Bye-bye Saint Lenin: BJP's Northeast win, attacks on statues, and more

Statues and wall graphiti depicting its saints (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, and sometimes, even Stalin) are ubiquitous and red flags and the hammer and sickle sprout everywhere like weeds

The demolition of a statue of Lenin in Tripura earlier this week, allegedly by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) workers, after the party snatched the Northeast state from the Left Front, which had ruled it continuously since 1993, reminded me of another fall of a communist government. In 2011, the Trinamool Congress routed the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led leftist coalition in West Bengal, which had been in power, uninterrupted, since the end of the Emergency. For many of us, born in the early- to mid-1980s, that would be the first time we would experience a change of government at the