The recent agitation over the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test began with students’ anger. Young people who had spent years preparing for one of India’s most competitive examinations discovered that their futures could be compromised by alleged paper leaks, administrative failures and a system unable to guarantee fairness. Students protested, families spoke out, and digital platforms carried their testimonies.
However, spontaneous anger does not automatically become sustained political pressure. It requires organisations capable of carrying demands from campuses to the streets, from demonstrations to Parliament, and into the national debate. This is where the Indian Left played an important role. Left-affiliated student organisations, including the Students’ Federation of India, the All-India Students’ Federation and the All India Students’ Association, helped organise protests over irregularities in NEET and other examinations.
The Left did not create the students’ anger, nor should it claim ownership of a movement driven principally by young people. Its contribution was different. It amplified their voices, provided organisational infrastructure and connected the examination crisis to public education, unemployment, privatisation and inequality.
Indian communism is often narrated through ideological divisions and electoral decline: the split between the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Naxalite movement, and the fall of the Left Front in West Bengal. But the communist movement cannot be reduced to electoral fortunes. It is also the history of ordinary people learning to organise: workers demanding better wages, agricultural labourers resisting landlords, sharecroppers seeking a larger portion of the harvest, and students opposing authoritarianism.
Indian communism emerged from the anti-colonial ferment following the October Revolution. Its early organisers faced surveillance, imprisonment and prosecution by the British Raj. The Meerut Conspiracy Case sought not merely to punish activists but to weaken communist and trade-union networks.
That capacity became visible in the agrarian struggles of the 1940s. In Bengal, the Tebhaga movement demanded that sharecroppers retain two-thirds of the produce they cultivated rather than surrendering half to landowners. In Telangana, peasants confronted landlordism, forced labour and princely repression. These struggles transformed peasants into political actors claiming land, dignity and power.
After independence, communists had to work within parliamentary democracy while challenging the unequal social order inherited from colonialism. The election of a communist government in Kerala in 1957 was historic. It showed that a communist party could win elections and pursue reform within a constitutional system.
Communist-led governments in Kerala became associated with public health, education, welfare and decentralised governance. In West Bengal, Operation Barga strengthened sharecroppers’ rights, while panchayat reforms widened rural participation.
None of these experiences should be romanticised. Communist governments accumulated bureaucratic habits, while party structures became rigid and distant. In West Bengal, the Left eventually appeared disconnected from the rural and working-class constituencies that had brought it to power.
Communist parties also struggled to confront caste seriously, often assuming that class mobilisation would automatically dissolve caste oppression. Other failures included factionalism, rigidity and difficulty communicating with younger voters.
However, the NEET agitation shows why the Left’s central questions have not disappeared. Who bears the cost when a public institution fails? Who can afford repeated examinations, expensive coaching and years without secure employment? Whose suffering receives political attention, and whose is treated as an acceptable consequence of competition?
The examination system presents itself as meritocratic. Every student supposedly sits the same paper under the same rules. But formal equality inside the examination room conceals enormous inequalities outside it. One candidate has elite coaching, educated parents and financial security. Another attends an underfunded school, studies while working or becomes the first in the family to pursue higher education. The NEET crisis reveals how fragile the promise of merit becomes when institutions cannot guarantee fairness.
The communist tradition’s enduring contribution has been its insistence that such failures are not simply personal misfortunes. They are political questions. A farmer’s debt, a worker’s wage, a student’s examination, a Dalit person’s exclusion and a minority’s fear may be experienced individually. Yet they are produced through structures of power that must be challenged collectively.
That is what connects NEET to the longer history of Indian communism. Not every student protest is communist. Rather, the Left has repeatedly helped convert private suffering into public argument and scattered grievances into organised demands.
The movement’s future will not be secured by commemorating its past or repeating old slogans. It will depend on whether it can listen to new movements without dominating them, connect class with caste and gender, defend public institutions while demanding reform, and build organisations suited to a younger, digitally connected India.
The question is therefore not whether the Left can reproduce its former strength by invoking history alone. The question is whether it can regain relevance by organising around the insecurities of the present: precarious work, unaffordable education, caste discrimination, shrinking freedoms, and the growing distance between democratic promises and everyday life.
After more than a century, the communist movement is electorally weaker and organisationally diminished. But the questions it placed at the centre of Indian politics land, labour, education, caste, secularism, equality and democracy, remain unresolved. As long as those questions survive, Indian communism will not belong only to the past.
