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Comrades and Comebacks: The Battle of the Left to Win the Indian Mind
The history of Left politics in India runs deep into the very heart of the freedom struggle. It can hardly be denied that both the freedom struggle and the political landscape of free India was, for the longest time, hued in various shades of red. Peculiarly, Leftism in India has developed in close ties with the culture in which it was rooted. A movement consisting of diverse forces----with moderate socialists at one end of the spectrum and extremist or revolutionary communists at the other----The Indian Left has had a complex and evolving role in Indian politics. While historically it has played a pertinent role, primarily in states such as West Bengal and Kerala, its influence and relevance, both have waned in recent years. It has been struggling to adapt itself to dynamic electoral politics and, therefore, finding it hard to regain its lost ground.
This book is about an ideology that is under threat or, as many say, almost extinct, at least in India. It tries to sketch a rich historical narrative that foregrounds left politics in world history, locate its relevance in India and chart a future of its revival.
This book is about an ideology that is under threat or, as many say, almost extinct, at least in India. It tries to sketch a rich historical narrative that foregrounds left politics in world history, locate its relevance in India and chart a future of its revival.
358 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 30, 2025
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January 27, 2026
I received this book last Saturday, at a time when reading itself has become an act of triage rather than leisure. My health, to put it gently, is not at its best: a small pharmacy’s worth of tablets punctuates my day, and a steady tether to oxygen is what keeps me upright and functional.
Under such circumstances, one grows fiercely protective of one’s attention. Every page demands justification. Every book must earn the right to be opened.
I have therefore become intensely selective—almost fastidious—about what I allow into my mental and emotional space. Anything that jars the senses, insults the intelligence, or demands patience without offering substance is quietly, decisively kept at arm’s length. In times like these, one cannot afford literary irritants.
And yet, fate—perverse as ever—had other plans. This particular volume, despite all better judgment, contrived to land squarely on my table. Uninvited, unwelcome, and entirely undeserving, it announced itself with the confidence of a guest who mistakes proximity for entitlement.
That it did so at such a moment only sharpened the offence.
Reading ‘Comrades and Comebacks’ left me with a familiar, faintly dispiriting feeling—the kind you get when you realize you’ve been listening to a speech you’ve already heard many times, only this time delivered with fresher diction and slightly better grooming. The content, however, remains stubbornly unchanged.
To be clear at the outset: Saira herself is not the problem. Her personal trajectory is, in fact, commendable. She is an acceptable face the CPI(M) has been eager to project in recent years.
When the party fielded her in the Ballygunge Assembly by-election in 2022, it was clearly making a statement about renewal. And electorally, the effort was not without merit. Against a dominant Trinamool Congress and an underachieving BJP, she managed to secure close to a third of the vote. In the outlandish arithmetic of Indian elections, that is no mean achievement. One can reasonably concede that she fought well and emerged with credibility.
But electoral promise and intellectual originality is not the same thing. A good campaigner does not automatically become a sharp diagnostician of ideological failure, and that distinction matters enormously for a book that claims to explain how the Left might reclaim the Indian mind.
Early on, Saira announces her purpose: this book, she tells us, is meant to return the Left to young, questioning readers who are dissatisfied with an unjust world. That single sentence quietly reveals the book’s deepest limitation.
The implied problem, according to this framing, is not that the Left’s ideas have failed to persuade, adapt, or deliver, but that they have somehow slipped out of youthful hands and must be placed back there. The solution, then, is not reinvention but reintroduction. Not rethinking, but retelling.
And so the book proceeds exactly as one might expect. Over nearly 300 pages, we are walked through a familiar CPI(M) worldview: a morally righteous freedom struggle, the betrayal of socialist ideals after independence, the sins of liberalisation, the depredations of capital, the heroism of trade unions, and the looming menace of the Right.
None of this is entirely wrong. But none of it is interrogated either.
For readers even abstemiously acquainted with Left literature, this is all painfully well-trodden ground. The prose may be competent but the insights are poorly recycled.
What is conspicuously absent are questions that actually matter:
1) Why did this movement fail so comprehensively, not just electorally but intellectually?
2) Why did it lose entire generations?
3) Why did its language stop resonating even with those whose material conditions should, by classical Marxist logic, have made them its natural constituency?
On all of this, the book has little, almost nothing to say. The global collapse of Marxism as a governing ideology is acknowledged only obliquely, and always defensively.
The Soviet Union failed because it was betrayed. China succeeded because it was pragmatic, though what that pragmatism actually entailed—namely, the abandonment of Marxism in all but name—is carefully glossed over.
