Communist Party of India

The period of the Civil Disobedience Movement saw the emergence of several other political trends, of which the most important and prominent was the Communist movement.

The Russian Revolution in 1917 saw the spread of Marxist and Communist ideas in India. The leaders who were influenced by these ideas believed that the political struggle against the British should be accompanied with social justice. Some of the important leaders of this movement were S R Dange, Muzaffar Ahmed, Shaukat Usmani and Naini Gupta.

Having seen the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the formation of the Communist International, M. N. Roy was the first to form the Communist Party of India, outside India, in Tashkent in 1920.

R. Dange started to publish an English Weekly ;The Socialist’ which propagated Marxist and the socialist ideas. In December 1925, a conference was organized by the Communist leaders at Kanpur, where the Communist Party of India (CPI) was formed.

In 1929, in the famous Meerut Conspiracy case, 31 leading communist leaders were arrested and tried by the British government. In 1934, the government banned the Communist Party of India.

There were also growth of communist ideas within the Congress too. Leaders like Nehru and Subhash Bose were leaned to the socialist ideas.

After independence, the Communist Party of India formed the first elected government in the world, in Kerala and E. M. S. Namodripad was elected Chief Minister.