Lenin, the spearhead of the Russian Revolution, which led to the emergence of the Soviet Union.
Since its launch as a separate political entity, the party started charting its own course, different from the INC, and spread its footprint across the sub-continent.
Still, the founding leaders of the CPI continued to be part of the freedom struggle in one way or the other. However, the party disassociated itself from the Quit India Movement, called by the INC as a final assault on the British colonial regime.
The CPI General Secretary D. Raja, however, overstated the case when he wrote in an edit-page piece that “… (the movement) had profoundly shaped India’s freedom struggle, its vision of the future of the nation and its social and economic vision.”
The deviations of the fledgling party from the central current of the freedom struggle were apparently the result of excessive adulation for the Soviet Communist Party, which under the leadership of Joseph Stalin was then the vanguard of the campaign against the Hitler-led Axis on the eastern front during the Second World War. This subservience, however, cost the party dearly in the subsequent decades.
To cut a long story short, after its formation the CPI formed its units in many parts of the sub-continent and started building a mass base. This owed much to the party’s campaigns against the exploitative socio-economic order sustained by the British imperialist regime.
The party also spearheaded some failed insurgencies, both during and after Independence.
The Ups and Downs of Indian Communism
The Communist Party was pioneered by outstanding leaders, many of them drawn from elite backgrounds, who were selfless and deeply committed to the cause.
After virtually giving up armed revolution in its post-Independence programme, despite initial confusions like the ‘Calcutta Thesis,’ the undivided CPI took to electoral politics in right earnest. In the early decades of Independence, the party had a strong electoral presence in Parliament and state legislatures.
The party made history and grabbed global attention when it won the Assembly election in Kerala in 1956. That was a rare event of a communist party attaining power through the ballot. However, that ministry, led by E. M. S. Namboodiripad, was dismissed after two years by the Congress government at the Centre led by Jawaharlal Nehru.
The dismissal came in the wake of a campaign called the ‘Liberation Struggle,’ launched by anti-communist political and social forces. This campaign eventually paved the way for the emergence of an anti-Left political front in Kerala, shaping the state’s political bipolarity.
In 1964, the CPI split after prolonged internal turbulence over fundamental ideological and tactical questions. A strong faction spearheaded by leaders like P. Sundarayya and B. T. Ranadive led the revolt against what they called the revisionist tendencies fostered by the clique led by S. A. Dange.
The breakaway faction went on to form the CPI(M), which in subsequent years emerged as a stronger party than the CPI and wielded power in West Bengal and Tripura for decades, besides alternately heading ministries in Kerala.
This development also saw the steady decline of the CPI, which chose to align with the Congress for years before returning to the Left fold after the 1975–77 Emergency.
After holding power for three decades in West Bengal and for several years in Tripura, the CPI(M) too started losing ground. The party’s sway became virtually confined to Kerala. The just-concluded local body polls signal that in Kerala too the party is on a slippery slope, after two consecutive tenures in power.
What Went Wrong?
Political historians have cited several reasons for the decline of the communist movement in India. These include a doctrinaire approach to the Marxian paradigm, which made the leadership overlook the socio-economic realities specific to India.
The age-old and complex caste regimentation stood out among them. Indian communist leaders failed abysmally to formulate an India-centric political line and strategies by factoring in caste as an agent of socio-economic exploitation. They myopically leveraged Marxian dialectics, whose emphasis is on class contradiction shaped by control over the means of production.
In contrast, the democratic socialist movement, under visionary leaders like Jayaprakash Narayan and Ram Manohar Lohia, leveraged caste-related injustice to build a sustainable political base by mobilising the backward classes on the plank of social justice.
The advent of the Mandal-Kamandal binary further shrank the space of the communists across vast political geographies.
In its initial years, the CPI was allegedly under the tutelage of the Communist Party of Britain. Later, it was influenced by the Soviet Communist Party. The political cost the party would have to pay for such ideological and material dependence was assertively pointed out by M. N. Roy, who had the opportunity to be part of the Communist International in the heyday of Soviet power.
There are also a host of other reasons, such as the rise of regional parties, opportunistic alliances, factionalism, and the decline of the party-led trade union front in industrial centres like Mumbai.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, followed by the free fall of the eastern socialist bloc, also dented the triumphalism of communism worldwide.
The story of the Indian communist movement would be incomplete without reference to the Naxalite movement. Its trailblazers were influenced by the ultra-revolutionary path trodden by the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong. Naxalism, which spawned a plethora of splinter groups over time, however, eventually became a revolutionary misadventure confined to isolated pockets.
