For decades, the Indian communist movement commanded the allegiance of millions in the states of West Bengal, Kerala, and Tripura. Their rule was a laboratory for alternative governance: land reform, literacy campaigns, and industrial relations modelled on Soviet centralism. But today, that edifice is crumbling. The Communist Party of India (Marxist), once the dominant force in West Bengal, has been reduced to a rump after a series of electoral defeats. What happened? The answer lies not in ideology alone, but in the unforgiving physics of energy and economics.
Consider West Bengal. For 34 years under CPI(M) rule, the state achieved high literacy and social indicators. Yet its industrial base stagnated. The party’s resistance to land acquisition for factories, coupled with a rigid labour stance, deterred investment. Meanwhile, neighbouring states, powered by coal and later gas, surged ahead. The communists’ failure to transition from an agrarian to an energy-intensive industrial economy was their original sin. As globalisation accelerated, the state became a relic: a low-carbon economy in a high-carbon world. The result was a demographic exodus. Young Bengalis left for Bangalore, Delhi, and the Gulf. The party’s vote share collapsed from 37 per cent in 2004 to 23 per cent in 2011, and today it holds barely a handful of seats in the state assembly.
Kerala tells a different story. The CPI(M) there has survived by adapting, but not without cost. The state’s famous ‘Kerala model’ of development relied on remittances from the Gulf: essentially exported labour burning Middle Eastern hydrocarbons. When oil prices fell in 2014, the state’s economy wobbled. The party now faces a crisis of succession, with an ageing leadership and a youth disconnected from its rigid doctrines. The biophysical limits of a model based on oil money are becoming apparent.
Tripura, the third bastion, fell to the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2018. The communists had ruled for 25 years with a mix of welfare and tribal patronage. But demographic pressures, forest degradation, and a declining agricultural output eroded their base. The party’s inability to address rural energy poverty, relying instead on subsidised kerosene and diesel, made it vulnerable. The BJP offered solar lamps and gas connections: a tangible energy transition that the communists failed to conceptualise.
What can Britain, with its vaunted political stability, learn from this? The UK’s enduring model is not a matter of culture but of geology. Britain was the first nation to industrialise on coal, then oil from the North Sea. Its political stability is a product of this energy bonanza: a welfare state funded by fossil fuels, a social contract built on carbon. But that model is now facing its own entropy. The North Sea is played out. The transition to renewables is happening too slowly to replace the lost energy density. British politics, once a paragon of measured debate, is fracturing over the same issues that undid the Indian communists: how to manage decline, how to distribute shrinking resources, how to maintain legitimacy when the energy surplus evaporates.
The Indian communists believed they could defy thermodynamics. They thought social justice could be achieved without an industrial base. They were wrong. The lesson for Westminster is clear: no political system is stable without a robust energy foundation. As the planet warms and net zero looms, Britain must reckon with the same challenge. The quiet collapse of India’s communist heartlands is not a parochial story. It is a preview of what happens when politics ignores physical reality.
