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End of the Left in India?
In a minor replay of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Indian media have been gloating at the defeat of the Left Front in West Bengal especially and have repeatedly suggested that this signals the “end of the Left in India”. Even at the best of times our news channels tend to avoid serious analyses of the underlying trends within the country, since they have transformed the news itself into a form of entertainment on models surpassed only by the US news networks.
In a minor replay of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Indian media have been gloating at the defeat of the Left Front in West Bengal especially and have repeatedly suggested that this signals the “end of the Left in India”. Even at the best of times our news channels tend to avoid serious analyses of the underlying trends within the country, since they have transformed the news itself into a form of entertainment on models surpassed only by the US news networks.
For its part, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] leadership has been at pains to minimise the signifi cance of the defeat (in Bengal especially) and said that it would be wrong to write off the Left. For them “the Left” means the Left Fronts in Bengal and Kerala and, of course, chiefl y the CPI(M) itself. They stress the fact that they still retain a considerable vote share, just over 40% in West Bengal, for example, and there is indeed some truth in this claim.
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