Everyone knows the ongoing populist crisis in Bengal and the closed situation for them. Populists in their present condition will not be able to break out of the closure. If they can, they will not be populists anymore – at least of the old type. They will have to reinvent their ideas and organisational form, which will mean extending their political horizon – beyond welfarism, beyond their leader, eclectic style of work, idiosyncrasies, and have a long term view of friends and foes in the journey ahead. It is an aporia.Yet many of their ideas will survive, so will survive their accomplishments. Their style of mobilising the unorganised masses mostly belonging to informal work force, bringing in women in large number in political and social claims for justice, expanding the ambit of citizenship identity and rights, following a strategy of inclusion by widening the concept of welfare to accommodate hitherto ignored sections of population, emphasising improvement of agriculture, expanding access to health and education, giving importance to social infrastructure equal to that of material infrastructure, etc. – will last for a long time as an important chapter in the grammar of popular politics. There is no way a Left movement will be able to ignore or damn the populist experience of conducting politics. It does not mean closing one’s eyes and ears to the abuses of power accruing from rental income and consequent amassing of wealth by leaders at various levels. It will remain a matter of eternal conjecture as to whether this process of amassing wealth would have given birth in due course to a Bengali bourgeois class in a state where urban existence would not be limited to one metropolis only but spread across districts. Increase of public revenue, greater welfare and logistical expenditure, and state indebtedness produce an unpredictable concoction. The outcome may be in the form of informal labour in greater number, it may also be a stability of peasant economy, but at the same time a proliferation of intermediary sections like petty traders, cold storage owners, black marketeers, etc., – something akin to what happened in the state in the last 15 years. The outcome will be contingent on historical factors like the presence or absence of a strong administrative machinery and a similar presence or absence of a vision of development of the poorer sections of people in villages and cities – informal labour and agricultural workers in particular. Populists failed disastrously in focusing on informal labour. They needed an unorthodox vision and plans for work opportunities, self-employed work avenues, cooperatives, and employment generation through governmental avenues – for which they required to go beyond some quickly-thought welfare measures.Farmers transplant paddy saplings at a field on the outskirts of Kolkata, West Bengal, Tuesday, July 7, 2026. Photo: PTI/Manvender Vashist Lav.Still, in the midst all the uncertainties, life of the lower classes became a little more cheerful with the message that politics need not devour life and that festivals were equally important features of collective life. As if populists were saying, the time and life of the human is not simply labour. It is also pleasure, rest, festivity, other kinds of need beyond bare ones, unanticipated moments of discovery of joy, occasional violence, mourning, and so on. With pronounced attempts to redefine life through the past 15 years, collective existence took an irrevocably biopolitical turn. Existence was a matter of body, a bit carnivalesque; politics was a matter of improving life, making it less anxious, a little more happier – notwithstanding the schizophrenic conditions all around. Populists were in that sense the schizophrenic subjects of politics. No wonder they understood deeply within themselves the somatic dimension of life and the consequent clue to the psychic condition of masses. Hundreds of new activists from all parts of the state joined the mobilisation – from all sections of population, particularly from minority and Dalit communities, intermediary castes, and most remarkably, women. Populists showed that secularism was not an ideology, but a matter of practice of inter-religious tolerance and amity. In all these or for all these, the leader had to symbolise virtue. If virtue was present in her person and acknowledged as such by all, could fortune be far behind? At the same it meant, if and when the leader failed, the whole system built around her would fall apart. If virtue left, would fortune be present for long? Thus, when the populist leader failed and stopped leading, people were shocked, and some perhaps thought, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez put it in his memorable words in Autumn of the Patriarch, “… and yet we didn’t believe it now that it was, and not because we really didn’t believe it, but because we no longer wanted it to to be true, we had ended up not understanding what would become of us without him, what would become of our lives after him…”.Of course, people will come out of the shock sooner or later, wise with some bitter experiences of hard right wing, nationalist rule, and the search for new politics will commence anew. No radical worth his/her salt will be able to ignore the intense experiences of populist politics at that juncture. After all, quite an amount of of the previous Left administration’s policies of welfare and justice went into the formulation of populist politics in Bengal. But whenever the “new Left” appears – in whatever shape and with whatever ideas, it will have to pick up from where the populists left – abjuring the wrong aspects and incorporating the correct ones. The challenge for the new Left will be two fold: (a) First, it will be in finding a new organisational form of politics that combines the class and mass, the organised and the unorganised, the articulate political cadres and the popular, and finally linking what Antonio Gramsci termed as the “philosophical event” of common sense enlightened with radical ideas and the “metaphysical event” of radical politics able to establish hegemony over the structure of politics. (b) The second challenge: in upholding and popularising the ideal of a caring society in place of a punitive society, solidarity in place of competition, and dialogue in place of mutual annihilation – through a strategy that combines these contradictory aspects of subaltern life under neoliberal conditions, which may also be seen as contradictory demands on the same life. In brief, the “new Left” will have to convey the idea to the masses, namely, that the political apparatus of the nation is within popular reach; only, the people will have to find out new ways to access the nation. Admittedly, a food distribution arrangement in a marginal area, angry villagers cornering a fellow villager for committing theft or usurping money in course of giving public service, opening of a school or a hospital – these images in some sense take us back to the ideals of a pre-industrial life, but these images also tell the society of the possibility of a non-penal life. Power will no longer manifest itself through the violence of its ceremony, but will be exercised through protection of the weak, marginal, and inclusion of the neglected. It is not a mythical or heroic discourse of life, but one