Beyond the Ballot Box, The Left’s Relevance Lies in Its Ability to Forge Powerful Social Movements
Supratim
While the beginning of the 20th century was marked by the success of the greatest socialist revolution in Russia in the history of mankind under Vladimir Lenin, the same century also witnessed the tragic fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), and the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991). While some political theorists like Francis Fukuyama had declared it as the “end of history” and the triumph of Western liberal democracy and capitalism over Marxism and communism, Jacques Derrida exposed the psychological and cultural limitations of Fukuyama’s parochial theorisation. An ideology does not die just because it loses state power; rather, it survives as a spectre, a ghost haunting society through the unfulfilled promises and unresolved contradictions of the past. Marxism, therefore, might not have persisted as a governing doctrine but as a lingering political and moral presence, particularly in Eastern Europe and Russia, where the transition to market capitalism produced deep socio-economic dislocations, inequality, and recurring crises.
Therefore, what was the result of the tragic 1990s essentially turned into a powerful weapon for the socialists and communists throughout the world in the 21st century – the ghost of Marx and the dream of an egalitarian world, which still drives the ‘utopia’. Karl Mannheim in his Ideology and Utopia (1954), precisely points out that a ‘utopia’ is not merely just an articulation of a planned ideal society, but a weapon of critique born out of the existing social condition. The ‘utopia’, therefore, not only frames an ideal future, but actively reconstructs the past and shapes the present, which serves their political goal. It is a method through which the downtrodden, the marginalised, and the peripheralised of society dream of an alternative reality, declaring the capitalist present “inadequate” and demanding something radically different- a system fairer to them. Ali Raza writes, “This ‘utopian’ imagination had the power to drive men and women to incredible, astonishing, and even suicidal lengths.” It is this dream of a better and fairer world that makes the doctrinaire left movements not only powerful, but also most enduring – carrying the flames of social movements that speak for the margins in the contemporary neoliberal capitalist order. Amidst this dream of a fairer world, colonial India indeed emerged as one of many hotspots which fire headed leftist and progressive movements. While the Congress might have been visible in high-profile elite negotiations, the left was rather amidst the subaltern people, addressing their crises that lie beyond the nationalist framework, leading the masses towards a revolution that will not only result in the mere transfer of power from the colonial power to the national elites, but a people’s democracy.
Not So “Waiting-Phase”
Sociologist Ghanshyam Shah describes the 1950s-60s as the “waiting-phase” in the history of social movements in India, for the people had laid down their faith in the Indian state to carry on a transformative role in restructuring the society. They write their address on a paper. While many political theorists like Granville Austin called the 1st Constitutional Amendment Act, 1951, to the Constitution of India as “social revolution” as it worked on securing revolutionary goals of zamindari abolition through Article 31A, 31B, and the addition of Schedule IX, the reality outside New Delhi was very different.
On paper, zamindari might have been abolished, but in reality, it persisted through elite nexuses. For example, the jotedars (zamindars) held a substantial amount of political influence over the Congress government in Bengal, in such a way that the Congress government had become a tool to secure the interests of the jotedars. Even when the West Bengal Estates Acquisition Act (1953) and Land Reforms Act (1955) were passed, the jotedars were treated as “landowning cultivators” and not the “revenue-collecting intermediaries”. The case of the State of West Bengal v Mrs Bela Banerjee (1954), where the court decided to provide “just equivalent” compensation to an acquired land through the West Bengal Land Development and Planning Act, 1948 – a task impossible and financially burdening for the newly independent, worn and torn state, was overturned through the 4th Constitutional Amendment in 1955. None of these affected the dominance of the jotedars over the bargadars.
In other words, the constitutional “social revolution” was not a universal phenomenon. And hence, local rebellion arose to address the wide discrepancy between constitutional promises and practical reality. Therefore, the so-called “waiting-phase” of the 1950s and 60s was essentially a ‘preparation phase’ for the upcoming struggle, and it was the leftists and communists who took charge of the struggle, following the spectres of the suppressed Tebhaga and Telangana Rebellion of 1946. And hence, the rebellion ushered in three stages – the Food Movement in the late 1950s, the Naxalite movement of 1967, and lastly Operation Barga (1977-83), emerging as the most successful land reform project in the history of India. However, these timelines must not be treated as the only phases of action. Minor rebellions took place, which upheld the discontent of the downtrodden. One of such many incidents was the Sainbari incident of 1970, when the peasantry allied to the left murdered a jotedar family, avenging the decades of feudal slavery the family had ushered upon the peasantry class. This incident indeed became a political flashpoint in the 1970s, which helped the left to strengthen itself for the upcoming assembly elections in West Bengal in 1977 which brought the Left to power.
These three episodes of the 1950s-70s, along with other minor incidences reveal an important lesson. The strength of the Left has never resided solely in political parties, governments, or electoral victories. Rather, it has rested upon its capacity to organise the marginalised into collective agents of historical change. Social movements have served as the bridge between utopian aspirations and concrete political transformation. They convert abstract ideals of equality and justice into material demands that challenge existing structures of power.
