One of the longest and largest experiments with parliamentary communist governance is at a key crossroads. From 1977 until May 2026, millions of people in India lived under various Communist-led state governments. With the recent state elections in Kerala, the Left Democratic Front (LDF) – a coalition of 11 parties led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) – was ousted after a decade in power. For the first time since 1977, there is not a single state administration in India where a Communist Party is in power.

The drama of the Communists’ absence from the administrative map of Indian governance should not lead us to overstate the importance of this specific result. Kerala’s politics have always oscillated between administrations; it was the fact that the LDF had won a second term in 2021 that was unprecedented. Nonetheless, this can be a valuable opportunity for Marxists in India to take stock of their project; any viable path towards socialism in the subcontinent requires radical rethinking, and the lessons gleaned from this period can be of value for the Left in India, and beyond. 

Communism in India or Indian Communism?

The origins of organised communist parties in India lie in the Communist International. When the call for world revolution went out from Moscow in the aftermath of the 1917 October Revolution, radicals from around the world – many of them dedicated anticolonial activists – flocked to the Soviet Union. One of them was the famous M.N. Roy, often considered one of the first “Indian communists”.

Roy had begun his career as a radical nationalist in Bengal before he was swayed by Marxism while in New York. His contact with radical movements there, the influence of the American communist Evelyn Trent, and his dissatisfaction with the mainstream nationalist movement led him to seek alternatives.¹ As he put it in his memoir, he was attending a socialist meeting alongside the Indian nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai in New York. A member of the audience asked: “How did the nationalists propose to end the poverty of the Indian masses?” When a nationalist speaker replied, “Let us first be masters of our house”, the reply came that it did not make much difference “to the Indian masses if they were exploited by native capitalists instead of foreign imperialists.” Roy was indignant at first, but realised “there was something wrong in our case. Suddenly, a light flashed through my mind: it was a new light…I left the hall alone, still quite confused in my mind, but vaguely visualising a different picture of freedom.”² The road to Marxism, for generations of Indian leftists, began with a dissatisfaction with nationalism and the politics of the hegemonic Indian National Congress (INC). It was wedded to a vision of anti-imperialism as well as social and economic revolution within India itself. 

After a brief sojourn in Mexico, Roy ended up in Moscow and took part in the famous “Lenin-Roy debate” on the colonial question. Essentially, Roy favoured a more independent communist approach to politics in the subcontinent, while Lenin argued for the still-revolutionary potential of bourgeois nationalism in the colonial world. The specifics of this debate are less important than the fact that it would set the parameters for one of the persistent conundrums for communists in India – how would they relate to the “national bourgeoisie”? The specifics of the communist relationship to nationalism – particularly when their opponents wield the “anti-national” label against them – remain a troubled one. It was partially on this question that, in 1962, the CPI split into two parties: the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)), and the CPI. The former took an approach that the working class struggle against bourgeois rule was the primary task, while the latter argued for a “strategy of a broad alliance [which might include elements of Nehru’s INC] against a ‘feudal’ Indian ruling class”.³

Early communism in India had an internationalist and exilic element to it. It was through the influence of diasporic and exiled radicals like Roy and the Comintern that the Communist Party of India (CPI) was formed and took its first faltering steps in the interwar period. They began to build trade unions in industrial cities and organised strikes. In the years to come, they oscillated between resolute hostility to the Indian National Congress (INC) and a Popular Front with them in the late 30s, in accordance with the Comintern’s strategy for the world movement. 

The form of Communism that the CPI espoused believed in the applicability of Marxism-Leninism to Indian conditions. Against those who suggested that Marxism may need “stretching”, to use Fanon’s phrase, figures like Roy argued that “it is absurd…to seek for a special variety of Indian communism. An Indian who calls himself a communist must be a communist like the others in the rest of the world.”⁴ While the actual practice of the party, and the immense creativity of activists and movements on the ground, was far more responsive to the specificities of Indian culture and history, the imprint of this initial dismissal of the need for “vernacularisation” remained, at least in the early years. Yet the charge that Communists refuse to take into account Indian specificities and realities also gives short shrift to the creativity they have often shown, especially in praxis.

The communists built up an impressive array of trade unions, peasant organisations, and links with cultural movements such as the Progressive Writers’ Association and the Indian People’s Theatre Association. They also helped push the Indian independence movement to the Left. This ensured that it had a focus on the material concerns of the toiling millions in the cities and villages of the subcontinent. They were some of the earliest voices calling for complete independence from the British Empire, and pioneers in the labour movement. They organised a General Strike in Bombay and began to terrify both the Indian capitalists and the colonial state. In response, the largest and most costly trial in colonial history was launched against 30 suspected leftists in 1929: the Meerut Conspiracy Case saw trade unionists, student activists, and left-intellectuals charged with “conspiracy to wage war against the King-Emperor”.⁵ For the prosecution, holding communist convictions was tantamount to guilt. The trial lasted 4 years and, due to the draconian nature of the case and partially because of the presence of three white British communists amongst the accused, spawned a transnational solidarity movement. 

