IN the middle of 1972 the party had suffered almost a total paralysis. The entire central leadership was virtually decimated. The remaining party forces were all lying scattered and fragmented. And on the question of the party's line, there was confusion all around.

At this juncture, a new Central Committee was organised on 28 July, 1974, the second anniversary day of Comrade Charu Mazumdar's martyrdom. The committee consisted of only three members – Comrade Jauhar, the General Secretary, and Comrades Vinod Mishra and Raghu. This new CC enjoyed the allegiance of the reorganised State Committee of Bihar which was at the helm of the growing peasant movement in several blocks of Bhojpur and Patna districts, the newly formed State Leading Committee of West Bengal which was struggling hard to keep alive the party and a section of comrades in Eastern UP and Delhi.

Soon, however, the party again suffered a major setback as many of its leaders, cadres and fighters got killed in police encounters in Bihar. In November 1975, Comrade Jauhar, the party General Secretary, too, died a martyr's death fighting an enemy offensive in a Bhojpur village. Comrade VM then took over as the General Secretary and in February 1976, the Second Party Congress was held in a village in Gaya district of Bihar. The Congress elected an 11-member Central Committee with Comrade VM as the General Secretary. It is this party which has in the course of time come to be known, after the name of the party central organ in English, as the Liberation group of CPI(ML).

Till 1977, we continued to follow essentially the old line with a particular emphasis on conducting armed guerrilla attacks on police and paramilitary forces and organising people's political power through revolutionary committees. Successive efforts were made to step up the movement in Bhojpur and Patna districts of Bihar, in Naxalbari and in Bankura district of West Bengal and in Gazipur and Balia districts of UP. But heroic actions and great sacrifices notwithstanding, the line was clearly Left-adventurist in character, and it failed to unleash mass initiative on any significant scale. Neither could the party consolidate the gains of our tremendous efforts.

For the people all over the country, those were the dark days of extreme repression institutionalised through the Emergency. And our heroic resistance, particularly in Bhojpur, became objectively a part of the anti-Emergency people's movement. Theoretically too, the party did adhere to the concept of building an anti-Congress united front, though it could not be translated into practice.

However, at a time when the CPI had aligned itself with the Congress, the CPI(M) was rendered totally ineffective and other factions of the CPI(ML) were lying in complete disarray, ours was the only group in the entire Left camp which had kept the red flag flying even in the trying conditions of extreme repression. Naturally, when the curtains were finally lifted in 1977, the red star over Bhojpur and our small group drew the attention of revolutionaries all over the country and also of the rejuvenated Indian media. Meanwhile, party work had spread to Assam and Tripura and now comrades from Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala too joined the party. By 1979, our party had taken an all-India character.