The fact remains unavoidable: there is no major country today that practices communism in its original form. Even its supposed cradles have moved on.
Yet the Indian Left continues to behave as though doctrinal purity is a virtue rather than a liability.
This refusal to confront failure honestly is what ultimately cripples the book. Nehru’s early flirtation with socialist planning made historical sense in a newly independent, capital-starved country.
But India changed—demographically, economically, aspirationally. The Left largely did not. What began as ideological steadfastness slowly ossified into irrelevance.
Kerala, inevitably, is presented as the exception. But here too, the narrative is selective. Yes, Kerala performs well on social indicators, but to attribute this entirely to Left governance is historically careless. High literacy and social reform in the state predate CPI(M) dominance by decades.
More troubling is what the book avoids discussing: the growing authoritarian temperament within Left politics in Kerala. The intolerance of dissent, the reflex to delegitimise critics, the culture of political violence that has become normalized. Moral superiority was once the Left’s greatest asset. Today, that claim rings hollow.
The inability to take criticism is not a minor flaw; it is the original sin of the Indian Left. Disagreement is routinely treated as betrayal, dissent as hostility. This attitude trickles down from leadership to cadre, creating a culture that is rigid, insular, and deeply unattractive to anyone outside the faithful.
The rise of the BJP in places like Tripura, and potentially Kerala, is not simply the result of right-wing mobilisation. It is also the consequence of the Left vacating emotional and aspirational space, leaving voters with few alternatives.
The book also struggles seriously with questions of gender and social change. Kerala’s high female literacy contrasts starkly with its low female workforce participation, yet this contradiction receives little sustained attention.
Feminism in Left discourse remains largely rhetorical—rich in slogans, poor in institutional transformation. For a movement that claims to speak for the oppressed, its failure to seriously engage with women’s lived realities is striking.
Perhaps the most ironic failure is that the Left has been outflanked on its own terrain. Welfare politics—once its moral stronghold—has been appropriated by the Right, stripped of rights-based language, and repackaged as benevolence.
Cash transfers, food security schemes, and health coverage are now framed as gifts from a paternal state rather than entitlements won through struggle. The Left should have led this conversation. Instead, it watched from the sidelines, clinging to slogans while the political grammar changed.
Underlying all this is a deeper linguistic and conceptual breakdown. Words like “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie” no longer describe how most Indians experience precarity today.
The gig worker, the contract teacher, the delivery rider, the unpaid caregiver—these lives do not fit neatly into 19th-century categories.
India’s young electorate is not hostile to justice; it is indifferent to jargon. It wants dignity, stability, and upward mobility, not lectures delivered in a vocabulary borrowed from another century.
In the end, this book feels less like a serious attempt at renewal and more like a reassurance manual for the already convinced. It repeats rather than interrogates, affirms rather than challenges.
Marxism in India did not merely lose elections; it lost relevance by refusing to evolve. This book, unfortunately, exemplifies that failure instead of explaining it.
History has little patience for movements that mistake memory for momentum.
I have only this to add that as the Left drifts in circles—uncertain of its purpose, exhausted of ideas, and increasingly estranged from the country it claims to speak for—it becomes evident that it has little of substance to offer India at this moment of civilisational churn.
This vacuum places a clear responsibility on those outside its shrinking orbit: to articulate a framework that can reconcile the demands of a modern nation-state with the depth, continuity, and dignity of India’s cultural inheritance. The challenge before us is not regression versus progress, but balance—between constitutional modernity and civilisational memory.
The debates surrounding the Ram temple in Ayodhya offered a revealing glimpse into this imbalance. For millions across the country, 5 August 2020 was not merely a political milestone but an emotional and cultural closure, marked with celebration akin to Diwali.
Yet, a familiar chorus of dissent rose in protest—not against lawlessness or injustice, but against the verdict of the highest court itself.
At the forefront of this disapproval stood the self-appointed moral sentinels of liberal progressivism and those long aligned with the Left.
The contradiction was striking. The very voices that enthusiastically endorse global movements to reassess historical wrongs—tearing down statues, re-evaluating legacies, and condemning centuries-old injustices in distant lands—unexpectedly found themselves hostile to a civilisational act of restitution at home.
That a sacred site, long believed to house a temple and later destroyed during a period marked by systematic religious violence, might be restored was dismissed as majoritarian excess rather than acknowledged as historical redress.
What was quietly set aside was the uncomfortable fact that historical injustices do not lose their moral weight simply because they were suffered by a majority community. India’s past, layered with conquest, desecration, and cultural erasure, is neither imagined nor incidental—it is documented, remembered, and lived.