Nonetheless, the state’s attempt to snuff out communism in India through police action failed, and in 1935 the CPI entered a Popular Front with the mainstream of the nationalist movement. They continued to build their influence in trade unions and peasant movements. When the Royal Indian Navy mutinied in 1946, they raised three flags: that of the Congress, the Muslim League, and the Communist Party of India. The CPI gave full support to the mutineers and organised massive solidarity strikes. The Congress and the Muslim League, eager to carry on negotiations with Britain on the constitutional front, condemned the sailors and urged them to surrender. They did, after being promised by the Congress that they would be safe from persecution; they were promptly arrested. This set the tone for the post-war period in India: the nationalists increasingly tried to curb the mass enthusiasm and militancy that was erupting across the country as they tried to negotiate a transfer, rather than a seizure, of power.  

Yeh Azaadi Jhooti Hai 

Amidst a wave of mass radicalism that was rocking the country on the eve of independence and in its immediate aftermath, the Communist Party inaugurated a new slogan: yeh azaadi jhooti hai, janta abhi bhooki hai (this freedom is a lie, the people are still hungry). Though perhaps ill-advised tactically, the slogan captured something real; independence in India was inaugurated with civil war, mass death, and a “passive” revolution that left brutal caste, class, and patriarchal exploitation largely intact. The Congress, too, was increasingly intolerant of dissent and began to draw quite narrow limits to acceptable opposition to the post-colonial state.⁶ The new Communist line called for insurrection against the state, which, they argued, had failed to deliver real independence. The reaction from the government was severe; around 50,000 communists were arrested, and the movement had to move underground for a time. Nehru admitted that the state was essentially “at war” with the Communists.⁷

This was also when one of the most significant episodes in Left history in India took place. In 1946, in the princely state of Hyderabad, ruled by the monarch, Nizam Mir Osman Ali Khan, peasants clashed with the armed men of a revenue collector. A village leader was shot dead, and the villagers declared they had had enough. As the historian Sunil Purushotam recounts, “volunteers carrying sticks embarked on jaitra yatras (victory marches) carrying the red flag from village to village, singing folk songs and rousing the people to rebel against the landlords.”⁸ The landlords and their men fled before them. The villagers proclaimed a new society: “an end to vetti (caste-based forced labour), bhagela (debt bondage), and traditional gender hierarchies.”⁹  What followed was massive land redistribution, debt forgiveness, and a “radical form of direct democracy that challenged the state’s monopoly on violence.”¹⁰ For 5 years, the CPI helped to lead a peasant insurgency against first the Nizam of Hyderabad, and then the Indian state after the latter invaded Hyderabad in a “police action” meant to force it into the Indian Union. The Indian armed forces moved into the area, put down the peasant insurgents, and then took part in a horrific communal bloodbath that saw up to 40,000 Muslims killed by Indian forces, Congress members, Hindu nationalists, and looters. The CPI officially called off the struggle in 1951, but the seeds had been planted for a new interpretation of revolution in India: what is known as the Telangana Armed Struggle was, for some, the forerunner of Naxalism – India’s Maoist insurgency. 

The Communists in Office 

While some looked on Telangana as an inspiration, others in the movement felt that the post-war insurrection had been a case of left-wing adventurism. Instead, they called for participation in the framework of bourgeois democracy set up in the aftermath of colonialism. While this was paired with an ultimate commitment to communist revolution, it was felt that taking part in electoral politics might still pay some dividends. The Congress under Nehru had a massive parliamentary majority, but it was the CPI, with 16 seats, that formed the first democratic opposition in independent India.

The CPI made impressive inroads in places like Bengal and Kerala. It was often precisely where the Congress had less of an iron grip on politics that the CPI was able to articulate its vision of politics and garner significant support. They built bases in industrial cities and amongst peasant movements in the countryside across the country. It was in Bengal and Kerala that they were able to articulate a Gramscian “national-popular” consciousness.¹¹ In Kerala, this meant spearheading the movement for the formation of a Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala out of princely states and British provinces from the colonial period. It also meant articulating an identity with a class basis and a culture that was simultaneously rooted in the particulars of Kerala and India, while “being inspired by anti-imperialist and socialist struggles elsewhere.”¹² In West Bengal, it meant articulating a sense of grievance for Bengalis vis-à-vis the central government and pointing out years of Congress authoritarianism, while mobilising the people of the state to fight for substantive freedom and building a radical culture. 

