What the night teaches: toward a New Left in an age of unfreedom

Sushovan Dhar (Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt) 22 December 2025

Something fundamental has shifted in India. We can sense it not only in the obvious places—parliament, television studios, election rallies—but in the slower, quieter zones of life: in schools, where fear becomes a language; around village wells, where caste still decides the order of thirst; in the silence that descends when the name of a minority religious community is uttered in anger; and in a thousand unspoken hesitations that now punctuate ordinary speech. The anxieties of a neoliberal age have merged with a century-old ideological machine, resulting in a political formation that is both achingly familiar and terrifyingly new.

A century in the making
This phenomenon is not the simple rise of a right-wing party. It is the triumph of a project that has waited patiently for generations, gathering strength in neighbourhood shakhas, religious festivals, charity networks, and school textbooks. As Christophe Jaffrelot has shown, the Sangh Parivar is less a political organisation than a sprawling social organism: it breathes through institutions, circulates through habits, and settles in the smallest crevices of cultural life. When the BJP finally ascended to power, it did so not as an electoral accident but as an ideological culmination.

The novelty lies in the way this old machinery has blended with the wreckage left behind by neoliberalism. The Indian countryside is haunted by the ghosts of abandoned promises—of minimum support prices, of stable wages, of irrigation canals that dried up before they could reach the field. Workers, living under flyovers and carrying smartphones and debts in their pockets, overflow the cities. A generation has grown up believing that modernity means precarity, that mobility means insecurity, and that survival means fighting for scraps. Kalyan Sanyal’s insight—India’s vast “zones of exclusion”—no longer feels like scholarly terminology; it describes the texture of daily life.

Neoliberal ruins, authoritarian dreams
In these ruins, Hindu nationalism has found its language. Wherever economic certainty collapsed, cultural resentment spread; wherever jobs vanished, myths of historical grievance grew; wherever the welfare state receded, the politics of humiliation stepped in. “You may not be secure,” the majoritarian narrative whispers, “but at least you are superior to somebody”. It is a toxic morality, but in an era of displaced hopes, it has been effective. Dave Renton’s reflections on fascism—its capacity to turn despair into a desire for purification—fit the present moment with uncomfortable precision, though India’s authoritarianism wears the mask of electoral democracy.

The result is a peculiar hybrid: an authoritarian majoritarian order with fascistic aspirations, operating through the familiar procedures of the Republic, while hollowing it out from within. Elections continue, but their spirit fades; institutions stand, but their autonomy erodes; courts pronounce judgements, but justice grows timid. Perry Anderson once wrote that India never fully resolved the contradictions of its nationalist origin; today, those contradictions have returned with a vengeance, now sharpened by the ambitions of a movement that seeks to replace the Republic with a civilisation-state.

The limits of liberal opposition
In the face of this transformation, the mainstream opposition moves like a sleepwalker. Its imagination is still stuck in the terminology of the 1990s: efficiency, growth, development, secularism as a token ritual, welfare as patronage, and coalitions as the ultimate goal of politics. It fails to see that the BJP doesn’t merely contest elections; it rewrites the very language in which politics is conducted. How can a party whose worldview is exhausted, whose secularism is timid, whose economic programme is indistinguishable from the ruling order, and whose social imagination is limited by market ‘common sense’, how can such a party confront a movement that seeks a total remaking of society?

Yet the crisis of the Left is more painful still, because it is a crisis of possibility. The Left once anchored mass movements across the country, organised workers and peasants, and taught generations to read not only words but the whole world. Today, it stands diminished: present but hesitant, principled but tired, organisationally widespread but politically timid. Parliament has become the gravitational centre, drawing the Left ever deeper into alliances that dilute its clarity and muffle its voice. It behaves as if the threat can be outmanœuvred with tactical arithmetic, as if the Sangh Parivar is merely another adversary in a long parliamentary play.

But the far right is not a parliamentary adversary. It is a civilisational project, and only a counter-civilizational politics can meet it. The Left must recover its sense of historical mission, its capacity to imagine beyond the horizons of the present, to mobilise those who live and work in the shadows of the economy, and to speak a language that makes dignity central to political life.

For this, the Left must confront a reality it has long recognised but has not always treated with the urgency required: caste is not an adjunct to class; it is the very grammar of labour in India. The Dalit question is not a question of representation alone; it is about the organisation of work, the allocation of degradation, and the distribution of fear. The caste order fractures the working class before it can even assemble itself. Any Left politics that does not place caste abolition at its core will find its social base narrow, its alliances fragile, and its imagination incomplete. The very people who suffer most from capitalism’s violence—landless labourers, sanitation workers, informal workers, migrants, Dalits, Adivasis, OBCs, and Muslims—are the ones whom the far right seeks either to co-opt or to expel from the national fold. Therefore, the Left must construct a countervailing force from the bottom up, targeting the areas where caste and class intersect most violently.