Yet the Left, so adept at invoking history when it suits its ideological ends, recoils from it when it complicates its narratives.
Instead of engaging honestly with these wounds, it retreats into abstractions—reframing lived history as dangerous sentiment, and cultural assertion as political threat—while continuing to fracture society through narrower social lenses.
In doing so, it not only abdicates its role as a moral interlocutor but also confirms its distance from the civilisational instincts of the nation.
That distance, more than any electoral defeat, marks the Left’s true decline. And until it learns to listen—to history, to culture, to the emotional truths of the people—it will remain not a force for balance, but a relic arguing with a country that has already moved on.
To conclude, until the Left learns that distinction, no amount of articulate candidates or well-meaning books will engineer the comeback it so dreadfully desires.
Give it a pass.
Under such circumstances, one grows fiercely protective of one’s attention. Every page demands justification. Every book must earn the right to be opened.
I have therefore become intensely selective—almost fastidious—about what I allow into my mental and emotional space. Anything that jars the senses, insults the intelligence, or demands patience without offering substance is quietly, decisively kept at arm’s length. In times like these, one cannot afford literary irritants.
And yet, fate—perverse as ever—had other plans. This particular volume, despite all better judgment, contrived to land squarely on my table. Uninvited, unwelcome, and entirely undeserving, it announced itself with the confidence of a guest who mistakes proximity for entitlement.
That it did so at such a moment only sharpened the offence.
Reading ‘Comrades and Comebacks’ left me with a familiar, faintly dispiriting feeling—the kind you get when you realize you’ve been listening to a speech you’ve already heard many times, only this time delivered with fresher diction and slightly better grooming. The content, however, remains stubbornly unchanged.
To be clear at the outset: Saira herself is not the problem. Her personal trajectory is, in fact, commendable. She is an acceptable face the CPI(M) has been eager to project in recent years.
When the party fielded her in the Ballygunge Assembly by-election in 2022, it was clearly making a statement about renewal. And electorally, the effort was not without merit. Against a dominant Trinamool Congress and an underachieving BJP, she managed to secure close to a third of the vote. In the outlandish arithmetic of Indian elections, that is no mean achievement. One can reasonably concede that she fought well and emerged with credibility.
But electoral promise and intellectual originality is not the same thing. A good campaigner does not automatically become a sharp diagnostician of ideological failure, and that distinction matters enormously for a book that claims to explain how the Left might reclaim the Indian mind.
Early on, Saira announces her purpose: this book, she tells us, is meant to return the Left to young, questioning readers who are dissatisfied with an unjust world. That single sentence quietly reveals the book’s deepest limitation.
The implied problem, according to this framing, is not that the Left’s ideas have failed to persuade, adapt, or deliver, but that they have somehow slipped out of youthful hands and must be placed back there. The solution, then, is not reinvention but reintroduction. Not rethinking, but retelling.
And so the book proceeds exactly as one might expect. Over nearly 300 pages, we are walked through a familiar CPI(M) worldview: a morally righteous freedom struggle, the betrayal of socialist ideals after independence, the sins of liberalisation, the depredations of capital, the heroism of trade unions, and the looming menace of the Right.
None of this is entirely wrong. But none of it is interrogated either.
For readers even abstemiously acquainted with Left literature, this is all painfully well-trodden ground. The prose may be competent but the insights are poorly recycled.
What is conspicuously absent are questions that actually matter:
1) Why did this movement fail so comprehensively, not just electorally but intellectually?
2) Why did it lose entire generations?
3) Why did its language stop resonating even with those whose material conditions should, by classical Marxist logic, have made them its natural constituency?
On all of this, the book has little, almost nothing to say. The global collapse of Marxism as a governing ideology is acknowledged only obliquely, and always defensively.
The Soviet Union failed because it was betrayed. China succeeded because it was pragmatic, though what that pragmatism actually entailed—namely, the abandonment of Marxism in all but name—is carefully glossed over.
The fact remains unavoidable: there is no major country today that practices communism in its original form. Even its supposed cradles have moved on.
Yet the Indian Left continues to behave as though doctrinal purity is a virtue rather than a liability.
This refusal to confront failure honestly is what ultimately cripples the book. Nehru’s early flirtation with socialist planning made historical sense in a newly independent, capital-starved country.
But India changed—demographically, economically, aspirationally. The Left largely did not. What began as ideological steadfastness slowly ossified into irrelevance.
