From colonial resistance to post-independence reform, the CPI’s journey reflects a relentless pursuit of justice, equality, and dignity for the working class. Though its electoral reach has diminished, its influence remains deeply embedded in the democratic and moral foundations of the Republic

Few political movements have imprinted themselves so deeply on India’s history as the Communist Party of India. Founded in 1925, at a time when the nation was still under colonial rule, the CPI was born not in the drawing rooms of elites but in the ferment of working-class struggle. From the outset, it carried a simple yet radical mission — to fight for equality, justice, and dignity for the toiling masses.

Over the next hundred years, the CPI would witness India’s transformation — from a colonised land to a free nation, from the hopeful dawn of independence to the complexities of globalisation. It fought its battles everywhere — on factory floors, in Parliament, in trade unions, in remote villages and restless cities. Through all these phases, it never abandoned its central conviction that democracy without social justice is hollow, and freedom without equality incomplete.

Critics have long dismissed the CPI as a party of “foreign ideas”, arguing that Marxism was an alien transplant from Europe. But this argument overlooks the living nature of ideas. Just as Buddhism travelled from India to shape the moral compass of Asia, Marxism too journeyed across borders to find new meaning in Indian soil. From its earliest days, the CPI was not about reciting European theory but about addressing Indian injustice. Its ideological pulse beat not in European libraries but in the fields of Telangana, the jute mills of Bengal, and the streets of Bombay. The party’s constitution consciously adapted Marxist principles to Indian realities — confronting caste oppression, feudal landlordism, and imperial domination.

In that sense, Indian communism was as indigenous as any other nationalist movement. It sought not to mimic Moscow but to marry socialism with the country’s moral and social struggles. Long before secularism became a constitutional principle, the CPI recognised that communalism was the greatest internal threat........

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