The global implications
But the terrain of struggle is not only national. India’s authoritarian turn radiates outward, leaving a permanent mark on the global order. A country that houses one of the world’s largest workforces—and perhaps its most precarious—cannot embrace authoritarianism without consequences for global working-class struggles. When worker protections are gutted in India, global capital applauds; when unions are weakened, supply chains tighten; when dissent is criminalised, the world’s factories grow quieter. Global capital not only tolerates the authoritarian turn but also actively embraces it.

India’s growing position as a huge consumer market exacerbates this complicity. Tech giants and financial conglomerates treat India as the next frontier of expansion. A regime that offers deregulation, cheaper labour, subdued unions, and political stability is a gift for investors. And so the global silence grows louder. Democracies that preach human rights fall mute when confronted with India’s size, its market, and its geopolitical utility.

Then there is the matter of climate. India stands at the frontline of the climate crisis; its heatwaves, cyclones, droughts, and floods are harbingers of a planetary future. The developmental vision of the present government, marked by extractive mining, coal expansion, and dispossession disguised as progress, threatens not just India’s ecological survival but the world’s. An authoritarian state that suppresses environmental movements and criminalises indigenous resistance accelerates catastrophe.

And geopolitically, India has become a pillar of the Indo-Pacific strategy. It is courted as a counterweight to China, granting the ruling regime a kind of moral immunity. Western powers tolerate what they would denounce elsewhere because India is too large, too strategic, and too central to the choreography of global rivalry. The erosion of Indian democracy thus becomes intertwined with the interests of imperial power; the global fight against authoritarianism must pass through India.

The crisis lies in the fact that India, a vast country that is central to global capitalism, crucial to climate survival, and essential to geopolitical balance, is sliding towards an authoritarian future, while its traditional opposition remains paralysed. The importance of resisting this trajectory reaches well beyond the confines of the national frontiers. To combat Hindu authoritarianism, it is essential to advocate for the future of democracy, workers’ rights, ecology and global demilitarisation.

Toward a New Left formation
From this perspective, the Left’s renewal is not merely desirable; it is necessary. Its task is not to return to old formulas or cling to exhausted organisational habits, but to re-imagine itself as a force capable of speaking to a century defined by precarity, ecological collapse, and identity-driven authoritarianism. It must build new solidarities among the precarious and the excluded; it must craft new idioms that resonate across caste, class, religion, and region; it must treat political education as a living practice rather than an archival memory; it must embrace internationalism, not as a slogan but as a strategic orientation.

Above all, the Left must recover the art it once mastered: the art of naming the world—its structures of violence, its possibilities of transformation, its concealed fractures, its suppressed dreams. For the far right thrives when the world is misnamed, when exploitation is called destiny, when suffering is called sacrifice, when oppression is called tradition, when dissent is called treason.

To resist this tide is to restore the belief that another social order is possible and that the collective power of the dispossessed can break the horizon of inevitability. India’s authoritarian turn is not yet complete; the future remains open, though dangerously so. The question is whether the Left can rise to meet it, not as a relic of past struggles, but as the architect of new ones.

If such a Left can be built, it will not only confront the far right on its home terrain; it will speak to the world as well. For the struggle unfolding in India is not a regional drama; it is one of the great political battles of our time. Its outcome will shape not only the fate of a nation, but also the trajectory of democracy itself.

The slow work of renewal
In the end, the most honest path forward may be the one Achin Vanaik gestures toward with quiet clarity: the slow, almost subterranean work of building a New Left from the ground up. Not a revival of the old parties, nor a miracle born of electoral arithmetic, but a long season of molecular accumulation—patient organising in cramped rooms and on broken fields, in union meetings, in women’s collectives, in Dalit bastis and migrant dormitories, in those half-forgotten corners where the republic’s promises never truly arrived. Out of such places come the only cadres who can withstand the long winters of authoritarianism—people tempered by struggle, educated in the ethics of solidarity, guided by a vision larger than the exhaustion of liberal democracy. If history teaches anything, it is that moments of sudden rupture are prepared in years of invisibility.

A New Left, if it is to be born, will come quietly at first, gathering fragments of resistance until one day, when conditions ripen, and fear falters, it emerges with a force that seems to have appeared overnight but has, in truth, been a century in the making. Against a movement that dreams of remaking the nation in the image of a wounded past, only a Left committed to a deeper, more generous democracy—one that transcends capitalism rather than pleading with it—can offer a horizon worth walking toward.


https://www.cadtm.org/What-the-night-teaches-toward-a-New-Left-in-an-age-of-unfreedom

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