India’s left parties are no longer as influential as they used to be. In her new book, Comrades and Comebacks: The Battle of the Left to Win the Indian Mind, Saira Shah Halim, CPI(M) candidate in the 2024 elections, analyses the reasons for this and suggests the way forward.
“There have been strategic decisions that went wrong, but morally the Left has never made a mistake,” she said in a podcast conversation with Sidharth Bhatia.
Halim talks of the need to bring in the youth and look at contemporary issues – “Let’s look at gig workers, at student networks, at climate change movements, at women,” she said.
She felt that the BJP could not be taken on by showing "soft-Hindutva”. She believes Mamdani had shown radical ideas — “I mean, this guy is unfazed, he is taking on Donald Trump, he is taking on these right wing oligarchs, he is taking on these big capitalists, and he is winning because, you know, people are liking these new ideas, which are a far cry from the traditional morals of what the old communists stood for,” though she clarifies that the old guard was right in its own way.
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