When vote counting in five regional assembly elections concluded on Monday evening, one of the biggest surprises came from the southern state: the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Democratic Front lost its majority to the Congress-led United Democratic Front, the main national opposition, which won 98 of the 140 seats in the local assembly.
The CPI for the first time came into power in Kerala when it won the 1957 election, becoming the first communist party to gain power within a democratic framework — unlike in the case of other early communist governments in the Soviet Union or China, which were established through revolution or one-party systems.
Since 1977, at least one Indian state had always been governed by left-wing parties. That is no longer the case, and it reflects a broader decline of leftist parties, even though their ideas remain relevant, according to Prof. Afroz Alam, head of the Department of Political Science at Maulana Azad National Urdu University.
“The tragedy of the left parties is that they have failed to translate their ideas and issues into a living political language that speaks to the young, the aspirational, informal workers, the urban poor and the new middle classes. The recent five assembly election results including, Kerala and West Bengal, show this crisis quite sharply,” Alam told Arab News.
The significance of leftist politics over decades has allowed millions of rural poor to gain more secure livelihoods through land reforms, especially in Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura, where they had been in power.
Left-led governments have invested heavily in public education and large-scale literacy campaigns. In Kerala, these policies have helped achieve near-universal literacy — the only Indian state to do so. Coupled with a strong public healthcare system, this has contributed to its consistent ranking as the highest Human Development Index state in India.
But over the years, these achievements have not been enough to keep the Left Front from losing across the country — and not bouncing back, like in the case of West Bengal, where it ruled for from 1977 to 2011, or Tripura, where it ruled 35 years in total — from 1978 until 1988 and from 1993 until 2018.
With the 2026 vote, both states are now ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, which has been the dominant force in national politics in recent years.
“BJP has changed the political battlefield in India. It does not only fight elections. It fights for imagination, culture, memory and identity,” Alam said.
“The future of the left depends on whether it can rebuild itself around new questions like gig workers, unemployment, private education costs, health expenses, urban housing, climate distress, caste injustice, gender security, digital capitalism and the crisis of federalism.
“If it changes its language, expands its social base, enters new digital and urban spaces, and builds alliances without losing its ideological spine, it can remain relevant. But if it continues to speak to today’s voters in yesterday’s vocabulary, it will become a respected footnote.”
But such an understanding may not yet be mainstream among the communist party’s cadres.
“That is a battle, an unequal place, unequal battleground that we are in. But otherwise, politically, I don’t think the left has weakened. Electorally yes, but not politically,” N. Sai Balaji, a prominent CPI activist, told Arab News,
“If someone wants to change the nature of a communist party, then philosophically, materially principally that will be another bourgeois party. So, until and unless the material conditions of the people whom we represent change, we can’t change.”