Observations on the Indian Communist Party Split

Abstract

( N APRIL II, I964, 32 of the 65 members attending a session of the Na' J tional Council of the Communist Party of India (CPI) in New Delhi walked out of the meeting. This group proceeded to establish its own Left organisation which was formalised at a convention held at Tenali in July and went on to hold a National Congress in October in the name of the whole Party. In the light of the great ideological schism in the Communist bloc, which had already been reflected in the Communist parties of a number of countries outside the bloc, a split in the CPI caused no particular surprise. It would be unwise, however, to dismiss this division as a simple alignment of the Party into a pro-Russian and a pro-Chinese faction. The profounder reasons for this cleavage are peculiar to the Indian Party, which compared to other Communist parties is in many respects atypical. The Sino-Soviet rift itself, which has been the determining factor in most other split Parties, was overshadowed by the Sino-Indian border episodes, which established quite different norms for the CPI. Whereas most split Parties begin the history of their factional divergence with the Conference of 8i Parties in Moscow in i960, with perhaps an oblique reference or two to Tito's defection from the bloc in I948, the contending ideologists in the CPI take their dispute back to the origins of their Party. This is in itself revealing, not only because it shows that the root causes antedate the Sino-Soviet rift, but because it indicates the indecision and lack of integrated national platforms that have plagued the CPI, and further because both factions seem anxious to demonstrate the Indian-ness of their origins. In these presentations the colonial beginnings of the CPI in the I920'S when it operated as a dependency of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) are glossed over and no mention is made of the considerable difficulty which the British Party and the Comintern organisers had in recruiting Indian anti-colonialists. One of the principal theorists of the Right faction, Dr. Gangadhar Adhikari, has gone into the history of the Party in some detail.' From this