[In two very significant developments in the non-mainstream Left, the Marxist Coordination Committee (MCC) of the Dhanbad-Jharkhand region and the Lal Nishan Party (LNP) of Maharashtra merged with the CPI(ML) Liberation. While the merger with the took place in September 2024, the one with the LNP happened on 31 May 2025. What is really significant about these two developments is that both the MCC and the LNP, in different ways moved away from orthodox thinking from the beginning. It is not surprising then that they decided to merge with the CPI(ML) Liberation, which in my reckoning, has made some very significant departures from orthodoxy on a range of issues concerning the Indian social and political scene (as also on matters such as democracy and climate change). It is no wonder then that while the MCC, founded by the legendary AK Roy, had developed strong ties of the trade unions in the colliery with the larger adivasi Jharkhandi society, the LNP in its time, distinguished itself by standing by and campaigning for Ambedkar in the early 1950s.

Here we reproduce two pieces by CPI(ML) General Secretary DIPANKAR BHATTACHARYA published in their journal Liberation. The pieces separately discuss the two mergers. – AN]

Lal Nishan Party’s Unification with CPI(ML): Towards a Stronger Communist Movement to Defeat the Fascist Offensive

To defeat the growing fascist offensive, India today urgently needs a stronger presence and role of the Left. The merger of the Lal Nishan Party of Maharashtra with the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), announced at a unity conference in Shrirampur on 31 May, marks an encouraging step in this direction. This unification brings together two great legacies of India’s communist movement in a state which has historically been the cradle of the quest for social equality. Maharashtra also happens to be the ideological fountainhead of Indian fascism and every advance of the communist movement in Maharashtra today has great value. The unification of LNP and CPI(ML) therefore evokes a lot of hope in the centenary year of India’s organised communist movement.

The genesis of the LNP in Maharashtra lay in the debate within the communist movement over the communist approach during the 1942 Quit India movement. The movement had emerged from Maharashtra and galvanised the entire country, triggering a powerful mass rebellion and even leading to the formation of a few parallel governments including one in Satara in Maharashtra. The founders of the LNP parted ways with the CPI, called for a vigorous combination of the anti-fascist international task and the anti-colonial national imperative and began to act under the banner of Navjeevan Sanghatana. While organisationally parting ways with the CPI, the Navjeevan Sanghatana considered itself as an integral part of the Indian communist movement and acted accordingly with exemplary commitment, developing strong pockets of influence among workers and peasants, especially the rural poor, in many parts of Maharashtra.

The late 1930s and early 1940s also saw the rise of Ambedkar as a powerful political voice of the social justice and workers’ rights cause. In 1936 Ambedkar came out with his clarion call of Annihilation of Caste and formed the Independent Labour Party which declared Brahmanism and capitalism as its twin targets. This paved the way for a short-lived but profoundly significant phase of close cooperation between the communist movement and Ambedkar, a phase marked by encouraging signs of an organic growth of worker-peasant unity and the shaping of progressive legislations for the working class. Unfortunately this phase did not last long and by the late 1940s and early 1950s, the two streams had moved apart amidst considerable bitterness. The LNP represented the only communist section that campaigned actively for Ambedkar in the two elections he contested and lost in 1952 and 1954 and in getting him elected to the Rajya Sabha in 1954 after his defeat in the by-poll.

In the subsequent years, the LNP remained a significant component of the Sanyukta Maharashtra movement and an ally of the Republican Party of India, the last party to have been launched by Babasaheb Ambedkar. A contingent of eight leaders from the LNP stream – Comrades Datta Deshmukh, Bhai Sattha, VN Patil, Santaram Patil, Nagnath Naikwadi, Bapusaheb Bhapkar, Jaisingh Mali and Dongar Rama – won the Assembly elections in 1957. The party led a series of struggles for the welfare and rights of the working people in rural Maharashtra and won victories in struggles for land redistribution and wage increase as well as securing employment guarantee legislation in the wake of severe drought in the state in the 1970s.

The 1970s and 1980s injected new energy in the LNP movement following the party’s close interaction with the Dalit Panthers and the ‘Magova’ group (a group of young Marxist intellectuals and activists active in the first half of 1970s which brought out a Marxist monthly in Marathi named ‘Magova’ meaning search or investigation). Comrades Ashok Manohar and Mukta Manohar, who were part of the Magova group, joined the LNP and brought in new political and social dynamism in the trade union movement. The LNP also forged close unity with the militant trade union struggles led by Dr Datta Samant, especially the historic textile strike that began on 18 January 1982. In 1984 Samant won the Lok Sabha elections from Mumbai South Central defeating the Congress and the BJP – a remarkable display of workers’ power in an election swept by the Congress after the assassination of Indira Gandhi and in which the BJP could secure only two seats.

Meanwhile, in Bihar the revolutionary peasant movement led by the CPI(ML) powered a remarkable electoral assertion of the landless rural poor under the banner of the Indian People’s Front. In the 1989 Lok Sabha elections, the anti-feudal struggle broke the feudal-criminal stranglehold on the election process and Comrade Rameshwar Prasad won from Ara in his first ever electoral contest. More victories followed in the 1990 Assembly elections and the massive “Dam Bandho Kam Do” rally in Delhi on 8 October at the call of the IPF attracted the attention of progressive forces across the country.

