MEANWHILE, the party had started feeling a desperate need for asserting its presence in the national political scene. In the wake of the failure of the first non-Congress experiment at the Centre and the restoration of the Indira regime, there had begun a national debate on a national political alternative and we decided to launch a mass political organisation to intervene in this ongoing debate from a revolutionary democratic premise.
Serious attempts were made at both bilateral and multilateral levels to seek the cooperation and participation of other communist revolutionary (CR) organisations in building such a forum. A meeting of thirteen CR organisations including almost all the major factions was convened by our party in 1981. That remains the first and last attempt for unity of the movement. At the same time, we embarked upon large-scale interactions with the emerging intermediate forces of non-party mass movement. All these efforts finally culminated in the formation of the Indian People’s Front through a three-day conference from April 24 to 26, 1982, in Delhi.
In December 1982, the party organised its Third Congress in a village in Giridih district of Bihar. This Congress was fairly representative In character and it elected a Central Committee of 17 full and 8 alternative members. The CC re-elected Comrade VM as the General Secretary. After a fierce debate, the Congress gave its green signal to the tactics of participation in elections. However, it reaffirmed the party’s resolve to grasp the peasant resistance struggles as the key link and to keep all our parliamentary activities subordinated to extra-parliamentary mass struggles. The 1985 assembly elections in Bihar were the first polls contested by the party, of course, under the IPF banner.
The formation of IPF opened up new vistas of political initiative and advance before the party. Organising mass rallies and demonstrations in various state capitals on almost all important political issues soon became an integral part of our party practice. From the realm of abstraction the party had taken its first major step into the realm of concrete political action, drawing for the first time the broad masses in political struggles based on the party’s minimum programme. While the communist party’s leadership over the mass political organisation was ensured through the party’s political guidance and by despatching staunch communists to various leadership positions, the MPO facilitated broader interactions with various streams of social and political forces, thereby helping the party in extending its influence and broadening its own social base.
A particular form of united front in the shape of a popular people’s revolutionary party, the IPF symbolizes one of our party’s rare achievements in the annals of the Indian communist movement, both in the realm of theory and practice. It has earned its own place in Indian politics and all practical political activities of the party are routed through it.
