Politics | Back to the wall, the Left faces a survival issue

In the late eighties, when the Rajiv Gandhi government was rocked by the Bofors scandal, it was once again the Left parties that pulled their weight behind Vishwanath Pratap Singh to oust Gandhi and form an alternative government.

In 1996, a hung verdict nearly propelled then West Bengal Left Front Chief Minister Jyoti Basu to premiership. But this was vetoed by his party in what would later be described as a “Himalayan blunder”. Communist Party of India stalwart Indrajit Gupta served as the Union home minister during the premierships of H D Deve Gowda and Inder Kumar Gujral.

The Left continued to influence national politics through the Atal Bihari Vajpayee days in the late nineties and was at the vanguard of providing a national alternative in 2004 when it played a key role in installing a Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government.

2004 was also its finest hour in Indian politics with the Left parties combining to win as many as 60 seats and massively influencing central government policies. Four years later, the Left withdrew its support to the government on the issue of the Indo-US nuclear deal in what would prove to be yet another Himalayan blunder for the party.

The Left parties have been in terminal decline ever since and never recovered from the jolt they suffered in the elections that followed. The Left Front lost power in West Bengal in 2011 and has been decimated in the 2019 elections in Bengal, with its vote share plummeting to a historic low of 4 percent.

It’s a far cry from 1957 when the undivided CPI won the first elections for Kerala in 1957. It was only the second instance of a democratically-elected Communist government in the world. The Left front has formed governments in the state every alternate election over the past 40 years, and remains in power even now under Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan.

However, this time it won a grand total of one Parliamentary seat out of the 20 from the state. This disastrous showing saw many detractors raising questions on the relevance of India’s Left parties, with Vijayan himself coming under fire.

The Kerala unit of the CPI (M) has virtually called the shots in decision-making in the party's national affairs following its weakening elsewhere. The Vijayan government has sworn by an alternate welfarist "Kerala model" to counter the growth of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in its backyard.

While the Kerala model has won plaudits from across the world, the CPI (M) has been facing the heat for its brand of politics in the state. For instance, in the run-up to the elections, the political murder of two Youth Congress workers turned public opinion massively against the communist parties.

In parts of northern Kerala, where it has enjoyed hegemony, the CPI (M) has often resorted to less than democratic means to retain its hold. This culture of political violence is regarded as one of the major factors behind its loss of power in West Bengal, where the Left Front ruled uninterrupted for 34 years till 2011.

In Kerala, the violence has been restricted to the state's northern parts where the party enjoys massive clout. While it officially disapproves and condemns such acts, its leaders, including Vijayan himself, have often sent mixed signals. This political culture is bred in colleges where the Left parties enjoy hegemony, political observers say.

Apart from political violence, the party has faced accusations of bogus voting in many of its strongholds. Such practices have allegedly been employed for a long time till webcasts of polling booths in sensitive areas finally caught some in the act.

Another reason for the setback to the Left Front in Kerala is the stand it took in the matter of the entry of menstruating women in the Sabarimala temple. A Supreme Court of India verdict last year lifted the traditional ban.

While Vijayan won the admiration of avowed secular people in Kerala for taking a strident position to implement the court order in toto, following the electoral drubbing, he is likely to face criticism from even within the party for his lack of flexibility and tact in implementing the verdict.

Facing an existential crisis, it is incumbent on the Left's Kerala unit to reinvent itself to remain relevant at the national level, and not just in the state.

(Kochukudy is is a Delhi-based academic and political commentator. Views expressed are personal.)