Fifty years back, on April 22, 1969, on the centenary of the birth of Lenin, Communist Revolutionaries of India who came out of the CPI(M) formed revolutionary Communist Party CPI(ML). The formation of CPI(ML) was announced in a Rally held on 1st of May, 1969. Formation of CPI(ML) was the culmination of the struggle which has been going on in the communist movement in India, first in CPI and then in CPM. Breaking from revisionism and neo-revisionism, communist revolutionaries of India formed their Party based on Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. They adopted a programme of New Democratic Revolution and path of Protracted People’s War. While struggle waged by Communist Party of China under the leadership of Com. Mao did provide the encouragement, it was the struggle of communist revolutionaries in India against Revisionism and Neo-revisionism and particularly their parliamentary path which led to their rupture from the anti-Marxist leadership of first CPI and then CPM.
Communist Revolutionaries who formed CPI(ML) had come out of a Party i.e. CPI(M). It was not a formation of a communist Party for the first time but reorganization of the communist movement in the country. It was the Naxalbari armed peasant struggle which had galvanized the revolutionary communists inside the CPI(M) to revolt against the neo-revisionist leadership of that Party. They formed All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries which united overwhelming majority of the communist revolutionaries from one end of India to another. Then AICCCR decided to form the Party. It said, “The growing unity within the revolutionary ranks despite the obstacles created by the reactionaries of all sorts proves that we have overcome the main impediment to the formation of a revolutionary party in India.”
Formation of the Party had to overcome some idealist deviations on the question of Party formation. Several organizations and individuals even now keep on criticizing CPI(ML) formation from those idealist positions. These positions saw no role for the Party in developing revolutionary struggles i.e. these could be developed without Party, no role for the Party in developing correct line for the revolution in India for that was the condition precedent for the formation of the Party. Essentially their positions were ‘idealist fantasy’ and worse these were advocacy of Party less revolution. For if the Party had to have no role either in developing a correct line for the Indian revolution or in developing revolutionary struggles in the country, for according to some both are to be developed prior to its formation, what on earth would be the need to have a revolutionary Party. In essence, these diehard subjective idealists denied the struggle inside the Party for a correct line or in other words refused to recognize the two line struggle inside the Communist Party. CPI(ML) had to overcome these anti-dialectical theories which glorified the ‘historical inevitability of groups’ and the trash of ‘pure party from below’ despite teachings of great teachers Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. That such trash is still poured out only shows that idealism has lives more numerous than fabled nine feline lives and is amply nourished by the petty-bourgeois milieu of our country.
Last fifty years have also been years of two line struggle inside CPI(ML) reflecting the class struggle going on in society and the complexities of the revolutionary struggles in India. In fact, this two line continued as earlier and it could not have been otherwise. The struggle against revisionism, that subversion of revolutionary Marxism to subordinate the struggle of the working class and other revolutionary sections of society to the interests of ruling classes, has continued unabated and it could not have been otherwise. While such struggle has been inevitable and continues to be so, the divisions in the CPI(ML) and the revolutionary movement were not inevitable and are a failure of the communist revolutionaries of India. It has brought up the task of uniting the communist revolutionaries of the country into a single Party having common ideological basis and unity on the basic points of the programme, tactical line and organizational principles. Basis for such a unity exists in India. But achieving it needs both a correct approach towards unification of communist revolutionary forces as well as growth of the revolutionary movement under the leadership of the forces having such a correct approach.
On this occasion of fifty years of CPI(ML) formation we should rededicate ourselves to the task of developing revolutionary struggles to take New Democratic Revolution to victory, should revigorate our struggles against all that is decadent and reactionary in society. Even while focusing on the immediate tasks, we should wage all round struggle against reactionaries and revisionists. CPI(ML) was formed to take forward revolutionary struggle breaking the shackles imposed by parliamentary cretinism; to overthrow this anti-people system maintained by the armed might of the state of the ruling classes through revolutionary violence.