Left out: The communist parties in India have lost their relevance

The 21st century has not been kind to India’s Left parties. In 2009, they were voted out of power in West Bengal after 32 years in office and have been reduced to a nonentity since in less than 10 years. In the Lok Sabha elections of 2014, they recorded their worst performance since India’s first general election, winning just 12 seats, down from a high of 59 seats a decade earlier. Tripura is the latest in this serial debacle, with the Left losing power after 25 years of rule last week; it managed to win just 16 seats in the 59-member House, down 33 from the earlier Assembly. That leaves Kerala, the first Indian state to vote a communist government to power, as the last Left state standing with 91 seats in a 140-member Assembly.

 
It would be wrong to link this erosion to the downfall of communism and the “victory” of global capitalism after a Cold War over four decades in the previous century. In fact, India’s Left parties gained in strength for more than a decade after that event, principally because the ideological issues that had kept them afloat retained their relevance in the era of economic reform. Labour relations and redistribution of resources became critical issues as delicensing opened opportunities for the private sector and privatisation gathered traction. But the problem for India’s melange of Left parties has been that they failed to synchronise their agenda to the new economic reality. In Tripura, for instance, Chief Minister Manik Sarkar’s personal values of legendary honesty and conspicuous “poverty”, though admirable, scarcely resonate with the aspirational millennial generation that finds it impossible to land jobs in a state with a shocking unemployment rate of 19.7 per cent. A quarter century of Left rule has done little more than consolidate the dominance of Bengali culture in a state in which tribal districts make up almost two-thirds of the area. Indeed, none of the states under Left rule can be considered beacons of economic growth. Kerala remains dependent on remittances from the Gulf. In West Bengal, the Left Front’s unruly championship of labour rights ensured the flight of capital as strikes, gheraos and cussed trade unions became the order of the day. Solid land reforms ensured votes from rural Bengal, to be sure, but also precipitated unprecedented levels of violence in local politics — still grimly in evidence today — as land-losers sought retaliatory political mobilisation.

 
In Parliament, despite being coalition partners twice, the Left has been unable to push through meaningful labour reforms, such as benefits for workers in the unorganised sector — ironically, it is the Bharatiya Janata Party that has found a way of doing so. Indeed, the Left’s core agenda has been steadily hijacked by other parties. Today, it is the right-wing Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh that is at the forefront of opposition to changes in labour laws. And the Congress under Sonia Gandhi’s leadership has burnished its pro-poor credentials through various mammoth entitlement programmes during the two terms of the United Progressive Alliance. This leaves the Left movement with no  raison d’etre, barring the very valuable creed of genuine secularism. Given a political culture that appears to be steadily retreating from this principle, the decline of the Left leaves a vacuum that no national party has been able to fill with credibility. In multi-cultural India, that is, perhaps, the biggest risk embedded in the decline of the Left.