On a Friday evening last month, I got a call from a friend who had gone to the Crafts Council’s exhibition of summer textiles at Aga Khan Hall in the national capital.
“Guess what Comrade XX (name withdrawn) bought today? Two sarees, including a Bawan Buti, from a Bihar NGO stall. Guess how much she spent on them?” she asked. I had no clue, obviously. “One for Rs 22,000 and another for Rs 9,500,” the friend informed me in an excited voice. She had taken the pains to find out the prices of those sarees from the seller after the firebrand CPI(M) leader had left the stall. “So, what’s the big deal? People spend much more on sarees. Why are you sounding shocked?” I countered. “But she is a Comrade!” said my friend.
I got the drift. She would rather have the Left leader sit on dharna demanding free electricity for artisans than buy their produce and actually make a difference. She didn’t know the Communist leader well enough. When the leader was working with Air India at Heathrow Airport in London during her younger days, she had forced the airline to relax the mandatory wearing of skirts and allow sarees. She became a firebrand Communist leader after her return to India.
Left is dead
My friend isn’t a Right-winger by any definition of the term. I wouldn’t call her a Leftist either. So, why should a veteran CPI(M) leader buying decent sarees bother her so much? I reckon she expected a Comrade to be strictly spartan, no matter how well-off she might be. Buying a saree for Rs 20,000 today doesn’t make one a bourgeois, but what do you do about public perception?
People expect Comrades to live like the proletariat they supposedly live and fight for. Unreasonable and unfair, probably. But that’s how Comrades are typecast in the public imagination.
There was a time when the life of Prakash Karat, at the height of his power as the CPI(M) general secretary during the Left-backed UPA government, would often come up for discussions in political circles. Just like the debate on Prime Minister Narendra Modi having sold tea at a railway station, there used to be frequent references to how Karat had to sell his Jawa motorcycle to pay his fee at Edinburgh University. Even then, he had his dissenters: “How many poor people owned a Jawa motorcycle in 1960s?”
There would be snide remarks about former West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu’s love for Blue Label scotch. And many would talk about how Sitaram Yechury was known as a connoisseur of wine in Delhi’s power circles.
What I am driving at is how the Communists in India have had to cope with public scrutiny of their personal affairs—things that would be non-issues for politicians from other parties. I was, therefore, not surprised by how my friend was shocked to see a Comrade buying a couple of sarees worth a few thousand rupees.
But this also tells us about the prevalent cynicism about Communism and its leaders in India today. CPI won 16 seats in the first general elections in independent India in 1951-52. This number grew to 29 in 1962 and 43 seats—as CPI(M)—in 2004. In this light, the biggest Left party’s vanishing footprint—3 in 2019 and 4 in 2024—is a virtual meltdown.
As per the party’s draft political organisational report, the CPI(M)’s membership has increased to 10.19 lakh in 2024, up from 9.85 lakh in 2021. If you were to put all CPI(M) members in one Lok Sabha constituency, Malkagiri in Telangana, they would barely manage to defeat the BJP candidate, Eatela Rajender, who got 9.91 lakh votes in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
“The Left is dead. Long live the Left,” Yogendra Yadav started his article in ThePrint after the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. “The Indian Left never quite understood Indian society: their Euro-centric frame prevented them from meaningfully engaging with the Indian national movement, Indian traditions and religions or taking on the caste system. The surprise is not that the orthodox Left faces a dead-end; the surprise is that it survived nearly three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union,” he wrote.
Has something changed for the Left in the last six years since Yadav declared its death? Has it learnt any lessons? Absolutely not, going by the party’s political resolution discussed at its five-day 24th Congress at Madurai in Tamil Nadu, which ended on Sunday.
Also read: A weakened India is trying to make friends with China again. It has already failed twice
Solidarity with China
The draft resolution had been adopted by the party’s Central Committee (CC) at its Kolkata meeting in January. There were 174 amendments to it at the party Congress in Madurai, details of which haven’t been made public yet. But given that the CC had adopted it only a couple of months ago, one doesn’t expect many drastic changes in the adopted resolution.
Go through the draft resolution and you’d know why the CPI(M) is on the political fringe in India today. Ignore the rhetorical points about the “Hindutva-corporate-authoritarian” Modi government that displays “neo-fascist characteristics”. See how the party looks frozen in time in terms of gauging the national mood in the fast-changing global geo-strategic situations:
“The US is using Ukraine to advance its goal of weakening and containing Russia. All the economic sanctions that were imposed on Russia by the US and its allies failed to cripple the Russian economy. Russia was able to escape from the net of sanctions because of its close relations and trade with many developing countries, particularly China and India,” read the document.
