We the undersigned beg to differ sharply from both the positions stated above. To begin with, the Left in India is not the Left parties alone and therefore the defeat of the Left parties does not mean the defeat of the Left. The Left in India has never been reducible to these large parliamentary fronts and party machines, much less to the groups embattled in the forests of India, but has always been a much wider spectrum of organisations, movements and forms of struggle that range from the hundreds of left-wing trade unions that exist in the country in all the major industrial centres, unions that are essentially independent of party control and seeking today to form a national federation, down to the dozens of popular campaigns and the organisations connected with them. These campaigns have fought consistently on issues such as displacement at major sites like the Koel Karo dam, the Baliapal missile range, the Hirakud dam, the Sardar Sarover project, etc., and there has been and continues to be mass opposition to the forced acquisition of land by industrial capital (POSCO, Vedanta, Jindals, the Tatas, Ambanis, and so on) in different parts of the country. There have also been militant resistance movements to SEZs, most notably in Bengal itself (at Nandigram and Singur).