The 21^st party congress of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, which concludes on Sunday in Visakhapatnam (also known as Vizag) in Andhra Pradesh, is taking place at a time when the CPM, and the Leftist movement as a whole, is faced with the question of political survival in the world’s largest democracy.

The CPM emerged out of a split in the Communist Part of India (CPI) in 1964 and gradually overtook the latter to become the biggest communist party in the country.

Today, however, things are drastically different for the CPM, which completed 50 years of its formation in 2014. The national vote share and the seat share of the CPM are at their lowest points ever. Its vote share and seat share have declined steadily over the past few elections.

The national footprint of the Left has also shrunk. The two major Left parties—-CPM and CPI—-had won Lok Sabha seats from nine states in 1991. Today, they are restricted to just three states: West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. And, unlike 1964, when the CPM grew at the CPI’s expense, no new or existing communist party has been able to gain ground over the past few years. This is reflected in the CPI’s decline, the only other communist party which has a member in the Lok Sabha in 2014.

News reports about the deliberations in Visakhapatnam suggest that the CPM’s sorry state has led to growing criticism within the party on its inability to lead campaigns, weed out corruption within its ranks, and its failure to mobilize the youth.

Only 6.5% of the CPM’s members are below 25 years of age, according to news reports . The representation of young people in the leadership is even worse. The CPM’s 20^th party congress documents show that there were only two delegates below 30 years of age out of the total 727 who participated in the congress held in 2012. The party congress is the CPM’s highest decision making body according to its constitution. The number of delegates between 30 and 40 years was around 28. The number of delegates aged 50-60 and above 60 was 267 and 338, respectively.

While issues like failure to expand outside traditional bases and lack of young people have been a recurring theme in the past, the central question which the party faces is overcoming its problems in West Bengal, where it ran a state government from 1977 to 2011.

Today, the same state seems to have become the CPM’s nemesis with the party continuously losing ground there since 2008. The drastic fall in the CPM’s seats in the 2009 and 2014 Lok Sabha elections is primarily because of falling numbers from West Bengal, which used to have a large share in its parliamentary contingent.

The Left’s decline in West Bengal has to be seen in the backdrop of political flare up over land acquisition for industrialization in Singur and Nandigram. It was after these protests and the death of farmers in police firing in Nandigram in March 2008 that the Left Front suffered its first major setback in the panchayat elections of 2008. Since then it has become an unstoppable slide.

While the CPM, especially the West Bengal leadership, came under severe criticism for its land acquisition policy within Left circles, the state unit of the party has maintained that the top leadership was not responsible for the turn of events in both these places. A document titled “The Left Front government in West Bengal: Evolution of an Experience,” adopted by the CPM’s West Bengal State Conference held in February 2015, has described the Nandigram events as a result of “unnecessary initiatives of a section of the local leadership”.

The reluctance of the CPM’s state leadership to admit a political mistake is in sharp contrast to the willingness of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leadership, which has borrowed a few tactics from the Left, to accept its mistake of giving up power in Delhi in 2014. The AAP rode back to power even with a bigger majority in the recent Delhi assembly polls.

There is a need to distinguish between the experience of the AAP and the CPM, said Manas Ray, a fellow in cultural studies at the Centre for Study of Social Sciences in Kolkata.

While the AAP does not have a long history and could go back to its network among the poor people and explain its mistake to win back a bigger majority, the CPM’s decay in West Bengal is a product of the patron-client relationship practiced by the Left government over three decades, said Ray. The absence of ideological motivation among its middle and upper leadership has contributed to the decline, he said.

S Venkat Narayan