COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA

• Attracted by the Soviet Union and its

revolutionary commitment a large number of
India revolutionaries and exiles abroad made
their way there.
• Seven Indians headed by M.N.Roy met at
Tashkent in October 1920and set up the CPI
• In the meanwhile a number of communist groups
and organisations had come into existence in
India after 1920 . Most of these groups met
at Kanpur in Dec 1925 and founded an all India
organisation under the name the Communist
Party of India [CPI}
•The main form of political work of the CPI in its
early days involved the creation of peasants’ and
workers’parties. Some of the them were:
•Labour Swaraj Party of the INC [ Bengal]
•Congress Labour Party [ Bombay]
•Kirti Kisan Party [ Punjab ]
•Labour Kisan Party of Hindustan [ Madras ] The CPI
called upon all it members to enroll themselves in the
Congress to form a strong left wing in an effort to
transform the Congress into a radical mass
organisation.

•By 1928 all these provincial organisations had been

renamed the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party[WPP] and
knit into an all India Party which would of course work
• Within a short time the WPP grew within the Congress and
also made rapid progress the trade union front and the
working class struggles during .
• Unfortunately the rapid growth of WPP influence on the
national movement was checked utterly wiped out during 1929
and after two developments
1. Severe government repression.
This began from 1922 - 24 . Communists trying to enter India
from the Soviet Union had been tried in a series of conspiracy
cases at Peshawar [1922-33] and in the Kanpur Bolshevite
Conspiracy case in 1924.By 1929 the government was getting
deeply worried and decided to strike hard. In March 1929 it
arrested 32 communist activists including British Communist
Phillip Spratt, Ben Bradley and Lester Hutchinson - who had
come to India to help the Trade Union movement.. The 32
arrested were put on trial in Meerat.
- though this caused suffering to the Communist
but the suffering of the Communist in these
trials brought the sympathy of nationalist leaders.
In the Meerat trial the defense of the prisoners
were to be taken up by nationalists like Jawaharlal
Nehru, M.A.Ansari and M.C.Chagla. Gandhi visited
the prisoners in jail in 1929 and expressed
solidarity.

Speeches were made, articles were written in

newspapers in defense of the prisoners and as a
result for the first time lakhs of people were
exposed to the Communist ideas.
2. However, more than the repression by the
government a greater blow was inflicted by the
communist themselves. Guided by the resolution of the
Sixth Congress of the Communist International, the
communists broke their connection with the National
Congress and declared it to be a class party of the
bourgeois .
Even Congress Left leaders like Bose and Nehru were
described as agents of the bourgeois within the national
movement. In 1931, the Gandhi Irwin Pact was
described as proof of the Congress betrayal of
nationalism . The result was the Communists’ political
position to isolate themselves from the national
movement at the very moment when it was gearing up
for the massive growth in the influence of the left.
Also the Communist Party split into several splinter
groups.
Nevertheless the Communist movement was saved from
disaster:
- many of the Communists had refused to stand apart
from the CDM.
- Many young people were attracted to socialism. Marxism
and the Soviet Union had joined the CPI after 1934.
- the CPI was reorganised under the leadership of
P.Joshi.
- the Seventh Congress of the Communist International
due to the threat of facism advocated the formation of a
united front with socialist countries and with bourgeois led
nationalist movements led in colonial countries.
The Communist Party now began to call upon all its
members to join the Congress. In it accepted the
Congress as the central mass organisation.
The CPI faced difficulties again during the
Second World War. When the war broke out
the Indian Communists declared it imperialist
according to the advice of the Communist
leader. However when in June 1941 Hitler
attacked the Soviet Union the communists in
India staged a turn about and announced full
support for the allied forces. The Communists
extended all possible support to the British
and demonstrated very clearly that the CPI’s
policy decisions were dictated by outside and
international wire-pullers.
During the period of transfer of powers the
CPI’s posture was pro-Muslim. They worked
towards a division of India into a number of
sovereign states, In 1942 CPI adopted a
resolution declaring India to be multinational
state and identifying as many as 16 Indian
‘nations’. In 1946 they put forward before
the Cabinet Mission a plan for division of India
into 17 separate sovereign states on the model
of the Balkans in the USSR.
By 1947 the CPI lost whatever place it had in
Indian politics and the CPI was a complete
disarray.
However Marxist Leninist philosophy
show of extra - national loyalties, had
some relevance to independent India.
The gap between the rich and the poor
and the underdeveloped condition of the
Indian economy provided a favourable
climate in which Marxism Socialism could
take root and serve as a beacon light
for downtrodden masses.