Documents of the history of the Communist party of India/ edited by G.Adhikari

As stated in the preface of the second volume of the Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India, the third volume of the early history of the party would be from the end of 1925 when the party was founded as an organisation at Kanpur to 1929, the year of the coun trywide arrest of communists and leftwing trade-union leaders in the wellknown Meerut communist conspiracy case. This was the period of the early mass activities of the party.

In these four years the young Communist Party suc ceeded in making a breakthrough to mass activity, over coming the stifling cordon of repression with which the British imperialists were seeking to strangle this rising revolutionary movement at its very birth. This was achieved by building open workers and peasants' parties in different provinces.

The emergence and the spread of the workers and pea sants parties, first in Bengal and Bombay and later in the Punjab, Ajmer-Merwara and in UP, and their mass and political activities taken together with the activities of the national-revolutionary groups (miscalled 'terrorists' by the imperialists), which had emerged simultaneously in Ben gal, Punjab and UP played a very important role in giving a militant turn to the national freedom movement of the country, as well as to the existing Indian trade-union movement.

It was in this period that a militant left wing emerges inside the Indian National Congress. This left wing, from its rise as a significant mass political force, was fighting for three great objectives:

(1) The acceptance by the Indian National Congress of the goal of complete independence from British imperial ism.