The communists were also helped by the legacies of radical nationalist movements in Bengal, which had often exceeded the strictures of Gandhian non-violence and Congress control; many of the young revolutionaries of the interwar period found their way into the Communist Party. This legacy included the CPI’s heroic relief work during the 1942 Bengal Famine, which saw more than 3 million people die of starvation. Amongst other things – including the fact that the Congress leadership was arrested while Communist support of WW2 saw their legalisation – it was because the Congress was imbricated with the same agrarian and industrial interests reaping profits at the time, that the Communists were able to step into the breach and act as they did.¹³ With impressive work in the cultural sphere – in poetry, theatre, and music, for example – the communists became a “hegemonic cultural force.”¹⁴

However, once the decision was made to participate in the electoral system in postcolonial India, the communists soon found themselves faced with a problem that socialists around the world had faced before them: what was a revolutionary party to do if it took office before a revolution? 

In 1957, the CPI in Kerala had to face this challenge head-on. Under the leadership of E.M.S. Namboodiripad, the CPI became one of the first democratically elected communist governments in the world. They implemented a programme of land reform, labour rights, and pro-people policies. However, they eventually faced mass discontent when they tried to create a uniform and secular education system – taking control away from churches, for example. This unrest, combined with opposition from landlords and vested interests, led to the Central Government dissolving the State administration and imposing direct rule by the Centre. Recent researchers have also revealed the likely hand of the CIA and British intelligence in orchestrating the fall of the Namboodiripad ministry.¹⁵ Nonetheless, the communists had gotten their foot in the door; from that point on, they would be contenders for state power in regions like Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura. They admitted that the transition to socialism would necessarily exceed the limits of the current Indian constitution but felt compelled to act within its bounds for the time being.

The Communists are still in this position. To this day, the CPI(M) Programme insists that it recognises the transition to socialism cannot be achieved within the confines of bourgeois capitalist democracy. The present state is, they argue, “the organ of the class rule of the bourgeoisie and landlords led by the big bourgeoisie, who are increasingly collaborating with foreign finance capital in pursuit of the capitalist path of development.” They, in contrast, articulate a vision of what they call “People’s Democracy”. Under the current dispensation, “there is no hope of emancipation of the people from backwardness, poverty, hunger, unemployment and exploitation under the present bourgeois-landlord rule.”  

Capitalism in India, in their reading, was grafted onto a “pre-capitalist society”, unlike the “advanced capitalist countries where capitalism grew on the ashes of pre-capitalist society”. (How much pre-capitalist structures were truly dismantled even in Europe is, of course, open to debate). Thus, it is the task of communists and the working class to “unite all the progressive forces interested in destroying the pre-capitalist society and to consolidate the revolutionary forces within it so as to facilitate the completion of the democratic revolution and prepare the ground for the transition to socialism.”¹⁶ This is the immediate task; the transition to socialism will be the road travelled once the democratic revolution in India is complete. This, of course, is something that multiple Communist Parties (including the Bolsheviks) have grappled with; the struggle for socialism is also often a struggle for democracy. It is also easy to see how a socialist politics can be combined with the defence of secularism, the fight against authoritarianism, and a social contract that delivers meaningful citizenship – freedom and the ability to meaningfully exercise it – to the Indian people. Yet, the challenge is to exist in, and struggle for, the present with an orientation towards a socialist future without subordinating the latter to the former. 

Results

With this theoretical foundation, the CPI(M) and CPI have participated in electoral politics for decades. A fundamental contradiction for the Communists was that they were taking the reins of state administrations (often governing tens of millions of people) that had to operate within the confines of the Indian bourgeois-democratic-capitalist federal structure. This set strict limits on what they could achieve in terms of a transition to socialism; it also meant they relied on the central government for financial transfers and funding in key areas. 

Nonetheless, they have managed incredible feats. Kerala has been called a developmental “model” by the United Nations for its massive achievements in social indicators and “redistributive development”. As part of a wider ecology of social movements, anti-caste mobilisations, and as the leaders of radical working-class and peasant movements, the communists in Kerala combined mass mobilisations and terms in office to, as the scholar Nissim Mannathukkaren writes, achieve “the elimination of landlordism, the vesting of land rights in tenants, the protection of labor, the spending of resources on the public provision of education, health, agricultural credits and food.”¹⁷ During the Coronavirus pandemic, the Left Front government in Kerala was a model for public action and won plaudits for its efficiency, public mobilisation, and humane approach to COVID prevention, particularly in comparison to the callousness and inhumanity of the Modi government’s response. They have also experimented with the devolution of power, with the implementation of panchayat (village council) level governance and participatory budgeting. 

