If the Left has 'zero relevance' why does the right keep returning to it?

What does it mean when a political force that has been declared electorally irrelevant by the right wing still provokes such intense political mobilisation?

At Jadavpur University, a dispute over a student general body meeting escalated on Wednesday night into allegations of assault, vandalism, arson and attempts to attack students. The immediate dispute involved the Faculty of Engineering and Technology Students’ Union (FETSU) meeting, whose validity ABVP questioned. ABVP alleged that its supporters were attacked and subjected to casteist remarks; Left student organisations, meanwhile, alleged that ABVP and RSS-linked groups brought outsiders into the campus. Several students were injured and police entered the university to contain the situation.

But the more revealing part of the episode may lie beyond the immediate confrontation. Left organisations have provided solid evidence that their flags were torn and burnt and that parts of the campus were vandalised with abusive slurs being hurled upon students. Politically, however, the behaviour is difficult to ignore. A red flag is not an electoral seat. Why, then, does it continue to generate such hostility? So much so that the same groups labeling left politics irrelevant, feel the need to sneak in outsiders into a university campus to attack and abuse students allegedly participating in left leaning politics?

Jadavpur has long been one of Bengal’s most politically charged university spaces. The latest confrontation also comes against a history of repeated clashes around attempts by the ABVP and the broader Hindutva camp to establish a presence on a campus associated with Left student politics. In 2019, ABVP-linked mobilisation at JU was accompanied by allegations of vandalism and arson, while the BJP subsequently described the university as an anti-national hub.

This pattern has today become the battleground which is not simply electoral. Universities produce political language of dissent, organisations and young cadres. They turn questions of employment, examinations, education, inequality and state power into collective action. The recent student mobilisation around examination irregularities, including the protests involving student unions like AISA demonstrates that Left student politics can still occupy that space even when the electoral Left is deeply weakened.

That is also why the language used against dissent deserves scrutiny. On Independence Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi used the term dimaagi Naxals, distinguishing them from armed Naxalism while warning that such ideological influence remained a threat. Union minister Kiren Rijiju subsequently said the phrase referred to people supporting Maoists and separatists, not Opposition leaders. Yet the political reaction exposed how easily Naxal can migrate from a historically specific armed movement aginst exploitation into a much broader vocabulary for describing ideological opponents.

That shift matters in Bengal, where the history of Naxalism also carries memories of radical student politics, class struggle and resistance to entrenched power alongside the violence of the movement itself. Reducing that complicated history to a synonym for terrorism erases the political argument embedded within it.

None of this makes the Left electorally powerful. Perhaps that is precisely the contradiction worth examining. If the Left has genuinely ceased to matter, why must its flags still be burnt, its symbols contested, its student politics repeatedly confronted and its ideological vocabulary repeatedly invoked as a threat?

The question is not whether the Left can return to power tomorrow. It is why a supposedly irrelevant political force continues to occupy so much space in the political imagination of its opponents.

Cover image : Debalina Mou