Election Commission reviewed the national & state status of various political parties by analysing their poll performance in national & state-based elections. After the analysis, the Trinamool Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Communist Party of India (CPI) lost their national party status, said EC on April 10. The party, started in 1920 in the Soviet Union as the Indian unit of the Communist International, lost the national party status due to the dismal performance in previous elections. Though it was a no-brainer in the case of CPI, as the left has lost its sheen, their offshoot CPI (Marxist) has still managed to maintain its national status with incredible difficulty. CPI lost its national status because of its poor electoral performance in West Bengal & Odisha after securing only 1.45 per cent & 0.12 per cent votes. These states, as mentioned earlier, were the hotbed of left politics in their glory days. Still, it has managed to be a state party in Kerela, Tamil Nadu & Manipur. Now only CPI (Marxist) has still managed to retain its national party status.
Under state party status, there are only three leftist political parties apart from the new entrant CPI: All India Forward Bloc (AIFB), Revolutionary Socialist Party, and Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation.
Over the years, the left has lost its electoral prowess, which earlier got a good headstart since independence as our first PM, Nehru & Congress party ideological leaning was always with the left principles. It was mainly accredited to their educational upbringing in the United Kingdom, where the Fabian Society played an active role in university politics, profoundly influencing young minds from commonwealth countries. It can also be viewed as a deep conspiracy by the colonial powers to subvert the educated & privileged class of their subjugated countries ideologically. It was a deep planning to handicap a country’s collective consciousness, which somewhat backfired UK & NATO during Cold War as India aligned with the Soviets. Even the secretaries of Indira Gandhi, known as the infamous Kashmir Mafia, helped make left-oriented policies a ground for CPI & resulting in attaining national party status in 1989.
But what happened in 2023? Why CPI lost its ground? Was it the advent of the BJP or their own policies allegedly dictated by foreign powers? Or the growing mistrust of voters against CPI because of their projection as an anti-national party.
It seems reasonable to claim that it has completely lost its focus and is now unimportant. The ground for the decline was already laid during Cold War only, right after the fall of the berlin wall & disintegration of the Soviet Union. It led to a domino effect of various communist-led states falling apart. But what happened in India, then? Although it has had some success as a sociopolitical movement & established governments in the states of Kerela, West Bengal & Tripura.
But it has utterly failed to win over the support of the lower classes and castes, which led to their ouster. It hasn’t been able to create a truly authentic critique of the politics in Indian society because it is so deeply entangled in Eurocentric and deterministic frameworks. The problem was the monochromatic view of the Indian problem through the lens of the bourgeoisie & proletariat categorisation limited their reach. The Indian left has always been the most confusing entity, which is just doing a simple copy-paste of Western imported ideals of the left.
We can even see that the leftist organisations in India failed to practice what they preach: equality & distribution. It has now become a party of upper-caste & high-class individuals who’re less attached to the ground realities; we can even call them the capitalist left. If we look at the party ranks of the left, we can see that most of the post-holders come from an upper-caste background, and the influence of Dalits in party politics is almost negligible. If we look at the nomination of the posts in the party is very nepotistic in nature. Even in the left-administered state of Kerela, there has been an alarming rise in caste-based attacks on Dalits & tribals.
The left’s hypocritical practices, both inside and outside the party, have been another serious issue for the left in India. While the left has long advocated for the underprivileged and working class, it frequently shows contempt for these groups, such as former Chief Minister of West Bengal Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s anti-worker tax policies [Special Economic Zones (SEZ) Act] favouring corporations only and not the worker class. Or their opposition to the US-India nuclear deal during 2006-2007.
News sources claim that the CPI’s dire circumstances have prompted increased criticism within the party over its incapacity to run campaigns or root out corruption among its ranks and its inability to mobilize the youth. The numbers are self-evident, as their performance in West Bengal & Tripura elections was terrible, resulting in losing their long-standing government in these states. If the left has to resurrect, they must restructure their party hierarchy by giving a chance to people who don’t come from a lineage or a specific lingual & regional category.
They also have to make changes in their ideological workings, just like in China and also don’t get overtly influenced by Western understandings because imposing Western notions of left & socialism has backfired miserably.
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