TELANGANA PEOPLE'S ARMED STRUGGLE 5 autocratic regime of the Asafjahi dynasty to its roots, delivering deathblows against it. To this heroic peasant resistance movement goes the credit of pushing the question of the agrarian revolution into the forefront, compelling the unwilling hands of the Congress leaders to embark upon various agrarian reforms, however halting, half-hearted and pitiful they were. It was during the course of this struggle that the bhoodan Utopia was conceived by Vinoba Bhave, the sarvodaya leader, who was sent there by the Congress leaders for the ^pacification' campaign and for anti-communist propaganda among the peasantry. It was in the course of this bitter and prolonged struggle that the people came to grasp the truth that the land problem can never be really resolved by the honeye^l phrases and pompous promises of the bourgeois-landlord rulers, that, on the contrary, only a powerful, organised, militant mass struggle can do this. It must not also be forgotten that not a small share of credit goes to the Telangana struggle for forcing the pace of states reorganisation on a linguistic basis, enabling the several disunited and dismembered nationalities to resolve their long cherished democratic demand for separate statehood. The powerful blows that this struggle delivered to the princely regime of Hyderabad inspired the struggle which won the Andhra State after the martyrdom ofPotti Sreeramulu in 1952; this, in turn, paved the way for the formation of linguistic states throughout India in 1956, forcing the Congress leadership to demolish the unprincipled and arbitrary division of the country made by the former British rulers. In this connection, it is very necessary to realise that the Communist Party, which had the proud role of leading this historic Telangana revolt, had to bear the brunt of the repression with tremendous sacrifices. The Communist Party, which was at the head of the Vayalar-Punnappra strug^ gle in Kerala, which was at the head of the post-war peasant struggles and. the working class struggles in Bengal, emerged as a result on the national poli^ tical scene as a widely recognised and effective political force, to be seriously reckoned, with. From a small force of militant working class trends that it used to be till then in shaping the destinies of India's multi-millions, the Communist Party earned the prestige and honour of emerging as the single biggest opposition group in the first Parliament, following the 1952 general election. The single biggest contribution made by the Telangana peasant revolt to the communist movement in India is that this struggle brought to the forefront of the Indian communist movement almost all the basic theoretical and ideological questions concerning the strategy and tactics of the Indian people's democratic revolution, for correct and scientific artswers and realistic and practical solutions. A series of issues, such as the role of the peasantry in the people's'democratic revolution; the place and significance of partisan resistance ajid rural revolutionary bases; the question of concretely analysing the classification among the peasantry; and the role played in the revolution by the different strata of the peasantry; the perspective for the Indian