India loses its last left-wing government after five decades

In the sultry August heat of 2007, India’s government under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was sweating over the future of negotiations with the United States over a landmark nuclear deal. The proposed agreement aimed to ease access to nuclear fuel and technology in exchange for greater international scrutiny of India’s facilities.

The problem? India’s communists – suspicious of the US – were opposed to the deal. And they were India’s kingmakers.
With 62 seats in India’s lower house in parliament, their support was holding up the Singh government. And the so-called Left Front threatened to withdraw that support if the PM went ahead with the deal.

Though Singh eventually gambled and convinced other parties to support him in parliament, and pushed through the deal in the face of communist opposition, that moment marked the high point of the political left’s clout in India.

On Monday, nearly two decades later, that influence appeared to have reached its nadir.

According to early results from a range of state elections, the left has been swept from power in Kerala, the southern state that was the first in the world to have a democratically elected communist government – and the last state in India where communists were in power. The United Democratic Front, led by the Congress party – the main national opposition – had won or was leading in 98 seats in the legislature of 140 seats by late afternoon. The Left Democratic Front – as the grouping of left-wing parties in Kerala is called — had won or was leading in 35 seats.
The state has long been a stronghold for left-wing politics and ideology. In the late 1950s, it gave the world its first democratically elected communist government, when the Communist Party of India (CPI) led Kerala from April 1957 to July 1959. That was before the government of Jawaharlal Nehru, the Congress leader and India’s first prime minister, sacked the communist authorities after they started land and educational reforms.

Since 1977, at least one Indian state has always been ruled by the left. Not any more.

“This year’s election results indicate that, for the first time, the left may not come to power in any state,” Rahul Verma told Al Jazeera. He is a political scientist and a fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), a think- tank based in New Delhi.

Left losing across the country
The Left Front, an alliance of left-wing political parties in West Bengal, was in power there from 1977 to 2011, when the Trinamool Congress, led by Mamata Banerjee, ended its long rule. In Tripura, the Left Front ruled from 1993 until 2018, when the BJP won. In Kerala, the LDF and the UDF have swapped power for decades: Before the latest election, the left was in power since 2016.

Even in India’s parliamentary elections, the left has seen a steady decline — from 62 in the 2004 election, to just eight seats now.

Rajarshi Dasgupta, an assistant professor at the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, told Al Jazeera that the left’s hold was always limited, and only managed to develop pockets or regions where they became influential and electorally powerful, such as Kerala, Tripura and West Bengal.

“Their presence in the Hindi-speaking belt [primarily in North India] was largely limited to industrial areas, which declined with the decline of trade union politics,” he said.

“The larger reason for their limited outreach is, in my opinion, their incapacity to address questions of caste and gender, and the changing nature of capitalism, especially after liberalisation,” he added.

Harish Vasudevan, an independent social activist and public interest litigation specialist lawyer, told Al Jazeera that the political trend in India is where right-wing ideology is favoured.

“But more than that, the left has partially lost their leftist ideology and [has] compromised,” he said.

Role of the left in Kerala
The left first came to power in Kerala under the CPI in April 1957. EMS Namboodiripad, an iconic communist leader, became the state’s first chief minister. His government brought about important land and education reforms in the state.