When was the Communist Party of India Marxist (CPI-M) formed ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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.  (b) 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.  (c) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2021 Q84 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q84 — History PYQ with Answer