In West Bengal, the Left Front did not oscillate in and out of power like in Kerala; instead, they were in office in an unbroken stint from 1977 to 2011. They won their first term as the dominant partner in a coalition in 1977 after years of massive repression of the Left. In the post-“Emergency” wave, following Indira Gandhi’s suspension of the constitution and state of emergency between 1975-77,  they got 35% of the vote and formed a coalition with other left-wing parties like the All-India Forward Bloc and the Revolutionary Socialist Party. In the years that followed – based on improved living standards, mass mobilisations, cultural work, improved salaries for white-collar and public-sector workers (as well as the police, who became a “bastion of support” for the CPI(M)), a commitment to secularism, and grassroots activism – they managed to build an incredible electoral and party machine.¹⁸ At their best, they combined programs of land reform and tenancy rights for sharecroppers with mass mobilisation and “participation, in an atmosphere of real euphoria.”¹⁹ 

In India’s third smallest state, Tripura, the CPI(M) was also in power from 1977 to 2018. While they were recognised as running an efficient and honest administration, they fell to the BJP and the “Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura”. As one writer puts it, “while CPM talked about ‘peace, stability and development’, the BJP used “the growing aspirations of the people, particularly young voters,” and capitalised on a wave of popularity for Narendra Modi.²⁰ Running on past performances as a state administration, and on “peace, harmony, development” rang hollow to the roughly 20% unemployed young workers of the state. There were also frustrations that the CPI(M) ran a system of patronage, which meant that those who professed loyalty to the party got preferential treatment – something that recurs in Kerala and West Bengal, too. 

On the national level, as part of a coalition with the Indian National Congress government of Manmohan Singh in the early 2000s, they pressured the government into passing the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGN REGA) – the world’s largest welfare programme and a vital lifeline for many in the countryside. They also came close to taking office as part of a coalition government, with veteran CPI(M) leader Jyoti Basu as Prime Minister, in 1996, before the party decided against taking power at a juncture when the political situation in the country was unfavourable.

Despite the limitations and contradictions of their time in office, their achievements have been real and have improved the lives of many. Yet the party, in many ways, risked becoming a machine of governance rather than one of revolution. People increasingly joined the CPI(M) for the opportunities and connections it might provide. There was a frustration with the intolerance of dissent and the increasingly heavy-handed behaviour of party cadre on the local level. Economically, as well, Left governments struggled to provide growth and employment. Kerala relies heavily on remittances from workers who move abroad – many of them to the Gulf. West Bengal suffered from a ballooning budget for the salaries of its base of public-sector employees, growing landlessness, and wealth gaps between the cities and the countryside. Capital flight and financial difficulties imposed by hostile central governments play a very real part in the Left’s economic difficulties, but they do not explain it entirely.

More importantly, electoralism has its own temporalities, its own incentives. The revolutionary horizon of the movement began to recede further and further into the distance. As discussed below, in recent years in Kerala, the language of class struggle was in competition with the language of development and welfare. The struggle against capitalism easily slipped into the claim that the Party could manage it more humanely than other parties. It also meant that there was less scope for grassroots initiative by party cadre. As Subho Basu and Auritro Majumder put it, “discipline now triumphed over spontaneity and loyalty replaced political ingenuity as the mechanism of party political activities.”²¹ But the most striking impasse for the party’s revolutionary telos and its participation in parliamentary politics came in 1967, in the village of Naxalbari.

The Ballot and the Bullet

In the West Bengali village of Naxalbari, peasants and local Communist activists intent on enforcing the government’s land redistribution policy took direct action and, in the midst of a food crisis, occupied vacant land. During the police response, which turned violent, an officer named Sonam Wangdi was struck by three arrows and killed. The first shot in India’s longest-running insurgency was fired by a tribal woman named Shanti Munda, who had a 15-month-old baby strapped to her back.²² The police reprisals were swift and bloody, and triggered a wave of uprisings across the country. The Chinese media (5 years out from a war against India in 1962) celebrated it as a “peal of spring thunder [which had] crashed over the land.”²³

At the time, the CPI(M) was a junior partner in a coalition government in the state. Faced with this revolt, they at first attempted to mediate. When that failed, the Party participated in a crackdown on the insurgents. This caused a split, with frustrated members of the Party who supported the uprising creating the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). Thus, Indian Maoism was born. The split had been gestating: members of the CPI(M) had been frustrated with the subordination of revolution to parliamentary politics, and some of them had been calling for agrarian revolt. The pattern was set for fratricidal violence, and it would continue in the decades to come.

