Perhaps the best outcome of the recent legislative elections held in four states — Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Keralam — is the total and overdue decimation of India’s communist parties — CPI and CPM (Communist Party-Marxist) — which over the past almost century have played a major role in Indian politics and an over-sized role in destroying the high potential of post-independence India. In Keralam the LDF coalition government headed by the CPM was roundly thrashed by the Congress-led UDF coalition winning only 26 seats in the 140 strong legislative assembly. In West Bengal where CPM ruled uninterruptedly for 34 long years (1977-2011), the party won just one seat.

It’s useful to remember that the Communist Party of India (CPI) routinely vilified Mahatma Gandhi and leaders of India’s freedom movement describing them — on orders of the Soviet (Russian) communist party — as stooges of Western imperialism. Following independence, after Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru became enamoured of the inorganic Soviet heavy industry, centrally planned economy model, the CPI was forgiven and permitted to function as a legit political party, and won legislative elections in Keralam and West Bengal. In the process by promoting class antagonism and vicious trade unionism, the CPI and especially its breakaway CPM owing loyalty to communist China, destroyed private industry and prompted capital flight that de-industrialised Kerala and West Bengal. Kerala, plugged as India’s most literate state (mainly because of the school education infrastructure built by the Roman Catholic Church) maintains a superficial prosperity because of huge annual remittances of human capital exported to West Asia to slave in humiliating conditions. Bengal was destroyed by large infiltration of under-qualified CPM apparatchiks into its once excellent education system.

Despite this huge damage inflicted upon the Indian economy by CPM comrades, there’s no shortage of Marxists in Indian academia who persist with confusing students with nostrums of this bankrupt ideology. The wipeout of the Communist parties in the recent legislative elections, is evidence that barely literate citizens are wiser than dunce professors.