Celebrating the Centenary

Hindol Nandy

The third decade of the twentieth century witnessed the gradual consolidation of a radical, revolutionary ideology called ‘communism’ in the Indian subcontinent. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, the writings and ideas disseminated by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels began to achieve a certain prominence in the premier political circles of Europe. The exploitative nature of capitalism, the existence of different socio-economic classes in society, the need for the most expropriated class–the proletariat–to organise themselves against the bourgeoisie and overturn the ruling tenets of capitalism into a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’–these were specific political ideations which would go on to find a popular reception throughout the globe not only from a purely theoretical position but also in the realm of actual praxis as well. Thus, theorising and organising have always been the two principal bulwarks of the communist position/philosophy.

Although communist politics professes a critical internationalism, it should never espouse an internationalism which is imitative of the West. Hence, there is a need to historically validate the separate, yet structurally braided histories of the many political movements, which took place in various regions/territories (in many cases, subsumed under the nation-state form) and declared their fealty to the communist ethos.

 The roots of the communist movement in India could be traced back to the early 1920s in Calcutta with the growing import of socialist literature in the colonial city and its subsequent dispersal among the educated colonised. But communism would fail to flourish if theorisation and organisation do not go hand in hand. Therefore, when discussing the beginning of communist politics in India, light must be shed on the history of its organisation. Although the first communist party was formed in October 1920 CE by Indian muhajirs (immigrants/refugees) under the leadership of M N Roy in Tashkent, it was actually a party-in-exile (Chattopadhyay 2011: 124). Moreover, ‘The ICP [Indian Communist Party] could never take off as an organisation. Its intent was serious but it did not mature as a collective and faded after a while’ (Chattopadhyay 2019: 19). In December 1925 CE, Satyabhakta organised the Kanpur Communist Conference which was the formal launching of the communist party in India, and ‘was the first open effort to develop a communist network all over the country’ (Chattopadhyay 2011: 147). Thus, the present year marks the completion of the (formal) centenary of the communist movement in India.

Indian Communism as ‘Pocket Communism’
The most notable political disease that has plagued the communist movement in India is factionalism, leading to the formation of one or many splinter groups. The Communist Party of India (CPI) which was formed in Kanpur in 1925 CE experienced its first split in 1964 CE, dividing the original CPI into the CPI and CPI(M) [The Communist Party of India (Marxist)]. Then again, in 1967 CE, when the peasant uprising in Naxalbari began, severe internal strains within the CPI(M) led to groups/individuals directly defying party directives to join hands with the subalterns protesting against the landed class. This splinter group professing a greater degree of communist radicalism, and known as the ‘Naxalites’, eventually formed their own party, the CPI (M-L) [Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)] in 1969 CE. Hence, within just five years, the unified CPI was fragmented into three separate parties, each attempting to champion their own ‘brand’ of (correct) communism. After the weakening of the Naxalite movement in 1972 CE, the then-three-year-old CPI (M-L) started encountering its own intra-party conflicts/tensions. The Naxalites started getting divided into regional factions, for example–the Dakshin Desh (which was later renamed as the Maoist Communist Centre [MCC]) in West Bengal, the MMG (Money, Man, Gun) , Bhitti, NLDF, Laltara [Nagi Reddy Group] in Bengal and CPI-ML (Party Unity) in Bihar and Jharkhand, the CPI-ML (People’s War) in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh and so on (Pandita: 2011). Although these separate Naxalite/Maoist groups have achievements to boast about, there is no doubt that their activities suffered sequestration and were, in the majority of cases, limited to a regional radius.

Therefore, the history of Indian communism from 1964 CE is also the history of the beginning of ‘pocket communism’ wherein the communist movement in India repeatedly, untiringly and unfailingly started getting increasingly fragmented into innumerable and mutually opposed ideological/territorial pockets. At least in two instances in the history of India where a decision by Indian communists to transcend factional boundaries and work cooperatively proved to be politically fruitful–one is the formation of the Left Front coalition in West Bengal which captured parliamentary power in 1977 CE and reached a historical landmark by retaining parliamentary power for almost three and a half decades. The other instance of communist coordination is the merger of the CPI-ML (People’s War) and the MCC leading to the formation of the CPI (Maoist) in 2004 CE, which offered a stupendous challenge to the Indian ruling elites by organising tribal and other subaltern classes successfully and adopting Mao Zedong’s method of protracted guerilla warfare against class enemies.