The leader of the nascent movement, Charu Majumdar, advocated a policy of “class annihilation” – individual landlords or agents of the state were targeted. Alongside the initial upsurge amongst peasants, young people in the cities also flocked to the movement. Many of them, driven by revolutionary zeal and a dedication to the cause of revolution, moved to the countryside to join armed groups. In other instances, some of them engaged in spontaneous violence, and “would roam around [Calcutta] with crude bombs and even razors with which they attacked lone policemen.”²⁴

In the Maoist view, India was a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country; with the main enemy being feudalism in the countryside, they argued for agrarian revolution along the Maoist model. The Party would organise the peasants and build an armed force with the countryside ultimately surrounding the cities. The initial uprising was quelled, but Naxalism has erupted time and again in the years since 1967, with its latest iteration in the Communist Party of India (Maoist), founded in 2004. 

In the 21^st century, the Naxalites have largely found a base amongst Adivasi (tribal) communities struggling against rapacious mining corporations and displacement. In 2006, the Congress PM Manmohan Singh labelled them “the single-largest internal security threat India faced.” The Maoists are active in areas that the Indian state and international capital are desperate to access: minerals estimated to be worth $80 billion sit beneath the lands, forests, and rivers of communities who understandably do not want to move. As Arundhati Roy has written, the Naxalite armies, therefore, were “made up almost entirely of desperately poor tribal people living in conditions of such chronic hunger that it verges on famine….They are people who have been mercilessly exploited for decades, consistently cheated by small businessmen and moneylenders, the women raped as a matter of right by police and forest department personnel. Their journey back to a semblance of dignity is due in large part to the Maoist cadre who have lived and worked and fought by their side for decades.”²⁵ To be sure, there are problems with the Maoists’ approach to politics: their analysis of India as a ‘semi-feudal’ society, the reliance on violence against individual ‘class enemies’, and the compromises they sometimes have to make to sustain their existence as an organised force under extreme repression by the Indian state.²⁶ Yet they are often the last line of defence for communities who have no recourse when armed men tell them, down the barrel of a gun, that they must make way for the sake of development.

The repression of Naxalism, begun by the Congress in 2009 under the name “Operation Green Hunt”, has been eagerly continued by the ruling Hindu Nationalist BJP. Tens of thousands of paramilitary and police forces have been deployed in the “Red Corridor”, which at its peak in 2007 included significant parts of the country. There was also a massive clampdown on those suspected to be sympathisers of the movement: the label “Urban Naxal” was used against everyone from prominent academics, who were arrested, to protesting farmers. In 2025, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), 70-year old Nambala Keshava Rao, was killed in a police action in Chhattisgarh.

In March of 2026, the Home Minister Amit Shah declared India to be “Naxal-free”: the “bad dream” was over, and the road to development was now open.²⁷  Having set a deadline of this year for the eradication of Naxalism back in 2024, he struck a triumphalist tone – the “Red Corridor” had become a “Growth Corridor”. Yet victory speeches may be premature. The government views the insurgency as primarily a product of ideology, and this may be their biggest mistake. Naxalism is the product of material conditions, and poverty and oppression remain. As the journalist N Venugopal said in a recent interview with the BBC, “leaders may fall but the anger remains. Wherever injustice exists, there will be movements. We may not call them Maoism anymore – but they’ll be there.”²⁸

Moving Forward

The parliamentary wing of communism in India is also in a difficult spot. The Left Front’s hegemony in Bengal ended dramatically in 2011, but it had been riddled by crisis for some time. They were ousted by the populist leader Mamata Banerjee, whose Trinamool Congress ruled the state until 2026. Now, the BJP have taken charge of the state long seen as one of the final bastions of resistance to Hindu Nationalist hegemony. 

The Left in West Bengal fell victim to some of the aforementioned problems of organisational ossification, a stifling party political culture, and a sectarian approach to dissenting voices. It also struggled to provide a stable economic foundation for the people of the state, and to address the aspirations of those who had succeeded from some of their reforms alongside those of their traditional worker-peasant base. Faced with India’s turn to neoliberalism and the fall of the Socialist Bloc in the 1990s, the CPI(M) found itself floating Special Economic Zones and trying to court investment in the state. This brought them into conflict with some of the rural bases they had helped acquire land and tenancy rights in the early years. The tension came to a head in 2007 in Nandigram, where resistance to a land grab by the government led to a crackdown by the Left government in which fourteen people were shot by the police. As one article reports, “police firing on peasants is not new in India; nor was the casualty rate high compared to earlier incidents. The real issue was that the Left, which claimed for itself the mantle of the savor of the peasantry…was now using the police and party cadres to acquire land for monopoly capital.”²⁹

In contrast, many argued that Kerala showed a more humane alternative to the West Bengal party’s heavy-handedness. Here, responsiveness to citizens, participatory budgeting, and grassroots mobilisation was used instead of the top-down approach. Yet even here, there were notable difficulties and contradictions before the 2026 defeat. 

