India’s left-right centenary
COMMUNIST parties in India are quibbling over the characteristics of fascism to see if Antonio Gramsci’s views on the scourge from his Italian experience are relevant to the challenge of vacating the threat in the country. The debate comes at a time for the communist movement as it marks 100 years of its transformation into an organised Communist Party of India (CPI) in the leather and textiles working class hub of Kanpur in 1925.
Not entirely by coincidence, the seeds of India’s organised fascist movement also sprouted the same year with the founding of the Hindu revanchist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Its political branch, the BJP, is ruling India for a third consecutive five-year term under the dubious leadership of Narendra Modi. The RSS was inspired by both Mussolini and Hitler who its leaders had described as the model for dealing with India’s minorities. It’s thus the centenary year of India’s left-right battles, though tragically for the left, the journey also witnessed moments of self-harming collusion with the right.
In the first general elections in 1952, communists became the main opposition to Nehru’s Congress. Since then, they have had their highs and lows. In the recent polls, they were reduced to the margins, not far from being rendered negligible in the electoral fray that shores up Indian democracy. Their vote share against Nehru’s 50 per cent in India’s first elections was 3.29pc, but they had 16 seats over the next opposition group, the socialists, who won 12.
By a quirk of India’s electoral system, though the socialists had fewer seats than the communists, they had a higher vote percentage of 10.59pc. In the 2024 elections, three communist parties won two seats each, none in West Bengal, with a joint national vote share of an embarrassing 2pc.
On their day, the British beat Indian communists and jailed their leaders, most notably following the infamous Meerut conspiracy case when its Hindu, Sikh and Muslim leaders were charged with plotting to overthrow British rule. The Hindu right at the time had become apologists for colonialism. Arun Shourie in a new book on V.D. Savarkar, author of the Hindutva doctrine, describes Savarkar’s numerous apologies to the British from his jail, offering to work for them if released. Hindutva’s hatred of Gandhi was not less than that of Nehru. On his part, Nehru instinctively assessed Savarkar’s Hindutva and its kindred spirit, the RSS, as a graver challenge to secular India than the communists.
It’s the centenary year of India’s left-right battles, though the journey also witnessed moments of the left’s self-harming collusion with the right.
The colonial experience spurred communist partisans to launch a gallant but eventually botched liberation war in 1946 in the province of Telangana, part of the Nizam’s feudal territory. Many poets, writers and actors cut their teeth in the romance of the peasant struggle against feudalism. The CPI spawned a cultural renaissance of progressive theatre, cinema and literature in the movement. The Telangana uprising ended tamely in 1951, and the party split in the 1960s in keeping with a familiar communist habit.
Impelled by the Telangana fiasco, the focus of communist leaders gravitated to electoral politics. It resulted in the world’s first elected communist government in Kerala. Since then, most communist leaders have embraced the provinces of Bengal and Kerala as their hub for struggle, where electoral success was more readily attainable.
When a political contingency offered communists a chance to rule the country, not just their two provinces, and have their leader Jyoti Basu as prime minister following inconclusive elections in 1996, the party developed cold feet. An Urdu verse aptly describes their terror: “Woh ghareeb dil ko sabaq miley ki khushi ke naam se dar gaya/ Kabhi tum ne hans ke jo baat ki to hamara chehra utar gaya” (Courting adversity and fear of failure/ I was pulverised by the prospect of happier tidings.) Basu would describe the party’s refusal to accept the challenge as a historic blunder.
A desirable quest for the increasingly marginalised communist parties at the current juncture, to the ordinary Indian’s mind, should be to help re-establish the secular democracy the nation had set out to be. In seeking this goal, the communists would be required to work, kicking or screaming, with willing bourgeois allies. Naturally, the more radical ideologues would for their own legitimate reasons see this as an embarrassment if not an outright betrayal of their elusive revolution. Do they have a better plan?
The current discussion on fascism arose from the reluctance of the Communist Party of India (Marxist, CPI-M) to accept that the country is already in the throes of the scourge under Modi’s regime. Instead, ahead of its party congress in April, it speaks of features of neo-fascism as stalking the country — features.
The CPI-M has lost power in the tribal state of Tripura to the BJP, West Bengal to Mamta Banerjee with room for the BJP to grow stronger. It is tenuously holding on to power in Kerala where its challenger, Rahul Gandhi’s Congress expects to win the state polls in mid-2026. Gandhi is working hard to defeat the twin challenges of BJP’s oligarchic rule and against its polarising hostility towards Sikhs, Muslims and Christians and less open support for assaulting Dalits.
The Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist), a smaller but more militant offshoot of India’s communist struggles, posits that the country is likely facing full-blown fascism, and that it is time to collectively mint a strategy to combat and defeat it. Being equidistant from the BJP and the Congress was once the CPI-M’s convenient stand. It allowed the BJP’s vertical rise to power. How long would the CPI-M continue to fight INDIA allies in West Bengal and Kerala and hope at the same time to join an opposition campaign to defeat fascism, or by whatever name it chooses to call the challenge? A hundred years of communist movement in India should have given the party all the time it ever needed to learn how not to score self-goals.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, March 11th, 2025