Indian communists must do everything in their power to heal from the disease that is ‘pocket communism’. Until one sees the end of ‘pocket communism’ in India, not only will revolutionaries be unable to imagine/envision a full-scale communist revolution in the country but also would be indirectly aiding the Hindu Right, who, since the 1980s have stepped into the vacuum left by the communists to further their sectarian agenda, in the absence of a consolidated politics preaching class struggle.

The Under-theorized Lumpen Proletariat
In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx postulates about a distinct social class known as the lumpen proletariat– ‘Money as gift and money as loan, it was with prospects such as these that he [Napoleon III] hoped to lure the masses. Donations and loans–the financial science of the lumpen proletariat, whether of high degree or low, is restricted to this’ (Marx 1852: 33).

It does not take a social scientist’s analysis to realise that a paramount part of the Indian political culture is still dominated by the presence of the lumpen proletariat. This lumpenised class, known as goondas in popular parlance, form the extra-legal backbone of almost all political parties. Indian communists have seldom thought that in order to strengthen the communist movement, a concrete theory about the lumpen proletariat class is in India holds significance, especially when neo-liberal capital finds itself in the throes of a worldwide economic stagnation at present. According to Piliavsky & Sbriccoli, ‘Columnists and academics alike see in ‘goonda raj’(rule of toughs) a symptom of India’s political and economic infirmities: its broken order of law, moribund and highly politicised bureaucracy, rogue capitalism, collapsed political institutions, mass unemployment, and an electoral process driven by fear and force’ (Piliavsky & Sbriccoli 2016: 372).

Marx, time and again, talked about how capitalism, by the sheer force of systemic necessity, keeps in its economic sidelines a ‘reserve army of labour’. Elsewhere, scholars like Partha Chatterjee opine that, ‘The massive surplus population of the dispossessed that primitive accumulation in contemporary postcolonial countries is producing shows that in the process of its emergence, capital creates its own outside which is not pre-capital but something entirely new. The new dispossessed population is not a reserve army of labour waiting to be absorbed into the industrial labour force: it is entirely redundant to the capitalist growth economy (Chatterjee 2017: 975).

Therefore, the process of lumpenisation is a vicious cycle: first, the new logic of neo-liberal capitalism is driving a huge mass of people towards pauperisation by denying them gainful employment; second, a section from this proto-proletarian, dispossessed mass is recruited by political elites and organised as an extra-legal army of paid labour, or simply put, as an army of lumpenisedgoondas; third, these goondas are ordered, by the free use of a combination of fear and force, to resist the development of any kind of radical/revolutionary activity among the working classes, further stultifying the already weak base of the anti-capitalist counter-hegemony; lastly, the absence of an anti-capitalist counter-hegemonic political force allows neo-liberal capital to grow without resistance, and a greater number of people are turned into paupers than was the case before, hence, completing the vicious cycle.

Conclusion
This short essay is not to instill pessimism and hopelessness in the minds of Indian communists, rather. The objective of this article is quite the opposite. This writer wants to urge the communists of all shades in the country to look back at the last hundred years of historical comradeship with a feeling of both fondness, as well as criticality. ooo

Bibliography
1.    Chatterjee, Partha. Gramsci in India (2017), FondazioneIstituto Gramsci;
2.   Chattopadhyay, Suchetana. An Early Communist (2011), Tulika Books;
–    Towards Communism (2019), Social Scientist, Vol. 47, Nos. 7-8;
3.   Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852),https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/, accessed June 22 2025.
4.   Pandita, Rahul. Hello, Bastar (2022), Penguin Random House India;
5.             Piliavsky, Anastasia &Sbriccoli, Tommaso. The ethics of efficacy in North India’s goonda raj (rule of toughs)[2016], Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 373-391.

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Vol 58, No. 4, Jul 20 - 26, 2025