Kerala, inevitably, is presented as the exception. But here too, the narrative is selective. Yes, Kerala performs well on social indicators, but to attribute this entirely to Left governance is historically careless. High literacy and social reform in the state predate CPI(M) dominance by decades.
More troubling is what the book avoids discussing: the growing authoritarian temperament within Left politics in Kerala. The intolerance of dissent, the reflex to delegitimise critics, the culture of political violence that has become normalized. Moral superiority was once the Left’s greatest asset. Today, that claim rings hollow.
The inability to take criticism is not a minor flaw; it is the original sin of the Indian Left. Disagreement is routinely treated as betrayal, dissent as hostility. This attitude trickles down from leadership to cadre, creating a culture that is rigid, insular, and deeply unattractive to anyone outside the faithful.
The rise of the BJP in places like Tripura, and potentially Kerala, is not simply the result of right-wing mobilisation. It is also the consequence of the Left vacating emotional and aspirational space, leaving voters with few alternatives.
The book also struggles seriously with questions of gender and social change. Kerala’s high female literacy contrasts starkly with its low female workforce participation, yet this contradiction receives little sustained attention.
Feminism in Left discourse remains largely rhetorical—rich in slogans, poor in institutional transformation. For a movement that claims to speak for the oppressed, its failure to seriously engage with women’s lived realities is striking.
Perhaps the most ironic failure is that the Left has been outflanked on its own terrain. Welfare politics—once its moral stronghold—has been appropriated by the Right, stripped of rights-based language, and repackaged as benevolence.
Cash transfers, food security schemes, and health coverage are now framed as gifts from a paternal state rather than entitlements won through struggle. The Left should have led this conversation. Instead, it watched from the sidelines, clinging to slogans while the political grammar changed.
Underlying all this is a deeper linguistic and conceptual breakdown. Words like “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie” no longer describe how most Indians experience precarity today.
The gig worker, the contract teacher, the delivery rider, the unpaid caregiver—these lives do not fit neatly into 19th-century categories.
India’s young electorate is not hostile to justice; it is indifferent to jargon. It wants dignity, stability, and upward mobility, not lectures delivered in a vocabulary borrowed from another century.
In the end, this book feels less like a serious attempt at renewal and more like a reassurance manual for the already convinced. It repeats rather than interrogates, affirms rather than challenges.
Marxism in India did not merely lose elections; it lost relevance by refusing to evolve. This book, unfortunately, exemplifies that failure instead of explaining it.
History has little patience for movements that mistake memory for momentum.
I have only this to add that as the Left drifts in circles—uncertain of its purpose, exhausted of ideas, and increasingly estranged from the country it claims to speak for—it becomes evident that it has little of substance to offer India at this moment of civilisational churn.
This vacuum places a clear responsibility on those outside its shrinking orbit: to articulate a framework that can reconcile the demands of a modern nation-state with the depth, continuity, and dignity of India’s cultural inheritance. The challenge before us is not regression versus progress, but balance—between constitutional modernity and civilisational memory.
The debates surrounding the Ram temple in Ayodhya offered a revealing glimpse into this imbalance. For millions across the country, 5 August 2020 was not merely a political milestone but an emotional and cultural closure, marked with celebration akin to Diwali.
Yet, a familiar chorus of dissent rose in protest—not against lawlessness or injustice, but against the verdict of the highest court itself.
At the forefront of this disapproval stood the self-appointed moral sentinels of liberal progressivism and those long aligned with the Left.
The contradiction was striking. The very voices that enthusiastically endorse global movements to reassess historical wrongs—tearing down statues, re-evaluating legacies, and condemning centuries-old injustices in distant lands—unexpectedly found themselves hostile to a civilisational act of restitution at home.
That a sacred site, long believed to house a temple and later destroyed during a period marked by systematic religious violence, might be restored was dismissed as majoritarian excess rather than acknowledged as historical redress.
What was quietly set aside was the uncomfortable fact that historical injustices do not lose their moral weight simply because they were suffered by a majority community. India’s past, layered with conquest, desecration, and cultural erasure, is neither imagined nor incidental—it is documented, remembered, and lived.
Yet the Left, so adept at invoking history when it suits its ideological ends, recoils from it when it complicates its narratives.
Instead of engaging honestly with these wounds, it retreats into abstractions—reframing lived history as dangerous sentiment, and cultural assertion as political threat—while continuing to fracture society through narrower social lenses.
In doing so, it not only abdicates its role as a moral interlocutor but also confirms its distance from the civilisational instincts of the nation.
