Left-Brahmin, Right-Bahujan And Caste Of Ideologies

Left politics, for some time now, has been witnessing a terminal decline. There is a growing concern in university spaces that Left politics may end up attracting only the social elite, and those they are attempting to mobilise may move to the Right. It is a new political configuration that I refer to as Left-Brahmin, Right-Bahujan. The imagination of the Left has, over a period, been getting eroded in terms of its appeal and jouissance. Those who it was mobilising seem to be operating on a different register. It is a conflict between idealism and pragmatism, ideology and strategy, structural change and immediate survival. But what has changed so fundamentally?

What has changed fundamentally is the way transformation is being imagined after the neoliberal era. Farmer movements in the recent past have been a great exception in bringing back street protests in a big way. Farmer protests succeeded in pushing back the farm laws, but they did not succeed in electorally defeating the current political regime. It is in this context, some may argue, that farmers protested against the farm laws and not for the political defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). They may protest at Delhi’s borders, but may go back to voting for the BJP and Narendra Modi. Defeating the entire corporate model of development was never their intention; it was only about saving their land.

Why should the farmers defeat the political regime? This question does not make sense in Left-oriented politics. It is part of a structural logic, but some in today’s context may argue as to why burden the farmers with a regime change? Is it the logic of politics or the burden of morality? If farmers pushed back the farm laws, but went back to voting for the BJP for other considerations, how should one analyse such a thing? Some may argue in the current neoliberal context that expecting a continuity or consistency in the political behaviour or subjectivity is itself never empirically true. One should allow seeing that political action and choices are fragments and remain essentially fragmented.

The same political subjectivity can be framed in a different Left lexicon that fragmented behaviour is itself the product and symptom of neoliberal times. Should politics then not be about bringing a sense of a semblance of connection between the fragments? Or is it more liberating to think of change as disorderly, discontinuous and piece-meal? The later kind of a change imposes no moral burden on the political subject, while the aim and imagination of large change is burdensome and also totalitarian in character. This is the central question and challenge that the Left politics are facing in current times. Its old ways are not working and the new ways are not acceptable to it.

The other major shift in Indian politics is that its idiom has changed. With representation becoming a significant dimension of social justice, there is a new local cultural idiom that has entered politics. There is a great shift to cultural symbolism and also making sense of economic and material issues through a cultural idiom. The BJP has been at the forefront of appropriating this phenomenon and the Left has not yet joined the party. It is still constrained by its social-ideological frameworks that lack affective depth. Revolutionary language brought in great symbolism of songs, dance, and slogans. They are now jaded and sound repetitive. The Left is often prone to confusing being repetitive with commitment. One could be tempted to compare it with the (Brahmin) Bhajan culture. It can be best understood by an anecdote when I took the initiative to arrange for a condolence meeting of a Left ideologue, and his comrades paid him rich tributes by saying that what he said in the 1950s, he said the same (or stood by the same) till 2000, when he passed away!

The Left certainly needs to reinvent itself. Both the parliamentary and non-parliamentary Left are on the wane. The decline becomes even more stark when you see that both the Communists and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) began in 1925, and the opposite directions in which they seem to have travelled. With the coming of Gen Z, the Left begins to look even more archaic, even though it’s the Left student politics that continue to remain successful.

This is where the Left needs to link the questions of capital and exploitation to culture and more so everyday existential issues. The market and neoliberalism are not only an economic phenomenon, but also a cultural phenomenon. It impacts the way we think and interact. Is loneliness not the gift of late capitalism and distorted modernity? Anxiety is the product of excessive competitive ethic, and intrusive markets at the root of anomie. The Left fights the markets without linking it to anomie, and fights competition and monopoly without linking them to anxiety. It fights spatial inequalities without fighting boredom. One need not go too far, but take a detour to stop at Bollywood when it sings Khali bore do paharo se… jhola uthakar chale..Ramachandra ji (Fed up of these empty, boring afternoons, I’m packing my bag and leaving). Boredom has emerged as such a potent issue that populist authoritarians have reduced politics to entertainment. People are looking for new stories to celebrate life, and workers and peasants too possess mobiles. Entertainment and compensatory consumption have collapsed to be one. How can the Left enter and encroach such spaces? Mostly, the Left assumes all of culture to be conservative, and mistakes performance for manipulation.

The Left needs to move back into popular registers where everything that is popular is not necessarily progressive. But in order to recover the progressive one cannot eschew the popular. It is now clear that the progressive has to be built from within the popular by resignifying myths, mythologies, folklore and civilisational stories. Revolutionary poet Varavara Rao from Telangana was known for his robust interpretation of Karna for the caste question and Draupadi for the gender. With the emergence of independent Ambedkarite movements, mythologies were seen as casteist and they gradually receded from public discourse.

The rise of populism is questioning politics as a professional and a specialised field. It is bringing the everyday into the political. This is in itself radical. The intimate is bursting the opaqueness of the political as a distant and an indifferent field of discourses and policies. The Left got bamboozled with the intimate in the political. It needs to begin experimenting with a new organisational culture that is friendly, affable and above all, provides a deep sense of belonging. They need a new culture to settle differences without splits. They don’t need to learn from the RSS, but could well begin with Lenin’s ideas on concentric circles. While the RSS floats a great number of ‘shadow armies’, the Left is unable to hold on to corporeal bodies.

It is time for the Left to rethink the possibilities of a merger between various factions that have microscopic differences given disproportionate significance. They may need to open a fresh dialogue between the parliamentary and non-parliamentary factions. The ‘Great Debate’ is no longer as relevant as it once was. Neither China nor Russia has remained socialist. We need to make a fresh beginning in telling ourselves that we do not know how to build socialism. Bertrand Russell was among the first to return disappointed with his trip to the erstwhile Soviet Union and early to point to its bureaucratic culture and the absence of creative freedom. The Left needs to read and listen beyond its coterie sometimes to see what looked obvious to many.

Social elitism works in many ways in the Indian context. It is in this sense that the Left needs to shrug its Left-Brahmin configuration to emerge with newer forms of solidarity. As long as it fails to do so, it will, figuratively, remain an organisation of ‘Brahmin boys’.

(Views expressed are personal)

Ajay Gudavarthy is with the centre for political studies Jawaharlal Nehru University

This article appeared as Left-Brahmin, Right-Bahujan in Outlook’s December 21, 2025, issue as 'What's Left of the Left' which explores how the Left finds itself at an interesting and challenging crossroad now the Left needs to adapt.