The CPI(M) in Bengal is going through an identity crisis, similar to what I went through when I was 16. The world was my oyster, everything was possible, there were so many identities I could grab.
I came of age in Kolkata of the 1980s and 1990s, so my interest is perhaps more sentimental than analytical. But I have spent thirty years in brand strategy, and what I see in the CPI(M)’s 2026 campaign is a textbook case of a brand that has lost the plot. What strikes me in the CPI(M) Instagram Reels is that the slogans and the wall graffiti — the language, the content, the tone — is remarkably similar to the ‘80s. The hardworking poor, their rights, the struggle against the rich/powerful/corrupt, the fight for secularism — the brand narrative is metronome-like in its consistency. It was the Congress/Centre then, it’s the BJP and TMC now, nothing else has changed. There’s even Castro caps and Lenin t-shirts, aur kya chahiye.
Coming of age
Yes, the faces have changed — it’s no longer the white-haired, rotund-bellied, venerable gents. A bevy of impassioned, articulate boy scouts and girl scouts have taken their place. The strategy, I am told, is to reposition the CPI(M) as a youthful brand.
It won’t work. Not because the youth is wrong, but because the party has made the oldest mistake in the brand playbook — new packaging, same product. Young faces carrying old ideas don’t reinvent a brand. They just make the contradiction more visible. It’s a bit like putting a contemporary sans-serif on a Soviet-era poster and calling it a rebrand. Consumers and voters see through it immediately.
The CPI(M) was not simply a party that lost market share in 2011. The Left in Bengal was a civilisational project. It built brand equity through structural indispensability — Operation Barga’s land reforms, a revitalised panchayat system and party cells that doubled as local ombudsmen. When that edifice collapsed, under the weight of Nandigram, Singur and decades of political violence, it was not a brand that faded. An entire category dissolved.
Any strategist will tell you that a genuine brand revival requires three things: an honest accounting of what went wrong, a value proposition that speaks to today’s consumer rather than yesterday’s and ambassadors who actually embody the new direction rather than perform it.
new target
The CPI(M) has done none of these. Worse, it has completely lost the consumer pulse. The people a genuine Left politics might serve in 2026 — informal workers, first-generation graduates without jobs, Matua and Namasudra communities, Muslim agricultural labourers whose votes are sought but whose lives are unchanged — are not waiting for a revival story. They are a new target segment entirely, with new needs, new anxieties, new aspirations. The old brand promise simply doesn’t speak to them.
And the party hasn’t updated its messaging to address any of this. Nandigram and Singur remain unaddressed. What is their position now? What do they make of the differences between Buddhadev Babu and Jyoti Basu? What is the economic strategy? Will they offer freebies if they come to power? These are not unreasonable questions from a voter in 2026. They are the core of any credible brand promise.
A brand that skips accountability and goes straight to aspirational messaging, carried on the shoulders of sincere, ideology-driven young workers, will not be believed. Consumers know. Voters know.
The brief for a credible Left politics in Bengal has rarely been stronger. But converting that brief into a winning strategy would mean reading the consumer pulse of 2026 — the gig worker, the woman entrepreneur, the first-generation graduate — and answering the one question no Reel can substitute for: what would you actually do, and why should anyone believe you this time?
The Left in Bengal probably doesn’t know. And that’s sad in the age of Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and Anura Kumara Dissanayake, Claudia Sheinbaum and Rumen Radev, when the global Left is finding new language, new relevance, a new brand identity. But Bengal’s Left is still painting the same walls.
(Shubho Sengupta is a brand and communications strategist based in Delhi)
Published on April 28, 2026