The loss of Kerala leaves communists without a state for the first time since 1977, but the broader Left remains vital to resisting the erasure of secular norms
Are the communists done for in India? And what of the Left, of which they are a subset? The comprehensive defeat of the CPI(M)-led Left Front in Kerala recently is apt to make some wonder about the further viability of the Left as a whole in the country.
Similar speculation hadn’t followed other events that had then caused surprise, for example, the BJP winning just two Lok Sabha seats in 1984. Think of the absurdity of wondering along those lines in the light of the present.
Beyond electoral defeat
In Kerala, the Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) have alternated in power for decades. The LDF broke the pattern in 2021, winning two elections in a row. Its 2026 defeat may therefore not be an event that by itself marks the future of things.
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Unlike in West Bengal and Tripura, where the communists once ruled but eventually saw their base collapse, the red flag bearers in Kerala have not been denuded of their critical mass—a fact clearly reflected in their resilient vote percentages. If analysts refrained from writing the UDF’s obituary after its defeat in 2021, it makes little analytical sense to write off the LDF now.
What the Left does
♦ Safeguards secular and pluralist Constitutional values
♦ Champions forward-looking, progressive social change
♦ Drives democratic, humanist, and egalitarian ideals
♦ Resists the spread of communal Right ideologies
♦ Acts as the core shield for federalism
But there is something to consider: This is the first time in half a century, i.e., since 1977, that the communists are not in power in any state of India. And, in West Bengal and Tripura, there is so much ground for them to retrieve that the task looks daunting in the current phase of history.
Can Kerala inspire again?
After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin gave the call for “socialism in one country” to protect the 1917 Soviet Revolution and the Soviet state founded in 1922 upon the defeat of the White armies and internal challengers. This meant strengthening the industrial and military base and consolidating the USSR’s power before attempting to spread the message outside (although the Soviet leader did support anti-colonial struggles).
Does this analogy work in Kerala’s context? Can “socialism in one state” have an encouraging or fostering effect in other states, and does the demonstration effect count, or are there too many countervailing factors?
When a communist government led by the stalwart EMS Namboodiripad came to be formed in Kerala in the late 1950s through a democratic election—and not a revolutionary takeover—it became a novelty for the world. The southern state came to be called the “Yenan of India”.
Yenan in China became the staging area for its communists as the Long March culminated. It was from there that Mao marshalled his revolutionary forces that triumphed with the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949.
The Yenan hark-back for Kerala is decidedly over-exuberant. And, of course, questions also remain as regards the collapse of the CPI(M)-led Left Front in West Bengal back in 2011, when the communist-led government crumbled before the electoral assault by Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress after holding sway for 34 years. A careful analysis is still awaited 15 years on.
Communism’s strategic dilemmas
Deeper questions concerning Indian communism do need examining—and perhaps the most crucial of these might be its historical disinclination, except on occasion, to work with centrist forces, namely progressive or Left forces which are not near-synonyms for communist. ‘Left’ in India has been conflated for too long as being nearly communist.
These are troubled times not only for Indian communists but for the Indian Left as a whole, and indeed the Indian people, whose Constitutional values and benchmarks are being sought to be scrubbed and set adrift.
Also read | With Pinarayi's LDF loss in Kerala, India left with no Left-ruled state
The reason for this does not lie in the recent defeat of the Left Front in Kerala, but in the change in the colour of the political map of the country and, concomitantly, the forced spread of the alien Hindutva ideology through concerted actions of the state (and the unchecked coercions being routinely practised by its support crowd of uncivil civil society elements).
Erosion of secular norms
As an indicative example, consider the recent flypast by Indian Air Force jets over the Dwarka temple in Gujarat to mark the 75th year of its reconstruction. It is unthinkable that pilgrim centres of other religions will receive similar state solicitousness, with the Prime Minister presiding over it.
Another example relating to religion was the visit of India’s Army Chief, in full uniform, to an ashram at Chitrakoot in UP last year to take his deeksha, or initiation vows, into a particular Hindu religious order.
Prior to that was the case of the then Chief Justice of India holding a religious ceremony at his residence. There can, of course, be no objection to that. But inviting the Prime Minister to it, with photographs of the event distributed to newspapers, is an altogether different matter.
If hobnobbing with the PM is objectionable enough for the country’s top judge, inviting the PM home for a well-publicised religious event is a marked distortion of the “secular” description embedded in the Constitution and a deviation from well-established norms of judicial conduct.
These are but overt examples of the destruction of the idea of state neutrality in respect of India’s flourishing pluralist religious culture, which was once the envy of the world and the hallmark of India’s uniqueness.
Democracy’s institutional challenges
Throw in the way the Election Commission goes about its task under the present dispensation, and under the benevolent gaze of the Supreme Court of India, and it is difficult to push away the sense that India’s citizens and their electoral choices are being placed at a severe discount in a premeditated way.
Further, the attempt to use population densities to carve out more parliamentary seats for politically convenient states, ignoring performing ones, appears to strike at federalism, another conceptual pillar of the Constitution.
What does the Left have to do with any of this? The short answer is: Everything!
Historically, the Left—taking from French history—has meant all those political forces that seek to work for forward-looking change in society and politics, and the Right is defined as those that seek to preserve the ancien régime, the old order, feudal and aristocratic privileges, and the upkeep of vestiges of the past which block progress, including superstition and irrationality.
In modern India, Left values have always spelt change in a progressive, humanist direction employing non-violent means. Only the communists—who constitute but a small segment of the Left—sought the abolition of private property. That was historical and theoretical.
India’s enduring Left tradition
In a fundamental sense, India’s freedom struggle—and the core ideas of its Constitution—were wholly of the Left and permeated with its spirit. Once the communists entered Parliament and took oath on the Constitution, which recognises private property as a fundamental right, their general direction became humanist and egalitarian.
Also read | UDF landslide in Kerala: The multiple factors that toppled Left
This was not so different from the other socialist-oriented formations associated with the freedom struggle. The difference of the communists on first principles with the non-Marxian socialists, Lohia being a prominent example, was basically a matter of emphasising caste or class.
As for the Congress party itself—the chief architect of the freedom movement under Mahatma Gandhi’s extraordinary moral leadership and under Nehru’s modernist impulse, and the guiding force of the country’s Constitution-making process—how deep is its difference with the country’s socialists or the communists in Parliament as far as credo goes?
Why Left matters
Gandhi’s insistence on Hindu-Muslim unity and the abolition of untouchability was strikingly Left. It is useful to recall that the most important Left leaders of the Congress were Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash Bose, with Nehru offering leadership and political support to the Congress Socialist Party from which the Indian socialists arose. And in today’s context, anyone who supports climate action or gender justice is also a firm Leftist.
It is the coalescing of the elements of this whole spectrum that can take the country forward. And it is this that the communal Right, which is in charge, dreads. That’s the relevance of the Left in India.
(The Federal seeks to present views and opinions from all sides of the spectrum. The information, ideas or opinions in the articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Federal.)
