Progressive Printers, the CPM’s half-a-century-old press in Delhi that catered to several publications of the Left, has shut down.

CPM coordinator Prakash Karat confirmed that the press stopped operations on September 30. “It wasn’t a loss-making unit but the development of technology overtook it…. Our requirements in Delhi are lesser. The effort and energy and the people and cadre required to be devoted to it was not worth it,” he told The Telegraph.

Karat, a former general secretary of the party who took charge as CPM coordinator after the demise of Sitaram Yechury last month, said that the party’s People’s Democracy English weekly is printed in five other locations in India. For the circulation that it and other publications of the Left have in Delhi, it wasn’t necessary to run the bloc’s own press, said Karat, who is also the editor of the weekly.

Progressive Printers not only brought out periodicals of the CPM and the mass fronts but also those of the larger Left fold and other literary works. It was founded by Partho Sarathi Sengupta — an austere communist known to live on two meals of rice with a watery egg-and-potato curry a day. He died at the age of 78 in Calcutta in 2001.

He had worked in the CPI’s New Age Printing Press as a machine operator before joining the CPM. Sengupta established it as a small private press in Delhi’s Rampura in the 1970s and it was later taken up by the party and relocated to Okhla in 1978. The press was later shifted to Jhilmil in 1989. Okhla and Jhilmil are industrial areas where Citu is active.

Karat recalled that in 1983-1984, there was a clash with a Maoist group at the Okhla press. Progressive Printers also published journals and pamphlets of the far-Left outfits.

Its former manager Ajay Kumar, an electronics engineer who quit a public sector undertaking to take over from Sengupta, told this paper: “There are young, energetic people in the far-Left as well, even if they may be on the wrong (political) line. I don’t discourage them. Many other presses refuse to print anything with a hammer and sickle (party symbols).”

He added: “Not just Left parties and mass organisations, we also print works of NGOs and individuals doing good work, who may not be affiliated to any party. We have done printing for (the CPI-backed) People's Publishing House ever since their press shut 20 years ago.

"We have printed D. Raja and N. Muthumohan’s Marx and Ambedkar — Continuing the Dialogue and Maxim Gorky’s Mother. Our focus is political works. Besides the RSS organisations, we would accept work from any other party if we had no serious objections to what we were printing."

"When (former CPM general secretary) comrade (H.K.S.) Surjeet asked me to run the press,” Ajay said, adding: “And we moved to Jhilmil, we had plans for a broad-Left daily. The fact remains that the party did not grow to the level where we would have enough subscribers for our daily."

He said: "We pay minimum wages. Other small presses pay half as much. We did not make any losses but it was difficult to sustain….We can’t indulge in unfair practices as it is against our conscience.”

The 10-odd workers remaining have been given a severance equaling a month’s pay as the law requires. The CPM has yet to decide what to do with the building. Its publications are moving to other presses.