The Left Front can take credit for much of the success of Kerala and its high social indicators. It also helped set the terms of debate in the state; politics there largely revolved around a “competitive welfarism”, with both the Left Front and the newly victorious UDF (United Democratic Front) professing a commitment to progressive policies. Yet increasingly, the  CPI(M)’s rhetoric in the state was about development, growth, and investment.³⁰ In the recent election, the Left ran on its “record in welfare delivery, healthcare and education”, while the opposition ran on questions of “unemployment, inflation, [and] governance.”³¹ Some of the party’s own activists have accused them of “replacing class struggle with the politics of civil society.”³² Increasing mobilisation by the Hindu Nationalists in Kerala also brought forth the spectre of the Left Front losing “Hindu votes”. In response, the Left Front began to dilute its famous secularism, to “try and coopt religiosity, rather than combat it.”³³ This was most evident in the Sabrimala episode, when the Left Front – faced with massive backlash – dropped its previous commitment to implementing a Supreme Court decision to allow women of menstruating age into the Sabrimala Temple Complex in Kerala, from which they have long been barred. 

The Left Front’s quest for investment led to them courting the London Stock Exchange – with the then-Finance Minister Thomas Isaac joking that the Communists were “beating the corporates at their game” – and working alongside Modi-aligned oligarchs like Gautam Adani.³⁴ In the latter instance, when fishing communities opposed the construction of a massive port backed by Adani, the CPI(M) cracked down on them, hinted that they may be receiving “foreign funding”, and even resorted to calling them the right-wing epithet, so often reserved for communists: “anti-national”.³⁵ It does not help that the Left government seems to share the Indian state’s predilection for massive, big-ticket infrastructure projects that are of dubious economic value to communities and are environmentally costly.

Class struggle was subordinated to developmental and electoral ends. When workers in public-sector employment have faced challenges at work, they have received only “subdued responses” from trade unions affiliated to the CPI(M).³⁶  When the imperatives of state development conflict with the interests of impacted communities on the ground, even the Left mass fronts are reluctant to speak out.

There is an understandable degree of unease among the party rank-and-file about these developments. Yet the internal culture, already difficult at times, has gotten much worse. The space for dissent in the party appeared to be shrinking. One of the most striking aspects of this last election is how many former CPI(M) members ran as independent candidates or joined the UDF. As one article put it, this was a case of “internal dissent [turning] electoral.” Consider a few striking examples. T.K. Govindan was a senior Party leader who left the party over accusations of favouritism in candidature choices for elections – he won a major left seat by over 12,000 votes. Another newly elected MLA is Sudhakaran, who belonged “to an older generation of CPI(M) politicians who built their political identity through trade union activism and grassroots mobilization”.³⁷ He also left the party over frustrations with the direction it was heading in, and the sense that inner-party democracy was stifled. 

While there may be some similarities in the decline of the CPI(M) in Bengal and Kerala, the situation is far from irreparable in the latter just yet. As mentioned at the outset, oscillation between governments is the norm in the state. Furthermore, the election result is not a repudiation of the Left and a move towards Hindu Nationalism. Far from it. Instead, it shows a frustration with the direction of travel under the LDF without a repudiation of their stated ideals. There is a real chance now for introspection, and a period in opposition may well help the party. 

Prospects 

The history of communism in India is a long and storied one. It has its heroes and villains, its pitfalls and its moments of genuine heroism and radicalism. It is also a story that is still actively being written by dedicated rank-and-file workers and peasants, party members, intellectuals, and the masses. The contradictions that make the overthrow of capitalism an urgent human, ecological, and economic necessity remain and are as urgent as ever. The Communist movement in India will play a vital role in this, but it will no doubt exist as part of a broader ecology of social movements, anti-caste movements, feminists, youth and student movements, regional parties, and other peoples’ movements that can and will be collaborators and interlocutors.³⁸ These movements will struggle on both the ballot and on the streets.

The inexhaustible reservoirs of creativity and radicalism that are available to the movement in India will continue to be tapped in order to find ways out of the current impasse. By way of suggestion, we might foresee a few directions of travel (which many in the Party and on the Left have already identified). 

One comes from the fact that India is not untouched by the disaggregation of production. Thus, mobilising workers in the informal and unorganised sectors takes on the utmost importance – something the communist Centre for Indian Trade Unions (CITU) has recognised. This means mobilising in the neighbourhood as well as the workplace (something the early CPI did to incredible effect in the famous 1927 Bombay General Strike).³⁹ 

The moment also demands a consistent defence of secularism and a principled opposition to the poisonous neo-fascism that is increasingly hegemonic across the entire country – on this front, the Left remains one of the loudest and most consistent sources of resistance. It demands articulating a class politics that recognises the divides of caste, gender, faith, region, and language, without reifying difference. It demands articulating a substantive form of “social citizenship” that focuses on livelihood, dignity and the ability to exercise genuine freedom in the economic, social and political spheres, without falling into the refuge of excessive nationalism or a focus on developmentalism.⁴⁰ Demonstrating communist patriotism, or relitigating the heroics of party members during the anti-imperialist struggle, are less important than trying to push for a new sense of what exactly it means to be an Indian, and what the people of the country are owed as fundamental rights. This will involve articulating new visions of development and flourishing for human beings and the environment. Yet it is important to remember that these will be transitional steps; the party’s diagnosis remains true: capitalism cannot solve the ills that beset us. This also, then, means returning to the language and practice of class struggle and revolutionary politics.

