MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 84 of 100

Correct — option (4), 1964. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) was not founded from nothing; it was born out of a split in the Communist Party of India, and every stage of that split falls inside the single year 1964. The immediate occasion was a document. Four letters were unearthed from the National Archives of India that year which appeared to show that S. A. Dange, the party's dominant figure, had written to the British authorities in the 1920s in apologetic terms seeking his release. The group on the left of the party demanded an inquiry; the National Council, led by Dange, rejected the demand and called the letters a forgery. On 11 April 1964, at a meeting of the National Council, thirty-two of its members walked out, accusing the leadership of reformism and of undue alignment with the Congress. Those thirty-two convened at Tenali in Andhra Pradesh from 7 to 11 July 1964 and resolved to hold the party's Seventh Congress themselves; it met at Calcutta later the same year and closed on 7 November 1964, which the CPI(M) takes as its founding date. The leaders who came out included A. K. Gopalan, M. Basavapunniah, P. Sundarayya and Harkishan Singh Surjeet on the left of the group, and E. M. S. Namboodiripad and Jyoti Basu nearer its centre. Behind the letters lay a much larger quarrel. The Sino-Soviet rift had divided communist parties everywhere over whether to follow Moscow's line of peaceful coexistence or Beijing's, and the Sino-Indian war of 1962 forced Indian communists to take a position on their own government's conflict with a communist state, with leaders on the left detained during and after it. Whether to support a Congress government judged progressive on some questions, or to oppose it as a party of the bourgeoisie, was the practical form the dispute took in India. The exam-relevant fact, however, is the plain one: the CPI(M) dates from 1964, and the answer is option (4).

• (1)1956 — 1956 is where the quarrel began, not where the party did, and that is precisely why it is offered. In February 1956 the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union heard Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin, and the doctrine of peaceful coexistence and of a parliamentary road to socialism which came with it opened the rift between Moscow and Beijing that eventually divided communist parties across the world, the Indian party among them. A candidate who has read that the split 'goes back to 1956' can convert an origin into a founding date without noticing. Keep the two apart: 1956 is the ideological starting point of the Sino-Soviet dispute, 1962 the year the Sino-Indian war made that dispute unavoidable for Indian communists, and 1964 the year the Communist Party of India actually broke in two.
• (2)1986 — By 1986 the CPI(M) was not a new party but an established one in government. It had led the Left Front in West Bengal since 1977 under Jyoti Basu and had held office in Kerala and Tripura, and the fights of the 1960s were two decades behind it. Nothing in the party's own history marks 1986 as a foundation. The option works only on a candidate who associates the CPI(M) with the era in which he first became aware of it — its long ascendancy in West Bengal — rather than with the era in which it was formed. This is a general hazard with party-formation questions: the year a party became prominent and the year it was founded are usually decades apart, and the paper asks for the second.
• (3)1946 — 1946 belongs to the undivided Communist Party of India, which by then was more than twenty years old — its Indian founding conference having been held at Kanpur in December 1925, after an earlier emigre group formed at Tashkent in 1920. The year is memorable in communist history for other reasons entirely: the Royal Indian Navy mutiny of February 1946, the Tebhaga movement of the sharecroppers in Bengal, and the beginning of the Telangana armed struggle against the Nizam's rule, a campaign whose later abandonment became one of the internal grievances that fed the 1964 split. So 1946 is a year in which the CPI was active and the CPI(M) did not exist. Answering it confuses the parent party with the party that broke away from it eighteen years later.

Indian communism has one party until 1964 and several after it. The Communist Party of India traces itself to an emigre group formed at Tashkent in 1920 and to the conference at Kanpur in December 1925 at which the party was organised on Indian soil; it worked through the trade unions and the peasant movement, was banned and legalised more than once under British rule, and after independence swung between insurrection and parliamentary participation — the Telangana armed struggle of 1946 to 1951 at one extreme and, at the other, the ministry formed in Kerala in 1957 under E. M. S. Namboodiripad, which was dismissed by the Centre in 1959. Two pressures then pulled the party apart. Internationally, the Sino-Soviet rift after 1956 forced a choice between the Soviet line of peaceful coexistence and the Chinese critique of it. Domestically, the Sino-Indian war of 1962 forced Indian communists to declare themselves on a war with a communist power, and the question of whether the Congress government was to be supported as progressive or opposed as bourgeois became unavoidable. The break came on 11 April 1964 with the walkout of thirty-two National Council members, and the new party was constituted at its Seventh Congress in Calcutta, closing on 7 November 1964. The fragmentation did not stop there: a further split in 1967, growing out of the peasant uprising at Naxalbari in Bengal, produced the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) in 1969 and the Naxalite movement that took its name from that village.

