Tracing the shifts in India’s Left

India has long been a sociopolitical oddity, a country with widespread poverty and wretched deprivation, mostly where the underprivileged find no voice in most political parties; one of the world’s fastest-growing economies where less than a tenth of the population has regular jobs and where a quarter of a million farmers have committed suicide in the past few decades; a democracy with largely free and fair elections, yet which failed to establish the rule of law and where human rights violations are rampant in the form of caste, religion and gender-driven hatred and discrimination.

A pertinent question that comes to mind is why left-wing politics has not flourished in India to the extent that might be expected in a society with a million injustices and growing inequalities, recently worsened by Hindu right wing and neoliberal capitalism. In fact, it has shrunk in range and variety.