Shikha Mukerjee | French lesson: Why India’s Left needs to reinvent itself

Convention says that the political space is distributed in three ways — Left, Right and Centre. Political parties based on their structure, organising principles and, above all, ideology, are therefore tagged in three ways. The recent elections in India, especially in Kerala, suggest that voters in the state are as deviant from the usual pattern when offered a choice between the hard-right Bharatiya Janata Party, the CPM-led Left Democratic Front and the centrist Congress-led United Democratic Front, as the voters in West Bengal.

In contrast, voters in France, faced with the probability of a far-right National Rally coalition under Marine Le Pen’s leadership, exercised their right to have second thoughts and the result was a stunning reversal for right-wing forces, a spectacular surge for the far-left New Popular Front and a disappointment for the centrist-conservatives, especially President Emmanuel Macron and his Renaissance party. The second-round voting put the far-left on top, the centrists in the middle and the far-right at the bottom, resulting in a hung Parliament.

The contrast with Kerala and West Bengal is striking. In both states, voters who have been long-time supporters of the Left have switched sides and voted for the BJP.

And, the Congress, which is in the middle too, has gained in the Lok Sabha elections, winning 18 seats out of the total of 20 seats in Kerala; the BJP scoring its first win from Thrissur against the CPI, and the CPM retaining the Alathur seat.

The significant change was in North Kerala, where in the Left bastions, the BJP’s vote share increased by 100 per cent as reports revealed, including in Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s Dharmadom seat. The Left and the Right may theoretically be enemies, but on the ground, voters on the Left have revealed a preference for voting Right, because they do not want to vote for a middle-of-the-ground or centrist party.

In West Bengal, voters switched from the CPM to the BJP in large numbers, starting in 2014, and the trend has not changed. The first time this happened was in 2014, and since then voters seem to have decided that even though they throng to the CPM’s rallies, lean on the party’s network of volunteers and workers in hard times like the Covid-19 pandemic, in elections they prefer the BJP. The act of introspection, which includes identifying mistakes and shortfalls, is a part of the routine of political parties after elections.

The problem is over publicly acknowledging that mistakes were made. The recent central committee meeting of the CPM, which had much to introspect on, came up with a bland confession that the results were “disappointing”. In France, the infuriated far-right National Rally was refreshingly transparent, saying that it had made “mistakes.” The CPM, instead of retreating behind its crumbling walls, would have done better by admitting that not only had arrogance and corruption contributed to its poor performance in Kerala, but organisational decay and unrealistic expectations stopped it from working for its revival in West Bengal. That is, without the diagnosis, there can be no treatment.

There is a non-obvious relationship between individual choices and overall outcomes in elections. It works in different ways in different places under different circumstances.

In the recent French parliamentary election, in the second round, the far-left and other Left parties, including the once-powerful Communists, pooled their collective strength, leveraged the support of their mass organisations like trade unions to emerge as the New Popular Front, which won the maximum number of seats.

The outcome reflected a perception among voters that France was not ready, as yet, to swing to the Right because public memory of the collaborationist Vichy regime with the German Nazis was powerful enough to deny Ms Le Pen a victory.

The French election outcome can be read as a split verdict, ushering in instability. It can also be read as a signal from voters to the acrimonious and fragile Left coalition and the equally divided centrist forces to find a way of addressing the issues that bother the popular sovereign or face the consequences. The same is true of the verdict delivered by the voter in Kerala and West Bengal, where too there is a three-way distribution of voter support.

The CPM has been going around in circles at the crossroads, where the Left, Right and the Centre meet.

Its dilemma is at the state level, where elections are fought and the organisation needs to be effective. In Kerala, there are problems within the party and there is a trust deficit among voters and the BJP’s vote share in the recent Lok Sabha elections crossed 19.18 per cent, up from 15.56 per cent in 2019, and 10.82 per cent in 2014. Worse still is that since 2014, the LDF, even though it won two state Assembly elections in a row, has now acquired a tarnished reputation, which matters for an electorate that has a literacy rate of over 94 per cent, tops the list of states on human development and multi-dimensional poverty is a thing of the past.

In West Bengal too, there is a gap between what the central leadership thinks and what the party does, because there are CPM veterans and voters who believe that the Left and the Right are permanently locked in a fight, therefore the immediate task is to work harder to win against the big party in the middle, the Trinamul Congress.

The new alignment has rearranged the political space by creating a hard-right, a Left and a centrist “middle of the road” holding both ends at bay after the 2024 elections. The BJP’s numbers are down, the numbers of the Congress and its partners in the Indian National Democratic Inclusive Alliance are up and the Left is feeble, with a mere eight seats, though it is an increase from the five seats it won in 2019.

The CPM needs to reinvent itself if it expects to hold the BJP, as the party of the hard right, at bay. Blaming organisational weakness or the arrogance of the leadership or even corruption or abuse of power for its problems is like an AI version of strategic recommendations for dealing with its shortcomings. There is deadwood that needs to be cut out and there is the problem of regaining the trust that people once had for the “Communists”, as selfless principled activists. The trust deficit is the hardest to fill.