The Durable and Disruptive Force
Again, scholars of social movements have theorised social movements to be both a cooperative and confronting force. They have used state institutions to challenge the state itself. Sociologist Allian Tourane has especially called the actors of social movement not only reacting to their crisis-ridden present, but actively forging the future. In such a scenario, when Marxists and leftists have a concrete vision of an alternative future, just and fairer, social movements invariably take a leftward turn. While it’s true that social movements can be reactionary in nature too – like anti-Mandal mobilisation following the Mandal Commission, social movements depend upon their durability as much as its intensity. The anti-Mandal protests might have been intense, with an upper caste Delhi University student self-immolating himself in protest, but was not durable. It was only a reaction to the present, and not a path for an alternative future. Social movements die out if there is no framing of a future. This is exactly what makes the leftist social movements a durable force. They provide a future to dream of, an ideal to convert to reality.
At the same time, the leftist social movements are disruptive. While social movements of any kind seek to confront the status quo, the left is engineered towards radical transformation – revolutionary or democratic. The experiences from pan-India movements like the Nirbhaya Movement, India Against Corruption Movement, anti-CAA-NRC movements, and the Farmers’ agitation brought numerous protestors to the streets. But most of them died out once the state actively repressed them, or else simply fell out of interest. It was the leftist groups who did not allow them to die out.
During anti-SIR mobilisations, the left has perpetually linked the process with CAA-NRC, reminding India that past injustices are yet to be addressed and refusing for the issues to die out. At the same time, every protest against new rape cases, like the rape case in R.G. Kar Medical College in August 2024, reminded the citizenry that justice is yet to be received from previous rape cases of Kathua and Hathras. They remind that the President of the Wrestling Federation of India, Brij Bhusan Singh, is yet to be investigated on allegations of sexual harassment by wrestlers. On every fight against political repression, the left reminds the citizenry of Sudipto Gupta and Anish Khan, who were murdered by the West Bengal state, and of Abhimanyu, who was assassinated by the Campus Front of India in Kerala. By invoking the memories, the left tends to make the state uncomfortable of its criminal past. It is for this very reason that the left always finds itself in a position of extreme state repression and censorship, for it refuses to limit itself to the present by invoking the past and providing an alternative future.
Through this, the left actively disrupts the very arenas that put the state at a comfortable position – the machineries of hegemony and ideological state apparatuses that work to erase the memory of their repressive past, and instead forge a narrative that whitewashes them by invoking nationalism, served ready and delightfully for a largely unaware citizenry to consume. The state, therefore, makes it easier for them to label any pro-people movement led by the left as ‘anti-national’.
Beyond the Ballot Box
In a scenario when the state is mostly hostile to movements led by the left, success for the left lies beyond the ballot box and electoral victories. The left in India has always pioneered social movements – with or without a government in power. In 2026, when the Left finds itself completely out of power after nearly five decades, following the Left Democratic Front’s defeat in the 2026 Kerala Assembly Elections, its legacy is tested not by the number of electoral seats it holds, but by the never-extinguishing relevance it holds in Indian politics and in the forging of powerful social movements.
After 34 years of the longest democratically elected communist government in West Bengal came to an end in 2011, the forces that once ruled did not fade away into oblivion, nor did they retreat towards appeasing any other emerging political factions. Instead, it held on to its independence, true to its ideals and continued its path of people’s struggle, confronting every challenge that came as a threat to the downtrodden class in West Bengal. It included campaigning for campus union elections in 2013, where the state forces murdered Comrade Sudipto Gupta, the 2024 R.G. Kar Medical College Rape Case, when various leftist organisations led powerful movements against the rape and murder incident, by not keeping it limited to R.G. Kar, but also invoking, as I earlier discussed, Hathras and Kathua, or of Brij Bhusan. The core of this social movement was not only to address that specific rape case, but to collectively rise in rage against rape culture and patriarchy.
With the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) coming into power for the first time in West Bengal with a mandate of 208 seats amidst the controversial exercise of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), they have deferred their promises of the Pay Commission or Dearness Allowances to something unannounced and undeclared – the eviction of hawkers from railway stations to “clean them” and make the stations suitable for the “Amrit Bharat Railway Project.” At midnight on June 1st, the newly formed eviction squads were ordered to demolish the hawker stalls at Dumdum railway station. No prior notices, no warning, just eviction squads bulldozing the livelihoods of hundreds of families living on society’s margins by 6 am. It took just five to six hours to devastate an economy that provided hawkers with three square meals a day, an income crucial to their families’ sustenance. Gargi Chatterjee, a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) affiliated Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), who has been leading the anti-eviction movement along with her comrades, told the media, “The person who is now chief minister had once declared that he would stand in the way of any bulldozer being used against poor hawkers.”
