Left out

Blinkered ideology has made it irrelevant

Inequality and joblessness in post-economic reform India have been persistent bleak spots in the landscape of economic growth but the movement that developed from colonial times to protect workers’ and peasants’ rights has steadily lost traction. Left parties once dominated the political landscape, with Left members of Parliament holding ministerial positions in the mid-nineties and supporting a Congress-led government at the Centre between 2004 and 2008. Now the movement has been reduced to a nonentity. It holds power in just one state from three at the start of the century, and only one of these parties has national-party status — the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI (M). Last year, the second-largest of the Left parties, the Communist Party of India (CPI), lost its national-party status. In the latest Lok Sabha elections, the Left marginally improved its position, with the CPI (M) winning four seats, up from three in 2019 (two in Tamil Nadu, one in Kerala, and one, surprisingly, in Rajasthan). The CPI won two, the same as in 2019, and the CPI (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation two in Bihar. In Kerala, the CPI (M)-led Left Democratic Front lost one seat and witnessed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) open its account in the state. In West Bengal, the four-party Left Front, which had an electoral understanding with the Congress and once ruled the state for over three decades, came in third in 32 of the 33 seats they contested, coming in second in the single exception.

The minor gains in the latest elections do not alter the picture of steep decline. Leftist commentators have put this down to the rise of neo-liberal right-wing fundamentalism. This misses the bigger picture of the Left’s failures. In the early noughties, the Left scored successes by supporting the rural employment guarantee law, which has become a mainstay for subsequent governments, the Right to Information, and the Forest Rights Act, which sought to protect the rights of tribals and forest dwellers. In West Bengal, its land redistribution movement of the 1970s undoubtedly transformed ownership rights. But the thrust of the movement remained negative and out of sync with the needs of economic growth. By protecting organised-sector workers, the Left failed to help unorganised-sector workers who account for the bulk of the workforce. A law for unorganised-sector workers to earn long-term benefits has been languishing for over a decade.

This abdication of responsibility for the most unprotected section of Indian labour as much as the promotion of gratuitous trade union-led violence has brought diminishing returns. With industry staying away from Left-ruled hotspots, workers in search of jobs were forced to move to geographies where protections are weak or non-existent. By opposing the United States-India nuclear deal and foreign investment in organised retail, the Left also showed itself to be blinkered by an ideology that its two international mentors, Russia and China, had jettisoned long ago. The irony is that in the competitive welfarism that has developed in the public discourse over the past decade, the Left’s ideals have been swamped by caste and religious constructs. If the Left doesn’t evolve and start representing the working class, it will continue to lose ground.