The 'differences' cropped up in the very first meet of the Baam-panthis (Lefists).
The first conference was convened in Kanpur (then called Cawnpore) by a man called Satyabhakta.
He is said to have argued for a 'national communism' and against subordination. He was "outvoted" by the gatherings of around 500 people - mostly industrial workers.
Even Satyabhakta was forced to leave the venue in protest. It was at this conference that the name and the organisation Communist Party of India was established.
The date was 26th December 1925. It was a four-day meet between Dec 25 and Dec 2028, 1925.
1920 : A Collector's snap :::: M N Roy (centre, black tie and jacket) with Vladimir Lenin (tenth from the left), Maxim Gorky (behind Lenin), and other delegates to the Second Congress of the Communist International at the Uritsky Palace in Petrograd.
Key historical reference :
Arguably; the Indian communist movement itself was strongly inspired by the October Revolution (1917) – a glorious episode in history that bore fruits not just in the struggle against the Tsarist Empire, but across all oppressed nations.
A set of Indian revolutionaries who wanted to overthrow British colonial rule in India reached Tashkent, in what was then the Soviet Union, from various parts of the world. Assisted by MN Roy – an Indian revolutionary who was a founder of the Mexican Communist Party and who was a member of the executive committee of the Communist International – they formed the Communist Party of India on 17 October 1920.
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Crucially important to note -- Karl Marx, a German philosopher settled in England, prepared a manifesto for Communist parties.
Marx anticipated that the capitalist system, with its headquarters in Europe, was bound to collapse under the weight of its own inner contradictions. This would be followed by a superior socialist system.
Until the 1940s, communist works in India were primarily those of western and Soviet Marxist thinkers.
Texts of Chinese communists were less circulated in India, in large part because Mao's works were generally available in English but not Bengali or Telugu. The Chinese texts of particular interest to Indian communists included 'On Contradiction, On New Democracy', and Liu Shaoqi's 'How to be a Good Communist'.
Between 1921 and 1924 there were three conspiracy trials against the communist movement; First Peshawar Conspiracy Case, Meerut Conspiracy Case and the Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy Case.
In the first three cases, Russian-trained muhajir communists were put on trial. However, the Cawnpore trial had more political impact.
On 17 March 1923, Shripad Amrit Dange, M.N. Roy, Muzaffar Ahmed, Nalini Gupta, Shaukat Usmani, Singaravelu Chettiar, Ghulam Hussain and R.C. Sharma were charged, in Cawnpore (now spelt Kanpur) Bolshevik Conspiracy case.
The specific pip charge was that they as communists were seeking "to deprive the King Emperor of his sovereignty of British India, by complete separation of India from Britain by a violent revolution."
Pages of newspapers daily splashed sensational communist plans and people for the first time learned, on such a large scale, about communism and its doctrines and the aims of the Communist International in India.
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In 2025 -- one can give the Indian communists some advice -- The double standards of communists, who preach secularism but practice communal politics often have been the reason for their destruction.
They may term it pragmatic politics but it goes without stating that the erstwhile champions of the working class, the peasants and the poor have generally lost track ... some of it willfully.
It is argued and rather claimed that with the emergence of communists in the anti-colonial struggle, the Indian National Congress, which was leading the 'national movement', was forced to adopt a stronger stance against British rule.
This was a departure from the mild resistance the Congress had put up until then.
In the Ahmedabad session of the Indian National Congress in 1921, two communists – Maulana Hasrat Mohani and Swami Kumaranand – moved a resolution demanding complete independence from British rule.
The resolution was rejected but taken seriously and this marked a neo-chapter -- showing that communist ideas had begun to make an impact on the anti-imperialist struggle.
ends
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