Read it closely. Is the CPI(M) complimenting the Narendra Modi-led government for how it handled the Russia-Ukraine crisis? “The US is trying to counter the growing assertion of Russia and China by strengthening its alliances like the G-7 and NATO and also by trying to form many new alliances,” the resolution said.
Read on.
“The Biden administration weaponised trade relations, raised tariffs to ‘ultra-high’ levels and declared a trade war. The US-led G-7 and NATO have openly declared that China is a major threat to their global dominance and vowed to strengthen alliances to contain, isolate and out-compete China. In spite of all these attacks and withstanding them, China remains the biggest growth engine of the world economy… More than 150 countries and more than 30 international organisations have joined the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) of China… The CPI(M) expresses its solidarity with all the socialist countries – China, Vietnam, Cuba, the DPRK and Laos.”
Not a word on Doklam or Galwan. Not a word on China occupying Indian territories. One must place a caveat here: These contents were in the draft resolution that was obviously prepared before Trump formally took over. One doesn’t, however, know whether and how the CPI(M) has revised its stance in the resolution adopted at the party Congress.
Also read: Alienating Hindus broke Congress. It must win them back to survive
A confused Left
Discussions at the CPI(M) party Congress were all predictable: corporates making hay, the RSS agenda to make Hindutva the State ideology and transform the secular-democratic Republic into a Hindu Rashtra, et al. The party has been discussing how the RSS is using “growing religiosity” in the society and the need to make believers understand that the party is not against faith but against the use of religious beliefs for politics. But as Prakash Karat admitted in a recent interview, the party hasn’t been able to “properly work out how to do it”.
Look at how confused the Left looks about the BJP’s ability to get women’s votes through freebies: “Several state governments have tried to build a female support base through a money transfer scheme of 1000 to 1500 rupees into the bank accounts of women. Such is the acute economic distress of the average woman that even such small amounts make a considerable difference in the lives of women and have a political impact on voting patterns. Our interventions must be sensitive to the positive response to such schemes among the mass of women.”
Going by the draft resolution, the CPI(M) is cognisant of the three-pronged BJP strategy in elections: aggressive use of Hindutva issues to create polarisation and consolidate pan-Hindu identity, engineering caste and sub-caste alliances for electoral gains, and use of State-funded direct cash transfer schemes to cultivate beneficiaries. So, how does the CPI(M) plan to counter it? The political resolution doesn’t go beyond empty rhetoric. It’s even appreciative of how Congress has been able to gain Muslim minority support in a substantial manner all over the country. Does it finally know how to deal with the Congress, especially after the death of Sitaram Yechury, Rahul Gandhi’s friend, philosopher, and guide?
“The Congress party represents the same class interests as the BJP. However, being the main secular opposition party, it has a role to play in the struggle against the BJP and in the broader unity to be forged of the secular forces,” read the document.
Under ‘tasks’ for the party, the document listed: “The Party should develop and intensify struggles of the rural poor, working class and urban poor on livelihood issues, land, food, wages, house sites, social security benefits and employment opportunities.” The 63-page party resolution mentions the middle class just once, while talking about defending the interests of the working class, peasantry, artisans, small shopkeepers, middle class, and intelligentsia.
“Based on the glorious traditions of the Communist movement, we are confident that we shall rise up to meet the challenges before us!” the CPI(M) draft resolution ended on this note. Of course, if wishes were horses…
The fact is that a party still looking up to China as its North star can’t expect to be taken seriously in India today. Look at the draft resolution. The party seems to be emboldened by the “Left gains” in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, and Sri Lanka.
Comrades who gathered in Madurai for five days managed to avoid the elephant in the room yet again: Is the India of 2025 bothered about Karl Marx at all? Dictatorship is the last thing on the minds of the proletariat in the freebie-distributing, cradle-to-grave welfare State. And when Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan is celebrating the ‘amazing achievement’ of the Adani-operated Vizhinjam seaport and holding global summits to attract private investment, how is Marx reacting in his grave?
The Comrades won’t answer because they have none. For now, the party has appointed a Christian, MA Baby, as its general secretary, about a year ahead of the Assembly elections in Kerala, a state that has 18 per cent Christians. Call it a tentative baby step toward understanding the real ‘classes’ in Kerala, at least.
DK Singh is Political Editor at ThePrint. He tweets @dksingh73. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)