Bengal: Left seeks survival in alliances amid youth exodus
New Delhi, Sep 28 (IANS) Trinamool Congress founder Mamata Banerjee’s newfound bonhomie with the Communists is being viewed as a desperate bid to rise again on the political horizon, while for a movement that has existed for a century in India, the move offers a similar haven in changing times.
Though the Communist Party of India (CPI) began to take shape in 1920, the official foundation was laid with its first conference on December 26, 1925, in Kanpur.
A major split in 1964 saw the formation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), which went on to become the principal constituent of the Left forces in India.
Despite several other fractures, the bloc established itself as a major political influencer, sometimes in alliance with anti-Congress fora, and at other times, when it suited, with the Congress.
But now the platform is facing a profound existential crisis. The Left has withered into a shadow of its former self, alienated from a changing electorate and plagued by structural rigor mortis.
A generation of sharp, dynamic firebrands, nurtured in the ranks of its frontal organisations, has abandoned ship, migrating toward centrist platforms like the Congress or regional alternatives; and in some ironic twists, even the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Among them are well-known former student activists from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Kanhaiya Kumar and Prasenjit Bose. The high-profile defections speak volumes about the structural suffocations within the big two Left organisations.
Kanhaiya Kumar, who famously shot to national prominence as the JNU Students’ Union president, was widely seen as a possible saviour of the CPI.
Yet, despite his electrifying rhetoric, he found his national ambitions constrained by a dogmatic, ageing hierarchy that prioritised bureaucratic protocol over raw electoral instinct. His eventual jump to the Congress was an admission that the Left no longer possesses the machinery in India’s politics.
Similarly, Prasenjit Bose, once the elite economic strategist and head of the CPI(M)’s research wing, was expelled in 2012 for challenging the party line on support for Pranab Mukherjee as President of India.
After over a decade as an independent activist, his formal entry into the Congress also underscored how the Left is no longer viewed as a viable national platform.
The trend has not set in suddenly. The 56-year-old Syed Naseer Hussain, a former JNUSU president who came from a Left-wing student movement background, is now a Congress Rajya Sabha MP and a key coordinator.
Shakeel Ahmed Khan (61), another JNUSU president from the SFI, also switched to the Congress and went on to serve as an MLA and party whip in Bihar. He lost the subsequent 2025 election from his Assembly constituency of Kadwa.
Among more recent former JNUSU presidents who were in politics as independents or in Left politics before joining Congress, or who are associated with opposition think-tank ecosystems, are Sandeep Singh and Mohit Pandey, former leaders of the radical All India Students’ Association (AISA).
Earlier, JNUSU president Batti Lal Bairwa, active in the late 1990s, also left SFI to join the Congress in Rajasthan.
Well-known politician D.P. Tripathi, among SFI’s top early leaders and JNUSU president in 1975-76, joined the Congress, finally switching to the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP).
Beyond the national capital, Pratikur Rehman’s abrupt turn to the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, where the Left Front once ruled for 34 uninterrupted years, further exhibits the generational collapse.
Just ahead of this year’s crucial state elections, this prominent millennial face, among others launched by the CPI(M) to revitalise its grassroots base, resigned suddenly.
Outside the traditional Left, youth leaders like Hardik Patel, who initially built their political capital on anti-establishment, socialist-leaning rhetoric, ultimately joined the BJP.
Many see the root of this exodus in a profound ideological and generational chasm. India’s contemporary youth are aspirational, digital, and transactional, while the Left allegedly remains trapped in mid-20th-century jargon, treating political strategy like an academic seminar.
–IANS
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