Party formation dates are standard MPSC material, and the Commission draws them from the whole century — the Indian National Congress in 1885, the Muslim League in 1906, the Ghadar Party in 1913, the Communist Party of India in the 1920s, the Congress Socialist Party in 1934, the Forward Bloc in 1939, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1951, the Swatantra Party in 1959, the CPI(M) in 1964, and Maharashtra's own Shiv Sena in 1966 and Peasants and Workers Party in 1948. Questions of this shape reward a single chronological list far more than any amount of reading about ideology. There is also a specific Maharashtra reason to know the communist story well: Bombay's textile mills were one of the movement's earliest strongholds, and S. A. Dange, the man at the centre of the 1964 quarrel, was a Maharashtrian trade unionist who had been prosecuted in the conspiracy cases of the 1920s and 1930s and who led the workers' organisations in the mill districts of the city. The Commission's history and politics questions frequently connect a national event to a Maharashtra figure in exactly this way, so the two lists — national party foundations and Maharashtra's political figures — are best learnt side by side.

• The Communist Party of India (Marxist) was founded in 1964; the party dates its birth to 7 November 1964, the closing day of the Seventh Congress held at Calcutta.
• The break came on 11 April 1964, when thirty-two members walked out of a meeting of the CPI National Council, accusing the leadership of reformism and of undue alignment with the Congress; they met in convention at Tenali in Andhra Pradesh from 7 to 11 July 1964 and resolved to hold the Seventh Congress themselves.
• The immediate trigger was the publication of four letters found in the National Archives of India, said to show S. A. Dange writing to the British authorities in the 1920s to seek his release; the National Council rejected an inquiry and called them a forgery.
• The deeper causes were the Sino-Soviet rift that followed 1956 and the Sino-Indian war of 1962, which forced Indian communists to take a position on a war with a communist state and on the character of the Congress government.
• The undivided Communist Party of India is much older — an emigre group at Tashkent in 1920 and the Kanpur conference of December 1925 — and a further split after the Naxalbari uprising of 1967 produced the CPI (Marxist-Leninist) in 1969.

• Answering a question about the CPI(M) with a date from the history of the undivided CPI — 1920 for Tashkent or 1925 for Kanpur — because the names are so similar
• Treating 1956 as the year of the split. It is the year the Sino-Soviet dispute began, which is the background to the split and not the split itself
• Dating a party from the year it first came to power rather than the year it was founded; the CPI(M)'s long tenure in West Bengal began in 1977 and has nothing to do with its formation
• Merging the 1964 split with the 1967-69 one. The first produced the CPI(M); the second, out of Naxalbari, produced the CPI (Marxist-Leninist)

The Commission examines political parties through dates, founders and splits, and almost never through doctrine. Expect the year of formation, the name of the founder or the leading figure, the place where the founding conference met, and the parent party in the case of a breakaway. A second shape pairs a party with a movement or an episode — the CPI with the Telangana struggle, the CPI(M) with the Left Front in West Bengal, the CPI(ML) with Naxalbari — and a third asks which of several parties existed before or after a given date, which is a chronology question wearing different clothes. All three are answered from one table of party names, years and founders, extended for MPSC with a Maharashtra column, because the State's own parties and the State-level careers of national figures are examined just as often as the national story.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Communist Party of India (Marxist) came into existence as a result of which of the following events ?

  • (a)The Naxalbari uprising of 1967
  • (b)The walkout of thirty-two members from the CPI National Council in April 1964
  • (c)The dismissal of the Kerala ministry in 1959
  • (d)The Kanpur conference of 1925

  Answer(b) The walkout of thirty-two members from the CPI National Council in April 1964. Those members left the meeting on 11 April 1964, met in convention at Tenali in July and constituted the new party at the Seventh Congress in Calcutta, which closed on 7 November 1964. The Naxalbari uprising of 1967 led instead to the CPI (Marxist-Leninist) in 1969; the Kerala ministry dismissed in 1959 belonged to the undivided CPI; and the Kanpur conference of 1925 is where the parent party itself was organised in India.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following pairs is correctly matched ?

  • (a)Communist Party of India (Marxist) — 1969
  • (b)Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) — 1964
  • (c)Communist Party of India (Marxist) — 1964
  • (d)Communist Party of India — 1964

  Answer(c) Communist Party of India (Marxist) — 1964. The CPI(M) was formed in 1964 out of the split in the CPI, and dates its founding to 7 November of that year. The CPI (Marxist-Leninist) is the later breakaway, formed in 1969 after the Naxalbari uprising of 1967, so options (a) and (b) simply exchange the two dates; and the undivided Communist Party of India is far older, being organised at Tashkent in 1920 and at the Kanpur conference of December 1925.