IN 1978, the party launched a rectification movement. It had all begun with the limited purpose of correcting just the style of work, but the spirit of rectification did not spare the political line. Great changes began to occur in the party line and practice which were formalised in a Special Party Conference held in a village of Bhojpur in July 1979. The Conference decided to initiate open mass activities through mass organisations.

At this Juncture, polemics within the movement was sharpened between the two trends represented by our organisation and the group known as the Provisional Central Committee (PCC). The PCC, an opportunist conglomeration of various factions, had won a lot of acclaim and support for the alacrity with which it had started rectifying all past mistakes. Its central figure, Mr. Satya Narain Singh, had deserted the movement In 1970 itself and begun to hobnob with bourgeois politicians. During the Emergency he advocated trailing behind Jay Prakash; in 1977 he worked out a deal with Charan Singh, the then Union Home Minister, asking Naxalite prisoners to come out of Jails by signing bonds abjuring violence; and finally ended up as a champion of unity with anti-Congress kulaks and big bourgeoisie.

We pointed out from the very beginning that the whole premise of PCC is liquidationist and what it actually intends to 'rectify' is the essential revolutionary spirit of the movement. We also predicted that this opportunist alliance of disparate factions would not last long. However, as the PCC put up a show of unity and initiated long overdue changes in forms of struggle and organisation, it did succeed initially in attracting large number of revolutionary forces to its fold. But soon it got trapped in a maze of absurd propositions supplied by its own self-styled theoreticians and split into more factions than it had united.

Meanwhile, the unified and organised rectification campaign undertaken by our party had begun to deliver results. With the initiation of various open forms of mass activities the militant resistance movement of the peasantry started reaching new heights both in terms of expansion and intensity and revolutionary elements started crossing over from the PCC to our party. That was the end of the challenge from PCC.

The other liquidationist exercise was made by Kanu Sanyal, an important leader of Naxalbari. He openly denounced the CPI(ML) and its heritage and pleaded for a revival of the pre-CPI(ML) coordination phase. He could however only mobilise some left-over elements and could never pose any serious challenge to our organisation.

It is in struggle against these liquidationist onslaughts that we eventually emerged as the biggest group of the CPI(ML).