Kolkata: In the softening glare of the setting summer sun, below a giant billboard of a popular jewellery brand advertising overlooking the bustling Lake Mall in Rash Behari Avenue, a small crowd of CPI (ML) Liberation cadres has gathered around a makeshift stage. Somewhere in the crowd stands Manas Ghosh, not easily noticeable.
In a white kurta and black trousers, with a cigarette in one hand and chai in the other, Ghosh, 55, the party’s candidate from the upscale Rashbehari constituency in South Kolkata, has blended with the crowd that has come to hear for the party’s promises to the voters in West Bengal.
“Rashbehari is not just about big buildings and upper-middle-class voters who inhabit them. There are shanty towns that are hiding in plain sight, with people inside them struggling to make a living. We are trying to bring the two classes together on a common issue that affects them. Both (PM Narendra) Modi and Didi (West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee) have duped them. There is acute joblessness in the state or elsewhere,” Ghosh told ThePrint, adding that both the Centre and the state have created a class of temporary workers with no social security.
“CPI (ML) Liberation wants to address the question of their survival,” Ghosh said.
Left out in binary battle?
In the 2026 West Bengal assembly polls, the CPI (ML) Liberation, born in the “ferment of the Naxalbari uprising of May 1967” and “founded on the birth anniversary of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 22 April 1969”, has fielded 10 candidates, aligning with the Left Front for the first time in a Bengal Assembly election.
Announcing the alliance with the CPI (ML) Liberation and the Indian Secular Front, CPI (M), state secretary Mohammed Salim last month, said, “All like-minded Left forces will come together to fight unitedly against the Trinamool Congress and fascist forces.”
Ghosh added that his party is not part of the Left Front, the coalition of left-wing political parties that has ruled West Bengal for 34 years from 1977 to 2011.
“We are in favour of Left unity. We can work on a common minimum programme,” he said.
The two parties, CPI (M) and CPI (ML) Liberation, have a troubled history. The original Communist Party of India (CPI) split into the CPI and the CPI(M). There was a second split in 1969, and the CPI-Marxist Leninist or CPI (ML) was born.
Under Charu Mazumdar, the radicals of the newly-formed CPI (ML), who were called the Naxals, accused the CPI(M) of choosing “class collaboration” over armed revolution and with the 1967 Naxalbari militant uprising in West Bengal as a catalyst, they ditched the ballot for the bullet to bring about social change.
After Mazumdar died in 1972, CPI (ML) split into many groups. The CPI (ML) Liberation has moved away from armed struggle towards a model of class struggle that “champions questions of dignity and equality” of the oppressed castes like Dalits and women.
Ghosh is unfazed by the moniker of Urban Naxal that is often attached to political formations like his party.
“If they call us Urban Naxals today, they may very well call Bhagat Singh a Turban Naxal and Gandhi a Durban Naxal since he developed his satyagraha philosophy from that South African city,” Ghosh said, adding that for the BJP-RSS, labelling others is one way of deflecting attention from the fact that they themselves have no heroes.
Ghosh also does not make much of Home Minister Amit Shah’s claim of making India Naxal-free. Shah has told Parliament that India is now free of Naxals after three years of intensive anti‑Maoist operations.
“For one, the conditions that led to armed struggle are still there. And Shah had declared that he would make India Congress-mukt. What happened to that declaration? All it took was for Rahul Gandhi to make the Bharat Jodo Yatra, and the country saw how the masses connected with him even when the Congress was not faring well electorally,” Ghosh said.
He added that the society is under siege, India’s democracy is threatened by the “fascist forces unleashed by the RSS and the BJP”, and to deflect attention from people’s issues, the Modi government has vilified the entire communist movement.
“The Hindu-Muslim binary that has been forcefully created in Bengal by the BJP and the Trinamool Congress keeps the electorate divided, benefiting the two parties electorally, while issues like jobs, healthcare, rights of workers and peasants, and illegal corporate landgrabs are pushed to a corner,” Ghosh said.
He added that democratic rights of citizens have been trampled upon in the name of SIR, with approximately 91 lakh names deleted from the electoral rolls.
Soumo Mondal, journalist and activist, who had come to listen to Ghosh’s speech, told ThePrint that the Left in West Bengal is fighting both the trampling of democratic rights by SIR and the attack on secularism. Mondal has filed a PIL for the cancellation of BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari’s candidature in the election for saying ‘secularism must be eliminated, as this is Hindustan and secularism and atheism will not be allowed here’.
“Secularism is a pillar of the Indian constitution. Those who openly attack it are part of an anti-national design. And yet terms like andolanjeevi and anti-national are thrown at candidates like Manas Ghosh,” Mondal said.
In an editorial, Dipankar Bhattacharya, general secretary, CPI (ML) Liberation, wrote that this ideological witch hunt is no longer limited to the anti-communist agenda of the RSS.
“With the sinister coinage and usage of terms like ‘urban naxal’, ‘andolanjeevi’, ‘anti-national’ and the like, the government has been targeting every single stream of dissent in a bid to transfer all resources of India to a few corporate hands,” Bhattacharya wrote.
Ghosh feels this election will be a revival for the Left Front in West Bengal.
“We have been meeting enthusiastic crowds whenever we are out campaigning,” Ghosh said.
In West Bengal, a state that the Left Front has ruled for 34 long years, it is facing an existential crisis after zero seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the 2021 Assembly polls and the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
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Teaching cinema, talking politics
Ghosh, an associate professor of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, has been teaching cinema for more than 20 years and has been in party politics for more than three decades. He said he has seen society change, and with it the language of cinema.
“Look at the commercial success of a film with an extreme Rightist agenda like Dhurandhar. I am glad that in Kolkata, even during the time of Dhurandhar, a film like Adamya, exploring issues of resistance and identity with a revolutionary Leftist hero who wants to change society, did so well. I have been talking to the director Ranjan Ghosh since he began writing the script of the film. Adamya gives me hope,” Ghosh said.
There has been talk this election in cafés in the constituency Manas Ghosh is fighting from. Ghosh’s rival, BJP candidate for Rashbehari, Swapan Dasgupta, has announced a plan to establish a Bengal café and culture district, putting it on the tourist map if voted to power.
“But what will happen in those cafes? Parisian cafes have a history of talking philosophy and engaging in intellectual deliberation. Camus, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were regulars at the Saint-Germain-des-Prés cafes in Paris during the 1940s. But Swapan’s party is anti-intellectual, against critical thinking. So I guess people will have to simply drink coffee and leave,” Ghosh said.
The Rashbehari constituency will hold polling in the second phase of the West Bengal Assembly elections on 29 April.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)