One recalls how strikingly Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible brought home the notorious McCarthyism of the 1930s when the US was awash with great moral panic against all left-wing ideologies. The American government went to town with exaggerated rhetoric, arrests, and deportments. It made lists to tar and feather “suspected Communists” in government, Hollywood, and society. The notorious House Un-American Activities Committee was formed to investigate “disloyalty” and “subversion”—code for leftist or socialist sympathies. An earlier wave of Bolshevism versus Americanism had risen after the First World War, enraged by organised labour movements like the Seattle Strike of 1919 that supported higher wages for dockyard workers.

That enormous antipathy to anything that smacks of socialism—collective ownership of commons, redistribution of land and wealth, negotiated labour-capital relations, putting public good over private profit—continues in capitalist America. It has given generous fodder to the Indian right wing, which scours the world for ideologies of hate and exclusion, and has helped create an entire mythology around evil Leftists and why they must be destroyed. The malevolence of the propaganda has been such that young people, once instinctively drawn to ideas of social, economic, and political equality, are now diffident, tentative to show empathy. Ironically, the pushback against this mindset too has come from the US, where New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani proclaims his democratic socialism proudly, and bats for universal childcare, free city buses, affordable housing, wealth taxes, and more.

This is what India needs today. A reclaiming of the vast lost grounds that lie to the left of the discourse. Rediscovering the worker behind the e-delivery and the farmer behind the kiwi shake is not just an ethical but an economic imperative, just as free midday meals or 100 days of wage labour are welfare imperatives. Economies cannot bask endlessly in commoditised labour. A South Korea or Vietnam used cheap labour to jump-start the economy, but their governments quickly invested in health, education, and R&D. These do not yield quick returns but produce longevity, progress that spreads both horizontally across population segments and vertically across generations. Government and industry must invest patient capital in people, which takes decades to yield returns but pays back real, deep-rooted progress. But are people anything more than voters for this government?

The US economy itself is undergirded by solid, socialist-inspired principles: labour laws, minimum wages, social insurance, public schooling, water, and sanitation. India, however, has chosen to leapfrog into a toxic neoliberalism where the idea of universal social, economic, and political justice is rubbished as naïveté. Anyone who works for tribal welfare, forest and environmental concerns, farmer and labour rights is lumped under pejorative and violent nomenclatures such as urban naxal, tukde-tukde gang, anti-national, or the latest, cockroach. They are arrested and hounded by a ruling party that does not have to actually resolve anything, whether farmer distress, unemployment, or a corrupt examination system. It gets by on an intoxicating idea it sells: Hindutva. The idea of the Muslim enemy, the Dalit subservient, the Christian other.

Countering this needs another, equally powerful ideology. A vision for the future that young people can palpably see and desire. India’s Left once had the wherewithal for this. It had principles. It had foot soldiers and leaders. Where did it all go? In 2026, its centenary in India, the Left has lost the last State government it headed. It has nobody to blame but itself and the poverty of its ideas and stewardship. In West Bengal, it shamefully chose to secretly back the right wing in a wildly misbegotten idea that in this lay its redemption. In Kerala, it tried to woo Hindu support by not condemning Vellappally Natesan’s anti-Muslim rhetoric when it should have taken a principled stand if it indeed unconditionally supports a secular India. At a time when India is riven by extremely communal politics, it needs not craven opportunism, but parties with backbone that will opt to lose elections in the short term rather than support communalism.

The Left’s failure affects the country more profoundly than is immediately obvious. Because it is in socialist ideas that the future must be sought in these violently unequal times. The Left’s inability to refashion ideology, enthuse the young with a new vocabulary, jettison old leaders and find new ones—it is all talked about but seldom addressed. One saw the old fire reawaken during the anti-CAA and farmers’ protests; it still sparks up when tribal rights are violated, forest lands invaded, or slums demolished. But the movement needs a full overhaul to be nationally effective, seen again, heard again. The polity, like the economy, is a long-term project. It needs patient capital. The Left still carries the spark of its proud history, but it needs fresh energy to rekindle it.