The province of West Bengal in India has long been the laboratory for applied experiments in communism. This wonderland has proved to be the most congenial enviornment for experiment in the application of various strands of communist ideologies discovered by great theoreticians from outside West Bengal. Marx and Engels were little known in Bengal till the Russian Revolution. A few relatively unknown, self-educated Bengali intellectual extremist freedom fighters, fed up with Indian Congress Party's struggle for Independence from the British Queen, developed a taste for communist ideas, especially as they needed to flee the country to escape arrest by the British rulers and landed into the attractive trap of the anti-British Germany and later into the trap of Lenin and Stalin seeking to spread the communist empire in India and Asia. The Communist Party of India (CPI) was set up abroad by Indian in exile as they contributed, with their knowledge of English picked up in British India, to develop the theories of applied armed revolution-centred communism in the heartland of Lenin-Stalin Russia. Bengalis, born since the late 19th century are good at developing ideological theories from half-baked ideas of foreigners who did not belong to the mainstream intellectual elite. Within a decade the founder of CPI had transformed into a radical congressman again. The CPI became a party controlled by good orators from Bengal and Kerala. In another three decades, the relatively less prominent intellectuals in the party ckecked out to form the CPI (Marxists), now referred to as CPM. Within a short period, the younger generation with stronger academic credentials formed their own extremist outfits as the Comunist Party Marxists Lennists and other parties who were collectively referred to as Naxalites or Maoists and who had once claimed that Chairman Mao of China was also their Chairman.
After being in action for the last ninety years, the communists in India has been successful enough to keep their influence largely limited to the three states of West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura with the extremist Maoist communists operating from the hideouts in relatively inaccessible or tribal-inhabitated forest areas in parts of West Bengal, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh. The communists polled about 7 % of the votes in recent Indian elections. The greatest achiement of the communist movement in India so far has been ruling the State of West Bengal for the last three decades and killing of thousands of people, mostly poor, unarmed policemen and wealthy rural oppressors. The dream of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat would continue to remain unfulfilled for the next few decades, if not for another century. And, after the loss of substantial strength in the National Pariament, the communist movement in India seems to be in quandary and lost in the labyrinth of their difficult-to-explain ideologies of clas struggle.
What would the communists do in the next few years?