This conjuncture calls for rethinking and reimagining, and that can only take place without the subordination of struggle to electoralism and with a truly democratic and open internal party culture in which the voices of the young, oppressed castes, religious minorities, and women are taken seriously and given more space to progress than they have to this point. 

The Congress party’s pan-India hegemony was fractured by the regionalisation of Indian politics in the late 20^th century; with the development of capital, the rise of regional parties and powerbrokers, and the Congress’s own hubris, more and more parties began to carve out independent powerbases in specific states.⁴¹ The Communists, in hindsight, appear in a similar light. Electorally, outside of Tripura, West Bengal, and Kerala, their performance has been poor. Their mass movements have much more reach, but they are increasingly challenged by BJP-affiliated unions, student movements, and more. Crucially, the BJP appears to be approaching the pan-Indian hegemony that the Congress once had. There are severe barriers to this – the slogan of “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan” is unlikely to appeal to the Sikh majority in Punjab or to voters in states who do not speak Hindi, such as those in the South – but the party is a formidable electoral machine. They also have an impressive street-level movement that is violent and fascistic but organised and well-funded. The Communists will likely not be the ones to beat them at the ballot box – they can be part of coalitions that try to do so, but their real impact will, for the time being, have to be on the streets and in workplaces and communities. Tapping into the dedication of their cadres, allowing for grassroots creativity, and a renewed focus on base-building rather than electoral results on an all-India level will help them continue to be one of the most consistent opponents of India’s descent into fascism. Achieving the right balance is difficult; socialists have often either repudiated electoralism entirely or subordinated the movement to its strictures. Instead, the movement should opt for a broad array of tactics with flexibility and a responsiveness to the demands of particular conjunctures and the grassroots. Communist student groups have been present at the incredible July 2026 student protests in Delhi, CITU is trying to make inroads into organising with gig workers, and there is surely a great deal of work rank-and-file cadre do that goes unnoticed. More can be done to organise landless agricultural workers (many of the farmers’ unions are dominated by landholders), to be present in struggles over social reproduction and environmental issues. This will mean rethinking prevailing ideas in some of the parties on class and development, for a start.  There are no easy answers, but admitting the urgency of the impasse is an important step.

The Communists have a difficult task. They must exist in two temporalities at once: firmly rooted in the struggles, needs, and demands of the present while also maintaining a firm focus on the ultimate goal of a socialist transformation. That challenge is one that they share with socialists worldwide. We have much to learn from where the communist movement in India has gone wrong, what it has done right, and where it goes next. 

