Communist Parties in India Continue to Lose Elections

 By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

Communist parties in India are losing ground in electoral politics, despite growing radical student protests, which recently saw the resignation of an education minister. The crisis is undeniable. The communist movement that once shaped national political discourse has been reduced to the margins electorally.

Communists were a major force in national politics. In 1996, Jyoti Basu, a founding member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), one of India’s three main communist parties, who was at the time West Bengal’s chief minister, even came close to becoming India’s prime minister as head of a coalition government. But his party rejected the offer, a decision Basu would later describe as an historic blunder.

The communists continued to shape politics in Delhi so deeply that in 2008, when they withdrew their support from former prime minister Manmohan Singh’s government, it was enough to push Singh into a confidence vote before he finally prevailed. At the time, the parties held 62 seats in the 543-seat lower house of parliament. They are now down to eight.

Today’s India is a very different place. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is reshaping the political landscape and has moved the political spectrum to the right. Since the 1990s, the rise of Hindu nationalism and market liberalisation has produced a religious, political and economic onslaught that squeezed the left from all sides. The communists have struggled to counter a politics increasingly organised around caste and religion rather than class.

Their social base has eroded. Organised labour was always a minority in India's vast informal economy. Welfare politics increasingly shifted from class mobilisation to direct cash transfers and identity-based coalitions. And contemporary electoral politics is now shaped by huge financial resources, corporate backed media propaganda and patronage-based campaigning.

Also, for the first time since 1957, India no longer has a single communist-led state government. West Bengal is gone. Tripura is gone. Kerala, too, has delivered a setback. At their peak, India’s various communist parties ruled states stretching from West Bengal to Kerala and Tripura. They impacted the lives of more than 100 million people through trade unions, peasant organisations, student wings and disciplined cadre networks.

West Bengal, in India’s east, has more than 106 million people. About 70 per cent are Bengali Hindus; neighbouring Bangladesh is a Bengali Muslim nation. The Left Front, organized by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), governed the state continuously from 1977 to 2011, one of the world’s longest-running elected communist administrations.

Tripura is a very small state east of Bangladesh. Its 3.6 million people are ethnically heterogenous, divided into 19 tribal communities, but 85 per cent are Hindus. In Tripura, the Left Front, which included both the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India, ruled for 35 years in all, including an uninterrupted 25-year stretch before its defeat by Modi’s BJP in 2018.

Kerala followed a different trajectory. The narrow state sits in India’s far southwest along the Arabian Sea. Its 36 million Malayalis speak Malayalam, the official language. Half are Hindus, one quarter Muslims, and about 20 per cent Christians.

Since 1957, when the state voted for one of the world’s first elected communist governments, power alternated between the Left under the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Congress Party, making the communists a durable force but never a permanently dominant one.

Last April’s election in West Bengal saw the defeat of the incumbent All India Trinamool Congress (AITC). The BJP won the election in a landslide and formed the government for the first time in the state. The Communist Party (Marxist) was reduced to one seat.

The BJP victory ranks among the most significant breakthroughs of Modi’s 12-year reign. It’s not merely the defeat of a three-term incumbent, but the completion of the party’s long march into eastern India. “Winning Bengal is a big victory for the BJP, a land of promise that has long eluded its grasp,” remarked author and journalist Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay. Unlike the BJP’s rapid rise in Tripura, West Bengal was never a lightning conquest.

The election saw violence as well. It stems from the state’s entrenched “party society,” explained Zaad Mahmood, who teaches political science at Kolkata’s Presidency University. Coined by political scientist Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya, the term captures how party affiliation became embedded in daily life and livelihoods.

“In the last decade or so, we’ve seen more atrocities around political identity than caste or religion,” Mahmood told the BBC, arguing that in many rural areas survival itself is tied to party loyalty, making any change in power feel existential.

Kerala also went to the polls in April. The election resulted in a historic landslide victory for the Congress Party-led United Democratic Front (UDF), completely unseating the ruling Left Democratic Front, which included the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India.

In Tripura, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was the dominant political force for decades, heading a Left Front coalition. In 2013, they secured 50 out of 60 seats Yet they lost power to the BJP in 2018 and have since then remained in the opposition. In 2023, they won just 11 seats.

It’s become clear that other divisions are bigger issues than those of class. So for communists in India’s states, the slide continues.