Left, what is left of it?
The Left Has Given Voice to the Voiceless, But Is it Politically Relevant? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TvYltig0V8 The Wire Sep 29, 2024
On September 12, 2024, India lost Sitaram Yechury – perhaps one of the tallest leaders of the Left movement in the country. Committed to his ideology, an avowed democrat, Yechury has been part of a movement that has been the voice of the voiceless.
The Left has contributed significantly to the Indian democracy over the years. But they have remained stagnant in the Indian polity. Is the Left still relevant? Does it have to reinvent itself? Nilotpal Basu is a member of the CPI(M) politburo, Jairam Ramesh is Rajya Sabha MP and a veteran Congress leader, Siddharth Varadarajan
Left Parties And Their Leftover Politics Polls 2024 By AMIT SENGUPTA https://www.thecitizen.in/in-depth/left-parties-and-their-leftover-politics-1039359
When it comes to the two mainstream Left parties in India, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), and the Communist Party of India (CPI) not only have they forgotten all they have learnt from the theory and praxis of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Illich Lenin, they seem to have effectively and finally dumped them into the dustbin of history. Despite their portraits which adorn their sprawling party offices.
The philosophers and strategists in their parties, or, whatever remains of that genre, seem to have abandoned their ships, ruined, damaged, and floating in the stagnant waters of an inevitable quagmire, especially in West Bengal and Tripura. Kerala seems to be the last red dot in their fading map, but these mappings, too, seem to be dissolving fast into the vast tidal waves of the Arabian sea.
Pray, whatever happened to the decades-old ideological training imparted to them, after more than 30 years of unilateral, one-dimensional hegemony over Bengal, whereby extra-constitution power structures ruled supreme in towns and rural Bengal? As many as 27 of the 29 Left candidates, forfeited their deposits. Two CPM heavyweights —Salim and Sujan Chakraborty, however, got back their deposits.
Will the mainstream Left galvanise the youth, students, farmers, women, civil society groups, social movements, and the oppressed marginalised sections, to rediscover its original political and social agenda, and choose to resurrect the forgotten paradigm of theory and praxis? Or will it, yet again, choose the shallow and sectarian stasis of sustained stagnation and apathy?