That was the beginning of the LNP’s association with the IPF and CPI(ML) which grew closer over the years. In 1995 Comrades Ashok Manohar and Datta Samant addressed a public rally in Patna along with Comrade Vinod Mishra on the occasion of the third conference of the All India Central Council of Trade Unions. The assassination of Datta Samant in 1997, the demise of Comrade Nagbhushan Patnaik and Comrade Vinod Mishra in 1998 and the passing of Comrade Ashok Manohar in 2003, came as major blows to our respective organisations, but the cooperation between the two parties continued to expand and has now culminated in this historic unification. The unification of the Marxist Coordination Committee founded by Comrade AK Roy in 1972 with the CPI(ML) in September 2024 and now the merger of the Lal Nishan Party of Maharashtra have armed the CPI(ML) with greater strength and energy at a time when the constitutional foundation and parliamentary democratic framework of India are facing relentless fascist aggression. At stake today is the very direction of the republic as a secular democracy and the rights of citizens in diverse spheres of life without which we cannot fulfil the promise to make India truly free and democracy really functional. A bigger and stronger CPI(ML) is determined to work wholeheartedly for deeper engagement with every democratic struggle of the people, forging closer unity among the Left and seeking broader understanding with the entire non-BJP political spectrum.

The MCC-CPI(ML) Unification:  Convergence of Two Legacies and Trajectories of the Communist Movement

The merger of the Marxist Coordination Committee into the CPI(ML) has been greatly welcomed by the broad Left ranks and well-wishers across the country. In today’s situation where we have to fight state repression, corporate plunder and communal hate and violence every day on every front, unification of the Left in any degree in any part of the country will certainly be a welcome development. And when such unification happens between two leading Left forces in a crucial state like Jharkhand, it naturally generates considerable hope and potential.

The initiative for the merger came from comrades of Marxist Coordination Committee. The idea was first mooted in the wake of the 2019 and over a period of joint activities and exchanges of opinion, the two organisations developed necessary mutual confidence to accomplish it. The success of the 9 September Ekta Rally in Dhanbad has unleashed a lot of enthusiasm and determination to turn this merger into a decisive step forward towards a resurgence of the communist movement in the North Chhotanagpur division.

While the merger is primarily driven by the needs of the current situation, it also has strong roots in history. The two organisations have been products of the same period in the late 1960s and early 1970s and both grew in the common socio-political environment of undivided Bihar and now Jharkhand. The CPI(ML) emerged in April 1969 from the peasant uprising of Naxalbari following a brief coordination phase (AICCCR), suffered a setback in West Bengal and grew rapidly in neighbouring Bihar through militant anti-feudal assertion of the oppressed rural poor. The central region of undivided Bihar had emerged as the principal area of CPI(ML)’s work and influence and it spread to the Palamu and Hazaribagh-Giridih areas of today’s Jharkhand. The coming together of the Liberation Front comrades led by Comrade Jayant Ganguly in Hazaribagh-Ramgarh belt and Comrade Mahendra Singh and Major Nagendra Prasad in the Giridih-Bokaro belt had lent great energy and mass strength to the CPI(ML) in the North Chhotanagpur division.

Comrade AK Roy had joined the Sindri unit of Projects and Development India Limited as an engineer in 1961 and in no time turned into a leader of workers. By 1967 he became MLA from Sindri on a CPI(M) ticket, returning again to the Assembly in 1969. But Comrade AK Roy never subscribed to the CPI(M)’s evaluation of Naxalbari as ‘Left adventurism’ and the consequent approach of hostility to the CPI(ML). While no votary of the early CPI(ML) call for boycott of elections, Comrade Roy underlined the need to subordinate parliamentary participation to extra-parliamentary mass assertion.

In an article titled “Vote and Revolution” published in the March 6, 1971 issue of the Kolkata-based radical weekly magazine Frontier, Comrade Roy was quite frank in his observation: “The speed and vigour with which Naxalism has spread in India and the impact it has produced speak unmistakably of its vitality, and vitality is always associated with truth”. This led to Comrade Roy’s expulsion from the CPI(M) and on 22 April 1972, three years after the foundation of the CPI(ML), Comrade Roy founded the Marxist Coordination Committee in Patna as an independent communist group. In the 1972 election he got elected from Sindri for the third successive time, now as an independent member of the Assembly. This was followed by three victories to Parliament from the Dhanbad Lok Sabha seat – in 1977, 1980 and 1989.

Differences with the CPI(M) continued to widen over the approach to other popular movements too. In Bihar associates of Comrade Roy took an active part in the 1974 movement and in south Bihar Comrade Roy went on to found the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha along with Shibu Soren and Binod Bihari Mahato. However, on the trade union front the Bihar Colliery Kamgar Union, the popular coal miners’ union founded under the leadership of Comrade AK Roy and the Marxist Coordination Committee continued to remain affiliated to the CITU. In his political views and policy positions, Comrade AK Roy remained consistently independent. Non-sectarian in his approach, Comrade Roy had sincere respect for people’s movements and strongly upheld the cause of democratic rights against every draconian law and repressive measure of the Indian state. As a leader of the working class movement he shunned economism and emphasised the social role of workers and worker-peasant unity. Under his leadership, the coal workers’ struggles became an integral part of the Jharkhand movement and Bihar-origin workers also became staunch supporters of the idea of separate statehood for Jharkhand. Over time many activists of MCC in northern and central regions of undivided Bihar had joined the Indian People’s Front and CPI(ML) – prominent among them being Comrades Taqi Rahim and Rajaram. In the Dhanbad-Bokaro region too MCC and CPI(ML) worked mostly in close collaboration with Comrades Dilip Mandal and Gurudas Chatterjee working as bridges between the two organisations. In the Bihar Assembly Comrades Mahendra Singh and Gurudas Chatterjee remained comrades-in-arms and the collaboration grew in Jharkhand over the next generation. Comrade AK Roy never repudiated the idea of an organised communist party, he preferred maintaining the coordination committee form and waiting and working for the re-emergence of a united revolutionary communist party to the formation of another party. The historic MCC-ML unification has now enriched the CPI(ML) with the legacy and vision of Comrade AK Roy and other martyrs and departed leaders of the Marxist Coordination Committee.