The Muslim Factor and the Left’s Decline in West Bengal

Historically, the CPI(M) had a massive base among landless Muslim peasants due to land reform initiatives between 1978 and 1980, especially Operation Barga, which aimed to provide legal recognition and protection to bargadars (sharecroppers). The program greatly benefited most Muslim sharecroppers, improving their socioeconomic conditions. However, over time, the moral impact of these land reform measures began to fade in the absence of new, inclusive development projects for marginalized Muslims. The party’s “symbolic capital” subsequently started to deplete with increasing bureaucratization on the ground.

A stark example of this was observed in the hunger-stricken, Muslim-majority district of Murshidabad, which witnessed multiple starvation deaths in the mid-2000s. The region’s major river, the Padma, has often caused severe erosion and destroyed fertile lands. This undoubtedly precipitated this situation, too, and yet environmental degradation was not the only factor contributing to the tragedy. Poverty, displacement, unemployment, and, above all, the criminal apathy of the CPI(M)-led government toward the crisis pushed the villagers to the brink, even causing starvation. The dire conditions and the state government’s apathy were highlighted in reports from Masum, a local human rights organization. According to Masum:

Every day someone or the other dies of hunger in the village of Dayarampur or among other adjacent villages. They have not even heard of Annapurna Yojana, a central government scheme intended to give them food grains when in need. One handicapped man named Amir Shah complained that their names have not even been included in the Below Poverty Line list, which would allow them to apply for assistance.

There were also instances where children were forced to drop out of school because studying on an empty stomach became impossible. In their struggle to survive hunger, many of these children were forced into child labor. Among many such heart-wrenching stories, there were also accounts of a desperate small child eating dirt to fill his stomach, only to later succumb to starvation.

However, despite repeated calls for intervention from the state government, these pleas were ignored, with even the state’s then rural development minister, Surjya Kanta Mishra, refusing to acknowledge the starvation deaths. As noted by the newspaper Tehelka, he crudely claimed that “[t]hese are stories woven by journalists; there has not been any starvation death in the region.” Mishra went on to become the secretary of the CPI(M) West Bengal State Committee in 2015.

Further, a detailed report by the Charity Alliance revealed that Below Poverty Line (BPL) ration cards, meant to provide subsidized food to the poor, were not issued to the majority of the affected population, many of whom later died from starvation and malnutrition. Instead, these government benefits were disproportionately allocated to a select few, notably CPI(M) cadres themselves.

Moreover, as journalist Tarun Kanti Bose highlighted, amidst this tragedy, CPI(M) functionaries not only threatened the villagers to discourage them from complaining, but also appropriated whatever relief materials came their way. On top of that, the party’s cadres launched an extortion drive against these hunger-stricken families in the name of collecting party funds. This blatant inequity and gangsterism went largely unchallenged, as fear of retaliation from party cadres deterred villagers from protesting. Those who attempted to highlight the starvation crisis were targeted by the police, as noted in a report by the Asian Human Rights Commission.

This intersection of bureaucratization and the absence of welfare policies in Muslim-majority areas gave rise to a crisis within a crisis, with each reinforcing the other.

In 2006, the Sachar Committee report — a detailed study of the socioeconomic conditions of Indian Muslims — further attested to the fact that Muslims in West Bengal did not receive equal sociopolitical and economic support from the left-wing government, compared to other communities. The committee found that Muslims in the state had some of the lowest mean years of schooling (MYS), and Muslim-majority rural areas lacked basic infrastructure, including medical facilities. Their representation in government jobs and work participation rate (WPR) were also among the lowest nationwide, making their situation one of the most disadvantaged in the country.

The report also pointed out that these socioeconomic deprivations pave the way for insecurities among Muslims, leading them to perceive these material problems as community-specific. As the late Marxist thinker Aijaz Ahmad aptly states in an essay on communalism:

Considering that the vast majority of Indians enjoy no rights of citizenship, except the abstract right of universal suffrage, it is all the more likely that most people would feel much less moved by our nationalist discourses and would be more attached to what we ourselves regard as the communities of their actual religious belief, affective relationships, and social belonging.

In this context, the dilapidated condition of underclass Muslims in West Bengal led to a shift from class consciousness toward the solidification of their religious identity, as a “protest against real suffering.” For example, the scarcity of educational facilities in Muslim-majority areas was partially addressed by the community through the establishment of Islamic denominational institutions, known as madrassas. An increasing number of private madrassas began to emerge in the state, catering to the underprivileged Muslim population.

This self-help by the community was cast as religious extremism by the then CPI(M) chief minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, who declared these unregistered madrassas “dens of terrorism.” The party leadership’s reductive view of these madrassas as extremist, rather than understanding them as a response to deprivation, can be seen as a product of “empiricization,” where political stagnation gave rise to ideological stagnation, and the absence of revolutionary praxis led to the emergence of a reactionary, anti-Muslim stance.

The CPI(M)’s alienation of Muslims was further worsened by its adoption of a neoliberal route to industrialization. The party’s attempt to acquire land from the peasantry to lease to Indonesia’s Salim Group conglomerate to build a chemical hub backfired, culminating in the Nandigram violence of 2007.

