The Red Star Isn’t Setting
The Red Star Isn’t Setting. It’s Being Systematically Erased — and Conveniently Misrepresented. Articles like “Is the Red Star Setting over India?” belong to a familiar genre of liberal commentary — smug in tone, shallow in substance. These pieces claim that the Indian Left is dead or irrelevant, while conveniently ignoring the structural conditions that gave rise to it and the role it continues to play in resisting the twin forces of casteism and religious authoritarianism. Worse, they rewrite history to suit a narrative that paints all resistance as either obsolete or misdirected. Let us examine the key premises of this narrative, and why they fail. 1. The Lazy Myth That "Communists Didn’t Understand Caste" This trope has been repeated so often, it has become a sort of reflexive dismissal of Left politics in India. But any serious student of modern Indian history knows better. The Indian Left — particularly the CPI(M), CPI, and other mass-based Left formations — didn't ...