It is precisely in such moments that the significance of social movements becomes apparent. The resistance emerged on the streets through demonstrations, solidarity campaigns, trade unions, and various leftist student organisations that sought to transform an administrative issue into a broader struggle over livelihood, dignity, and economic justice. Much like the peasant struggles of an earlier era, the anti-eviction movement reveals how marginalised communities can be organised into collective actors capable of challenging state policy.
The struggle of hawkers also highlights a recurring contradiction of contemporary capitalism. Cities depend upon informal labour for their everyday functioning, yet periodically seek to erase its visibility in pursuit of a sanitised urban landscape. In challenging this contradiction, the movement has connected the immediate question of eviction with broader concerns of unemployment, precarious labour, and the exclusion of the poor from urban development. Such political framing is central to the Left’s historical strength: transforming isolated grievances into collective struggles and linking present injustices to a larger vision of social transformation.
A Struggle to Continue
As Hindutva gradually permeated the Bengali political culture, even Bengali Muslims have been largely vilified and often been sceptically seen as illegal Bangladeshis. Amidst this forging of a hostile and exclusionary political culture, which was otherwise not mainstreamised earlier in Bengal, the hawker eviction drive appears to be appealing to the upper middle-class less for the “illegality” of these structures, but more from a false belief that the hawker eviction drive serves the motto of, in the words of Home Minister Amit Shah, “detect, delete, and deport” of the “illegal Bangladeshis” and Rohingyas. The supposed “illegal encroachment” by the “illegal Bangladeshis” serves as a mere narrative to enable the commercialisation of the very plots where the hawkers’ markets have persisted for ages. The reality is, the first victims of the BJP’s neoliberal policies are these hawkers who were evicted without any notice to enable future commercialisation of those plots.
The left’s struggle against hawkers’ eviction is not just about opposing the policies of the ruling class, but also about addressing the deep-seated structural limitations that enabled hawkery that pushed their survival to the margins. The informal markets did not develop outside the knowledge of the state. Their growth was mediated through local police networks, municipal actors, trader associations, and ruling party functionaries. These markets developed with the tacit consent of the local administrations. In many spaces, these vending spaces were informally allocated, disputes were politically mediated, and the hawkers were required to bribe the local authorities, allowing them to run their shops. All these transactions took place in the shadows. But the motto of this shadow transfer of money differed. For the local authorities, it was to fill their pockets. For the hawker, it was to ensure that their livelihood is not razed down.
When Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, an advocate and leader of the CPI(M), approached the Calcutta High Court to issue stay orders from the eviction drive from Topsia to Jadavpur Railway Station, he had invoked the usage of the laws prepared by the state itself to safeguard them from unilateral state action. The laws in action were the Public Premises (Protection of Eviction Act), 1971 and Sections 4 and 5 of the Street Vendors Act, 2014, passed by the Modi government itself along with previous Supreme Court rulings like the Olga Tellis v Bombay Municipal Corporation (1985), Sudama Singh v State of Delhi (2010), and Ajay Maken v Union of India (2019) – all of which pointed a singular direction: that hawkers, vendors or slum dwellers cannot be evicted arbitrarily without “due process of law”.
It is this very “due process of law” that the ruling class seems to jeopardise every time it uses force and coercion in its anti-people policies. The Left’s struggle uncomfortably makes the state remember the very facets which defined the Constitution of India. And it is not just the CPI(M) or other left political parties who are active in the struggle. It is equally the aware independent citizenry, NGOs, human rights organisations, interest groups, hawkers’ unions, and other independent leftists who are carrying forward the slogans of the social movement aimed not only at the relocation or rehabilitation of the evicted hawkers, but also for their structural development. It is the left’s social movements that repeatedly press for holistic development of mankind, rather than a skewed development which pushes the downtrodden to the corners.
And it is with the struggle of the Left that on 18th July, the Calcutta High Court again installed stay orders on every demolition drive till the end of June. That does not mean the ruling class will halt its anti-people operations. The court’s orders are verbal and do not amount to punishment for non-compliance. This was also well witnessed when the court issued a stay order in demolition drives in Jadavpur railway station on 1st July and provided 8th July as the next day of discussion revolving the issue. But the state, knowing that the legislature exists that can very well halt their anti-people eviction drives, was present with bulldozers on 7th June, razing down the hawkers, and acting against court orders. This clearly signifies that the state fears the movement. It might have the might of military and bulldozers, but are morally bankrupt.
For the Left, therefore, the path forward lies beyond a narrow fixation on electoral outcomes. Elections remain important, but they cannot substitute for the difficult work of organising those who experience the consequences of inequality most directly. Whether in the fields of Tebhaga, the villages transformed by Operation Barga, or the streets of Kolkata Suburban occupied by hawkers resisting eviction, the enduring strength of the Left has rested upon its ability to forge social movements that challenge entrenched structures of power.
As long as questions of livelihood, dignity, and social justice remain unresolved, the spectre of Marx will continue to haunt the contemporary world. The Left’s future will not be determined solely by the number of seats it wins. It will be determined by its capacity to transform everyday struggles – such as the fight against hawker evictions- into broader movements capable of imagining and constructing a more egalitarian future
