General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation from 1975 to 1998. His important theoretical contributions include writings on party organization building, collective leadership and political unity, as well as his theories on caste, class and gender issues in the Indian context

Born on 24 March 1947 at Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh, Vinod Mishra devoted his entire life to the communist movement in India. His early years were spent in the labour colonies of Kanpur, then a thriving industrial city and a major centre of working class activism and left politics. After completing his post-graduation in Mathematics, he joined the Regional Engineering College at Durgapur, West Bengal in 1966 in the faculty of mechanical engineering. It was here that he became actively involved with the Indian Communist Movement of the '60s (popularly termed as the Naxalbari uprising) that challenged the official policies followed by the Indian government in relation to the prevailing food crisis of the times, unemployment, poverty, corruption and general misrule by the Congress ministry.

Sharp ideological debates over the programme and political agenda to be followed by the Communist parties intensified during this period leading to the birth of the Communist Party of India Marxist (CPI-M) from the Communist Party of India (CPI) and then the Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist (CPI-ML) under the aegis of Charu Mazumdar. It is hardly surprising that by 1969, young Mishra decided the future course of his career as a professional revolutionary and became a "whole-timer" (full time activist) of the newly formed CPI-ML. He waged an active struggle in the revolutionary movement of the times, led armed struggles in the countryside, served a term in jail, suffered from bullet injuries, kidney ailment and other physical complications owing to the difficulties of a more than decade-long underground life in Bihar, eastern U. P., Delhi and West Bengal trying to reorganize the party from the setback it had suffered. He was elected as General Secretary in 1975 and he worked untiringly to re-organize the party, to initiate new forms of peasant and working class struggles, to recognize the need for (open) mass movements and mass organizations (considered taboo in the initial Naxalite framework that believed in the theory of armed struggle) and to unite the communist revolutionaries of India.

His important theoretical contributions are his writings on party organization building, collective leadership and political unity, understanding the peasant question and land reform, united front practice, fighting metaphysical thinking and ideas of perfectionism, conceptualizing the people's front, theorizing on caste, class and gender issues in the Indian context and a series of writings on the specific politico-economic conditions of struggle in Bihar.

Vinod Mishra died on the 18 December 1998.

Selected Works of Vinod Mishra

Similar Selected Works of Vinod Mishra