The Communist Party of India (Marxist), better known as the CPI(M), the largest Left party in the country, has a new general secretary — Mariam Alexander Baby, a former parliamentarian and state-level minister. The 71-year-old Baby is the second-oldest to come at the helm the party in its six decades’ history. However, he has a younger team to work with. More than one-third of the new leadership are new entrants.
Baby, who has been variably described as a consensus-builder, a pragmatic communist and a man of refined taste, faces many challenges.
First, he takes charge of the CPI(M) at a time when it is going through its worst organizational crisis. Of its three strongholds, eastern India’s West Bengal and northeast India’s Tripura states have witnessed a rapid decline in the party’s support base and organizational strength. Although the party is in power in Kerala in southern India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is making inroads, mostly at the cost of the Left.
In recent years, the party has made marginal gains in the east Indian state of Bihar, south India’s Tamil Nadu and western India’s Rajasthan. But this is largely due to coalitions with other Left and non-Left parties.
For decades, the Left has played an important role in shaping India’s politics, especially on issues concerning workers and farmers’ rights, progressive social movements and economic policies.
The Communist Party of India or the CPI, born in 1925, was India’s main opposition party in the immediate post-colonial years. The CPI(M), born out of a split in the CPI in 1964, soon overtook the former as the main leftist party. Its tally remained in the 30s in the 543-seat Indian parliament through the 1980s and 1990s (except for 1984 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination created a pro-Congress wave), peaking with 44 seats in 2004.
However, popular support has declined steeply since 2009, winning 16 seats in general elections that year, and only nine, three and four seats in 2014, 2019 and 2024, respectively.
The same holds true for other Left parties. For most of the period between 1967 and 2004, the cumulative tally of the Left parties in the parliament stood around 50. This came down to 11 in 2014, the year the BJP came to power nationally, and further slid to six in 2019 before slightly rising to nine in 2024.
The Left parties are fighting for survival.
CPI(M) general secretaries have generally had long tenures at the helm. P. Sundaraiyya, the party’s first general secretary, served for 15 years (1964-78), followed by EMS Namboodiripad (1978-91) for 14 years, Harkishan Singh Surjeet’s (1992-2005) for 13, and Prakash Karat (2005-15) for a decade. The last general secretary, Sitaram Yechury, had already completed nine years at the party’s helm when he died last year.
With the party setting 75 as the upper age limit of the top leadership, Baby likely has a rather short tenure to prove his mettle with a relatively less experienced team. As many as 31 members of the 85-member central committee and eight of the 18 politburo members are new.
He has to immediately swing into action, as the assembly election in Bihar is due in a few months and in the states of Kerala, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Assam the next year.
“The leadership changes are part of a continuous process. We have implemented an upper age limit to rejuvenate the party. So, we have a leadership with lower average age,” Md Salim, who continues as a member of the politburo, told The Diplomat.
Salim heads the party in West Bengal, once the Left’s strongest bastion. A CPI(M)-led Left Front ruled the state for a 34-year uninterrupted stint till 2011. Currently, it is in disarray. The party has no member in the West Bengal state assembly and no representation from the state in Lok Sabha, the parliament’s lower house. It’s last Rajya Sabha (upper house) member’s tenure is set to end.
The CPI(M)’s vote share in West Bengal in the last three elections has been dismal — only 6.3 percent in the 2019 parliamentary election, 4.8 percent in the 2021 assembly election and 5.7 percent in the 2019 parliamentary election, with no seat in their tally.
Salim said the party has readjusted its focus, setting the removal of the BJP from India’s power and weakening its state-level collaborators as its prime objectives. “The BJP turned India into an authoritarian state and destroyed its secular nature without changing the Constitution. The fight for restoring secular democracy in India by defeating the neo-fascists and their collaborators is our top priority,” he said.
Towards this goal, coalition building is one of their essential tasks. They call for the broadest possible alliance of secular-democratic forces against the BJP. They are part of the INDIA bloc, a national platform of opposition parties. However, INDIA block member Congress is their principal rival in Kerala, the last state where the Left holds power.
In West Bengal, the battle is essentially between the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC), an INDIA bloc member, and the BJP. The CPI(M)’s challenge is to make a mark as the third force.
While coalition building in Kerala, Bihar and Tamil Nadu will be among the party’s priorities, Baby also has to deal with coalitions in other states and for national-level coordination of anti-BJP forces. Three of Baby’s predecessors — Surjeet, Karat and Yechury — were seasoned in national politics and coalition affairs. Baby, though, has mostly remained focused on his home state of Kerala.
“He has a tough challenge, but we, communists, believe in collective leadership,” a newly elected central committee member told The Diplomat, requesting anonymity. He thinks Baby’s election would boost the party in southern India’s Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
The Left parties were the main opposition to the ruling Indian National Congress in the first two decades of post-colonial India. However, a series of splits since 1964 and the rise of regionalism, ethnic and caste identity-based politics and Hindu nationalism since the late 1960s stagnated the Left’s growth.
The post-1990s period of economic liberalism, globalization and the digital revolution has impacted society and production relations in different ways, which the Left evidently failed to respond to. The party faces criticism for being dogmatic.
Two of their biggest strengths were the trade unions and the farmers’ organizations. The trade union movement has greatly weakened with the privatization of the public sector, the contractualization of jobs and the emergence of the gig work economy. In the recent major farmers’ movements in northern India against the Modi government’s policies, the Left was only among several components in the leadership but not the controlling force.
While a party is about teamwork and more so in the case of communist parties that believe in collective leadership, in the CPI(M), the general secretary has often been restrained from taking his preferred path by the rest of the top leadership.
Baby will have to swim through troubled waters not only outside but also within the party.