ABSTRACT
By the time the CPI had won a strong political base and hegemonic influence in
Kerala around 1940, in Bengal the CPI was a small, illegal party, with a
somewhat restricted base among workers and tenants in parts of undivided
Bengal. Kerala’s trajectory, as delineated in Chapter 4, can be used as a
‘benchmark’ to understand the specificities of communist party formation in
Bengal. The question is, to what extent did the political strategies and practices
of the CPI, applied in the context of the specific ‘objective conditions’, colonial
rule and the anti-colonial nationalist movement, matter in determining its narrow
political base and organizational weakness in Bengal comparatively speaking? In
the previous chapter I argued that the Kerala CSP’s political practices of
redefining lower caste politics in terms of the political-economy of class, and of
working within and rebuilding the Congress Party, allowed it to build a mass
base and attain a degree of political hegemony by 1940. These strategies and
tactics were carried out in the nationalist political sphere where the dominant
classes had failed to organize themselves as a strong opposition to the CSP. Did
the differences in strategies and tactics between communists in Kerala and
Bengal determine all of the disparity between the two parties, or were there
‘objective factors’ that made communist party formation in Bengal different to
begin with? This question will eventually address the larger question of what
effects the kind of base the CPI built during the nationalist period, and its specific
(and shifting) strategies and tactics, had on its mode of ascendancy in the post-
independence period, and what it could then do once it won state power in the
post-independence era.
