For the first time in 50 years, India doesn’t have a communist government: How the Left got left behind

In 2015, the late Sitaram Yechury wrote in The Marxist: “We [communists] have, for many decades, been repeating the Leninist dictum that the ‘concrete analysis of concrete conditions is the living essence of dialectics’… An incorrect estimation of the concrete conditions, naturally, will lead to an erroneous political line and consequent tactical line.” The CPI(M)’s current political nadir — in fact, the seemingly interminable decline of all of India’s communist parties — is evidence, among other things, of a prolonged “incorrect estimation”. With the defeat of the Pinarayi Vijayan-led LDF in Kerala, the communist parties are not part of a single government in the country for the first time in nearly 50 years. This decline was not one foretold by “historical forces”. It is, rather, a function of a series of interconnected failures and complicities.

Vijayan’s return to power in the last election bucked the trend of anti-incumbency verdicts in Kerala, and it is conceivable that the LDF may return in 2031. Even if that is the case, however, a party that, at its height, was the third-largest in Parliament with a government in three states, is now a contender in one. The decline is not merely electoral; it is also reflected in the depletion of ideas and organisation. Take the changing nature of work and the ways in which workers’ rights can be undermined in the “gig economy”. Parties and movements that claim to stand for those left behind by the system should be at the forefront of articulating their concerns. Yet, an absence of “concrete analysis of concrete conditions” has meant that the CPI, CPI(M) and others are merely playing catch-up. There is also a fundamental organisational question. For a long time, the tension between the popular leader and the party — as with Jyoti Basu in Bengal and VS Achuthanandan in Kerala — has deepened factional faultlines. If the left is to recover, it must decide who is best placed to lead that recovery: Those with their ears to the ground or those who fear “revisionism” more than political extinction.

Over the last four decades — beginning with the fall of the Soviet Union — the obituary of the Indian left has been written many times. The difference in the last decade is the rise of a political force that, like the communists, is cadre-based and ideologically driven. The left, unless it comes up with fresh ideas, is bound to be left behind.