The Indian Left has gone from movement to museum. Its last great fortress, Bengal, fell years ago. Tripura joined the retreat. Kerala holds on – but as an exception that proves the rule. Nationally, its leaders are fossils in Parliament, preserved but powerless. Yet the questions the Left once asked – about land, labour, dignity, and justice – refuse to die. Which is why Comrades and Comebacks arrives not as nostalgia, but as provocation.
That’s the spark behind Saira Shah Halim’s Comrades and Comebacks. An activist-politician herself, Halim argues this is exactly the time to revisit the Left: because while its votes have collapsed, its questions remain.
Once Upon a Time
Her book is spirited, occasionally self-deprecating, and often idealistic. It reminds us of what mainstream textbooks gloss over – communists weren’t hecklers on the sidelines. They organised strikes, mobilised peasants, fought in the Telangana uprising, and pushed for land reform and workers’ rights. Many of our Constitution’s Directive Principles echo their demands.
The Left’s achievements were substantial, but so were its flaws. Ideological rigidity, endless splits, and a preference for purity over pragmatism meant that the ground kept slipping beneath its feet.
It wasn’t always marginal. Kerala, Tripura, Bengal – three laboratories where the Left ran entire states with a mix of brilliance and stubbornness. These stories are crucial to Halim’s narrative: proof of both promise and pitfalls.
One of the pleasures of the book is its parade of Left icons. From P. Sundarayya, EMS Namboodiripad, and Jyoti Basu to Rosa Luxemburg, Che Guevara, Salvador Allende, and Bernie Sanders – the pantheon is formidable.
Halim uses them not just decoratively but to map a lineage of ideas – freedom, equality, solidarity – that connected Bombay’s mills to Latin America’s cane fields. Even if the Indian Left stumbled, it shared a global grammar of justice that still lingers.
Of course, where the Left truly sabotaged itself was its attitude to business. Entrepreneurs weren’t seen as regulated partners but as class enemies. It felt righteous, but it drove away jobs and investment – political suicide in a young country hungry for work.
Equally damaging was the cultural gap. Leaders often looked and sounded like relics, tone-deaf to modern aspirations. While the Right mastered memes, Bollywood values, and 4K nationalism, the Left stuck with tired slogans.
The Now, Not Then
Halim refuses to write a sepia-toned history. She takes on today’s capitalism and its mutations. The gig economy, with its Swiggy riders and Uber drivers celebrated as “entrepreneurs,” but stripped of protections, makes old Left slogans sound new again.
On identity politics too, she is candid. Class alone is not enough in a society fractured by caste, religion, and gender. Feminist, Dalit, queer struggles – long ignored by the Left – must be stitched into its fabric.
Climate change, Halim argues, is the ultimate class war. Its harshest costs fall on those least responsible. Farmers ruined by failed monsoons, coastal families watching their homes sink – inequality now has a planetary dimension.
Here, the Left’s old grammar of solidarity feels almost prescient. It offers a vocabulary of resistance that neoliberal economics simply cannot.
The book’s sharpest insight: the Left may no longer be a ruling force, but it can remain a moral one. Look at farmers’ protests, student agitations, women’s groups, climate activists – their language of justice and solidarity flows directly from the Left’s dictionary.
Globally too, from Bernie Sanders to Latin America’s “Pink Tide,” progressive politics has found second winds. But here’s the catch – shaping protest is not the same as shaping government. The Indian Left, Halim concedes, will not seize power soon. At best, it can play gadfly – stinging the establishment, keeping democracy awake.
Elegy or Call to Arms?
This is where the book risks wobbling. By reframing the Left as conscience rather than contender, it sometimes feels like an elegy dressed up as a manifesto. Can a movement survive if it stops aiming for power? Or does it wither into a debating society?
Yet Halim’s honesty is refreshing. She admits the Left’s failures but refuses to bury its questions: who owns, who labours, who benefits? Those questions remain urgent, even if the old answers no longer suffice.
At its best, Comrades and Comebacks is a reminder that the Left was once vital and its moral vocabulary still matters. At its weakest, it risks being nostalgia in activist garb.
But the book is necessary because it reopens a debate many had closed. The Left may never again rule India. But as a mosquito buzzing at democracy’s ear – annoying, insistent, impossible to ignore – it still has a role.
Is the Left finished? Politically, perhaps yes. Morally, maybe not. And the irony is this: India may still need the Left’s questions, even if it no longer trusts the Left’s answers.
The author, Palash Das, is a political analyst based in Kolkata.
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