During this state-backed crackdown, CPI(M) cadres brutally suppressed peasants protesting against land dispossession, resulting in the deaths of fourteen villagers and leaving over a hundred missing. Coincidentally, the majority of the affected peasants were Muslim, further deepening their distrust with the party.

This series of events indicates a continuous reproduction of crises that appear isolated but are, in fact, interrelated symptoms of a larger structural malaise within the party at both political and ideological levels. The decline of the Left in West Bengal is a symptom of these contradictions. By the 2009 general elections, this accumulated alienation resulted in a nearly 10 percent shift in the Muslim vote away from the Left, leading to its eventual electoral collapse in the state.

A Case for Kerala

Despite Kerala’s world-famous leftist government, the dominance of communist politics has not overshadowed the role of religious identity and caste.

The veteran CPI(M) leader E. M. S. Namboodiripad once observed this shortcoming vis-à-vis religious minorities:

Looking back, I feel one of our key failures has been in understanding issues connected with religious minorities in Kerala. Unlike West Bengal and Tripura, the population of Kerala has large Christian and Muslim minorities, which form over 40 percent of the state’s population. Muslims and Christians are under the predominant influence of religion-based leaders, that is, of the Muslim League and the Church.

Since his speech in 1994, little progress has been made on this front, as the CPI(M) continues to struggle to rally Muslims under its Left Democratic Front (LDF) — an issue the party yet again acknowledged in its review of 2024 parliamentary elections. The review states that Muslims did not see the Left as a force in the fight against Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

This gap between the Left and Muslims of Kerala becomes evident in their electoral behavior during parliamentary elections, with most rallying behind the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML). The party holds significant electoral power in Malabar, a region with a large Muslim population. Although the IUML was once allied with the CPI(M), it joined the Indian National Congress–led United Democratic Front (UDF) over four decades ago and has remained a key ally ever since.

At the same time, the Hindu-nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and BJP have seized the opportunity to extend their anti-Muslim propaganda, aiming to strengthen their position in Kerala. Slowly but surely, they have been succeeding, with one example being the growing divide between Christians and Muslims. Concurrently, there has been a noticeable shift by the Left’s traditional Ezhava (a so-called backward Hindu caste group) base toward the BJP in the last general election. However, to overcome such short-term political setbacks, the CPI(M) has often resorted to “populist reasoning,” invoking the specter of Muslim extremism to balance its position among non-Muslim communities.

Commenting on this problem, Kerala-based journalist Ayyapan R writes that

the [CPI(M)] had subtle ways to humour the openly secular but secretly communal Hindu. [The CPI(M)] created a villain, the Extremist Muslim, and flogged it publicly. The spectacle was clearly intended for the satisfaction of the “half-way Hindu” who did not want to be seen with the [RSS and BJP] crowd but still had found merit in the wild fears they had raised about the Muslim.

This is not to imply that communal forces are entirely absent from Muslim politics; however, they remain largely marginalized within the community. One contributing factor is the widespread presence of the IUML, a secular, democratic Muslim party that works for minorities in general and also has members from non-Muslim communities. In addition to support from upper- and middle-class Muslims, the party also has backing from the Muslim working class, garnering support through its trade union, the Swatantra Thozhilali Union.

The CPI(M) has made attempts to court the IUML, most recently in the run-up to the 2024 general elections. But, following the devastating electoral results and the failure to bring the IUML into the LDF, the party which previously regarded the IUML as a secular outfit suddenly reversed its position. It then accused the IUML of being communal and claimed it had a secret alliance with Muslim extremists which led to the defeat of the LDF.

The party’s move to blame Muslim extremists for its electoral failure hints at another symptom of a bigger crisis, where it continues to focus more on external factors for its decline rather than engaging in “ruthless criticism” of its own line. But most importantly, the party’s attitude of framing “Muslim politics” in this or that schematic fashion according to its electoral convenience, resembles just another bourgeois parliamentary tactic where scapegoating Muslims remains constant in today’s India.

Growing Islamophobia within Kerala’s society and state machinery also hints at a regression of its strong secular trend, itself the result of once-uncompromising struggle of communists and other social reformers. Recently, a Muslim independent journalist was detained by Kerala police for wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh during a cricket match. After his release, his mother was questioned by the Kerala Anti-Terrorism Squad, which inquired whether her son was religious.

This incident, like many others, showcases the CPI(M)’s failure to combat anti-Muslim biases within civil society and the state machinery. Accompanied by its occasional strategic use of the “good vs. bad Muslims” narrative and the appropriation of Hindutva lexicon, the party fails to shift the Overton window on Muslim identity away from its Hindutva definition. This also highlights the party’s reluctance to rethink its engagement with the question of identity, leading to a dead end where theoretical limitations translate into political failures.

These symptoms that previously emerged before the collapse in West Bengal are now increasingly evident in Kerala, the party’s last remaining stronghold.

At its core, this structural crisis in the CPI(M) is a crisis of imagination regarding the kind of social transformation it aims to achieve. The party’s reliance on balancing the majority-minority calculus to stay electorally relevant also means getting trapped in the conflicts of identity. Such an approach clearly contradicts its long-standing claim of transcending such divisions through working-class politics.