Left In The Lurch: Can CPM’s New Faces Save A Sinking Ship?

It was not a shocking development, if at all, just a surprise to some that the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) recently decided to show the door to some of its top leaders. The Karat couple, Prakash and Brinda, Manik Sarkar, Surjya Kanta Mishra, Subhashini Ali and G Ramakrishnan, were ousted from the party’s Politburo.

The logic for dropping them from the Politburo was the party’s rule of replacing those over 75 years with the younger generation of leaders. However, at the same time, an exception was made for Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, who is 79, making it clear that it was sort of a coup that was enacted during the CPM’s Madurai session earlier this month.

The step was in the making for some time. It was probably required too, considering their dogmatic style of functioning had become an obstacle to the CPM reinventing itself in Indian politics. Prakash Karat, in particular, was seen as the man responsible for the party’s sudden decline from the all-time high to its free fall. Karat was at the helm as the CPM general secretary for a decade between 2005 and 2015. During this period, the CPM was ousted from power in its bastion, West Bengal, in 2011, followed by its rejection by voters in another stronghold, Tripura, in 2018. The situation had come to such a pass that the CPM could win just four seats in the 2024 parliamentary elections. It is unimaginable that the party that ruled West Bengal for 34 years at a stretch failed to win even a single seat in the 2011 assembly elections. Currently, it is in power only in Kerala, where the CPM-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) retained power in the 2011 elections, breaking the decades-old tradition of ruling the state alternatively with the Congress party-led United Democratic Front (UDF).

The surgery was required to make the party healthy before key assembly elections in West Bengal and Kerala in about a year. There can be no guarantee that the LDF would create a new record of a hat-trick of victories in Kerala, while in West Bengal it has been relegated to margins, with the BJP emerging as the main challenge to the state’s ruling Trinamool Congress.

CPM, along with the entire Left Front led by it, is paying the price for its follies and refusal to make timely adjustments to its ideology to remain relevant in national politics. Three instances can be cited for their decline: the CPM Politburo not allowing the then West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu to head a coalition government at the centre in 1996; the Left Front withdrawing support for the Congress party-led government at the centre in 2008 over the Indo-US nuclear deal; and its quixotic decision, bordering on absurdity, of having an alliance with a sinking Congress party in West Bengal and opposing it in Kerala. Prakash Karat authored the last two decisions.

Although the Indo-US nuclear pact was not going to solve India’s energy shortage, it did become a national issue since it was projected then as if it were the solution to the problem. Barring those living in big cities, people across the country were suffering from power outages. Opposition to the pact merely because, being Marxists, they had to oppose anything to do with the US was ridiculous and did not go down well with the voters, especially the youth.

Indian communists have always been used to taking orders from Moscow and Beijing. When the Soviet Union and China started drifting away, one faction looked up to Moscow and the other to Beijing, leading to the CPI’s split in November 1964. The CPM came into being but refused to learn a lesson from the CPI’s decline when it was forced by its bosses in Moscow to support Indira Gandhi during the infamous Emergency and become its ally. The CPM leaders continued to take orders from Beijing, and their act of opposing the nuclear deal was apparently taken at the behest of their bosses in China.

The CPM forgot that it might get ideological and monetary support from China, but all voters were not their cadre to blindly support such acts. They overdid labour union activities, resulting in industries being driven out of West Bengal. They forgot that their closure could result in a loss of revenue and employment.

The Madurai session decision to go in for cosmetic surgery might be too little and too late. The first requirement for them is to initiate talks with the CPI and other Left parties to reunite and merge into one entity and reinvent themselves as a pro-India party. Merely replacing some old faces with new ones might not work with the voters seeking progress, development and prosperity, and not dogmatic rhetoric.

All eyes now would be on the new CPM general secretary, M.A. Baby, and his team since 2026 could be a make-or-break year for the Indian Left. They might be doomed if they fail in Kerala and West Bengal.

Ajay Jha is a senior journalist, author and political commentator

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