A Short History of the CPI (M-L) [Compiled from different websites]

The Communist Party of India (CPI) was first formed in 1925, but this party eventually went revisionist and became part of the liberal wing of the ruling class establishment. This vice took a prominent shape just after the 20th congress of the CPSUB, that consolidated the foundation of international revisionism by silhouetting comrade Joseph Stalin. The launching of the great debate between USSR and China in early sixties exposed the rightist face of the pro-Soviet CPI leadership. The CPI’s nuke ultranationalist line in the Indo-China War (1962), finally drew the line of demarcation between the rightists and the leftists. In 1964, when the Sino-Soviet ideological struggle reached its culmination, part of the CPI split off to form the Communist Party of India (Marxist), usually abbreviated as the CPI (M). But this party too soon gave up on revolution and settled in on the comfortable path of bourgeois electoral campaigns and reformism.
However, there have always been Marxist revolutionaries in India who were not willing to accept such revisionist betrayal. In 1967, some of these revolutionaries, inspired by the historic eight documents of comrade Charu Majumdar (Secretary, Darjeeling District Committee of CPI-M) launched an armed struggle in the region around Naxalbari in a remote northern part of West Bengal. Comrade Majumdar’s documents were heavily influenced by the Chinese line of protracted people’s war. Moreover, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which was then underway in China also made a great impact on his mind.
Inspired by the historic Naxalbari uprising, the revolutionaries within the CPI (M) began establishing their own publications [Deshabrati (Bengali) Liberation (English) Lok Yudh (Hindi)] and networks of contacts.
On November 12-13, 1967, many of these revolutionary communists from Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Orissa and West Bengal, met and formed an organization they called the All India Coordination Committee of Revolutionaries in the CPI(M), or AICCR.
But events were moving fast. On May 14, 1968, this committee was renamed the "All India Coordination Committee of Communist Revolutionaries" (AICCCR), with Comrade Sushital Roy Chowdhuri as its convener. It decided to boycott all elections.
Two important groups of revolutionary communists were not part of the AICCCR: The Maoist Communist Centre chose not to participate because of differences over the party-building line. And a group of revolutionaries from Andhra Pradesh under the leadership of Tarimala Nagi Reddy were excluded because they disagreed that sufficient preparations had been made to launch an immediate people's war.
In February 1969 the AICCCR unanimously decided to form a new communist party (though some state units later refused to go along). This party, the original Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), was launched on April 22nd, 1969, Lenin's birthday. Comrade Charu Majumdar was elected the General Secretary of the Central Organizing Committee of the new party.
The revolutionaries who formed the CPI (ML) had already begun setting up guerrilla zones in West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, and especially at Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh. But severe repression from the government came down on all these areas, especially Srikakulam. Seven top members of the party were murdered by the government on May 26-27, 1969, and several other top leaders were murdered at the end of that year. This led to an unprecedented uprising of students and youth in Calcutta and throughout West Bengal.
After the Deshabrati publication office was raided by the government on April 27, 1970, the party was forced to go underground. In the same year, the CPI (M-L) organized its first Party Congress, and called to revolutionize the country by ‘annihilating’ the bureaucratic big bourgeois and feudal class. The Congress elected a new Central Committee, consisting of - Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal, Sushital Roy Chowdhury , Saroj Dutta , Soren Bose, Suniti Ghosh, Ashim Chatterjee, Satyanarayan Singh, Gurubax Singh, Rajkishore Singh, Shiv Kumar Mishra , Mahindar Singh, Dr. Nagbhushan Patnaik , M. Appalasuri, Vempatapu Satyanarayana , Adibathla Kailasam , Appu, Kodasudayanam, R.P. Saraf, Ambaddi and Jagjit Singh Sohal (Sharma)
On July 10-11, Comrades Satyam and Kailasam, two top leaders of the Srikakulam uprising were captured and murdered by the police while in captivity. The Srikakulam guerrilla zone began to suffer reversals.
In the initial hours of 1971, Satyanarain Singh and Ashim Chatterjee developed differences with the official party line, and created a parallel central committee, in opposition to the original CPI (M-L). This in turn led to a few more splits by the end of 1971. The martyrdom of comrade Saroj Dutta (CM’s comrade-in-arms) on 5th August, 1971, was also a big blow to the organization. Things got worst, when on 28th July, 1972, comrade Charu Majumdar was killed in the police custody. With his martyrdom, an important chapter of India’s revolutionary struggle came to an end.
Yet, the spirit of Naxalbari survives and it will survive until the world becomes a people’s world.