Tales of Two Outfits Touching 100

Gandhi Jayanti, October 2, celebration was last year eclipsed by the centenary celebration of the RSS, the Alma Mater of the ruling Bhartiya Janata Pary (BJP). Another organisation born the same year, 1925 with the promise of usher in communism in India, was however not in a celebratory mood. Rather, an extremist faction of it was facing both physical and organisational annihilation.

The Red is splintered, scattered, thined and in the twilight zone, the Saffron is effulgent and ascedant. Hitting the centenary milestone is cause for jubilation for the one, while time for sobre introspection for the other.

Official Left parties woke up from slumber after a full month when Madvi Hidma, carrying a bounty of one crore on his head, was killed by the security forces. Hidma was the youngest member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), which is the highest and most radical manifestation of the century long Indian journey of left politics that started with the formation of Communist Party of India on December 25th, 1925 in Kanpur and reached its political culmination with the merger of Peoples War and Maoist Communist Centre in 2004 resulting in CPI(Maoist).

Hidma was given a lip service by left parties, as they did with the killing of CPI(Maoist) General Secretary Nambala Kesavarao earlier in 2025, with a three-paragraph press release.  A month later, the Press Information Bureau, in its press release titled “From Red Corridor to Naxal-Free Bharat”, declared 2014-25 as a decade of decisive gains against LWE, slashing the most-affected districts from 36 to 3, marking the near collapse of the red corridor. As per the release, “in 2025 alone, 317 Naxals were neutralised (including top leadership), 800 plus arrested, and nearly 2,000 surrendered, driving the highest-ever attrition and demonstrating irreversible momentum toward a Naxal-free India by March 2026”.

As it seems, the Spring is yet to arrive but the Spring Thunder has gone. We do not know for sure if this could be claimed decisively, but we are certainly in a spell to say that 2025 has proved to be an all-time low for left politics and an all-time high for right-wing politics, which currently rules the roost, not only in India but globally. Could this also be said of their ideologies?

Politics is not the same as ideology. Politics operates by managing or exploiting ideological fantasies. We see politics through the lens of ideology. So, ideology is omnipresent, like time, like ether. There is nothing outside ideology. Being apolitical or seeing the world objectively also amounts to being ideological. Therefore, the high tide of rightist politics does not guarantee the success of its ideology, just as the low tide of left politics is not synonymous with its ideological demise.

Let us glance at some instances that speak of the ideological decay of right-wing politics in India. In an interesting release way back in 2021, the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) had claimed that 433 MPs/MLAs have switched their political parties since 2016, out of which BJP has seen the highest number of MLAs (44%) joining from other parties.

This has gradually eaten into the most-demanded ruling party, resulting in the alienation of pracharaks, the ground-level RSS workers, that RSS founder K. B. Hedgewar termed the backbone of the organisation. The upper echelons of RSS leadership have been corrupted by power, privilege and money as never before. The newly built 13-storeyed RSS headquarters in Jhandewalan, costing more than 150 Crores, can be a central motif to understand the loss of ideology. In fact, the rise in power of RSS (and BJP) is directly linked to the rot in its ideological core.

The same could be said and easily observed in the case of left parties, the most revolutionary among them have been wiped out, and the left-out officialdom of CPI, CPI(M) and CPI(ML) are trapped in popular musings, losing the remaining ground after every state election. CPI(ML) in Bihar is a case in point. The ideological mantra of class-struggle has become as obsolete as the election being a tactic to revolution.

In fact, the organisational structure of left parties in India has got out of sync with their political program. So they prefer to outsource their revolutionary victories by celebrating the win of Mamdani in New York, the youth upsurge in Nepal, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and elsewhere while their cadre work for alliance parties, election management companies and NGOs for livelihood. The lull and silence on the road and factory gates over the cold-blooded killing of MNREGA and the new Labour Code are witness to the lost ideological fervour that had seen the glorious days of Telangana-Tebhaga and Punnapra-Vaylar movements. 

So, on October 2, 2025, whereas the visible dissimilarity between the right and left manifested itself in the realm of realpolitik, the ill-fated similitude of their shared ideological decay lay hidden under. This peculiar state of things had surfaced much earlier in the West, where political correctness had displaced the class struggle and produced a liberal elite that focused upon racial and sexual minorities to divert attention from its members’ own economic and political power.

The lies spread by this wokeness, in turn allowed the neo-right populists to claim themselves as the protector of the people against the “deep state” elite, again guaranteeing their economic and political power.

Celebrated Slovenian philosopher Zizek summed up this neo-liberal transformation of ideological polity much aptly in the following words way back in 2022, which now could be applied with caution to the Indian situation. He wrote: “Ultimately, both sides are fighting over the spoils of a system in which they are wholly complicit. Neither side really stands up for the exploited or has any interest in working-class solidarity. The implication is not that “left” and “right” are outdated notions – as one often hears – but rather that culture wars have displaced class struggle as the engine of politics.