Communist Party of India (Marxist)
인도 공산당(마르크스주의)
A Marxist–Leninist party in India that split from the Communist Party of India in 1964. It is the largest communist party in India in membership and seats. The Left Front government it led in West Bengal for 34 years, from 1977 to 2011, was the longest-serving democratically elected communist-led government in the world.
In depth
The split grew out of disputes over the assessment of Indian society and the party programme. The right wing, which followed the Soviet line, saw the Indian bourgeoisie as progressive and called for a national democratic revolution; the left wing saw it as reactionary and called for a people's democratic revolution. The Russian-language source writes that the 1962 Sino-Indian border conflict, coming on top of the Sino-Soviet split, upset the balance between the pro-Chinese and pro-Soviet wings. The left was branded pro-Chinese, and hundreds of its leaders were jailed.
At a CPI National Council meeting on 11 April 1964, 32 members walked out; after a convention in Tenali in July they held a separate Seventh Party Congress in Calcutta from 31 October to 7 November, while the CPI held its congress in Bombay. The 422 delegates in Calcutta claimed to represent 104,421 members, 60% of the total, and elected Puchalapalli Sundarayya general secretary. The party was first called the "Left Communist Party" or "Communist Party of India (Left)" and adopted its present name for the 1965 Kerala election.
In 1967 hard-line district leaders such as Charu Majumdar led a peasant uprising in Naxalbari, West Bengal; the Chinese Communist Party hailed it, and relations between the two parties broke off. The West Bengal government, of which the party was a major partner, violently repressed the movement, and Majumdar's group left to found the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) in 1969. During Indira Gandhi's Emergency of 1975–1977 the party was one of the main opposition forces.
In 1977 the Left Front led by Jyoti Basu won the West Bengal election and went on to win seven consecutive elections until 2011; Basu was chief minister for 23 years. In Kerala, from 1980 the party-led Left Democratic Front alternated in power with the Congress-led United Democratic Front, and in Tripura the Left Front governed without interruption from 1993 to 2018. In the 2004 general election the party became the third-largest in parliament.