The Left parties are widely expected to lose their “national” status in the forthcoming elections, getting votes, seats and a regional spread below the eligibility threshold. The BJP is expected to emerge as the largest party. These are not unrelated developments.Rather, the Left’s decline is a major contributor to the rise of the Right in India. The Left in India has always punched far above its weight. It used to have a coherent critique of mainstream politics, all right, but coherence was not what made it noteworthy.Its coherence was based on an interpretation of the world that seemed plausible in the 1950s and the 1960s, but increasingly was exposed as misconceived as the Soviet Union unravelled and collapsed, as China stopped pretending there were any non-capitalist cats at all in its frenzied, colour-blind race to catch all the mice in the world, and openly capitalist policies delivered millions out of poverty across developing Asia.The Left still mattered because it stood for the values of liberal democracy in a largely pre-modern cultural context, championed modern, capitalist reforms to end assorted pre-capitalist agrarian relations, stood for moral uprightness in politics, was the only political force that was consistently liberal in social policy, controlled unions that gave India’s burgeoning democracy its basic units of organised action and generally articulated a foreign policy designed to maximise India’s autonomy vis-à-vis the great powers. But, over the last two decades, it has given up every one of these virtues. This ceded space for the Right to occupy.The BJP is not growing because the Sangh Parivar’s agenda of redefining Indian nationhood as Hindutva and bludgeoning the minorities into second-class citizens has suddenly become popular.Rather, it’s the Congress’ inability to rise up to meet the aspirations of Reforms’ children — the middle class that grew numerous and prosperous due to globalised growth, seeking an end to corruption, in favour of governance and more substantive democracy. The BJP has been able to capitalise on the resultant discontent.Why has the Left ceded space? It is easy to blame individual leaders but that would be a mistake. The real culprit is visible dissonance between the lived reality of globalised growth and the Left’s rhetoric of moribund capitalism.A party programme that damns any attempt to create jobs and prosperity as neo-liberal conspiracy and has no constructive agenda to offer of its own ceases to be taken seriously on any count. The party programme says the Left’s job is to mobilise people against capitalism.The Left still works in electoral politics where people expect jobs and welfare to be supplied in the world as it exists. So, the Left promotes industry as compromise with its basic programme.Compromise is contagious and escalates to corruption. This has robbed many Left leaders and the Left in general of the moral standing they once enjoyed. The Left has carried out land reforms in its areas of influence.Further qualitative change calls for the rise of modern industry and services. But that would be a capitalist sin. So, the economy stagnates in Leftruled areas. Carrying out land reforms exhausts the progressive change the Left is willing to support. Thereafter, it becomes a force of conservatism and reaction, hindering progress — in the name of the people, of course.Since its programme says forward movement is impossible without overthrow of the present capitalist system, trade union strength is designed to protect the sectional interests of workers, not to lead society forward. This creates unions that protect workers’ rights but are delinquent on duties. Bye-bye to higher productivity and shared prosperity.This union policy also paves the way for authoritarian takeover. Delhi University illustrates this in microcosm. A petty autocrat and intellectual flyweight is excoriating the university of its academic essence, using the backing he has mustered in the name of clamping down on teachers who don’t teach. If the unions had themselves acted against errant teachers, things would have been different.The Left has made reflexive anti-Americanism its sole guide to foreign policy. This, and nothing else, explains its hostility to the Indo-US nuclear deal that has paved the way for India’s release from a global technology denial regime.Liberal democracy would still have remained a redeeming feature for the Left, but for its abandonment in West Bengal for authoritarian patronage politics. Unlike in Kerala, where every party competes to give every citizen her due, the Bengal communists maintained power based on patronage and militantly enforced exclusion of the non-patronised.Unless the Left accepts that capitalism remains a vibrant system and that its own job is to tap the immense emancipatory potential of globalised growth, it will recede further to the margins.