About Lose

This is a personal note, born out of frustration with recent political developments. But as long as we are historical beings, nothing truly personal is apolitical.

My grief is not just about the LDF losing in Keralam. It is about what is unfolding across the country. It is about the growing acceptance of a politics rooted in communalism, violence, and unchecked greed. People voted for “change” once before too. We know where that led in 2014. Twelve years later, it feels as though democratic choices themselves are increasingly shaped by fear, identity, and division. Religion—particularly Islamophobia—is no longer incidental to politics; it is being actively mobilized as an answer to complex political questions.

I am not particularly worried about LDF in Keralam. Power there has always shifted with public sentiment, and must be. Winning and losing elections are part of democracy and they must be. My concern is not with the outcome alone, but with the political moment we are in. In the next five years, who will stand firmly against the normalization of hate? Who will resist what is now being sown more openly into our social fabric—especially when the very governments that resisted it more than most have all fallen at once?

I do not believe that the Congress and the BJP are the same. The distinction in their stated values—on democracy, on equality—still exists. But what is troubling is how, in practice, that distinction is weakening. I do not see the Congress confronting this moment with the force it demands. The kind of opposition required now is deeper and more uncompromising than what we are witnessing.

I have seen the streets of Bangalore—low-income Muslim neighbourhoods alongside affluent Hindu-majority areas. These are not the same worlds. Not in safety, not in dignity, not in how the state or society responds to them. It is from within this reality that the gap between political ideals and political practice becomes visible. Even where foundational values differ, the politics of religion, caste, and accumulation continues to shape decisions on the ground. That is where the lines begin to blur.

The ideas like eradication of extreme poverty is not a value that these parties, shaped by the logic of capital, are driven by. Even in Keralam, where a Left government recently achieved this, it did not translate into political support. For one, extreme poverty is no longer the central concern of the majority, so it does not carry electoral weight. This is not to say that people are unaware or incapable of making political choices—the Left government had its own issues in how power was handled, and those matter. But it is worth asking whether electoral shifts across India are being driven primarily by such governance questions. Is Keralam entirely insulated from the broader currents of majoritarian politics shaping the country? And even if dissatisfaction with the Communist government or with Pinarayi played a role, are we certain that what replaces it reflects stronger democratic values? I may be a cynic here, or an outlier failing to see something others do—but these questions remain difficult to ignore.

There is another kind of sadness too. For the first time in my life, there is no communist government in power anywhere in India. I grew up in a communist household. I remember, when I was around eight or nine, my cousin and I tried to volunteer at a bookstall set up by the RSS in a nearby temple during a local event. We did not know what the RSS was; to us, books were reason enough to be there. But my father was furious. At the time, we did not understand his anger. It took years for it to make sense. What stayed with us, though, was the feeling that there was something deeply wrong there, something we would come to understand later. I have thought about that moment often as an adult. When I told this story, several times I have heard people criticise my father for making political choices for us, too early. My parents had their flaws. But raising us as communists—with the conviction that all human beings are equal across caste, community, gender, language, and wealth—was not one of them.

 I am a communist from the time I identify as anything. I do not remember learning the word “bourgeois.” It existed in me as early as language itself. And that matters. Because words shape how we see the world. They teach us to recognise exploitation, to question profit, to see history not as inevitability, but as struggle. Communism taught me not just that injustice exists, but that it is made—and therefore can be unmade. So, of all the expectations that I grew up with, the expectation that I should be a communist was the easiest to follow through.

And for that matter, I am not a perfect communist. My engagement with the party has been limited—a brief period within it, followed by social media, conversations, and voting. I live within the contradictions of this world. I buy cheap clothes. I use platforms like Swiggy and Uber. But I do not see contradiction as a reason to abandon values. If anything, it makes holding on to them more deliberate: to believe in dignity, to stand for equality, and to resist, in whatever ways I can. At the same time, I do not think communism can be reduced to the party alone. The idea has always been larger than any single organization, and history is full of moments where communists themselves have challenged their own parties. But in this moment, I find myself uneasy with what that distance can become. Because when people choose not to support the party electorally, even out of dissatisfaction or dissent, I am not sure where that energy is directed. In a political landscape already shifting toward the right and the centre-right, it becomes difficult to tell whether such dissent strengthens the ideals of communism, or ends up weakening the very spaces that still attempt to hold on to them.

Because what we are living through is not neutral. We are watching irreversible damage being done to both people and the planet in the name of profit. "Forests are being cut because shadows cannot be sold". Lives are reorganised around extraction and accumulation. And still, we are told this is the only way. I do not know how long one can sustain hope.

Recently, someone asked me: if it is such a powerful idea, why did it not spread?I do not have a simple answer. Why is it so easily reduced to authoritarianism in popular imagination? Why does an idea centred on equality repeatedly struggle to sustain power? These are not questions with easy resolutions. But imagining a world with no alternative—where profit is the only organizing principle—is far more unsettling. That would be a world without hope.

For communists, power is not the end goal. I remember my father once comparing them to doctors. In a world without disease, doctors would not be necessary. In a world without injustice, communists would not be necessary either. It is an ideal. But so is a world without illness. And yet, the existence of disease does not make doctors irrelevant. It makes them necessary. In the same way, the persistence of injustice makes communism necessary.

I am told all these goals of communists are impractical. That human beings are naturally hierarchical, naturally inclined to dominate and exploit. But if “nature” were enough to explain us, how did abstract ideas like money and God come to shape entire civilizations?

We are not just animals. We are shaped by layers of history, by ideas, by struggles, by imagination. So no, I do not want to be practical in a world where people are beaten, raped, and killed for their caste, their language, their colour, their religion. If practicality means silence, I want to choose otherwise, hope for the impractical ideal future.

We may lose elections. Again and again.

But as long as there are people who refuse to accept injustice as inevitable, as long as there is a spirit of protest and revolution that refuses to die, the idea survives.

And as long as the idea survives, it is not a loss.

It is a continuation.