THE Fourth Party Congress was held in January 1988 in a village in Hazaribagh district of Bihar. In keeping with the changing situation and its own enhanced understanding, the party radically revised various outdated ideas and stereo-typed positions, thus clearing the way for entering and reshaping the mainstream of Indian politics. Giving up the tiresome phrase of unity of communist revolutionaries, that is the Naxalite groups, it resolved to initiate interaction with the main Left parties and advanced the call for a Left and democratic confederation. The Congress elected a Central Committee of 21 members, and the CC, in its turn, elected a 7-member Polit Bureau with Comrade VM as the General Secretary.
The CPI(ML) movement of the 70s had by now split into two distinct trends – one, represented by our party, retrieved Marxism-Leninism through a thorough and consistent struggle against anarchist deviations both in theory and practice and brought the party back to the course of the communist legacy, revolutionary mass struggles and full-fledged political initiatives, while the other, represented by host of groups like the Maoist Communist Centre, the Second Central Committee, Party Unity and some factions of PCC perfected the anarchist deviations into a full-fledged theoretical framework. Within the CPI(ML) movement as a whole this anarchist challenge has consolidated itself in the last few years and poses the main challenge before the party’s advance.
However, within our party, in the course of struggle against anarchist deviations we had to wage a serious struggle against liquidationism. The liquidationist trend raised its ugly head immediately after the Fourth Congress. Beginning from a right capitulationist standpoint, this trend tried to obliterate the party’s essential difference with the opportunist Left. But it did not stop here and soon moved over to the point of obliteration of all differences between revolutionary and liberal democracy. Encouraged by the developments in Soviet Union and East Europe it even demanded renunciation of Marxism and the Communist Party itself and advocated an out and out reformist programme. Its chief proponent is currently engaged in social investigations to produce a databank to help developmental programmes of the government and private agencies.
Our party resolutely fought back this liquidationist tendency and frustrated all attempts to split the party. Truly speaking, the party witnessed a qualitative development in the years after the Fourth Congress. In the 1989 parliamentary elections it succeeded in sending the first Marxist-Leninist representative to the parliament and in the assembly elections of 1990 it was able to form a sizeable legislature group in the Bihar Assembly.
Most notable has been the success of the IPF-sponsored mass rally in the capital on 8 October, 1990. It has reinforced the undying relevance of revolutionary Marxism and illustrated the growing stature of the revolutionary Left in the national political scene. The massive demonstration of lakhs of people has also triggered off a realignment of forces in the Left camp. It has brought to the fore the struggle between the two tactical lines and two premises of Left unity – whether the Left should count upon the bourgeoisie and bourgeois institutions for a democratic transformation of the Indian society and polity or should it strive to take the lead itself and rely exclusively upon mass struggles.
Large number of forces from the CPI and CPI(M) in Bihar, UP and West Bengal are crossing over to the banner of revolutionary democracy while formal relations are being developed with almost all the main parties of the Left and avenues explored for developing joint actions and a Left confederation.
