The Kerala Consensus.

The Left Front, a coalition of parties led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), was elected in my home state of West Bengal in 1977 and stayed in power for thirty-four years. When I was growing up, its permanence seemed no less solid than the stars and the moon. As late as 2004 Communist parties held fifty-three of 545 seats in the Indian parliament. Twenty years later, in the 2024 election, the three Communist parties together won eight seats. As their vote share shrank, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party rose, and the center-left Congress became largely indistinguishable from the BJP on economic questions. Both parties worked to privatize state assets, remove licensing restrictions on domestic businesses, and woo multinational capital in a global race to attract foreign corporations. In Bengal, the Left Front's economic policies in the 2000s followed a similar path, and it used eminent domain laws to seize agricultural land from sharecroppers to give to domestic and international firms. Violent confrontations over land rights in Singur and Nandigram led millions of the Left Front's traditional voters—from street vendors and auto-rickshaw drivers to small farmers and sharecroppers—to abandon the coalition, culminating in its defeat in 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]