Inquilabi Communist Sangathan

The early years

The united organisation decided not to have a General Secretary, and instead elected a Central Committee and a smaller Central Secretariat. Important leaders included Achin Vanaik, Magan Desai, Thakore Shah, Amar Jesani, Vibhuti Patel, Somendra Kumar, Jagabandhu Chattopadhyay and Kunal Chattopadhyay. Vanaik edited Marxist Outlook, Kumar edited the Hindi Majdoor Jang, and Kunal Chattopadhyay edited the Bangla Naya Antarjatik.

Between 1985 and the beginning of the 1990s, the ICS had units in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Kerala, West Bengal, UP, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, and members at large in Tamil Nadu, Jammu and Kashmir, Delhi, etc. It was involved in considerable trade union work, in political campaigns around reservations, in anti-communal activities, and in the women's movements.

The crucial political documents adopted by the ICS in the early period were The Rajiv Era, an early appraisal of the changing strategy of Indian capitalism and its willingness to open up the economy, and a major attempt to analyse the necessity of affirmative action beyond Dalits. Another document was on the changing nature of communalism and communal violence, which argued that communalism was moving from the fringes to the centre of Indian politics. A major organisational document dealt with the relationship between party, responsibility of members, and of mass organisations.

Crisis in the 1990s

During the 1990s the ICS declined. A number of factors were involved. The ICS had talented activists, who however often could not work as a team. Secondly, two styles of work repeatedly clashed—one led by Magan Desai, for whom party work meant taking "basic" Trotskyist ideas and texts and formulae into every struggle, and others like Vanaik, Rohit Prajapati, and others, for whom mass movement participation was crucial. Third, the recruitment of a significant number of ex-Maoists in West Bengal resulted in a Mao-Stalinist political culture being imported into the organisation. By the late 1990s, Patel, Jesani, Vanaik, had all left the organisation, the ex-Maoists had split to form a formally orthodox Trotskyist group that denounced the USFI.

The Gujarat Communalist Carnage, the ICS Resistance, and the Final Split

In 2002, the ICS played a tremendous role in campaigns over the Gujarat communal massacres. But this in turn intensified conflicts, with one wing arguing that communalism was reducible to an economic determinist analysis, and also arguing that the other side, in campaigning for secularism, had been projecting individuals rather than the party. Thus, in 2002, the ICS brought out the first major book documenting the Gujarat violence anywhere in India (The Genocidal Pogrom in Gujarat: Anatomy of Indian Fascism), and Prajapati and Trupti Shah in Vadodara played key roles in PUCL's documentation of the violence in Gujarat. Yet by the end of 2002 Prajapati had resigned from the ICS. Another factor in this conflict was a debate over the relationship between environmental struggles and class struggle. The 2003 ICS conference in Vadodara saw the entire West Bengal delegation walking out, along with Trupti Shah. What was left of the ICS was confined to Vadodara. The last major public activity of the ICS was its opposition to the World Social Forum 2004 and support for the mainly Naxalite-backed Mumbai Resistance, for which it brought out a major leaflet.

The West Bengal-based Trotskyists who had left ICS in 2003 regrouped in 2008 to form Radical Socialist. This organisation brings out a Bengali journal Radical, and has a website www.radicalsocialist.in. Its members are active in forest rights struggles, trade union struggles, women's movements, and student-youth work. Prajapati, Shah, and a few other Gujarat members are also associated with Radical Socialist.

In August 2026, the Radical Socialist unified with the Revolutionary Communist Party of India. The united organisation retained the name RCPI, citing the continuity of the RCPI, and reaffirmed an explicitly anti-Stalinist orientation. It upheld working-class self-emancipation, democratic proletarian rule, opposition to both popular-frontism, and ultra-left adventurism, and a transitional approach linking immediate struggles to the struggle for socialism. The process was presented as a new political identity, drawing on the legacies of both traditions.