Half a century after the formation of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), the curtains are descending on what the comrades once saw as the beginning of a Leftist transformation of India. In the years soon after the 1964 split in the undivided Communist Party led to the CPI-M’s birth, a senior leader of the Marxists, M Basavapunniah, noted the Congress’ decline and said, “We will not feel happy if this party goes down without the emergence of a viable democratic alternative.”

Communist Party of India Marxist (CPIM) General Secretary Prakash Karat delivers his address during a mass rally organised by the CPIM in Kolkata on February 9, 2014. PIC/AFP

According to him, “Such a situation will help imperialist and regressive forces to dismember the country. Our concern for the Congress is because it affects our future. We want to take over a united and not a fragmented India.” This overweening confidence stemmed from the belief, as spelt out by a CPI-M central committee document, that “Marxism-Leninism is an inexhaustible spring that can nourish socialism's new thrust forward.”

One reason, however, why the “thrust” never materialised was that the CPI-M itself fell apart when the extremists in its ranks, the Naxalites (as Maoists were known then), left and formed their own outfit in 1969. The CPI-M ruefully noted how “a section of party leaders and cadres were carried away by the Left adventurist point of view advocated by the Communist Party of China. The two successive splits (in 1964 and 1969) sapped the strength of our party.”