That distance, more than any electoral defeat, marks the Left’s true decline. And until it learns to listen—to history, to culture, to the emotional truths of the people—it will remain not a force for balance, but a relic arguing with a country that has already moved on.
To conclude, until the Left learns that distinction, no amount of articulate candidates or well-meaning books will engineer the comeback it so dreadfully desires.
Give it a pass.
September 14, 2025
When I first came across the name of the Saira Shah Halim's Comrades and Combacks: The Battle of the Left to Win the Indian Mind (Penguin Random House India, 2025) in Amazon, two thoughts drew me in.
As an interested watcher of politics of West Bengal, I was curious to know if the book offers a hypothesis on "comebacks of the comrades" to power in the State.
Secondly, Saira Shah Halim. Is she related to West Bengal Assembly's former Speaker Hashim Abdul Halim?
The answer to the second curiosity is yes. She is Halim's daughter-in-law.
As for the first ... more about that later.
Saira has impressive credentials. Formerly in the corporate world, she is an "educator, theatre artiste, TEDx speaker."
In 2022, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) fielded her as a candidate in the by-election in the Ballygunge Assembly seat.
The blurb informs us that "In a fierce battle, she shattered the Trinamool Congress-Bharatiya Janata Party duopoly - a political upset that marked her as a serious force in Bengal’s future."
Even if you ignore the advertising hyperbole, it should be admitted that Saira did put up an impressive performance in the electoral battle.
Records show that in the elections, the Trinamool candidate got 51000 votes (49%), BJP 13000 (12%), and CPI(M)'s Saira 30000 (30%).
Of course, elections in India have their own arithmetic and dynamics. But some of the credit for the noteworthy performance must rub off on Saira.
But, does that make her book worth the time and effort it demands from the reader?
Saira declares that "This book is my way of bringing the Left back to where it belongs: into the hands of the young, curious minds searching for alternatives to an unjust world." (Preface, p. ix)
The operative word may very well be "young."
The Communists, at least in West Bengal, are trying to bring in young, articulate, college-educated young people to the forefront to shore up its plummeting electoral fortunes.
Saira has spoken to the young people. Whether that will make much of a difference is a moot point.
Otherwise, the book is a 300-page narrative of the all-too-familiar Communist (read CPI(M)) positions on history, society, economics, and politics.
For an informed reader, unfortunately, the young author does not have much to offer.
Probably, I was looking for an answer as to what bedevils the Communist movement - world-wide, and, closer home, in West Bengal.
Unfortunately, I am not any wiser!
In the end, Comrades and Comebacks has remained a high school textbook for the faithful.
As an interested watcher of politics of West Bengal, I was curious to know if the book offers a hypothesis on "comebacks of the comrades" to power in the State.
Secondly, Saira Shah Halim. Is she related to West Bengal Assembly's former Speaker Hashim Abdul Halim?
The answer to the second curiosity is yes. She is Halim's daughter-in-law.
As for the first ... more about that later.
Saira has impressive credentials. Formerly in the corporate world, she is an "educator, theatre artiste, TEDx speaker."
In 2022, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) fielded her as a candidate in the by-election in the Ballygunge Assembly seat.
The blurb informs us that "In a fierce battle, she shattered the Trinamool Congress-Bharatiya Janata Party duopoly - a political upset that marked her as a serious force in Bengal’s future."
Even if you ignore the advertising hyperbole, it should be admitted that Saira did put up an impressive performance in the electoral battle.
Records show that in the elections, the Trinamool candidate got 51000 votes (49%), BJP 13000 (12%), and CPI(M)'s Saira 30000 (30%).
Of course, elections in India have their own arithmetic and dynamics. But some of the credit for the noteworthy performance must rub off on Saira.
But, does that make her book worth the time and effort it demands from the reader?
Saira declares that "This book is my way of bringing the Left back to where it belongs: into the hands of the young, curious minds searching for alternatives to an unjust world." (Preface, p. ix)
The operative word may very well be "young."
The Communists, at least in West Bengal, are trying to bring in young, articulate, college-educated young people to the forefront to shore up its plummeting electoral fortunes.
Saira has spoken to the young people. Whether that will make much of a difference is a moot point.
Otherwise, the book is a 300-page narrative of the all-too-familiar Communist (read CPI(M)) positions on history, society, economics, and politics.
For an informed reader, unfortunately, the young author does not have much to offer.
Probably, I was looking for an answer as to what bedevils the Communist movement - world-wide, and, closer home, in West Bengal.
Unfortunately, I am not any wiser!
In the end, Comrades and Comebacks has remained a high school textbook for the faithful.
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