of a life of compassion, care, and dialogues. Shorn of such an ideal of life, a strategy of how to conduct life, and here we are speaking of the collective life of popular classes, communists in most countries even after the advent of neoliberal rule worldwide, persisted with old ideas and methods of an earlier era of capitalism. They practised an organisational model of life around party-building, but never looked deeply into the critical question that followed from their own organisational philosophy, namely: How to treat organisation as the crux of politics at a critical juncture in a radical journey? When masses go forward, how should and why must leaders find ways to eschew passivity or lag behind? In this way, for instance, Lenin who had theorised the idea of party moved on to the idea of Soviet as the organisational model of a collective militant life. The key organisational challenge then is for the Left: How then to incorporate people’s desire for change (existing in Gramsci’s language as common sense) in a programme of social transformation? In this task, inventing new forms of organisation and mobilisation is a task of high priority. It is also indicative of a new form of collective existence, a new idea of militant life dedicated to the cause of eradicating injustice and exploitation. Locating and mobilising other forms of power besides the party form is a part of that task. No programme of social and political transformation has been possible without dual power. The populist interregnum of fifteen years in Bengal points to the possibility of fashioning such a strategy. It may well be that the party form itself will have to inhere some aspects of the populist mobilisation style, or the party may have to secure and firm up popular organisations and institutions and infuse the latter with the spirit of dual power to stay in the protracted battle for power. For the actualisation of all these innovative possibilities, the first requirement is to discard any prejudice against populism. Reinventing Leftism through neoliberal means is not the way to engage with populism. After all, populism has proven to be a durable phenomenon in this neoliberal world. Equally important for the new Left is not to be overwhelmed by the immediacy of an event howsoever overwhelming it may seem, and retain the capacity to see things in the long run. A man carries a child during a joint protest rally of Students Federation of India (SFI) and Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over the NEET paper leak issue, in Kolkata, West Bengal, Friday, July 24, 2026. Photo: PTI.Bengal populists have split and are the beaten dog in all middle class discussions on television channels. But, remember, communists in India too split massively in 1964 in the wake of the Indo-China war of 1962 with many unsavoury developments that followed damaging the movement. Radical revolutionists too split from their parent party within a few more years with mutual killings in an orgy of fratricidal violence. In politics immediacy often takes the place of strategic analysis, prejudice replaces solidarity, and conceit kills the ability to negotiate differences and establish bonds between the party, social institutions, and the subaltern classes on the basis of a dialogic culture . Will those who practise radical politics be able to analyse the significance of the populist interregnum in the long rule of parliamentary-liberal politics in Bengal – an interregnum that just passed into history? Given the deep rooted sectarian tradition of the Left and their unending confidence as the know-all agency of human life, chances are slim that a new Left can emerge from the conventional Left. The institutionalisation of populist innovations has been weak. And yet, without the organisational linkage between innovation and institutionalisation, the power that innovates cannot last for long. Indeed, innovation by itself is unthinkable without the existence and functioning of a particular form of power. Hence, for radical politics to learn from the experiences of the populist interregnum means to initiate new organisational-institutional mode/s from day one. The task is relevant not only to Bengal, but the country as a whole. To be truthful, its relevance is for post-colonial politics itself and to a strategy of social transformation. There is no easy continuity from populist politics to communist politics. Development of the political subject requires a fracture in both. If the subject of the politics of social transformation is a product of the passage from one to another, make no mistake, it will leave its impact on both, transforming both to greater or smaller extent. And, here is the biggest irony. If the populists have to reinvent, find new slogans, ways to clean up the party, and make a fresh journey, it will mean transformation of everything that made it what it was. The movement represented a God that inspired attraction rather than fear. And this was not a party, or a movement, or a leader that knew the art of combining various dimensions of politics and economics through a perpetual exercise of determining the ratio of choices and options. Its style affected the body of the commoner, the style churned in her belly, made her dream or despair, and through its sins and virtues the style formulated a form of affective politics that could both inspire and horrify the follower. It was biopolitics from below.This is the perspective in which one has to judge the possibility of the return of the populists as a serious political force – contributing in the process to democratisation of Bengal and a greater participation of the lower classes in the transformation of society and along with it the nature of public power. Perhaps we cannot expect populists to behave or perform contrary to their essential structure of existence. They cannot be pushed towards a frontier they do not visualise. There is the good, bad, and the ugly in their ranks. The good stays with the leader, closes ranks, shows resilience, and may go down fighting. The bad suffers bad conscience, realises errors and “sins” after the debacle and silently leaves the ranks and moves aside, and the ugly stabs from behind, picks the “right” moment and abuses the trust that made populist politics possible in the first place. The matriarch has to watch helplessly, silently. If these were not the trajectories, they would not have been populists. They are now friendless, ally-less. The Left cannot tolerate them, the Right will try to buy them over, else punish them – in such lonely condition, how much mass politics can hope to advance? This is the autumn of the matriarch.So, are we then looking at an eternal aporia or a killing paradox that has no productive outcome? The question of the return of populism will have to be discussed therefore in a different framework. The theme of possibility must be seen as one of potency, elements of a structure of existence, also limits, and finally the dynamics of its transmutation. In other words, it will not return in its present form. The form must undergo transmutation, if it has to at all reappear. On the other hand, society will once again give birth to populist politics due to the sheer dynamics of the social war continuing among classes. Ranabir Samaddar is Distinguished Chair, Calcutta Research Group.