The last event in the campaign before the students union elections in Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (described by US diplomats as ‘Kremlin on Jumna’, according to Wikileaks) is traditionally reserved for the Students’ Federation of India, the student wing of CPI-M. And the speaker is usually Sitaram Yechury or Prakash Karat, who held union positions in the 1970s and remain popular among the campus community. In the question-answer session after a lecture a few years ago, a student politely asked Yechury: “The communist party was supposed to be a mass organisation. Do you have any plans to make a beginning in that direction?”

The point is, the Left conglomeration in its 85 years of existence in India (both CPI and RSS were founded in 1925) rarely went to the masses – not outside the two states united by their love for literature and football, apart from Tripura. In Kerala, the Left takes turns along with the Congress and lost this time, but in West Bengal, it has been defeated after 34 years. Now they will rule only Tripura for a while. Quite a comedown for a coalition that was calling shots at the national level a couple of years ago and came close to the post of prime minister in the 1990s.

Why the Left has failed to read Indian reality right from the freedom struggle days is a subject matter for doctoral dissertations. More puzzling is the fact that the Marxist parties have failed to fill the vacuum that was created when the Congress and others vacated the socialist space and turned to (neo)liberal economic policies in 1991. In the past two decades, the Left indeed put up somewhat effective (or token) opposition to privatisation and any relaxation in labour laws, but then in West Bengal they too turned to the same corporate-led industrialisation.

The years of liberalisation and economic ‘reforms’ have been the years of economic freedom and riches for a few of us but most people including marginal farmers and workers have been left out. Contrary to what BJP veteran LK Advani has repeatedly argued, the Left indeed is all the more relevant in India now, but the Left leaders are a different matter: they did not take up cudgels on behalf of the have-nots.

Instead, CPI-M-led Left showed all the symptoms of excesses of power in West Bengal, with their militia known as Harmad Bahini terrorising the opponents. This, when people are asking for jobs, justice, opportunities, development in one or the other sense of the term. Remember Qutubuddin Ansari, ‘the face of Gujarat riots’? CPI-M offered his rehabilitation in West Bengal, he lived in Kolkata for a while, only to return to Ahmedabad. For what? For livelihood.

Then there’s another sort of vacuum that remains to be filled. At the top of the CPI-M leadership. Prakash Karat remains to be blamed for factionalism within the party, especially in Kerala. The new leadership of networking netas also lacks the imagination and vision of EMS or Jyoti Basu (who heralded the Left rule in Bengal with landmark land reforms).

The opposition benches are as good a vantage point as any to come to terms with reality. Let’s hope the communists will be better able to appreciate reality from there. They are needed to articulate an alternative economic vision in the national discourse. As they say in JNU that other Red Fort of Delhi: Who will be right if there’s nobody left?