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1.  See Shreya Bhattacharya, ‘Evelyn Trent: Erased Voices and the Radical Struggle Against Imperial Capitalism’, Substack newsletter, Discourse on Anti-Colonialism, 21 May 2025, https://discourseonanticolonialism.substack.com/p/evelyn-trent-erased-voices-and-the. ↩︎
2.  M. N. Roy, M.N. Roy’s Memoirs (Ajanta Publications, 1964), p. 28. ↩︎
3. Kheya Bag, ‘Red Bengal’s Rise and Fall’, New Left Review, no. 70 (August 2011): 69–98. ↩︎
4.  M.N. Roy, “An Indian Communist?” Masses of India III (July, 1927) as cited in Gene D. Overstreet and Marshall Windmiller, Communism in India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), 89. ↩︎
5.  See Manu Goswami, ‘A Communism of Intelligence: Early Communism in Late Imperial India’, Diacritics 48, no. 2 (2020), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/797662. ↩︎
6.  See Shalini Sharma, ‘“Yeh Azaadi Jhooti Hai!”: The Shaping of the Opposition in the First Year of the Congress Raj’, Modern Asian Studies 48, no. 5 (2014): 1358–88. ↩︎
7.  Sunil Purushotham, From Raj to Republic: Sovereignty, Violence, and Democracy in India (Stanford University Press, 2021), 183. ↩︎
8. Ibid ↩︎
9. Ibid ↩︎
10. Ibid ↩︎
11.  See Nissim Mannathukkaren, Communism, Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Theory: The Left in South India (Routledge, 2022). ↩︎
12. Ibid, 59 ↩︎
13.  Ania Loomba, Revolutionary Desires: Women, Communism, and Feminism in India (Routledge, 2018), 198. ↩︎
14.  Subho Basu and Auritro Majumder, ‘Dilemmas of Parliamentary Communism: The Rise and Fall of the Left in West Bengal’, Critical Asian Studies 45, no. 2 (2013): 167–200, https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2013.792569. ↩︎
15.  M. P. Basheer, ‘The Kerala Precedent: How Article 356 Became a Weapon of Cold War Politics’, The Wire, 19 August 2025, https://thewire.in/history/the-kerala-precedent-how-article-356-became-a-weapon-of-cold-war-politics. ↩︎
16.  Communist Party of India (Marxist), ‘Party Programme’, accessed 10 July 2026, https://cpim.org/party-programme/.  ↩︎
17.  Mannathukkaren, Communism, Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Theory, 1. ↩︎
18.  Bag, ‘Red Bengal’. ↩︎
19. Ibid ↩︎
20.  Suhrid Sankar Chattopadhyay, ‘Fall of a Citadel’, Frontline, 14 March 2018, https://frontline.thehindu.com/cover-story/fall-of-a-citadel/article10094600.ece.  ↩︎
21.  Basu and Majumder, ‘Dilemmas of Parliamentary Communism’.  ↩︎
22.  Anonymous, ‘Naxalbari@50: Maoist Uprising Was Sparked by This Tribal Woman Leader’, Hindustan Times, 23 May 2017, https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/naxalbari-50-meet-the-woman-who-lit-the-first-fire-of-uprising/story-5ey8bOCHpquwFT33vo9H5I.html. ↩︎
23.  ‘Spring Thunder Over India’, People’s Daily, 5 July 1967, https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/documents/peoples-daily/1967/07/05.htm. ↩︎
24.  Rahul Pandita, ‘The Rise and Now Fall of the Maoist Movement in India’, Aeon, 21 October 2025, https://aeon.co/essays/the-rise-and-now-fall-of-the-maoist-movement-in-india.  ↩︎
25.  Arundhati Roy, Mr Chidambaram’s War, 2010, https://isreview.org/issue/69/mr-chidambarams-war/index.html. ↩︎
26.  For example, the Maoists sometimes charge “protection money” from businesses operating in areas they control. See Kheya Bag, ‘Red Flags In The Forest’, New Left Review, no. 118 (August 2019): 141–48. ↩︎
27.  Rashmi Drolia, ‘“I Can Proudly Declare India Naxal-Free”, Says Amit Shah’, The Times of India, 19 May 2026, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/raipur/i-can-proudly-declare-india-naxal-free-says-amit-shah-bastars-50-year-loss-will-be-repaired-in-5-years/articleshow/131178644.cms. ↩︎
28.  Suvojit Bagchi, ‘Is India Finally Winning the Decades-Long War against Maoist Insurgency?’, BBC News, 27 May 2025, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgle158kp17o. ↩︎
29.  Basu and Majumder, ‘Dilemmas of Parliamentary Communism’. ↩︎
30.  Nileena MS, ‘How Kerala’s CPI(M) Took a Hammer to Its Ideology While Chasing Electability’, Caravan Magazine, 1 April 2026, https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/kerala-ldf-pinarayi-vijayan-cpim-compromises-election. ↩︎
31.  ‘Kerala Election Wrap-up: How UDF Ended LDF’s 10-Year Rule’, The Times of India, 22 May 2026, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/kerala-election-wrap-up-how-udf-ended-ldfs-10-year-rule/articleshow/131249440.cms. ↩︎
32.  MS, ‘How Kerala’s CPI(M) Took a Hammer to Its Ideology’. ↩︎
33. Ibid ↩︎
34. Ibid ↩︎
35. Ibid ↩︎
36. Ibid ↩︎
37.  Lakshmi Priya, ‘Beyond Anti-Incumbency: What Kerala’s Verdict Says about the LDF’, Newslaundry, 7 May 2026, https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/05/07/beyond-anti-incumbency-what-keralas-verdict-says-about-the-ldf. ↩︎
38.  It bears mentioning that the CPI(M) does indeed have mass-membership organisations like the Students Federation of India or the All-India Democratic Women’s Association. ↩︎
39.  See Sinha, Abhinav. “Whither Working Class Movement?,” n.d., https://www.academia.edu/9922066/Whither_Working_Class_Movement. I have written on the Bombay strike elsewhere, at Tanroop Sandhu, Mills and Marxists: Communism and Internationalism in Interwar Bombay, History Workshop Journal, Volume 101, Spring 2026, Pages 169–195, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbag012.   ↩︎
40.  Basu and Majumder, ‘Dilemmas of Parliamentary Communism’. ↩︎
41.  Achin Vanaik, ‘India’s Two Hegemonies’, New Left Review, no. 112 (August 2018): 29–59. ↩︎